Hi all,
I've reached the point where I can share about my little project of 
late. It's just for fun, there's no serious motive behind it yet; this 
is mostly a recreation away from my day job.

Anyway, I'm writing a framework called SIMS (Squeak Simulation of 
Interactive Mobile Sentients), which is basically becoming a Smalltalk 
object-oriented MUD, although I'm sure it'll have to be a distributed 
peer system to keep things running smoothly. It's takes inspiration from 
a lot of MOO features, notably Cold and LambdaMOOs, but more importantly 
it supports the kinds of toying-around with people idea of the 
commercial game, _The Sims_.

Note that SIMS itself is not intended to be a game, but just a library 
and logic system for many games, in the manner of GURPS. Once SIMS is 
sufficiently rounded out, I'm going to focus on Squabble, which will 
basically be a 3d graphics engine (based on Wonderland I think), 
libraries, and data for a _Sims_-like game where you toy around with 
suburbianites.

SIMS is *extremely* flexible and pluggable: each Sim-Person is made up 
of several different components, modularizing everything from AI to body 
type and layout (yes, aliens and animals can be modelled this way). 
Potentially, SIMS can also be used for a VR-type chat session, but I 
haven't looked into this deeply enough.

I have put up a recent snapshot of my relatively well-documented code, 
in pre-Alpha state, on the Swiki:

SIMS: http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/2441
Squabble: http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/2442

both linked from the "All Projects" page under "Games". The SIMS page 
has a node for feature suggestions, which automatically notifies me, so 
feel free to use it. Obviously if anyone wants to help with artwork or 
the graphics end of things, I'd appreciate it.

What do you think? Are there any lessons you have learned from other 
MOOs or such? Let me know.

Brian T. Rice
~
water at tunes.org