It's been a very long time since the Sims community was very active with the Sims 1. At the time I developed two applications for the game: The Neighborhood Handler and The Add-on Handler. Almost three years ago I decided to make the source code of these two available under the GPL2 license. Time has passed and although the source was publicly available online, it was never really announced. Time to change that, so here's the announcement (and more)!

The Neighborhood Handler and The Add-on Handler are now Open Source software! I must say I haven't properly cleaned up the code or anything: it's basically nothing but a dump of the code I wrote all those years ago. As I was still learning at the time, I bet it's full of bugs, crappy ("WTF") code and other nightmares. Yet if anyone is willing to pick up and improve (or rewrite) one or two of these projects, you now can. If you just want to take a peek: you can do that too.

As for The Neighborhood Handler: I've made a minor restart for a brand new version (still C++, but using the Qt toolkit for UI). Although I haven't had the time to put any work in it, that source is also available for anyone to work with.

There's one more thing Sims 2 content creators may find useful: I've put quite some work into a Sims 2 Packer, which allows custom packaging of the famous .package files for the Sims 2 (into .Sims2Pack files). In fact, this project may serve as a nice base for custom Sims 3 packages as well, since the file format for The Sims 3 is quite similar. I never got around to actually finishing up and publishing this, but it may still be useful to someone.

For all my open code, which also includes Drupal projects, other tools I wrote way back and more, see my public git repositories. If you're just looking for the projects mentioned above, go to:

• TheNeighborhoodHandler repository (see 4.1 branch for the old version, or the master branch for the new almost-nothing-done version)
• TheAddonHandler repository
• libSims2Pack repository
• Sims2PackerUI repository (depends on libSims2Pack)

Note that the old software requires Borland C++ Builder to build. The newer stuff (the new version of The Neighborhood Handler, libSims2Pack and Sims2PackerUI) uses CMake as build system, and depends on Qt (both are freely available). You can use the Qt Creator to build and debug all that code.

Also note that all of this is to little or no use if you're just a user of these tools, and have no interest in the actual source code. I currently have no (recent) binaries/installers available, although you may still find The Neighborhood Handler and The Add-on Handler at The Sims Zone.

Feel free to contact me if you have questions about the code or if you'd like to continue development of one or more of these projects: I can give you write permissions to the repositories if you're serious about taking these projects to a new level. It is unlikely that I'll be touching this code anytime soon.

All in all this is mostly legacy stuff, but nevertheless I hope someone will find it useful!