Trouble with giving a skating rink an invisible swatch

Can you link the package?

Here are the files and I thank y'all greatly. It's the sun shadow that's the issue. There isn't a ground shadow--not one that I can see, anyway. However, altering the shadow mesh glitches the animation and honestly, I'm fresh out of ideas.

I'm thinking that maybe it's not possible to have a visible and invisible swatch for something that has scripts or codes or whathaveyou attached. Having an invisible swatch for an OMSP is one thing; this skating rink is a whole other animal altogether. Bakiegaming I think has some invisible items but I think in his case the items are fully invisible. There is no visible swatch. And I think his invisible items have either a drastically minimized mesh or perhaps an empty mesh. I'm wondering if that's the route I should go with this.

Shoot. Sorry about that. drive.google.com/file/d/1vD7sQ8U1RigKwSobYd995Ebln-t_AqvJ/view?usp=sharing

All right, most of my usual tricks were not even options on this particular file, but I did find one that worked. (It also got rid of the ground shadow, which was definitely there and extremely obvious in the sunlight.) After trying a few other things, I just went into the Model resource, scrolled down to LODs and clicked on the Edit button, and just straight up deleted the two shadow LODs from the list. Then I went into the game and confirmed that both shadows were completely gone, and made a Sim skate on it, which he did with his blades touching the ice rather than up in the air. I did not do extensive testing, just proof of concept, but nothing seems to have broken. Naturally, as I mentioned earlier, you can't have a genuinely useable visible swatch on the same package and catalog entry as the invisible one, or it'll be missing its shadow; shadows are usually not variable by swatch. Hopefully that'll work for you and hold up to more involved testing.

Cidira, you are the man! Or woman! We are not worthy!



I did not realize it was okay to delete a resource. I figured that game coding is usually tied to certain resources and if a game expects a resource and it's not there, the game will burst into tears and crash or throw errors or won't load the mod, and so on, and so on. TS4 may be different but other games, such as Stardew Valley, will not load a mod if a resource isn't there or isn't named appropriately. Come to think of it, however, the shadow mesh does not contain the floor, only the walls, and the walls don't have anything to do with the sim's animation. I don't know why I didn't make that connection before. 

Thank you, thank you, thank for figuring this out. I likely won't test this extensively as I've got 10,000 other things to do atm but the original person who wanted this will, I think. Gosh, I sure appreciate your help. 

Edit: Well, dang, Cidira, looks like I spoke a little too soon, but I did manage to figure it out thanks to you. I tried multiple variations of files where I deleted the shadow resources from the medium LOD, the shadow meshes themselves, one visible swatch, no visible swatches. All of them resulted in the same thing. 



Then I noticed that the shadow was in the exact shape as the mesh group that's meant to be the windows. So, I narrowed my focus on that particular group and saw this:



I unchecked ShadowCaster in all the LODs and it works! Yes, you can have a visible swatch and an invisible swatch, but I found I had to either remove the shadow resources under "Model" as you said, or just delete the shadow meshes in the list where the strings and images and everything else is--I'm not sure if the shadow meshes under "Model" and the shadow meshes in the list are the same thing, tbh. I just know that if I leave both of them the shadow shows up. In other words, I have to get rid of the shadow meshes and/or the shadow resources under "Model," make sure every LOD is set to PhongAlpha, and uncheck ShadowCaster in every LOD, in addition to adding a blank png to the invisible swatch (or a dds with a black alpha), of course. Everything works great after that. No shadow, you can have a visible swatch, and the animation is fine. Again, it's thanks to you. I would not have known what direction to go with my expirementation if it were not for you. Thank you!!!

Just double-checking here, but the shadow resources found under "model" are the floor shadows, right?

I tried to test this more extensively. I'll definitely need to blank out the snow map as it shows phantom snow when invisible, and will probably delete the light resource altogether to avoid the phantom light issue, as well. I hope deleting the light source doesn't cause issues. I noticed if I put the rink indoors and had it close to the walls in the lower-left corner the animation was a little jerky as the sim left the rink. Sometimes it happened, other times not. I don't really know why the animation is jerky at times but it seems to be only if the rink is indoors and squeezed into the lower-left corner of the room and only when the sim left the rink. I'll probably upload this and I wish I knew why there is occasional jerky animation.