From: Don Hopkins [mailto:xardox@mindspring.com] 
Sent: Saturday, August 26, 2000 5:09 PM
To: SimWatch@egroups.com
Subject: Re: [SimWatch] Edith

"Edith" is a version of The Sims that's compiled with a whole bunch of
special purpose editing tools built in.

The name came from "Edith Bunker", the first mother Sim, and it also
means "EDIT House".

(We would have called it "Archie" for "ARCHItecture Editor", but he's
such a loud mouth close minded bigot, it didn't seem right.)

Edith lets you view and edit "SymAntics" code, which is the visual
programming language for scripting the behavior of The Sims.

Edith lets you control the behavior of people and objects, but not
their appearance.

It's extremely complicated and needs to be documented in order for
anyone outside of Maxis to use, which I'm working on.

The SymAntics language was used to program the people in SimCopter,
and Edith evolved out of that.

Edith has grown a lot and is much wiser, now that she's integrated
into The Sims instead of running as a separate program, so she is
actually able to debug and edit code and data while it's running live
in the game!

SimTransmogrifier is a simple stand-alone tool, that I wrote after the
game was finished.  It lets you change the surface appearance of
objects, but not their behavior.  You'll be able to use
SimTransmogrifier and Edith together, to do all kinds of great stuff,
since they complement each other!

I don't know when Edith will be released, since I haven't finished
writing documentation yet, and the final decision and timing is up to
Maxis.

Down the road, I hope we'll be able to release easy to use versions of
the the original high end tools for creating any kind of 3d objects,
bodies and character animations for The Sims, that will work with
gMax, the free version of 3D Studio Max for gamers, that Discrete is
going to release some time in the future.

I'm working on finishing up and testing a new version of
SimTransmogrifier that fixes a bug with Magic Cookies (the previous
release 1.0 only lets you create 256 objects per cookie), imports and
exports object definitions (so you can see and change many other
aspects of the object by editing the xml file), and handles 24 bit
images and images with different color palettes (so you don't have to
do all that tricky work to make all the palettes the same).

    -Don