The Sims (Windows)/Oddities/Early Builds Artifacts
This is a sub-page of The Sims (Windows)/Oddities.
The forgotten remnants of The Sims ' prerelease haunt Sim Lane still, if one looks closely.
Contents
Smiley.bmp
_-_Smiley.png)
Smiley.bmp, a placeholder design of the Friendship icon seen in pre-release builds, can be reactivated in the Select-A-Family menu. Strangely, it is a photograph of a real person — probably a developer. One's able to activate it by holding ⇧ Shift as they click on the Select or Create Family button on the Neighborhood Screen.
The "programmer art" was once the User Interface's household name, in earlier builds.
The icon, oddly appearing in the final.
8 Sim Lane
The eighth house in the Neighborhood Menu. When looked at through the map_edit cheat code, or its isolated thumbnail, the terrain is notably rougher. The final game evened it out quite a bit.
Detail of Neighborhood's bottom-right corner, where House08.IFF normally is...
Same area, in a pre-release snapshot.
Intro Video
The intro video for the Base game up until the Vacation expansion is a compressed and edited version of the E3 1999 teaser. Being this old, it contains a lot of footage from various builds.
A rather haphazardly edited version of the video was used in the Unleashed expansion, with new scenes added to show off new features, before it was removed entirely in the following Superstar expansion.
Early design of the middle-end TV.
Early low-end sofa and unprepared meal sprites. The interaction queue also has a different pale thumbnail background color.
The pizza-delivering NPC's cap appears to use incorrect, skin-like textures. It also depicts an early low-end TV design, an unused chair, as well as an early arrow-shaped active character Plumbob. An early design for the trash pile can be partially seen in the upper right corner.
Oval food servings, and early sprite of the microwave object. Again, there's an arrow-shaped Plumbob, that quivers the more "stressed" the Sim becomes, unlike its final counterpart.
More oval food servings. The individual plates also seem to be moderately offset in relation to the Sims, causing an unsettling feeling they eat the dining table, instead. The table itself appears to be in a slightly different design. Contains an early design of the relationship point icon. Sims talk about
Spooky Stuff, a scrapped interest.
Early mid-end TV and computer desk (sold as a desk + PC combo, rather than being separated Buy Mode items!) designs, as well as an alternate skin for a used dining chair. Here, two Sims
Shove; the base game unknowns this interaction. It was later repurposed in the Hot Date Expansion Pack.
Final design of the active character indicator, although it still uses an early trembling animation. Early, overdetailed puddle sprite close to the bathtub. White railing appears in an early design.
Interaction queue has a different pale thumbnail background color. Early design of the middle-end TV and dining chair. Also shows a late design of a scrapped orange chair.
Early speech balloon icon for the Politics talk topic, portraying Abraham Lincoln, as well as the Sim next to the stereo object running a test animation, used as a motion-capturing experiment — still present in the game's files. Rare sight of a flower tile intersecting with a Buy Mode item, in this case a fountain, which is shown here in an early design. The tree in the upper right corner appears to be intersecting with the floor tile, which is not possible in the final game.
Early high-end TV design. Also, contains a removed coffee table object, brought back to the game in Hot Date.
Unused orange chair and coffee table, as well as early mid-end TV and Politics talk topic icon design.
Earlier biker head texture, wearing a blue bandana instead of red. He is juggling to a female Sim of entirely removed head and body, both of which appear to belong to Samantha, a character used in a 1998 demo of the game.
Early design of the work carpool. The vehicle portal also seems to be dramatically misplaced, making the car to be spawned much farther from the asphalt. The hedges are slightly taller than they appear in the final.
Versions
ross and sam Prefixes
In the directories that contain the Sim animations, six files are prefixed with ross and sam - such as ross-walking-loop, the animation for the default Sim walk.
These are incidental references to much older development builds of the game - a safe guess would be the Steering Committee demo, compiled nearly two years prior to The Sims ' first release, as two of the three characters that star in its tutorial scenarios are characters that go by the names Ross and Samantha, the only Sims that were created for the game back then.
Jazz
In various BHAV and string resources for the stereo object's file, "Jazz" is often mentioned. But that's because it is the early name for what the final build calls the Latin radio station.
| Sound strings | ||
|---|---|---|
| ID | String | Context |
| 7 | stereo_jazz_cheap |
|
| 8 | stereo_jazz_exp | |
| 9 | stereo_jazz_mod | |
Early Object Sprites
Some events, like carpools and phone calls, are handled by controller objects. Each one of the playable lots have copies of these, with their graphics hidden. When made visible, the graphics depicting them are older versions of objects commonly seen in pre-release media.
| Various | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ID | Sprite | Final | Note | ||
| 100 | 
|
|
An older design for the Will Lloyd Wright Doll House. It's found in various controller objects, like phonecall.IFF and NPCController.IFF. The light and shadows are cast from a different angle, and the roof is both red, and steeper with a Gothic design. | ||
| CarPortal.IFF | |||||
| ID | Sprite | Note | Context | ||
| 128 | 
|
An early version of the small dining table. In the base Sims game, no dining tables take up less than 2x2 tiles. Interestingly, this one in particular takes only 1. A similar concept with single-tile dining tables would be implemented with future Expansion Packs. |  endtable1 graphic, as seen in a late 1998 snapshot. |
||
| PedPortal.IFF | |||||
| 128 | 
|
The pedestrian portal, that spawns neighbor and service NPC's, has the sprites of an early end table. |  old nightstand and old end table, as seen in a late 1998 snapshot. | ||
| PhoneLine.IFF | |||||
| 100 | 
|
An early nightstand. | |||
Unknown Faces
30 September 1999 14ː18
UnknownFace.bmp
UnknownRel.bmp
UnknownThumbnail.bmp
The game has fail-safes incase something breaks, including icons like UnknownRel and UnknownFace.bmp, also nicknamed the Upside-down Lady Syndrome.[1][2].
While, at first glance, they appear to be normal error handlers for missing portrait textures, they're actually vertically flipped portraits of pre-release characters that the final game has no remnants of- specifically, The Duchess and Sigmund Silver.
Despite not matching the aesthetics of the final builds, they were important to the development of the game. They were first implemented by James Doornbos as a replacement Sim portrait in the November 1998 build.
She is mistaken for Betty Newbie (Technical E-mail, page 43), and is thought to be the face of the original Mercedes.
Setup Leftovers
There are many oddities in one of the setup's background images, specifically the Base Game's 377.bmp image. Someone resembling Betty Newbie is seen insulting a person with a talk balloon, when no balloon accompanies insulting in the final game. It's also showing a Sim talking about an unused conversation, specifically, one depicting a falling missile.
This Falling Missile topic is found in [media.]
100th Day Easter Egg
The 100th Day Easter Egg, with Charles London and Eric Bowman, show segments from older versions of the game.
team_ericb
- The wooden sign, at the image's bottom-left, is in a very early state. The game's manual has a similar screenshot in higher quality, so we can infer that the signs reads THE SIMS. It's much smaller, and uses a plainer font than the final game's stylized logo.
- The pre-made Goth household is missing.
- The View Web Pages button, at the image's upper-right corner, has an earlier Ethernet cable icon.
- Pre-made houses use an early, saturated blue roof design instead of the final's greyish color. Similarly, the mansion's roof, at the image's upper-right corner, has a redder hue than its final, orangeish counterpart.
team_charles
Indistinct text is seen above the Friends counter. Because of a similar image in the manual, we can safely infer that the text is the family's last name. This space is void of text in the final game.
Early Localization
The original US release supports US English and Spanish languages only. However, it has all the resources needed for all regions, and contains preliminary translations for 14 languages. Among these are: Thai, Traditional Chinese and Dutch.
Some ID's (e.g. Japanese) contain English strings for an unfinished version of the staff roll, close to near-final builds. Some of the localization team are not mentioned, and some core team members are credited in a humorous way, though not as heavily as in the even older credits roll.The Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Polish and Swedish ID's for these early strings were actually translated and, later, used.
| Early | Final |
|---|---|
SIMULATION GOD ENGINEER Jamie Doornbos GRAPHICS GURU ENGINEER Eric Bowman ENGINEERING Patrick J. Barrett III Don Hopkins David Oester Trevor Perrin Alex Zvenigorodsky |
SIMULATOR ENGINEER Jamie Doornbos GRAPHICS ENGINEER Eric Bowman ENGINEERS Patrick J. Barrett III Don Hopkins David Oester Trevor Perrin Alex Zvenigorodsky LOCALIZATION TESTING Gregory Touilliez, Alvaro Corral, Dirk Vojtilo, Natasja Hagemeier, Giulio Marchionni, Sami Valkama |
Early Lot Names
House06.IFF
House07.IFF
House08.IFF
House09.IFF
House10.IFF
The ability to name and describe lots wasn't implemented until the Hot Date expansion, but the original Base game has a few houses with names that seem to be from the Steering Committee Demo (Jun 1998) build, as the names themselves don't match the lots in the final game. This suggests that these houses are based on versions from the Steering Committee build.
