Considering that this site was established to report on Programs and Tools for The Sims game, it’s only fair to publish news on them!  Steve posted 2 updates of The Sims 3 Workshop tool that is currently underway by some of the best talented programmers in The Sims Community – Delphy, Inge_Jones, Peter L Jones, Echo, jfade and Karybdis (to name a few).

First update is that all information and coding used in The Sims 3 Workshop will be open source, allowing other programmers to use the code within their own tools.  It may not mean much to the average joe, but this will allow for even more programs to be created!

The second update is that they’ve successfully imported a TS3 mesh into the Workshop, and they are currently working out the texture properties as well as writing/debugging the code to import meshes.

Also, a few new programs have been added to The Sims 3 – Package/Sims3Pack Editors section:  jFade’s  3Viewer and The Compressorizer Redux.

3Viewer
Source: DJS Sims
Copyright: jFade

The 3Viewer aims to be a Sims3Pack Installer, Editor, and overall Download Manager all without using the Launcher provided by EA. Think of it as the Sims 3 version of the Clean Installer with additional content management capabilities.

  • View any type of Sims3Pack file, including content from the store.
  • Properly install the following types of Sims3Pack files: Sims, Households, Lots, Patterns
  • Extract content from any other type of Sims3Pack for experimenting. (Done manually, extracted files are dumped as soon as the Sims3Pack is loaded into the ProgramPath/Temp directory.)

The Compressorizer Redux
Source: DJS Sims
Copyright: jFade

The Compressorizer Redux! will compress DBPF package files to save hard drive space. Just like the Sims 2 Compressorizer, the Sims 3 Compressorizer allows you to pick a directory and will search for all known file extensions utilized by the game. Currently, this includes:

  • .package
  • .dbc
  • .ebc
  • .sim
  • .sims3
  • .world

Functions just like the Sims 2 Compressorizer. Point the program at a directory and it will search for files within that directory and execute the s3rc.exe tool on them.