Every sim that you create can be assigned five personality traits which ultimately decide how your sim is, in terms of entertaining themselves, reacting to various situations and of course responding to and interacting with other sims they come across in the Sunset Valley neighbourhood.

Below is a list of personality traits that have been confirmed for The Sims 3. Please bare in mind that this list may change, with some traits possibly being replaced by new ones, or removed from the game altogether. We will however do our best to keep this list upto date as things change – if they do!

The Sims 3 Personality Traits

• Abscent Minded
• Ambitious
• Angler
• Artistic
• Athletic
• Bookworm
• Brave
• Can’t Stand Art
• Charismatic
• Childish
• Clumsy
• Commitment Issues
• Computer Whiz
• Couch Potato
• Coward
• Daredevil
• Dislikes Children
• Easily Impressed
• Evil
• Excitable
• Family Orientated
• Flirty
• Friendly
• Frugal
• Genius
• Good
• Good Sense of Humour
• Great Kisser
• Green Thumb
• Grumpy
• Handy
• Hates the Outdoors
• Heavy Sleeper
• Hopeless Romantic
• Hot-Headed
• Hydrophobic
• Inappropriate
• Insane
• Kleptomaniac
• Light Sleeper
• Loner
• Loser
• Loves the Outdoors
• Lucky
• Materialistic
• Mean
• Mooch
• Natural Cook
• Neat
• Neurotic
• Never Nude
• No Sense of Humour
• Over Emotional
• Party Animal
• Perfectionist
• Schmoozer
• Slob
• Snob
• Technophobe
• Unflirty
• Unlucky
• Vegetarian
• Virtuoso
• Workaholic

The Sims 3 allows your sims to venture out in ways that have never before been possible, and this does not exclude the careers part of The Sims 3 game.

Some careers that were there in The Sims 2 are still here in The Sims 3, but they are joined by a host of new careers too, and it’s believed that more are still to be confirmed before the game is released.

Dedicated Career Buildings
Each career in The Sims 3 will have it’s own unique building within the neighbourhood.

Visible Trips to Work
You can now watch your sims making their way to and from work in The Sims 3, but you cannot enter their workplace during work hours. They will instead disappear into their chosen career’s building to start work, and will reappear when their shift is over.

Career Progression Changes
Your sims can of course still advance in their chosen career paths in The Sims 3, but the rate at which you progress is now effected by many more things. It is no longer just a case of having the skills and the social popularity, but other things such as your relationship with your colleagues and boss are taken into account. Also certain work-related goals must be met before you can advance to certain points in your career path such as taking work home.

The Sims 3 Careers
Career paths which have already been confirmed for The Sims 3 include Athletic, Medical, Music, Business, Journalism,  Politics, Law Enforcement, Education, Cooking, Criminal, Entertainment and Science. More are expected before The Sims 3 hits shelves in June.

Part Time Jobs
Your sims can now take part time jobs. It is believed that this feature begins once your sims reach the young adult age.

Job Seeking
Finding a job is no longer limited to reading the newspaper or searching on the computer. Your sims can visit the specific career buildings within the neighourhood and apply for jobs there.

Workload Setting
Before your sims head off to work for the day you are now given the opportunity to set how hard they should work during the day. However choosing to take a less-stressful day at work will result in less skill points gained, and it’s not likely to impress your boss, is it.

The Sims 3 introduces you to a whole new way of building properties and furnishing them thanks to a number of new features, or advanced tweaks of features which were there in The Sims 2.

The possibilities for homes, shops and community lots you build are now quite literally endless with the new custom pattern features and advanced item customisation features.

Custom Patterns
Using a simple drag-and-drop system, you can apply any pattern you like to the items in your sims properties. You could even use a photo of yourself as a repeating wallpaper, if you are that vain of course!

Item Customisation
Virtually every item you can use within your homes in The Sims 3 is customisable to some degree. Items come with between one and four customisation points allowing you to create truly unique homes and lots.

Modding Tools
The Sims 3 will be accompanied by a range of modding tools which allow you to create items of your own if you wish to do so. What exactly the modding tools will cater for is yet to be confirmed – things such as cars and skins may not be creatable from the very beginning, but time will tell.

Object Positioning
In The Sims 3 you can rotate many objects such as sofas and tables 360 degrees, allowing you to place furniture at an angle as most of us do in our real homes. This adds a whole new level of realism to the game.

High Rise Properties
You can build properties upto five stories high in The Sims 3.

Filling Empty Objects
Some items, such as bookcases can be purchased empty to begin with. You can then purchase individual books in the game to add to your bookcase.

Linked Furniture Sets
Sets of furniture, such as a dining table and chairs, or a bed and bedside tables will now be automatically linked by The Sims 3 allowing you to move the entire set of furniture at once rather than having to move each item individually.

Customising Stairs
You can customise staircases in The Sims 3 by using a slider. The slider allows you to make certain stairs within the staircase upto four tiles wider than the rest.

The create-a-sim mode from The Sims 2 is another part of the game which has been given a complete makeover for The Sims 3. Here is a run-down of what you can expect to see with the Create-A-Sim mode in The Sims 3.

Body Shaping
In The Sims 3 you are able to shape the body of your sims in the same ways you were able to shape faces in The Sims 2.

Physique Sliders
The weight and fitness of your sims is set by using sliders.

Gameplay Effects Weight
If you create some overweight sims in The Sims 3, they can become slim during the game if they excercise enough. Also sims that are created slim can become fatter if they do not excercise, and eat too much of the wrong stuff.

Ethnic Models
You are able to specifically select asian and african sim models on which to base the characters you are creating in The Sims 3.

Personal Preferences
You can select your sims favourite colours, foods and music in The Sims 3 which you could not do in The Sims 2.

Footwear Selection
The Sims 3 allows you to select the footwear for your sims in a new create-a-sim category.  You are even able to give your sim bare feet if you like.

Clothing Changes
Shirts and Jackets are now seporate from other clothing items and all-in-one outfits. Some of them will hang over your chosen pants, skirts or shorts.

Customise Clothing
You can now customise the clothing your sims are wearing in The Sims 3. If you like a certain shirt but not the colour  then do not worry, simply choose the shirt and select it in a colour of your choice. You can even style the shirt yourself by applying a pattern of your own.

Heights
You are not able to change the height of your sims. No midgets yet i’m afraid!

Voices
The Sims 3 allows you to select from three different voices for your sims. You can also set the pitch height for your chosen voice to give each sim a voice unique to them.

The Sims 3 boasts a new breed of neighbourhood – neighbourhoods like we have never seen before in The Sims series, or any other simulation title.

The sense of community you feel in The Sims 3 neighbourhoods is fantastic, as it really feels like a living, breathing town as you play in more ways than one. In The Sims 3, the neighbourhood opens up and becomes a real part of your game play experience as you are able to bypass many of the hideous loading screens and move from one place to another in no time at all.

This particular feature of The Sims 3 is being dubbed the “seemless neighbourhood”, and there is no better description for it. Here are some details about The Sims 3 neighbourhoods.

Seemless Neighbourhoods
In The Sims 3 your sims can pay flying visits to your neighbours simply by walking from their own lot. Your sims can also walk to other lots such as parks and shops without those intrusive loading screens we saw in The Sims 2.

Living Neighbours
As you play as your chosen sim or sims in The Sims 3, other sims around you will continue living their lives in real-time as if you were there. They will get jobs, get married, fall out and perhaps even die as you and your playable sims go about your own business. In The Sims 3 life no longer sits still for everybody else as one playable family moves on.

Number of Neighbourhoods
The Sims 3 will have just one active neighbourhood when you begin your game. A tool will be made available by Electronic Arts for players to create their own neighbourhoods which can then of course be used in The Sims 3 game.

Lots in Neighbourhoods
The neighbourhood that is playable from the start in The Sims 3 will have approximately 90 lots. It is understood that you will have the ability to delete, edit or add lots as you wish just like in The Sims 2, as well as choose whether the lots are to be treated as residential lots or community lots.

Downloadable Content
As expected you will be able to download all kinds of content to use in your The Sims 3 game. This includes neighbourhoods and towns created by other people.

Building Types
There will be two kinds of buildings visible in The Sims 3 neighbourhoods. The standard lots which allow you to create buildings of our own, for your sims to live or work in. Also there will be ready made buildings that act as decoration in a way, but your sims will be able to enter as they go about town and will emerge from again later. You can choose which ‘un-playable’ buildings to have in your neighbourhoods simply by dragging and dropping them in.

Confirmed Community Lots
The Sims 3 has a number of confirmed community lots already. The Sims 3 will feature a pool, a gym, a park,  a bistro, an art gallery, a library, a clothes store, a city hall and a book store from the start.

Neighbourhood Stories
The neighbourhood stories featured in The Sims 3 are a prequal to those seen in the original The Sims games, so you can expect to see some familiar faces, only younger.

The Sims 3

The chances are that if you have purchased a PC within the last year, or perhaps two, then you should have nothing to worry about as most PCs have the capability to run The Sims 3 nowadays. But just incase, here are some details about the game’s requirements. These system requirements have been confirmed by The Sims 3 official website.

FOR WINDOWS XP

* 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent 
* 1 GB RAM 
* A 128 MB Video Card with support for Pixel Shader 2.0 
* The latest version of DirectX 9.0c 
* Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 
* At least 6.1 GB of hard drive space with at least 1 GB of additional space for custom content and saved games.

FOR WINDOWS VISTA 

* 2.4 GHz P4 processor or equivalent 
* 1.5 GB RAM 
* A 128 MB Video Card with support for Pixel Shader 2.0 
* Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1 
* At least 6.1 GB of hard drive space with at least 1 GB of additional space for custom content and saved games.

For computers using built-in graphics chipsets under Windows, the game requires at least:

* Intel Integrated Chipset, GMA 3-Series or above 
* 2.6 GHz Pentium D CPU, or 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo, or equivalent 
* 0.5 GB additional RAM

FOR MAC OS X 

* Mac OS X 10.5.7 Leopard or higher 
* Intel Core Duo Processor 
* 2 GB RAM 
* ATI X1600 or Nvidia 7300 GT with 128 MB of Video RAM, or 
* Intel Integrated GMA X3100. 
* At least 6.1 GB of hard drive space, with at least 1 GB additional space for custom content and saved games 
* This game will not run on PowerPC (G3/G4/G5) based Mac systems, or the GMA 950 class of integrated video cards.

Windows Supported Video Cards

NVIDIA GeForce series
FX 5900, FX 5950
6200, 6500, 6600, 6800
7200, 7300, 7600, 7800, 7900, 7950
8400, 8500, 8600, 8800
9300, 9400, 9500, 9600, 9800
G100, GT 120, GT 130, GTS 150
GTS 250, GTX 260, GTX 280, GTX 285, GTX 295

ATI Radeon™ series
9500, 9600, 9800
X300, X600, X700, X800, X850
X1300, X1600, X1800, X1900, X1950
2400, 2600, 2900
3450, 3650, 3850, 3870
4850, 4870

Intel(R) Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA)
GMA 3-Series, GMA 4-Series

Laptop versions of these chipsets may work, but may run comparatively slower. Standalone cards that are installed in vanilla PCI slots (not PCIe or PCIx or AGP), such as some GeForce FX variants, will perform poorly.

MAC OS X Supported Video Cards

NVIDIA GeForce series
7300, 7600
8600, 8800
9400M, 9600M GT
GT 120, GT 130

ATI Radeon+G22™ series
X1600, X1900
2400, 2600
3870
4850, 4870

Intel(R) Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) GMA 3-Series