Part of a translation from the official German Sims site:

A very beautiful small coastal town with several beaches and the hilly land behind it, extends into small mountains. In the center of the very idyllic city, there is a small park with jumping wells and lakes, surrounded with some public buildings, businesses and Cafés. Around the center of the houses, there is also some very modern art. Beautiful is also that they can be built directly at the beach or also in the mountains. Behind the hills is even a small agrarian area with farm with wheatfields and a plantation with fruit trees. The developers unfortunately did not want to say whether they are playable farms with appropriate functions or only neighbourhood decorations.

Since there will be a new aging system, the entire neighbourhood aging and developing together, they showed these effects on the population structure in a simplified computer simulation. Different factors and statistics were stuck at the basis, in order to balance birth rates, marriage frequency, movement of child-rich families to larger houses, etc. This way it is ensured that the population in the city changes regularly, but always remains stable. So there should be no fear of the Nhood becoming empty or overcrowded.

In gameplay mode, the first that is noticed is the changed interfacemenu. It's more clear and somewhat more elegantly to work with. But they are clearly recognizable as Sims menus and most information can be found in the same place.

In the Sims 3, there are only four needs, which won't play such an important role, so that you can concentrate more on pleasant and interesting things. The needs are seized together to four main needs such as recovery, hygiene, fun and hunger (the designations could still change). All needs hide behind these categories, like bladder urge goes under hygiene or sleeping under recovery. The four needs are only indicated as small symbols in the menu. If all needs are fully fulfilled, their symbol is green. If a need becomes more urgent, the color changes to yellow and red. When the color changes, simply float your mouse cursor over the symbol. Then a small window appears with more information explaining what the urge exactly is.

There are more interactions and play options for babies, pregnant women and elders. The life stages will be somewhat longer, but the exact length is not certain yet. Babies can be carried around in the neighbourhood but there are no baby carriages.

For those with slower PC's a possible option may be that the city size could be smaller. You cannot import sims from the Sims 2, due to the larger complexity of the Sims and the social structures.

In the CAS screen, you can choose favorites; Music type, food and color. With music there were five selectable styles and with the favourite meal 25 options. The favourite color is freely selectable.
Very nice is also the fact that these can still be changed and adapted to Sims after the creation in the game.

It is more, more, more!

The Sims 3 is more, more and more! Although the development of the game is still far from complete, we have seen already how the Sims creation has been exported to new dimensions and construction, and furnishing has been done better.
Many of the questions, such as the game hardware requirements, we have not been informed about ... If something is not mentioned, it was not answered, so it is completely unnecessary to post.

Some changes to CAS:

• Skin color can be changed with sliders, so you can make Skin color as dark or as light as you want. There is, "normal" skinskale & green one.
• There is a new feature in eyes, the spill, which makes them much more naturally looking. Eye colour can be adjusted with sliders, so there are around a million eye colours.
• The old four-color palate is history. In Sims 3 after choosing hair model you can adjust the color just like you want, surprisingly, with sliders, so you can choose from about million colors from blond to brunette and all the way to violet. Each hair model has 4 areas to 'paint', which includes, bottom, root, hairtop and highlights, each of these areas are individually adjusted. Result of this is really natural and colorful hair. You can do for example: dark hair, with a lighter root and which have light stripes. Or violet hair with pink stripes, green hairtop and green roots.
• Your own hair selections can be saved/stored, and used in other hairs.
• Sims can individually be edited, with the amount of muscle and fat – these are separate sliders.
• You CAN'T CHANGE YOUR SIMS HEIGHT.
• Face-editing is really unique.
• Shoes can be placed separately
• Similarly, socks, jewelry, sunglasses… There are no piercings.
• Upper- and lowerbody match now more naturarly.
• You can choose sims favorite color, food and music.
• Sims can choose five different traits, for example, bashful, a clean, vegetarian, aggressive, happy, inspired, etc... There are about 100 different... The old sloppy/neat scales stays away.
• You can choose and adjust your sims voice with sliders.
• You can adjust the lenght if each age.

Building and furnishing

• Objects can be set between tiles.
• Tiles are smaller which affects to walls building.
• You can rotate the objects as you want.
• Lots of new small objects, such as the paper rolls, notebook, hanger for toilet paper roll, make up set etc…
• You may set a number of different items on the table, and also place other than just the middle of the table. You can for example place paper roll on kitchen table and still be able to use the table.
• Improved hammer tool, allow you to choose for example, all of the rooms' objects and remove delete them at once.
• New magnificently animated plants.
• You can adjust the size of stairs.

New Concepts

• You can zoom directly from the neighborhood to house, from one house to another and from houses to neighborhood.
• Sims walk on the streets, which actions can be observed.
• WORKPLACES appear in neighborhood as houses, and you can apply for the job by clicking on the house. Houses are such as farm, hospital, town hall...
• There are 7 Age Groups:  baby, toddler, child, teen, young adult, adult, elderly person. Young Adult comes in the "basegame", and not in and expansion like in the Sims 2.
• Sims can fish.
• Sims can own cars
• Direct transition neighborhood to house/from house to another/etc.
• Zoom out of house and click for example park, and you can make your sim to walk there.
• What sim does at work, can affect: when sim goes to work you can choose how the sim spend his day: Working hard, pleasing his boss.
• Sims can bring work to home.
• Babies and seniors are expect to include new interactions
• You can adjust, how many simhours your sims for example sleeps.

We were warned at the outset: despite the all-new design of our small world Sims, the creators did not want to do "Simtown", or "Simville", this game once abandoned. However, Sims 3 made me think irresistibly. Now, you do not have long wait between the appearance of a neighborhood, and the game itself with our virtual friends. You choose a Sim in a house, and you zoom in a manner perfectly playful. Let us try to follow the adventures of a Sim We will her Laura!

I do not know what we can see for the first time in a woman, especially in a Simette, say that they are his eyes! With the new tools come with the Sims 3, you can create the color of iris you want, even one that our genes to us, we prohibit poor people So, long live the Martians in the eyes of oranges,  purple eyes, etc! For specialists, creation tool includes a range RGB. What can be done with your eyes, you tell me, can we do with other elements of the physical aspect of our Sims? I reply: "of course, and color of the skin have the same nuances, intended to reproduce all pallets human skins or Martian basically anything you want. Clearly, the green is planned at the outset, but thanks to all the tools, you can create people with the skin blue, orange, etc. ...

There, where it gets more being of is that hair is just as easy to achieve, and that keep you well: You can act independently on the roots, the background colour and the tips. You see that the tools creations are quite revolutionary.
Regarding clothing, new shoes are totally independent from the rest of the costume. Women are also entitled to gloves!
Now, a great desire of the community, which responded brilliantly designers, was able to play with truly unique characters! I would say to start that we have a choice between six ages, when we create a Sim from nothing: toddler, child, adolescent, young adult, adult, senior. The novelty is to have first class age "young adult", which is now the real age "18-30 years"!

The tools used to define the human face that you want (according to the laws of nature, however). The animation is truly realistic, as you can see from the pictures. The body modifiers are resolved easily, since a slim size mannequin, until the total obesity! Another modifier can define strength of character, with anatomical accuracy, which has no relation to what we were accustomed ... Another new very important: we have a choice between three different voices for each sex, which we can set the tone!

However, it is the psychology of our young people that is most revolutionary. You can choose between many traits, and you can combine up to five, to achieve a truly unique character. Take the example of Laura! We will decide it is a genius, very comfortable with computers, it has green fingers, and finally it will be a break-neck, and paradoxically romantic desperate ... Of course, these character traits are not always identical for both sexes. For example, there are Sims to be narrow-minded, freedy all the time on this or that. And, I swear to you that the animation that we saw is amazing!  Because relate to each character animation is a precise, when the new Sim ...

Now, the new interface we learned that Laura wants to find work in a scientific career. We will therefore give her satisfaction, because obviously we do not our Sims to be unhappy. We need only return to the city and seek the brand new laboratory. However, do not imagine any more than we see the Sims work! We are now informed by the mood of our Sims and it needs to entertain. This need is satisfied in a manner entirely classical. But, having restored a very ordinary, since it is not specially equipped for cooking (Sims who have the taste of food will have a few more opportunities, of course ...). We will therefore go to sleep, but other novelty, we can adjust its time to sleep!

The next day she gets up in a good mood and, after a day's work, in which it has chosen its objectives (For example, it may decide that she will spend her time to talk with his colleagues. Or, it may want to earn a lot of money ,...), she suddenly wanted to meet new faces!
Our Sims therefore buys his a new car, and visit, for example the park, where it has the opportunity to fish.
Then she will read Michael, which is passionate about fishing, but is also a sacred luring!

Everything goes well with each other and we see progress in their relationship over the helm of the screen. We were able to choose what you’re talking about to the characters. It progresses into a romantic relashionship. In the end, each Sim has learned something over the other. We are seeing a message: "Laura has learned that Michael loved fishing. She thought it was fun." Both agree there thus far at the outset, but other combinations are obviously less happy and, as in reality, it is not always easy to establish good relations between our Sims. The game will be even more interesting ...
If our wishes Sims review its new friend in the future, then it is not home, she could always use his laptop ... Ils feront une promenade romantique en bord de mer, admireront les vagues, mais ne pourront pas se baigner. They will make a romantic stroll on the seafront, admireront waves, but they will not bathe. Pour cela, il faudra aller à la piscine ! This will go to the pool! Ils pourront tout aussi bien se rencontrer au café. They could just as well to meet the coffee.

Let us now see what's new in the world of Sims!

• First, there is new construction tools quite remarkable.
• No-Cheat codes to place a piece of furniture to 45 ° Now you can move around 360 degrees.
• Here, I must say that everyone in the audience was really amazed!
• Better still, we are no longer confined to our small tiles, to insert an object into a house.
• Imagine the possibilities decorative novel!
• Similarly, the stairs can be adjusted in line with the width.
• We saw that our Sims owned cars.
• These are placed on the ground, using a marker very discreet, which can he also be adjusted to 360 degrees.
• You can leave your vehicle on any ground in the sense that you need to ...
• It is also possible, once some furniture joined naturally, because they work together (a table and chairs, for example), to move together, using the mouse.

The management of stories is through a table, where each Sims is represented by a symbol, placed in a rectangle representing his house. Other symbols include objects. Over time, we see the lives of our Sims forward. However, we retain some control over their lives, insofar as we can decide that certain events will not occur
For example, we can authorize Laura and Michael to marry, but prevent them from having children until further notice!

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Translation notes:
Please note that this is a rough translation, some aspects of the translation may not fully reflect the authors original intentions.



Expect something BIG!
How big can a game get? We all know The Sims is the worlds most sold game, with over 100 billion games sold so far. And for many players is the chase after more objects a constant fight about what their computers can handle.
Can the producers of the game make all our wishes come true?

The game is far from complete. so the words below are just a sneak peak of what that game has to offer. The producers have really read and listened to many of the players wishes.
The sims can once again brush their teeth and get a fresh miny breath to start the day with, or finish the day with a smile on their lips. The sims now only have four needs to fulfill. Also, the sims are more intelligent, so they can take care of their needs by themselves.
If a sim gets hungry it will go to the fridge and prepare its own food, instead of stand around and complain like they do in The Sims 2. It will hopefully be less accidents with sims failing to get to the toilet in time.
All of this will make the storytelling run more smoothly, which is one of the producers main goal with The Sims 3. It's about your story and how you tell it!


Create a Sim
When you create a sim you will have a lot more options than in The Sims 2. Many of the choices are made with sliders and color palettes.
There are default settings you can use, but you can modify these to make your sims unique. Because of the sliders and palettes, only your creativity sets the limits of what kind of sims you can create. You can make a sim with big pink eyes and green hair with yellow highlighs.
Hair will have four segments that you will be able to adjust precisely and then save them, so you can use them for many different hairstyles. Make the ears small and the chin long, make a heavy sim or a muscular one.
Choose on of the pre-made voices and use the sliders to make the voice darker or lighter.

You can now choose socks and shoes for your sims, and there will be many different accessories for your sim. Most of the clothes and accessories arent finished yet, so specific details about this cant be made right now.

One of the biggest news in The Sims 3 is that you can now choose characteristics and adjust your sims personality. There will be about 75 traits to choose between, and these traits have a great impact on your sims life and decisions.
Some of these traits are not compatible with eachother, though. If you choose a trait that has one or more opposites, they will not be selectable.
The desicions you make for a sim during one age group will settle what new traits you can give your sim when they reach a new age group. Toddlers will have 2 traits, children 3 traits, teens 4 traits, adult and up will have 5.

Young adults are a new age group that reflects the age between 18 and 30. This age group can move out, get married and have kids. Relations between young adults and adults are allowed.


Build mode
In The Sims 3 they have included some of the functions that only were attainable using cheats in The Sims 2.
You can now place furniture diagonally. The furniture will function as it normally does, without weird bugs and glitches.
If you hold down the Alt-tab you can rotate the furniture 360 degrees! On a diagonal wall you can place windows and other wall objects.
The grid is split into 1/4 tiles, which makes it easy to, among other things, center a tv, in front of a 2 tile couch.
If you want to, you can ignore the grid completely and furniture the house just the way you want it.

Furniture has, just like sims, gotten smarter.
Example: if you place chairs around a table they will "glue" themselves to the table. If you want to move it, you click on it and that chairs will be moved along with the table.

There will be a lot of decorations to place around the house. You can, for example place a box of tissues on the sink in the bathroom. In the kitchen, you can place objects on the counters and still use the surface for preparing food.
An object will only occupy the surface that the base of the object uses, and you cal place decorations on most empty, flat surfaces.


Play mode
The game focuses on storytelling and interaction between sims. The producers want to make the game load as fast as possible, so you can start telling your own story. Many of the things in The Sims 2 that made your sim displeased have been removed and a lot of things have been simplified.
The time in the game will tick for all sims in the neighborhood while you play with one family. If you play with more than one family you will notice how time has passed for a family you got back to play with after playing with another family.
This means you can miss important moments in your sim's life. Just like in real life, time flies!

The jobs in The Sims 3 are less abstract, each career has its own building in the neighborhood.
You cant come with your sims to work (it would get boring after a day anyways), but you can choose what your sim will focus on at work.
Your sim can for example work hard, assist the boss, or just chill out. The choices you make for your sim will affect if it will get a promotion, be exhausted after work, be energetic or recieve an opportunity.
The opportunities are tasks or assignments that your sims can do.
If your sim completes it, it will recieve a reward.

When your sim talks to another sim you can guide the conversation in any direction you want. If your sim just got a new job it can bring it up, or maybe talk about things that happened during the day. If your sim is looking for love you can choose a flirtatious tone during the conversation.

After a day of work, interaction and exploration of the neighborhood, it will be nice for your sim to get home and go to bed. Even if its good for you to get eight hours of sleep every night, we dont have that much time to spare. You can now choose for how long your sim is going to sleep and your sim can get up early to get ready for a new day.

In the end it's the small details that will make The Sims 3 something BIG!

Part of a translation from Simparool:

Producer Ben Bell gives a short tour through the game. The Nhood comes into view and above certain buildings, an icon is hovering to show what is in that building. To start, you just click on a building with the icon of a house. The game then zoomes into the house and you can start playing. Not a single loading screen appeared.

Everybody will get the same Nhood. They did this because then you can share experiences with eachother. But ofcourse you can adjust and remove anything. You can also move your house to a bigger lot. This is because you can no longer decide where to place lots. All existing lots are pre-determent. The reason for this is that the Nhood is much more dynamically built with curvy roads and even lots that are diagoanally placed.

All careers that you can follow have building where your sim can go to work. There are also restaurants, shops, town hall and hospital. But asking if you could actually use that hospital, no answer was given. Furthermore, we didn't see a single building from the inside, not even the restaurant. So it is unsure if you can see your sim dining out or when they're shopping.
There are 2 kinds of buildings; Buildings that you can build yourself and look into, and buildings where your sim disapears into and re-appears after some time.
These buildings are ploppable; it means that you can just select them from a menu and put it in the Nhood all made and ready. This wasn't demonstrated though.

A moodlet is something that a sim get if something happens to him or what he does. Like getting a comfortable moodlet while sitting in a nice chair, but also bigger moodlets like being married.
With the help of these icons, you can easily see how a sim feels. This is very handy when playing. Because, for example, it wouldn't be wise to give a big party when your sim is mourning over a dead family member.
You also have wishes and they just appear when something happens. For example if you're in the park and a sim is there, a wish to meet that sims comes up. You can choose to fulfill the wish or not, but if you fulfill it, you get a fulfilled moodlet which makes the sim a bit more happy. You can only get 1 wish at a time.

Talking to other sims is improved. You can talk about things, but you can decide if you talk in a romantic way, mean, etc. In Sims 2 it's not possible to talk with 3 sims together (except when in a sofa etc.). Now you can talk to multiple sims while standing.
Sleeping has been changed. You can choose how long a Sims sleeps so no more automatic wake-ups at 6 am. You can also choose how long a sim reads a book; Like at what time they should stop.etc.

There are a few small things concerning jobs. For example if your sim is in the military career, you can choose to show your date a fighterplane or it may be possible that sims randomly start to salute you on the street.

It's important to know that clothes are very elastic. It does not matter how thin or fat a sim is, the clothes will always fit.A typical Sims 2 problem is that shirts and pants never seem to fit together. Mostly that is because a shirt does not hang over the pants and they all have this 'stuffed in the pants' look.
That will change in the Sims 3. Seperate jackets and shirts can hang over the pants. There are ofcourse still complete outfits.

You can choose the voice of each sim. There are 3 different voices for each gender and then choose a pitch height for that voice.
Lastly, your sims has favorites like a certain food or music. It's not so that this sim ONLY wants its prefered favorite, just a bit more then the rest.

The grid, to place things on is now much smaller. 1 Gridtile in Sims 2 is 4 grids in Sims 3. But theres also an option to play completely without grid.
There are also some minor details like, you can now place small items on the wall like toilet rolls or place tissuebox on the sink.
There are no spiral stairs in the game yet, but you can choose how wide a stairs can be.
They are also experimenting with a new buy menu. Here you can choose all objects in some form of symbolic shaped room.

There are no garages and parking is changed. Here's how it goes. The sim stops with his car in front of the house and then gets out of the car. Then the car will magically disapear and re-apears on the parking space.
Maybe a bit unrealistic, but this way you can place this parking space anywhere on the lot and in any angle.

Sims 2 Brazil - #2
Translated by:
Sims 2 Brazil - #2
Translated by: Sims 3 Maniacos
[ View Original Post ]

Hi!

Hello Guys!

It's MM, i'm writing to tell you what's coming on, when we're talking about The Sims 3. This article is the first of two parts, the second one's coming on Tuesday, 12th august.
The Sims 3, uhmm, I don't need to say that it's the prettiest version ever, do I? ha ha. We've been with the developer team: Rod Humble, Lindsay Pearson, Ray Mazza, Joanna Lio, and Ben Bell all day long, and they could show us the very first version of Sims 3. Then you ask: Where are the movies?
The Electronic Arts didn't allow us to film the content, by the way a lot of things are going to change while the game's being produced on next months, but when some new version will be getting ready, we come back to California and then catch all those things for you, ok?
First Impressions –
The first interesting thing to talk about in The Sims 3 is that it'll come with cars already! We won't need to wait an expansion pack to drive down the street… And by the way, your Sim can be "fine" then going to every place by Taxi. Now you can see your Sim sat on the passenger bench of the vehicle, while awesome characters act as drivers, like ducks, NPCs, etc.
The Water has a transparence and totally beautiful reflection, and when your sims take a shower, the blur will be still there, so you won't see any naked Sim.  And a cool thing is that the hot water has a fog now.. !
The Game Time is customizable, it means that you can ask your sims to do something, then u turn the clock to another time, then you'll see the action already done!

News
When a Sim goes to a body academy, you'll see softly the muscles being more perceptible. By the way, if your Sim keeps eating all the time, surely he will get fat. The body lines in this new game are fantastic, thin or fat, Sims now have a more definite size.
More and more surprises will be included in this game, but the producers prefer to keep it secretly for now…!

The Time
You can see the day happening really. While the shadows walk slowly at evening, you can watch the sky changing its colors, from the blue, passing through the red, wine and then to the navy blue.  The wind makes our plants shake over the neighborhood, and that's amazing!

Some Features
Your Sims will have a mobile phone/ Pager  that comes with the character icon. It's called Opportunities (goals): Tasks, Friend Callings and scraps will be shown in this pager.
Clicking over the character icon, a relationship net will appear on the screen, then you'll be able to manage you contacts better.

Create-a-Sim
- The Main Feature is PALLETE.
- Customized eyes, textured hairs, reflections, three tones…
- Five basic skin tone scales that can still be customized inside its initial tone and one more green scale, what make us thinking it's going to have Aliens again.
- There are 6 life stages now, from a toddler, children, teenager, young adult (between 18 – 30 years old), adult, and elder.

What we can tell
- Diagonal walls now can place all sort of objects.
- The Environment doesn't alter the lifetime of your sims.
- Most of the Sims 2 cheats codes will be in Sims 3 too.
- Objects don't need to be in the grid, now.
- There's a big possibility to find some SuperStar object in Sims 3.
- We don't know if the game's going to be released for PC and Mac at the same time.
- The Main Goal on this game is to socialize.
- We got beach, and we can walk on the sand. But we can't swim in the beach, only in the swim pool.
- The Motives (Needs) won't be obligatory anymore.
- We can't take our sims 2 families to Sims 3.
- The Sims 3 and Spore won't have any connection.

What the producers didn't talk about
- Pets.
- Future expansion packs or anything else.
- Coloring shoes.
- Modeling tools to the neighborhood.
- Color palette to the objects.
- Business lots, as the expansion pack Open For Business.