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Post by xordevoreaux on Mar 31, 2022 20:51:04 GMT -5
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Post by xordevoreaux on Feb 2, 2022 11:54:51 GMT -5
Would love to see a batch fix to remove a selection of tags from an item to "solve" miscategorized items without having to one-by-one edit them. I'd rather remove all the color tags from something than have to go in to 20 different swatches of 20 different items and change them by hand. Every single one of these is tagged "White" and the only way to fix it is spend an hour and a half doing it manually (for several sets of items, not just these), or not use the items at all. A middle ground would be appreciated. And if we wannt get truly wild, maybe a way to auto-tag items colors based on the RGB value of their swatch thumbnails, which is information S4S has access to. I doubt that's feasible though.
That might work for EA content, but not for modded. For example, when I assign swatch colors to things, especially a painting or poster mod which I typically include anywhere from 12 to 35 swatches, I start on the right-side of the color palette, work my way down assigning swatch colors regardless of the content, go the next-right column, go down that column, etc.
Applying your suggested technique to my content won't get you anywhere. I do sample each texture for things like doors and curtains and such to set the swatch color, but for 30 beer can textures? Nay.
Edit: Also, regarding RGB values, some people may see a teal color as green, others might see it as blue, so Andrew would need to maintain a dictionary, or establish an index, of what is considered "red" versus "red-ish" and what do you when people interpret subtle colors differently?
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Post by xordevoreaux on Jan 26, 2022 10:31:09 GMT -5
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Post by xordevoreaux on Jan 24, 2022 15:14:52 GMT -5
18 high-resolution recolors of Lady Ravendancer's Crystal Ball, both the crystal ball itself and its pedestal. The ball has been recategorized under Activities to be easy to find. Requires Paranormal
Optional download for a retextured and fully functional seance table, categorized under Indoor Activities (table available at NexusMods).
Both priced 1 simolean. Enjoy!
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Post by xordevoreaux on Jan 18, 2022 0:13:39 GMT -5
I have four different packages of doors, all based on the same door object, all priced the same, all nearly named identically, both in terms of their package names and what they're named in-game, just different swatches in each. When I go to place them in the game, I see they're scattered pel mel among other doors of the same price rather than being together.
Is price my only way to separate these four packages from the other doors so these four packages all appear in the catalog in a cluster together? I can do that, but was first wanting to check if there wasn't another way I could finesse the order of appearance in the catalog without having to resort to repricing.
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Post by xordevoreaux on Jan 8, 2022 17:45:04 GMT -5
I'm currently building a series of override mods to flip industrial eco values to green.
What I've found this afternoon surprises me. I may be a bit late to the party on this, as I'm sure some people have already discovered this, but as far as wood flooring goes, a lot of the floors have object tool tip tags that are missing, partially missing, or flat-out wrong in relation to their actual tag values. There's a few issues with stone, tile, and concrete, but the majority of what I found was with wood, I believe. I've updated 38 floors so far so I may be misremembering exactly which.
Just wondering if anyone else has noticed this, and if I'm re-inventing an old wheel by creating these mods.
Since I am flipping from industrial to green, it's a bit of cheat mod as well as truing up object tool tip tag reporting.
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Post by xordevoreaux on Jan 7, 2022 11:12:41 GMT -5
1. Shift-clicking a series of elements in the Warehouse (such as Wall, Catalog Definition, etc.) to allow us to update all of the selected properties (object tool tips, etc.) at once. 27 swatches of one wall, I'm flipping their environmental scores, which takes can be done all at once, but then updating their object tool tips is one at time, tedious.
2. Hitting escape dismisses dialog boxes.
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Post by xordevoreaux on Dec 20, 2021 22:19:38 GMT -5
Is DDS even necessary? I save both cas and object textures as PNG
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Post by xordevoreaux on Dec 7, 2021 3:25:22 GMT -5
I've made a lot of skins for other games, but I'm new to Sims4 modding, so I haven't figured where to upload templates and mods yet. Consider applying (for free) to SimsFileShare where you can then link your Sims4 creations uploaded there to anywhere, such as on your own content thread here at Sims4Studio, or your own website.
It's easy on SimsFileShare to organize and compartmentalize your downloads, and you can share entire directories, if you want.
This is how I've organized mine, with nothing at the root directory. Everything is shoe-boxed:
I use SimsFileShare for here and my own site. Image storage
If you do decide to use SimsFileShare to showcase your work here or on your own site, consider one of these two free sites for including screenshots: imgur.com and postimages.orgPostImages, at least for me, is overall a cleaner, less cluttered experience and isn't trying to be Pinterest. Both are fairly hassle-free as far as the image upload process.
Self-hosted sites
You can also post directly—and for free—to The Sims Resource (TSR) and ModtheSims.info (MTS), both of which have self-hosting and index, archive, and curate your content for you, which is definitely a plus, especially since if you go the SimsFileShare route, it's more or less up to you to raise awareness of your stuff rather than letting another site do it.
TSR
I've never placed anything on TSR because they have an 8-swatch limit per Sims4 package. One of my magazine decor objects has 36 swatches. TSR sells mouse clicks, and forcing people to encapsulate their work across multiple objects with fewer swatches in them = more clicks. That said, some creators on TSR have download counts in the millions, and TSR does let you present all of a given set of related packages as a collection and people can download the entire collection of packages, but that still means sitting there creating multiple packages and keeping track of what you elected put in each, where in most cases, even with disparate content, one merged package would logically suffice.
The only time I break up mine is when the packages would otherwise be very large or there's a slight variety between bits of the content and people may wish to download only certain portions.
MTS
ModTheSims.info is a highly-trafficked site, and I've used them over the years, but more than once I've run into some mercurial and inane moderated rejections from them, everything from having lighting in a background screenshot too low to a folding chair being "too white" and you never win an argument with them. If a moderator there rejects your submission, they tell you precisely why and how to fix it, and give you a couple times to do so, which is what I've managed to do in the past—get an initial rejection accepted eventually. I only have so much patience for over-the-top moderation, though.
But that's a me-problem, so if your content is rated G, I still recommend ModTheSims if you want high visibility on your creations, and unlike TSR, I've never hit a swatch limit, and it's one of the best for tracking, at a glance, what of your stuff is downloaded most frequently. For example, this is a partial screen shot of my personal scorecard on ModTheSims.Info tracking a few of my uploads there:
NexusMods
To completely avoid the moderation hassle, anything I publish now is on nexusmods.com, including my creator templates. The trade-off is that Nexus is far, far less trafficked for Sims4 content than TSR or MTS (but they are the largest warehouse for Skyrim mods and thousands of other games).
Nexus has an excellent visual presentation of your creations, messaging system, and version control. It also has a desktop app to automate downloads directly into a user's Sims4 folder, but to keep things simple for people, I flag that option off and just have people select the manual download option. They know what to do with that. Nexus caps download speeds to 2mb/sec if you don't subscribe, but free is free (no cap on upload speed).
Tip: Always include a by-line in each object's textual description. Doesn't have to fancy:
Once you publish something on the Internet, unless you're rich enough to afford a team of lawyers, you really have no control as to where your stuff winds up. By including a by-line, people who download your creations will at least know who created that download even if the third-party sites don't directly credit you. Most do, fortunately.
Googling myself, I have found my Sims4 downloads all over the place, even sites whose languages I can't read. These third-party sites have either linked to other sites where I've posted stuff, such as ModtheSims, or have directly posted my uploads to their own sites (behind their revenue-producing ads). Life's too short to get upset over it, though, and good luck issuing a take-down notice to content hoarders on foreign servers. I try to be zen about it and be happy that at least people have sites in their local languages where they can get my stuff.
Hope this helps.
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Post by xordevoreaux on Nov 27, 2021 11:00:25 GMT -5
I've moved my publicly available content to nexusmods a while ago, but today I'm seeing nexus is having fits, so here's my personal upload page. It's not the complete collection, but the bulk of it is there. Hopefully someone at nexus will reboot the file server over there or fix whatever's going on.
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Post by xordevoreaux on Nov 25, 2021 23:12:06 GMT -5
There is a lot to learn, but if you break it up into manageable chunks, and start with the little things, like a simple recolor texture, you'll gain confidence to try bigger things, and part of success is being patient with the occasional failure. More than once I've abandoned a mod because I lost patience with the process, but that's okay. You can drop a project, start something else, and then when you're feeling more up to it, try the other project again. What also helps along the way is being very comfortable with the tools you use, especially graphical tools for textures. Some people use GIMP, some use PhotoShop, some use Krita, I personally use Paint.net and LibreOffice Draw, but if you find yourself experiencing frustration with the tool, that translates into an overall frustration with what you're doing to create a mod, so be the boss over how you want to build stuff and pick the graphical tool you're most comfortable with, not one just because everyone else seems to be using it. Also, some mods fail for no obvious reason, then you learn little things, like how certain objects in the game behave badly. My first inexplicable failure was a chair with a totally hosed texture swatch. Updating the texture of the next swatch for that object also updated the first swatch. Nasty! But I kept with it until I figured it out. In those cases, it's an identifier reference problem or some such native to those particular objects. When you see it happen (it doesn't happen a lot), create enough additional swatches and move them, delete a few, until they behave like we expect them to. Might take a few tries. And some objects are ornery in other ways. And again, it's not anything you've done, it's the object. There's a shadow on a small landscape painting that if you hit right bracket ( ] ) to make the object 2x as big in the game, its shadow renders far below it. Not all wall decor does that, just that one. Suprasymmetry, I believe. If it happens to the in-game object, it'll happen to the mod based on that object, and I'm okay admitting I've yet to figure out how to fix that shadow when enlarging the object. So I just use different wall art. Given that, any time you have an object not behaving as expected in the game, it might not be your efforts that are the issue. Check the base game object to see if the same behavior happens. If it does, and you feel yourself hitting a wall, slow down, breathe, then consider trying substituting another, similar, object for what you're trying to accomplish rather than delve into the dark science of why a particular default object in the game is messed up.
And even expert modders, far more talented than myself, sometimes must make do with compromises. For example, candles, if you use the right bracket to make them larger, have flames that stay positioned in the air where the object would have been if not resized. Zero you can do about it. It's a game thing. But there's a work around, creating "fake" flames that look just as nice that resize/move when the object is resized.
So yes, there's a lot to learn, but give yourself some credit and keep at it!
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Post by xordevoreaux on Nov 25, 2021 8:09:36 GMT -5
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Post by xordevoreaux on Nov 12, 2021 1:33:16 GMT -5
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Post by xordevoreaux on Nov 5, 2021 14:58:32 GMT -5
Stand-alone texture overhaul of the City Living "Foldy Foldable" dining chair, now without scratches or dents, in 26 new colors. I was making a lunch room for a school and was using the "Foldy Foldable" chair. The color choices were limited, the red swatch was washed out, and then I looked closer and saw all the scratches and dents, and voila, new mod! Cost: 2 Simoleans Catalog: Comfort / Chair (Dining)
Left is the original with scratches/dents, right is my version cleaned up:
Created with Paint.net and Sims4Studio. Enjoy!
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Post by xordevoreaux on Oct 31, 2021 16:50:08 GMT -5
25 swatches of craft beer cans. Base-game compatible. Cost: 2 Simoleans Located under Decorations / Clutter Created with Sims4Studio, Paint.net, and LibreOffice Draw. My complete public collection for Sims 4 is hosted on NexusMods.
Enjoy!
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