The original Sims game is coming to mobile, thanks to the team who brought back The Sims Online. FreeSO has just announced their new project, which involved porting the original game to their current engine, and making available for play on mobile.

Since The Sims Online is actually built on the engine of The Sims 1, it’s not too much of a leap to adapt our engine to support and use objects and resources from the original game. After quite a bit of work, we are now running nearly all lots in a default TS1 neighbourhood (including downtown, studio etc), without much issue. You can imagine a few benefits to playing TS1 in the FSO engine, such as the lighting, high framerate support, 5 floors and powerful modding tools… but the true final objective is to get The Sims 1 running on mobile devices with an entirely custom UI.

While this is mainly a project in its own right, the development of this engine is gradually improving the state of our TSO engine. I’ve tracked down multiple very specific bugs which were completely untracable within TSO’s objects, notably the “running man” interaction bug and obscure behaviour with animation events. It was the development of this project that lead to the addition of terrain tools across both projects.

Finally, here is a mockup of the mobile friendly UI that will be used in the TS1 frontend. Note that these are just a few shots out of a large collection of menu mockups, but you should be able to note that we’re keeping it simple.