MySims Officially Adds Steam Deck Compatibility For MySims and MySims Kingdom

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If you are looking for a more cutesy version of The Sims where you can build your own town and furniture, I would check out the MySims Cozy Bundle. This includes both MySims and MySims Kingdom, two older titles that EA released on the Nintendo DS and Wii back in 2007 and 2008, and have been repurposed for the PC. The games also just got an update on PC that should make it significantly more playable on the Steam Deck!

The new patch, which was released yesterday, officially adds Steam Deck compatibility for both games included in the Cozy Bundle! The gamepad has been configured so that the trackpad functions as a mouse, while everything else acts as a regular Xbox gamepad. This was one of the big issues I found when trying to play on the Deck, so it is compatible, and fixing the gamepad support is huge.

The update also adds the ability for Sims to be moved to the Garden area, so 8 new residents can join you, there aaare four new skin tones for players to choose from, Steam Trading Cards are now available, and there have been a bunch of bug fixes like lighting and cutscene changes, fixed flickering on Trevor's Island in Kingdom, a softlock when inviting a commercial Sim to move in is now fixed, and all hand and arm skin tones should match your face on all outfits that can be worn.

The team also went a little into detail as to why these features took so long to add to the game, and I really appreciate them going into detail! The team said that:

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 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.

MySims Development Team - Steam Community Post

You can check out the full changelog for the update via their Steam Community Post.

The MySims Cozy Bundle is available for $39.99 on Steam.

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