If you follow my Tumblog, you’ll see that lately I’ve been focusing on the sims3py library instead of sims3.scaffolding. There are two reasons.

Reason number one, I need to be familiar with the binary data structures of Sims3 objects. As it happens, I learnt a lot on the very strange decisions the programming team made. This experience will ultimately help me in designing an efficient in-memory, file-backed object storage system.

(Perhaps contrary to many programmers, I’m from the “old school” of dataflow and DTD, where data is the most important, and everything else conforms to the data and how it is used. Thus, properly modelling the data is of utmost necessity before I can continue. Amazingly, with the help of good debuggers, code injection becomes relatively easy…)

Reason number two, I see the need of a better, cross-platform tool for the manipulation of DBPF and S3P files. The current tools seem to have been abandoned by their makers (can’t blame them; after years, one would be burnt out), and the roundabout way to run then on non-Windows platforms has been more problematic. So, Sims 3 players on non-Windows platforms are in dire need of assistance.

There, my simple explanation. Once I’m finished with sims3py, I’ll go full speed on sims3.scaffolding.