The first main project aimed at restoring TSO was called
The Sims Online Restored and it sounds like early in production they knew they wanted an open source code but they were forced to shut down due to a cease and desist issued by EA games.
However, it was believed that the C&D was an elaborate scam as it was issued to TSOR’s project leader Ghost after they took money for the game:
Ghost informed the public that only those that paid $50 with PayPal would be eligible to test the game, though partial installments were accepted. Over six months, $2400 had been raised by roughly 100 people into Ghost's account, which roused suspicion in former developers that had been terminated and banned from the project for forbidden communication with other banned forum members; at no point did the project have any visible progress beyond basic OpenGL and XNA lesson demos and format readers, whatsoever. In less than a year past its inception, with no progress, Ghost closed the website and ceased the hosting contracts, leaving a goodbye message for a few weeks. None of the donated money was returned, and the takedown notice was never posted.
With TSOR dissolved the project split into two groups, Project Dollhouse and Niotso. This is where things get interesting.
Niotso (ran by a dude called Fatbag) wanted to stay true to the original goals of TSOR but felt there was too much drama between Ghost and the project leaders, so when TSOR dissolved Niotso was born: New Implementation of the Sims Online. TSOR and Niotso share a common goal in bringing The Sims Online back as a public server, and they are
opposed to FreeSO’s current private server status.
Niotso's aim is to construct a clean and functional game engine for The Sims Online that is as faithful to the original as possible, under the guidance of strict rules that will ensure that the project falls under fair use in all use cases.
Niotso’s website went dead in 2014, but let’s take a look at where Project Dollhouse went.
According to the Niotso wiki:
The programmers of TSOR, Fatbag (then X-Fi6) and Afr0, continued their work anyway by branching the code into
Niotso and
Project Dollhouse, respectively. They now work independently.
Now this is where I start to pull up broken links and completely missing forums where these exchanges supposedly occurred.
Instead, I found
yet another wiki, this time however hosted by something called TPaw, a handle for one T Casey Wilcox
According to the “TPaw” wiki, Tomas also known by his screenname IRL Tomas, “had been involved in” Project Dollhouse and TSOR and put his furry-stories on hold in favor of pursuing these projects, implying he was a modder:
FreeSO is an open source project aimed at reverse engineering The Sims Online. It shares code from it's predecessors, Project Dollhouse and TSOR.
IRL Tomashad been involved with all of them since TSOR, putting TPaw and other projects on hiatus.
Conflicts between IRL Tomas and the TSOR leader arouse very early on starting with the very concept of TSOR being open source.
Now getting back to Project Dollhouse, how does this relate? Here is what one Sims wiki has to say about Afr0:
and here is what Tomas’ furry wiki has to say about it:
It all goes back to the Discord. The entire Wiki is somewhat of an explanation about why Tomas doesn’t like FreeSO and Rhys essentially, although it might explain why they are obsessed with IP banning. If you can get through the :autism:
FreeSO Discord
Blindsided by FreeSO, IRL Tomas wanted to redeem and created the Blue Rose, a small but functional FreeSO launcher and updater for FreeSO. He would later go on to the FreeSO Discord, formally New Sims Online, when Skype proved to be a handful for Rhys. IRL Tomas invested a lot of time into FreeSO Discord since none of the moderators would support him. He also it as a chance to provide support for Blue Rose.
He handed the Discord to Rhys when he caught him sharing disgust for meeting someone else who shared a similar views as him. As a consequence, the Discord was labeled as official. Rhys' justification was because IRL Tomas was never a staff member.
My Simulation
My Simulation was a attempt to start his own community inspired by a defunct Sims 2 roleplaying forum of the same name. He created a Discord where he shared the link on his profile. A mixture of formally banned members and a few members of FreeSO.ml, the longest running FreeSO server, joined.
IRL Tomas freely shared his frustration with FreeSO. He shared a "fuck you" blog post that was aimed at Rhys but not meant for Rhys to see immediately. Even though Rhys was never on his server, he got him banned from the forums, anyway, with little warning until his next visit to the forums. This quickly lead to paranoia that someone was sending information back to FreeSO but he didn't know who.
Private Beta
Tensions reached their peek when IRL Tomas shared a small amount of screenshots to My Simulation, since most of the members were never going to be able to play the game, anyway, or were already in the server. Despite this impression, he was banned from private beta without warning but the person who sent the information back to Rhys did come clean.
Before the opening of private beta opened to the public, IRL Tomas and his friend were able to login and sign up, respectfully, into the private beta server. He was amazed he wasn't banned on the server while his friend was quick to point out the oversight. The moderator who convinced Rhys to send the invite to IRL Tomas was to angry at him. He tried to apologize while his friend and him kept trying to warn of the oversight.
On the eve of going public, Rhys quickly implanted IP banning. The two were banned at the same FreeSO saw an influx in registrations from people eager to sign up. The overload in sign ups caused his server to crash. FreeSO used the crash as an opportunity to paint IRL Tomas as a stupid villain.
If you didn’t figure out that :autism: sounds like Tomas was a developer as well and wanted to be back on the FreeSO project so he created a launcher and Discord in an attempt to win them back after bruising Rhys’ ego by claiming to be the better developer. It sounds like Tomas ran the Discord until he handed it over to Rhys who decided it would be the official place to hold business, and it sounds like he removed Tomas’ moderating rights because he wasn’t an “official” FreeSO mod. Oh, and he bruised Rhys’ ego.
Tomas creates his own Discord community, My Simulation, where enough people have already been fucking banned from FreeSO’s early development stages to follow him. Tomas feels secure enough in his new following to share a “fuck you” post about Rhys to his personal blog where Rhys sees it immediately and bans him from the FreeSO forums.
Tomas is still apart of the private beta apparently and leaked photos of it to his community of mostly-banned members. He gets banned from the private beta, and before FreeSO goes public those who were banned find they have access to the servers. Doesn’t last long though because Rhys implements IP banning on the day of public launch to keep those mean boolies away. FreeSO was unable to deal with all the attention they get on launch and their servers crash, they blame the failure on him.
FreeSO goes back private to work on a new API and Tomas creates a new server to act as backup. Tomas says he “criticized FreeSO's unwillingness to let the public test the new API since the whole point was to prevent what happened the first time.”
If you read on the Wiki (I won’t jeepunds like he wanted to keep all the forum and other info about their past failures up and the community didn’t like that. Somehow him and his My Simulation group got labeled as Nazis. Boy, does that sound like every Simming community I have encountered.
The second part is again heavy in :autism: but there are other sources to support it. Apparently FreeSO received a C&D after attempts to make a mobile version:
Not wholly related to the C&D, this was written further down in Rhys’ signed blog post and I found it of note:
Here is a short post of Rhys and another developer quick to tell people that acshtually FreeSO and Niotso are the same while getting clearly bent out of shape in the same post
Here is a relevant post with someone asking about the status of Niotso, with Fatbag himself answering, and
truly a cow worthy reply from Rhys Simpson, still ego hurt over being told he wasn’t a good developer:
Keep reading the thread and Fatbag and someone named Blayer discuss coding together. Afr0 asks Blayer what it is that he helps Fatbag with:
They get the game sort of running in the thread if you can follow and Rhys admits they did good work. It goes dead till 2016 when Blayer says they are still working on Niotso on a Discord community, and the thread is locked.
When you search “Rhys Niotso” on google one of the first hits
is a user page on the Niotso Wiki...belonging to Tomas:
.
User:Zc456
I was a player of The Sims Online from 2003 to 2005. When it shut down, I moved to Second Life. TSOR and it's dependents, Project Dollhouse and FreeSO, rekindled my hopes in playing the game again. But it was never meant to be apparently since I was banned from the community, mocked and people continued to telegraph back to Rhys about my friends and me to the point that it was used for a April Fools during 2017. It's been rough.
My fork wasn't any easier. I was always on my own with those who were from the community and knew something about it were too busy focusing on FreeSO or Rhys even though they themselves had been banned as well. It was a cause of a lot of frustration and it unintentionally made it's way into my issues I wrote on Github.
The Sims Online was my childhood. Despite being brought back, it's been nothing but drama. See you on Second Life.
In a previous edit, he references AidanCheddar as being his previous handle before switching to ZackCasey and this handle. Looks like he ran multiple accounts at once.
Here is Tomas
defending Rhys’ decision to take over and fork the code, although it seems he changed his mind later on (and that part is surreptitiously missing):
Afr0 left the project, handing it over to Rhys, because his code caused too many problems. Afr0 returned after the Play Test furious at his modifications, spouting "I did not give you permission" to loosely quote, and threatened to kick him from project. Confused the hell out of all of us since he did and the license for Project Dollhouse allows for modifications without permission, ect... Rhys had enough with the BS and decided to finish Project Dollhouse on his own, calling it FreeSO.
Here is a conversation where Tomas doesn’t agree with the direction and tries to fork his own community, only to be told off because how dare he say it will be better than FreeSO! This is because you don’t like Rhys not because you want to do your own thing! There’s some great examples of gaslighting as well as Rhys’ supporters continue to throw his name and redirect the conversation back to him. Rhys’ supporters shame Tomas for forking off, despite the fact that Rhys himself did the very same thing.
but talking to a furfag crashes that game.
unless for some reason he isn’t wanting to redirect traffic back to FreeSO, can’t imagine why anyone would want to do that.
