Oh no. Not another one of these threads. This game has not even been released to most and already the this VS that threads are starting. What a headache. Runs off to get aspirin
Is it just me that doesn't understand why this matters? I mean either way EA clearly made some poor choices in the development of the Sims 4 which left them with not enough time and left us with an incomplete base game. Does it really matter what the catalyst for those choices were? Either way we are where we are now, and either way I would think they've learnt from the past for when/if they make Sims 5. Now which choices get classed as poor ones will depend on who you ask but I think we can all agree that the initial base game wasn't really ready for release.
Honestly I just think Olympus is straight up useless, I have no interests in playing this "App" and I don't get why EA think this was a good move for them considering they look to big for their boots, like C'mon I'm here waiting for better things then this,is this just a way to keep us occupied?
Weren't you constantly preaching Olympus was dead/fake?
Anyway, I saw surveys of a mobile Sims game posted in TS3's forum back in 2014, so I'd say it started around then.
He/She always spews whatever nonsense fits their agenda. The
mobile game was announced less than 12 hours ago, and they're already trying to make crazy claims to discredit Olympus becoming Sims 4.
She, thanks.
And you don't? You never provide a single source to anything, while I always have.
And there's countless simulaties to Olympus, more than The Sims 4 ever had.
Infact, people only assumed because Olympus "looks like The Sims 4" but this also looks like The Sims 4.
How can you not see how it looks almost the same?
From what I have gathered going by a sims VIP post regarding Left over game code found, Olympus IS the sims 4. Olympus was a kind of code name they gave to the early UI during development when it was planned to be an online game. There's an entire post on it here which is a really interesting read:
The article on simsvip was written by a modder who doesn't even seem to ever have been a professional programmer. The article even confuses the UI (a shell between the game and the simmer) with the game engine (the core of the game which controls everything).
There also is a funny confusion in this forum that the programmers "left" something that doesn't belong to the game anymore in the released version of the game. Just like people assume that EA's programmers are lazy and mess things up because they don't remember which code that the game uses
But it reminds me of a tiny toddler who says: "Your foot is made of leather!" and which you can't explain that it is only your shoe that is made of leather. So you have to show that tiny toddler that you can take your shoe off and that the shoe is only a shell
My point is that the UI also only is a shell. But I can't remove it in a way such that people who aren't programmers could understand it.
So why are there code for pets, toddlers or multitasking in the UI for the basegame when the basegame didn't have neither pets nor multitasking or toddlers? The obvious explanation is that the programmers likely wanted to avoid making it more difficult than necessary if those things maybe would be added later on. So they used a couple of minutes to reserve a place in the UI for the code for pets, toddlers and multitasking such that they knew that they easily could be added later on if there also should be made code for them in the game core (or in a later expansion). But people seem to think that just because a programmer used two minutes to write 3 lines of codes for this then it even proves that the whole team worked on pets, toddlers and multitasking for many months - this isn't different from a tiny toddler assuming that your whole foot is made of massive leather just because your shoe is
People must have forgotten that EA was advertising that blue plumbob up until the last minute in TS4 until it suddenly diappeared.
Nah, The Sims 4 and the other game both had Online elements. The Sims 4 was local multiplayer, the Olympus game was an MMO.
You are probably right that they considered to make TS4 into a game where you locally could play with your friend.
Olympus was just a project (like Ikarus) and not even a game. We still don't know for sure if those projects even existed and if they did what they were about. But there have been many guesses
Olympus was a project in EA about 2012 and leaked by Patrick Kelley in 2013 when he had left EA. He was working on user interfaces for different games in his years in EA and he thought that Olympus was a user interface meant for the Sims 4. This was interesting at the time because he said that the Sims 4 then would have been planned to become a multiplayer games. He also leaked some videos which seem to have been made with a much older game (the Sims 2 for consoles) which also had a multiplayer option. But it is of course old news and the Sims 4 isn't multiplayer at all. But a lot of simmers in this forum have liked to throw tantrums about many suspicions and fantasies. Some of those tantrums have assumed that EA wasted years on making the Sims 4 into a multiplayer game and then just dropped the whole thing to hurry the Sims 4 through as a completely different game and they like to have fantasies about that being the reason why so many things from the earlier big Sims games were missing in the Sims 4
Now some of those simmers have changed their minds and think that Olympus instead could have been about the Sims Mobile. But this is about equally doubtful because Olympus was from 2012 and it isn't likely that the Sims Mobile should be even planned already that long time ago.
The article on simsvip was written by a modder who doesn't even seem to ever have been a professional programmer. The article even confuses the UI (a shell between the game and the simmer) with the game engine (the core of the game which controls everything).
There also is a funny confusion in this forum that the programmers "left" something that doesn't belong to the game anymore in the released version of the game. Just like people assume that EA's programmers are lazy and mess things up because they don't remember which code that the game uses
Have you ever worked as a professional programmer ? The reason why there are leftovers in the code is because there is rarely any reason to take the time, and the risk, to remove something that basically does nothing. There are tons of things still in the game code that have never been released.
The article on simsvip was written by a modder who doesn't even seem to ever have been a professional programmer. The article even confuses the UI (a shell between the game and the simmer) with the game engine (the core of the game which controls everything).
There also is a funny confusion in this forum that the programmers "left" something that doesn't belong to the game anymore in the released version of the game. Just like people assume that EA's programmers are lazy and mess things up because they don't remember which code that the game uses
Have you ever worked as a professional programmer ? The reason why there are leftovers in the code is because there is rarely any reason to take the time, and the risk, to remove something that basically does nothing. There are tons of things still in the game code that have never been released.
I have followed lectures in structured programming, studied several programming languages to compare them and made big programming projects as parts of my education to get a master degree as a computer scientist from a Danish university. But I then switched to mathematics and only used computer science to teach about it on highschool level.
It would be unusual to leave code from a dropped project in the final version of the program because it would make the program bigger than necessary and it would mess up the code such that the causes for bugs would become harder to find. Therefore I don't believe in that explanation. But I know that if I maybe would be asked to add yet unknown expansions to a program later then I would consider carefully not to make the program in such a way that it would become more difficult than necessary. So if I expected that an option for multiplayer, toddlers and pets weren't unlikely to be asked for later then I could mark and reserve places for such additions and especially in the UI which only is a shell between the program and the intended users.
The article on simsvip was written by a modder who doesn't even seem to ever have been a professional programmer. The article even confuses the UI (a shell between the game and the simmer) with the game engine (the core of the game which controls everything).
There also is a funny confusion in this forum that the programmers "left" something that doesn't belong to the game anymore in the released version of the game. Just like people assume that EA's programmers are lazy and mess things up because they don't remember which code that the game uses
Have you ever worked as a professional programmer ? The reason why there are leftovers in the code is because there is rarely any reason to take the time, and the risk, to remove something that basically does nothing. There are tons of things still in the game code that have never been released.
I have followed lectures in structured programming, studied several programming languages to compare them and made big programming projects as parts of my education to get a master degree as a computer scientist from a Danish university. But I then switched to mathematics and only used computer science to teach about it on highschool level.
It would be unusual to leave code from a dropped project in the final version of the program because it would make the program bigger than necessary and it would mess up the code such that the causes for bugs would become harder to find. Therefore I don't believe in that explanation. But I know that if I maybe would be asked to add yet unknown expansions to a program later then I would consider carefully not to make the program in such a way that it would become more difficult than necessary. So if I expected that an option for multiplayer, toddlers and pets weren't unlikely to be asked for later then I could mark and reserve places for such additions and especially in the UI which only is a shell between the program and the intended users.
So never as a professional then ? Educational and professional projects have vastly different objectives, so it's not surprising you may not have the same perspective. When you're making a project for your studies, you don't have a budget, you don't care if it's profitable or not, you also typically don't have a big team relying on you. In a professional setting, you want to be efficient. We don't care about the size of the program, code size is minimal compared to the assets anyway, while removing code takes time, and could potentially cause regressions, so it's high risk/low gain and thus usually a fairly low priority.
The article on simsvip was written by a modder who doesn't even seem to ever have been a professional programmer. The article even confuses the UI (a shell between the game and the simmer) with the game engine (the core of the game which controls everything).
There also is a funny confusion in this forum that the programmers "left" something that doesn't belong to the game anymore in the released version of the game. Just like people assume that EA's programmers are lazy and mess things up because they don't remember which code that the game uses
Have you ever worked as a professional programmer ? The reason why there are leftovers in the code is because there is rarely any reason to take the time, and the risk, to remove something that basically does nothing. There are tons of things still in the game code that have never been released.
I have followed lectures in structured programming, studied several programming languages to compare them and made big programming projects as parts of my education to get a master degree as a computer scientist from a Danish university. But I then switched to mathematics and only used computer science to teach about it on highschool level.
It would be unusual to leave code from a dropped project in the final version of the program because it would make the program bigger than necessary and it would mess up the code such that the causes for bugs would become harder to find. Therefore I don't believe in that explanation. But I know that if I maybe would be asked to add yet unknown expansions to a program later then I would consider carefully not to make the program in such a way that it would become more difficult than necessary. So if I expected that an option for multiplayer, toddlers and pets weren't unlikely to be asked for later then I could mark and reserve places for such additions and especially in the UI which only is a shell between the program and the intended users.
So never as a professional then ? Educational and professional projects have vastly different objectives, so it's not surprising you may not have the same perspective. When you're making a project for your studies, you don't have a budget, you don't care if it's profitable or not, you also typically don't have a big team relying on you. In a professional setting, you want to be efficient. We don't care about the size of the program, code size is minimal compared to the assets anyway, while removing code takes time, and could potentially cause regressions, so it's high risk/low gain and thus usually a fairly low priority.
I was always mainly a mathematician and in the beginning it was my plan to combine it with physics. But I didn't like that a university degree in those things only could be used for teaching. So I switched to computer science and attempted to make my master degree there. At the time it was mostly about constructing new programming languages and building compilers (and sometimes interpreters) for such programming languages and about learning about very different types of programming languages. So we had projects about building compilers. There were also another school whitch was more about theoretical models of computers. Their courses were quite mathematical and very different from the more practical courses about constructing programming languages and building compilers. But the theoretical courses were just bad and primitive mathematics in my eyes compared to the mathematics which I also had studied earlier and the programming began to feel way too much for me as just practical routine work. It wasn't difficult at all. But it became more and more boring.
So I ended up in a situation where I had to admit that I had chosen a wrong studium. There were actually only two options left for me:
1. I could drop out of the university near the end of my studium.
2. I could drop the idea of getting my master in computer science and get it in mathematics instead. Then I would at least still be able to use my bachelor degree in computer science too.
So I chose option 2 even though it meant that I would become a highschool teacher instead of a higher paid computer scientist in some big company. I soon discovered that I even liked teaching. So I have never regretted it
It is true that we didn't have a budget for our programming projects at the university. But we still had the same kind of deadlines anyway. Usually we got a sketch of a project and then we had to make the program and write a report which should be finished a few months later if we wanted to pass our exams. So we had limited time and often worked on our projects even at night. (We had keys such that we always had access to the department of computer science and could use their computers 24/7.)
@jackjack_k - I'm more likely to believe a modder that's under no obligation to the company versus former or current employees...they can only tell us so much! @TwistedMexican has just given it to us straight after having seen the code. No fluff, no room for speculation...as @Cinebar said:
Weren't you constantly preaching Olympus was dead/fake?
Anyway, I saw surveys of a mobile Sims game posted in TS3's forum back in 2014, so I'd say it started around then.
Not fake, but a separate project entirely to The Sims 4, in which this game seems pretty much confirmation.
That IS interesting, though. Pretty much says to me that they shelved Olympus in 2012 (apparently) to finish the Sims 4, and got straight back to work.
It's not Olympus, I've looked at the code and it does rely heavily on TS4 assets, though modified, and there are design elements that were present in Olympus, but it's a completely different engine, borrowing game controllers from firemonkey studios, EA's mobile sector. Also if you watch the concept video, it's very clear Olympus was not being developed with mobile in mind.
Also TS4 was most certainly the end result of Olympus. This is for multiple reasons:
The UI in TS4 has Olympus code laced almost entirely throughout. For all intents and purposes, the TS4 UI is Olympus.
The game's code uses Google Protocol Buffers to talk between Python and C++. The only logical reason for designing a game like this is as a netcode (client to server and vice versa). I believe the mod-friendly python code we got was a result of needing a local client/server connection without modifying the core code. I can't say for certain, but it's very likely this crosstalk is why the game can't seem to keep up with simulations at higher speeds.
CASt wouldn't have been in the works either because of the amount of data transfer that would be needed to sync customized textures to all players, so that is a valid explanation for the lack of CASt in what we have today.
As a side note, we need to remember at the time Olympus was discovered and TS4 was announced with emphesis on "single-player offline experience", SimCity was crashing hard in response to it's online and restrictive gameplay. After years of working with the TS4 engine, I say all signs point to a sudden shift from a SimCity style engine to what we received today.
thank you if they can't take your word I don't know who they will believe.
@jackjack_k - I'm more likely to believe a modder that's under no obligation to the company versus former or current employees...they can only tell us so much! @TwistedMexican has just given it to us straight after having seen the code. No fluff, no room for speculation...as @Cinebar said:
Weren't you constantly preaching Olympus was dead/fake?
Anyway, I saw surveys of a mobile Sims game posted in TS3's forum back in 2014, so I'd say it started around then.
Not fake, but a separate project entirely to The Sims 4, in which this game seems pretty much confirmation.
That IS interesting, though. Pretty much says to me that they shelved Olympus in 2012 (apparently) to finish the Sims 4, and got straight back to work.
It's not Olympus, I've looked at the code and it does rely heavily on TS4 assets, though modified, and there are design elements that were present in Olympus, but it's a completely different engine, borrowing game controllers from firemonkey studios, EA's mobile sector. Also if you watch the concept video, it's very clear Olympus was not being developed with mobile in mind.
Also TS4 was most certainly the end result of Olympus. This is for multiple reasons:
The UI in TS4 has Olympus code laced almost entirely throughout. For all intents and purposes, the TS4 UI is Olympus.
The game's code uses Google Protocol Buffers to talk between Python and C++. The only logical reason for designing a game like this is as a netcode (client to server and vice versa). I believe the mod-friendly python code we got was a result of needing a local client/server connection without modifying the core code. I can't say for certain, but it's very likely this crosstalk is why the game can't seem to keep up with simulations at higher speeds.
CASt wouldn't have been in the works either because of the amount of data transfer that would be needed to sync customized textures to all players, so that is a valid explanation for the lack of CASt in what we have today.
As a side note, we need to remember at the time Olympus was discovered and TS4 was announced with emphesis on "single-player offline experience", SimCity was crashing hard in response to it's online and restrictive gameplay. After years of working with the TS4 engine, I say all signs point to a sudden shift from a SimCity style engine to what we received today.
thank you if they can't take your word I don't know who they will believe.
I'm surprised this game uses Python, I thought that was a very old thing from way back in '95/ '98. (at least that's the way I remember it about floppy discs games from way back).
As a modder, no disrespect, but all they can know is how the game is configured ") @TwistedMexican is actually speculating based on the code. Not from what's been said internally.
Olympus was an MMO had an online aspect confirmed, and we've already had confirmation The Sims 4 was had an online aspect, but was not an MMO.
So of course, in a game with online gameplay, that would be in the code.
HOWEVER, Olympus was an MMO. Chi Chan said there was an offline game as well, with a Story Mode and Freeplay mode. Which is not an MMO.
So, again no disrespect, we've had a Guru even confirm Chi Chan's comments, so;
Fan Speculation =/= Actual Confirmation.
Olympus doesn't mean "Online", Olympus was a code name for an MMO.
An MMO is an online game."Massive Multiplayer Online". Please stop contradicting yourself.
People must have forgotten that EA was advertising that blue plumbob up until the last minute in TS4 until it suddenly diappeared.
Nah, The Sims 4 and the other game both had Online elements. The Sims 4 was local multiplayer, the Olympus game was an MMO.
Well if Sims 4 had "local multiplayer" than no, it wouldn't have had online elements. It would be a self contained multiplayer game that multiple people would have to play on the same machine; like how multiplayer worked on old console Sims games. That is local multiplayer functionality, offline player vs player.
The code referencing multiplayer functionality in an online world says you are entirely wrong with your analysis of the game. We're at the point where you are either incapable of understanding what is right in front of you, or you are choosing to not believe it for whatever odd reason. As always, if you have legitimate proof you should share it. Making claims that have absolutely no basis, and contradict code from the actual game isn't a productive way to spend time.
Oh no. Not another one of these threads. This game has not even been released to most and already the this VS that threads are starting. What a headache. Runs off to get aspirin
People must have forgotten that EA was advertising that blue plumbob up until the last minute in TS4 until it suddenly diappeared.
Nah, The Sims 4 and the other game both had Online elements. The Sims 4 was local multiplayer, the Olympus game was an MMO.
Well if Sims 4 had "local multiplayer" than no, it wouldn't have had online elements. It would be a self contained multiplayer game that multiple people would have to play on the same machine; like how multiplayer worked on old console Sims games. That is local multiplayer functionality, offline player vs player.
There are several ways that a game can be multiplayer:
1. It can be an MMO game where there is an online game server which everybody is connected to.
2. It can be multiplayer in the same way that was used in the old days - often in clubs where everybody brought their own computer and connected them with cables. Some games only had support for two connected games while other games could allow up to 8 computers to be connected.
3. There is nothing in the way for using the internet to allow people to connect only to a couple of friends in the same way as they did in the old days by using cables. If this was done for a game like TS4 then maybe only two players could play with eachother via the internet. An advantage for EA by doing it that way would be that the game could be multiplayer without needing EA to set up a gameserver.
We don't know which way EA maybe can have considered before dropping the multiplayer idea completely.
Comments
Mess.
Does this mean we would get a huge volcanic eruption to wipe out the whole town?
I don't think it's either...THIS IS SPARTA!!
But do we get to have Gerard Butler in leather man panties?
From what I have gathered going by a sims VIP post regarding Left over game code found, Olympus IS the sims 4. Olympus was a kind of code name they gave to the early UI during development when it was planned to be an online game. There's an entire post on it here which is a really interesting read:
https://simsvip.com/2017/05/10/olympus-ui-multiplayer-code-found-sims-4-engine/
I recommend reading it as the article finally puts this whole Olympus thing to bed.
There also is a funny confusion in this forum that the programmers "left" something that doesn't belong to the game anymore in the released version of the game. Just like people assume that EA's programmers are lazy and mess things up because they don't remember which code that the game uses
But it reminds me of a tiny toddler who says: "Your foot is made of leather!" and which you can't explain that it is only your shoe that is made of leather. So you have to show that tiny toddler that you can take your shoe off and that the shoe is only a shell
My point is that the UI also only is a shell. But I can't remove it in a way such that people who aren't programmers could understand it.
So why are there code for pets, toddlers or multitasking in the UI for the basegame when the basegame didn't have neither pets nor multitasking or toddlers? The obvious explanation is that the programmers likely wanted to avoid making it more difficult than necessary if those things maybe would be added later on. So they used a couple of minutes to reserve a place in the UI for the code for pets, toddlers and multitasking such that they knew that they easily could be added later on if there also should be made code for them in the game core (or in a later expansion). But people seem to think that just because a programmer used two minutes to write 3 lines of codes for this then it even proves that the whole team worked on pets, toddlers and multitasking for many months - this isn't different from a tiny toddler assuming that your whole foot is made of massive leather just because your shoe is
Nah, The Sims 4 and the other game both had Online elements. The Sims 4 was local multiplayer, the Olympus game was an MMO.
Insta: https://instagram.com/jkarajs?igshid=oef2ymrand3g
Olympus was just a project (like Ikarus) and not even a game. We still don't know for sure if those projects even existed and if they did what they were about. But there have been many guesses
Now some of those simmers have changed their minds and think that Olympus instead could have been about the Sims Mobile. But this is about equally doubtful because Olympus was from 2012 and it isn't likely that the Sims Mobile should be even planned already that long time ago.
Have you ever worked as a professional programmer ? The reason why there are leftovers in the code is because there is rarely any reason to take the time, and the risk, to remove something that basically does nothing. There are tons of things still in the game code that have never been released.
It would be unusual to leave code from a dropped project in the final version of the program because it would make the program bigger than necessary and it would mess up the code such that the causes for bugs would become harder to find. Therefore I don't believe in that explanation. But I know that if I maybe would be asked to add yet unknown expansions to a program later then I would consider carefully not to make the program in such a way that it would become more difficult than necessary. So if I expected that an option for multiplayer, toddlers and pets weren't unlikely to be asked for later then I could mark and reserve places for such additions and especially in the UI which only is a shell between the program and the intended users.
So never as a professional then ? Educational and professional projects have vastly different objectives, so it's not surprising you may not have the same perspective. When you're making a project for your studies, you don't have a budget, you don't care if it's profitable or not, you also typically don't have a big team relying on you. In a professional setting, you want to be efficient. We don't care about the size of the program, code size is minimal compared to the assets anyway, while removing code takes time, and could potentially cause regressions, so it's high risk/low gain and thus usually a fairly low priority.
I was always mainly a mathematician and in the beginning it was my plan to combine it with physics. But I didn't like that a university degree in those things only could be used for teaching. So I switched to computer science and attempted to make my master degree there. At the time it was mostly about constructing new programming languages and building compilers (and sometimes interpreters) for such programming languages and about learning about very different types of programming languages. So we had projects about building compilers. There were also another school whitch was more about theoretical models of computers. Their courses were quite mathematical and very different from the more practical courses about constructing programming languages and building compilers. But the theoretical courses were just bad and primitive mathematics in my eyes compared to the mathematics which I also had studied earlier and the programming began to feel way too much for me as just practical routine work. It wasn't difficult at all. But it became more and more boring.
So I ended up in a situation where I had to admit that I had chosen a wrong studium. There were actually only two options left for me:
1. I could drop out of the university near the end of my studium.
2. I could drop the idea of getting my master in computer science and get it in mathematics instead. Then I would at least still be able to use my bachelor degree in computer science too.
So I chose option 2 even though it meant that I would become a highschool teacher instead of a higher paid computer scientist in some big company. I soon discovered that I even liked teaching. So I have never regretted it
It is true that we didn't have a budget for our programming projects at the university. But we still had the same kind of deadlines anyway. Usually we got a sketch of a project and then we had to make the program and write a report which should be finished a few months later if we wanted to pass our exams. So we had limited time and often worked on our projects even at night. (We had keys such that we always had access to the department of computer science and could use their computers 24/7.)
An MMO is an online game."Massive Multiplayer Online". Please stop contradicting yourself.
Well if Sims 4 had "local multiplayer" than no, it wouldn't have had online elements. It would be a self contained multiplayer game that multiple people would have to play on the same machine; like how multiplayer worked on old console Sims games. That is local multiplayer functionality, offline player vs player.
The code referencing multiplayer functionality in an online world says you are entirely wrong with your analysis of the game. We're at the point where you are either incapable of understanding what is right in front of you, or you are choosing to not believe it for whatever odd reason. As always, if you have legitimate proof you should share it. Making claims that have absolutely no basis, and contradict code from the actual game isn't a productive way to spend time.
I share your pain. I offer this:
1. It can be an MMO game where there is an online game server which everybody is connected to.
2. It can be multiplayer in the same way that was used in the old days - often in clubs where everybody brought their own computer and connected them with cables. Some games only had support for two connected games while other games could allow up to 8 computers to be connected.
3. There is nothing in the way for using the internet to allow people to connect only to a couple of friends in the same way as they did in the old days by using cables. If this was done for a game like TS4 then maybe only two players could play with eachother via the internet. An advantage for EA by doing it that way would be that the game could be multiplayer without needing EA to set up a gameserver.
We don't know which way EA maybe can have considered before dropping the multiplayer idea completely.