Since killing your Sims was such a popular sport, I made another simple more accessible online tool for making custom tombstones (either a spooky haunted Halloween Tombstone with ghosts, or a serious Solemn Tombstone with flowers), that let you upload a photo of the deceased, enter their name, write an eulogy, and it would create a custom object that you could download and play in the game.
Eventually "The Cemetery" contained 2249 tombstones (minus the nastiest ones I moderated, and the private ones -- I still have the full archive of all 4065 tombstones and eulogies), and there is even a handy RSS feed for keeping track of everyone who's died. A lot of sad heartbreaking stories and sick grave dancing celebrations:
It was a proof of concept for some of the things we planned to do with SimProv (but never finished due to the legal gray area of selling Sims content, and the consequential lack of funding).
The Wedding Consultant NPC can gives you a "Wedding Photography Magazine" which has a pie menu that lets you select which wedding photographer to hire. There would be several different wedding photographers of different skills and styles, who would attend the wedding as NPCs programmed to take photographs of different situations (by making screen snapshots in your family album, which you could upload).
So different photographers could focus on family, friends, enemies, activities, flowers. Each photographer could have their own themed set for Sims to pose for photographs in.
During the wedding the photographer would automatically do their thing (walking around, or using a set), taking a bunch of photos into your album. Then after the wedding you would pick your favorite wedding photos from your family album, write comments and stories on each photo, upload them to the server, and it would make a custom wedding album with your photos and comments that you could download to memorialize your wedding. (Just like how the tombstone works, but with multiple pages.)
Here's the hope chest, wedding consultant, and magazines for selecting wedding options (warning: programmer art and placeholder text!):
The hope chest lets you summon and dismiss the wedding consultant, who walks over to the hope chest and just stands there until you tell them to go home. The wedding consultant is not fully implemented (and there could be multiple with different personalities and styles), so for now she just stands creepily and silently by your hope chest all night, not reacting or saying anything, even as you sleep in bed and woowoo with your lover (or their best friend).
From a reified user interface design perspective: Think of inviting and sending away NPCs as opening and closing user interface dialogs (reified in-game as people and objects), which can produce other sub-objects and NPCs like magazines, cupids, clowns, photographers, officients, etc, depending on the state of the game.
Objects and NPCs can have properties and state machines you can use menus and other objects or actions to change, and they can pop up dialogs with text and images and buttons, and have nested pie menus of actions.
The special objects the NPCs create might not be directly available in the catalog (Cupid is), so they can restrict access unless you satisfy the required conditions, and the objects themselves are like other user interface sub-dialogs and widgets and utilities.
The Cupid statue is a love making utility with a nested menu of neighboring Families and their Sims to fall in love with.
The Buddha statue it a feel-good utility that keeps everyone happy and full and low bladder and energetic, so you can concentrate on the wedding instead of mopping up puddles of blue urine.
The Crowd Sitter podium is a magnetic seat filler and crowd gatherer utility that's great for getting everyone to sit down and shut up, or gather around in a mob, for ceremonies and other rituals. (When using the Crowd Sitter for long periods of time, using the Buddha statue is highly recommended.)
The various magazines are like radio buttons, each having a popup dialog describing and showing the currently selected option, so you could page between options, with a pie menu to change the option, and a "recycle" option to get rid of them with you're done. The magazines included Ceremonies, Entertainment, Food, Gowns, Suits, Rings, Decoration, Photography, Bouquets, and Florals. Some would invite NPCs at certain times, and others would create objects you could place and decorate with in Build mode, or character skins and accessories you could dress with.
If you change your mind or want to see what you signed up for, you can go back to the Wedding Consultant NPC to get another copy of the magazine. The NPCs also have menu items to advance to the next stage of the wedding, once you've fulfilled all the requirements (fall in love, propose, acceptance, stag/hen/whatever parties, reception, ceremony, party, wedding night, etc).
The overall gameplay would be about selecting and deploying all these objects and characters to stage and orchestrate your wedding, so you got some great photographs and memories, and it would memorialize the event by creating custom content like your wedding certificate you can hang on the walls, you wedding albums you can page through and read later, and full sized paintings you can hang on the wall, rugs you can put on the floor, with pictures and text you wrote, even custom tombstones of your ancestors that you can leave flowers at, and of your enemies that you can dance on.
We wanted to bring the user created content tools and their user interfaces into the game itself as much as possible, instead of them being external tools (like later versions of The Sims have done).
