FreeSO Archive Progress Update

Hello, Sunrise Crater ex-residents!

How’s the homeless life treating you? Ready to experience a rush of nostalgia after only less than a year of absence? Unfortunately, you’ll have to hold it in for a little longer. But nearly all of the complicated work is done!

To tide you over, you can check out this sneak preview of the Archive Client. As well as the new interfaces for managing and connecting to archive servers, there are a huge number of optimizations and fixes that make it much easier for you to explore Sunrise Crater with an entourage of your choosing. A big improvement is 64-bit support, so that the game can properly handle hosting multiple lots for other people at the same time you’re playing. Additionally, almost all stuttering is gone from the city view, allowing you to scroll as fast as you like across thousands of lots without a fire breaking out. Technology really is amazing.

There are a ton of other tweaks to visuals and animations throughout the game. Longstanding bugs with lighting and the city view have been completely squashed! See how many you can spot in the video. (or you could just read some of the commits at https://github.com/riperiperi/FreeSO/commits/archive/ )

The archive client hosts a version of the game server that has been stripped back to remove sensitive data like user accounts entirely, where players can assume the role of any character in the city, but can still make their own sims tied to their client. Ingame user management tools allow hosts to block unwanted players through verification and IP banning. When supported, the game can use UPnP to automatically forward ports for other players to connect directly to you over the internet, so long as they have your IP. Additionally, you can still host a dedicated server with the archive data that will stay open without you needing to leave the game on! To make things easier, this configuration can be created and exported directly from the game and used with the dedicated server software. It’s not appropriate to run as an MMO server, but it could make things easier for larger groups of people exploring Sunrise Crater together.

More features are still to be added, such as configurable automated seasonal events, money/skill speed scaling and update support. Town Hall and event lot cleanups are still to be completed. We’ll also need a new launcher setup (or to fix the issues it works around), as the old one was obviously decommissioned. There are still annoying bugs that haven’t been fixed yet – some of them even appear in the video! I want the first release to be in a really nice state so that people enjoy their time rather than run head-first into hundreds of issues and lose interest.

Best place to stay up to date is on our Discord, though the final client will also be posted on here, and likely will have another Youtube video attached to it, so you can follow that too.

Thanks for your patience!
– Rhys