MySims™: Cozy Bundle New Features and Patch Notes!

Sul Sul, MySimmers! 

We are extremely excited to bring you this update today – some things we have been working on for a long time are finally ready! This update is truly made by a dedicated team of fans, for our dedicated community. Happy playing!

-The MySims Team 

For the most current bug updates, please visit the Forum. 

April 14 Patch Notes:

New Features*:

• Steam Deck compatibility for both titles, allowing you to play on the go!
  • Tip: The trackpad will function as a mouse, while the joystick and buttons will act as an Xbox controller. You can't use both at once, so, if you nudge the trackpad any joystick or button input will allow the controller to regain functionality. If you want to change controllers while playing on the steam deck, you will need to configure that within the deck itself to recognize a new primary controller. 
• In MySims, added the ability to move Sims into the Garden area, opening up room for 8 new residents 
• In both MySims and MySims: Kingdom, added 4 more skin tones for players to choose from, allowing for increased customization of your Sim.
• Steam Trading Cards are now available!

Fixed Bugs:

• A lantern option, currently only available for Goth Boy and Madame Zoe, is now available for all buildings once unlocked in MySims (Switch and PC) 
• Multiple songs now loop in Workshop and remodel modes in MySims (Switch and PC) 
• Resolved a softlock if you invite a commercial Sim to move in, but then change your mind to invite another; leading to no one being able to move in (Switch and PC) 
• Hand and arm skin tones match the face on all outfits now in both games (Switch and PC)
• Buddy and Lyndsay’s icons appear during Island transitions in Kingdom (Switch and PC) 
• Fixed flickering visual glitch on Trevor’s Island in Kingdom (Switch and PC) 
• Thanks to your feedback, we have been made aware of some discrepancies in the lighting and cutscenes. Adjustments have been made to Kingdom to ensure a more consistent experience in some of our characters from the original MySims game. (Switch and PC)
• Changes made in the Garden now persist after leaving / saving (PC) 
• Various memory and performance improvements to resolve crashes (PC) 

Thank you as always for playing our beloved game and being a part of our community. We appreciate you for continuing to share and report issues and don’t forget to join the MySims section on our official Discord! 

*Why did these features take so long?

These games are very old, built using old or custom systems that break if you look at them the wrong way. We are a small team working on these ports and patches, and wanted to bring you the games first…knowing to make these features actually feel worthwhile, they would take some time to perfect. 

The Garden was not zoned at all to handle NPCs. Making it so you could move in a Sim was the easy part. But, as you know if you are a long-time MySimmer, the Sims had a tendency to vanish in the original version. So when we opened up the Garden to residents, suddenly, those Sims were at risk of just disappearing. We also knew we couldn't just have sims move in. We had to make the Garden alive, allow for NPC routing and activities. Adding all of this to a place that wasn’t set up to handle those events caused crashes, loading issues, stutters, all which we needed to remedy before releasing to you!

It also sounds simple to add skin tones to the game but, the way the game handles outfits is that each one is baked down into a texture. Meaning - each individual outfit isn't just an asset on top of a Sim body. It's actually got the skin tones baked into it. As such, adding 4 new skin tones turns into creating over 1000 new assets for all the outfits. Which - how textures are compiled - would have made the game over double in size!! This would have completely changed how much memory it needed on Switch and PC which isn’t ideal. So, we had to invent a different way to solve for this! The way we managed to approach skin tones now simplifies how the games differentiates between skin and outfits. By using mask textures, we are able to isolate the skin parts and apply any RGB color we want. Not only is it way more scalable, but also it avoids generating a new outfit texture for a new skin tone.