the sims 3 (64-bit & metal) release

by Marg_Sosa
Reply

Original Post

Re: SIMS 3 64bit

★★★★★ Guide
@gustavsjb I don't know anyone who said that. The most official things I've read from the EA Answer Centre (here: https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues-Mac/An-announcement-for-The-Sims-3-players-on-Mac/m-p/827... ) and on BlueBellFlora's blog is that they said early 2020. Hell, depending on how you interpret "early" could even go up to, say, June 30th as that would be the end of the first half of 2020.

Also, there is also this whole Coronavirus thing going on and if the Sims team is working on this from home, you still have to give them time to get their home rigs set up (assuming that EA is allowing their employees to work from home, which is possible).
Message 81 of 4,043 (2,471 Views)

Re: SIMS 3 64bit

★★★★★ Guide

Also, I definitely believe the The Sims team is currently working from home. After all, SimGuruFrost has noted that we should be hearing something very soon about upcoming content for The .... Additionally, it appears that EA is near the end of completing one of the next expansion packs for the Sims 4, so I sincerely doubt things are going to wind down too terribly because of COVID-19. If anything, it might be a hiccup.

 

Not to mention, I'm seriously thinking about buying up the remaining Stuff Packs I DON'T have for TS3 once TS3 is updated and I'm hunting down a copy of Katy Perry's Sweet Treats to add to my Origin library. In short, this could seriously revitalize their ability to make money off content that pretty much has already been produced. Hell, if it weren't so buggy before Catalina, I'd probably STILL be playing The Sims 3 and I'm super stoked at the notion of being able to play this again.

Message 82 of 4,043 (2,438 Views)

Re: SIMS 3 64bit

[ Edited ]
★★★ Guide

Samee @VeroniqueBellamy! Katy Perry's Sweet Treat is a nightmare finding, no luck til' now cause EA revoked it from the market – only physical copies are available. 

Message 83 of 4,043 (2,403 Views)

Will EA ever make Sims 3 compatible with newer macs?

★★★ Newbie

Sims3 Is my favorite sims and I want to be able to play it on my mac but I've learned that its not compatible with Catalina, which really sucks. Im wondering if EA will ever make Sims3 compatible with these devices or if they just don't find it worth it to make it accessible.

Message 84 of 4,043 (3,025 Views)

Re: Will EA ever make Sims 3 compatible with newer macs?

[ Edited ]
★★★★★ Guide

... They already are, @laureng910. Give them some time to do so.

 

Currently, the technology that EA/Maxis used to make The Sims 3 compatible with Mac in the first place is a porting library called "Cider". EA announced their usage of it back in 2007. However, there are some key problems with this approach. Namely:

 

  1. The company that makes Cider, TransGaming, Inc., is no longer in the technology industry. Oddly enough, they moved into real estate instead. So, naturally, this means that...
  2. Cider is no longer being actively maintained. It was merged into the Cedega project in 2007 and Cedega was subsequently discontinued in 2011 and the division that worked on this was ultimately shuttered in 2016.
  3. Currently, the approach by EA is an attempt to future-proof The Sims 3 so that it can be playable into the foreseeable future. To this end, they are doing a few things:
    1. Updating the graphics engine so it will use Metal. Now, I'm not too entirely sure if The Sims 3 uses OpenGL or DirectX, but neither are tenable options. Firstly, DirectX would rely on that Cedega package that hasn't been maintained in years, so there's that. And Apple has announced that they have officially ended support for OpenGL. It's only a matter of time before they stop including an OpenGL binary or library in MacOS altogether. Therefore, in an effort to future-proof it so that they don't have to do as much work down the road, they're upgrading The Sims 3 to run on Metal.
    2. Updating the codebase to run on 64-bit architecture instead of 32-bit. Now, this may not seem too difficult but trust me, it can present some problems when you use some coding conventions that react differently to being on 64-bit architecture versus being on 32-bit.

Naturally, this will take some time. It's my hope that the end result is a more MacOS-native The Sims 3 experience that will be much more stable than the Sims 3 was back when it was just a Cider port.

Message 85 of 4,043 (2,979 Views)

Re: Will EA ever make Sims 3 compatible with newer macs?

★★★ Newbie

Wow! Phenomenal and detailed explanation!  Thank you for that.  If all this is the case, then the delay makes sense.  I just downloaded sims4 because I just want to play sims so bad, but just as I remembered when I first played it a couple of years ago...it sucks.  The sims3 spoiled me with its open-world concept and I can't except anything less.  If for some reason they're unable to make sims3 playable for mac, I really hope they at least plan on making sims5 open-world whenever it comes out in the future.  Again, thank you for the info you provided!

Message 86 of 4,043 (2,925 Views)

Re: Will EA ever make Sims 3 compatible with newer macs?

★★★★★ Guide
@NaturallyAsh There's no reason why they can't necessarily make The Sims 3 playable on MacOS Catalina, given enough time and money thrown at the problem. Several games have been converted to using Metal and 64-bit in anticipation of this, given that this has been announced a while ago. In fact, this is what Aspyr did to their copy of SimCity, which is available on the Mac App Store and should be fully compatible with Catalina.

However, this is the problem with a shortcut like they took in building the Mac OS version of The Sims 3 in the first place. A native version would have been much easier to port over to the new architecture. It seems to me like The Sims 4 was built natively for Mac OS and thus, it was easier for them to port it to be 64-bit and Metal-compatible. Not to mention that for all its flaws in gameplay, The Sims 4 is a hell of a lot more stable than The Sims 3 is and there are several reasons for it.
Message 87 of 4,043 (2,904 Views)

Re: Will EA ever make Sims 3 compatible with newer macs?

★★★★★ Guide

Okay, so an example of a problem I had as a developer that relates to the 64-bit/32-bit question to help people illustrate it. Back in 2014, I was working for this small web dev company and I was responsible for maintaining existing projects. On one, it seemed like they had a problem that was vexing the team. You see, the CAPTCHA on this particularly old-looking website was broken. How it was generated was using a random number generator and then converting it to base64 (which is the numbers 0-9, and capital and lowercase letters of the English library, which two additional characters "/" and "+"). Now, because my company moved the script from one server with one architecture to another, this changed how PHP handled the data type. I fixed it by changing the data type.

 

A lot of the random stuff that happens in The Sims and across the content packs relies on a lot of data types. Not to mention, there should be some testing to make sure things work, considering this is being billed as one last hoorah for Mac Simmers for a game that has been largely abandoned for The Sims 4. It makes sense that if they're doing this, they may as well want to make sure things work right. Because, if someone reads through any one of the guides BlueBellFlora has written about the various ailments The Sims 3 seems to have with being on Mac, from how difficult it is to do a clean uninstall/install, troubleshooting issues, etc, it would probably scare most non-technically minded people away. Not to mention, the last time I had The Sims 3 installed on my Mac, I couldn't grab any of the stuff I bought on The Sims 3's DLC store.

Message 88 of 4,043 (2,846 Views)

Re: when will sims 3 Mac be released

★★★ Newbie

This excites me!!! I miss Sims 3 Frown

Message 89 of 4,043 (2,659 Views)

Re: when will sims 3 Mac be released

★★★★★ Guide

Me too, @Mikala01. Me too.

Message 90 of 4,043 (2,641 Views)