I’ve been an avid Simmer since Sims 1. What I enjoy most is building and decorating houses. I recently got a new MacBook and, although I had played the Sims 2 alot on our PC I decided to treat myself to the Mac version of the game. Notwithstanding the lack of Stuff Packs for the Mac, I’ve been pretty happy.� However, the one thing that I did find tedious is the constant RSI clicking required for installing the floor and wall patterns which are Sims2Pack files rather than the .package files that you just tip into the downloads folder.
Please note of course the use of the past tense here. What I’ve done this morning over my breakfast danish is look into automating it some how. There is nothing magical or otherwise about the .Sims2Pack file, its just XML with some knobs on. I discovered that all that your clicking does is split it into two files a .Sim2Import file which is the XML information at the top of the file an a .Sims2Tmp file which is the rest of the file – the actual image data pretty much and pops these into the Teleport directory. When you launch the game and enter a neighbourhood the game then kicks in and processes the two files and imports it.
Well, I thought, this looks like a job for my Python skills, and sure enough I managed to knock together v.01 of a script which creates the two files for the Teleport folder, which in turn the game happily loaded up.
Since v.01 of SymPack2Go, a cheesy name that I came up with before I wrote a line of code, just uses a hard coded path to pick up the file to munge the next stage of course is to be able to point it at a directory and get it to deal with all the files it finds.
I will probably work on this over the weekend and try and release something tomorrow evening. It will most likely be a command line app to begin with but I’m happy to share the code with anyone, or throw together something a but less user-daunting.
