aikea_guinea: (Jem - Roxy)
[personal profile] aikea_guinea
If you guys are anything like me, the Decorative section of your in-game catalog is a mess of random clutter where that one tiny item you really want for a picture is lost among empty liquor bottles and trash. Thankfully, now that we have collections available there's a way to clean that mess up just a bit without actually losing anything: putting items into collections and then hiding the item from the catalog. I've seen this done with TS2 items, and am glad I can finally bring it over to TS3. It's so insanely easy, both to hide and unhide items, that anyone with S3PE can do their own clean up. Creators can also use this to provide two different versions of their items. (In fact, I wish I'd been able to use this way of catalog-hiding when I released my poison bottles rather than making them twice.)

Step One:
When in the game, add your items to a collection. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT, since if you don't have the collection you won't be able to place the items at a later time since they won't be showing up in the catalog. Keep track of what you're putting in the collection, then exit out of the game.

Read more... )

That's it! Your object is now hidden from the catalog, yet available for placement via the collection file. If you keep your packages merged, you'll have to remerge the changed file to include the update. If you use CCMagic to merge your files, you'll have to do whatever you do when you update files with that. If you ever feel like having the item show up in the catalog again, simply change your 'False' back to 'True.'

HUGE THANKS to the anon who actually figured all this out!!
aikea_guinea: (TS3 - Aikea - Drawing Board)
[personal profile] aikea_guinea
I initially intended to do a pair of tutorials, one using S3OC/S3PE and another using TSRW, but I just don't have the patience to do more than the TSRW tutorial. What I've done instead is split this into three and a half sections, the image parts of which can be used to create recolors of my mesh with S3OC/S3PE if you're familiar with making retextures that way.

Since this is done using TSRW, it should be fairly easy for just about anyone out there to do, so let's get to it, shall we?

Note: This tutorial was put together based on my half-height wall writing. Therefore, all the image sizes are 512x512. The full-height and double-wide wall writing images are 1024x512. Please be sure to pay attention to which wall writing mesh you're creating on. ;)

First step, you may find it very useful to download my half-height wall writing psd template:

Download!

Creating Overlays )

Creating Overlay Packages With TSRW )
But you're not quite finished.

It's important you not skip the next step!

I've had packages that just don't work when exported via TSRW, but I found it's pretty easy to fix them just by using S3PE to import them as DBCs.

A Simple Fix. )

Creating CAStable Writings/Designs )

Creating CAStable Packages With TSRW )

Hopefully this will be of some use to those of you out there who want to give creating wall insanity a go. If you don't get something, feel free to ask. I can't promise I'll be able to help, but I can at least pretend I know what I'm doing.

Also, it's a good idea to compressorize your final DBC'ed package, as I've found the TSRW packages are about 4x the size of files I've made with S3OC/S3PE until compression happens.

Snag the completed wall writings here!
aikea_guinea: (TS3 - Jacob - Computer)
[personal profile] aikea_guinea
This tutorial is now OBSOLETE. Please use The Texture Tweaker for all your master/slave texture needs. Trust me... it's much easier and much better all around. :)

Back in TS2, it was possible to have a set of meshes where one of them held a texture that the others all used. This cut down on file sizes and made recoloring all that more straight-forward. I'm not sure how recoloring will work with the TS3 method I've worked out here, but it definitely cuts down on file sizes. I looked everywhere trying to find information about this, but couldn't find anything. I managed to work it out after a happy accident earlier today and thought maybe the information could prove useful to someone else.

This tutorial won't teach you anything at all about actually making objects; you'll have to find other tutorials for that. You should be fairly comfortable with making objects using S3PE and S3OC as I couldn't begin to tell you how to go about this with TSRW (though apparently it's possible).

Making Master/Slave Files for TS3 )

Now, like I said, I really don't know how recolors would work with this. I imagine you'd have to do something horrible like clone all the meshes, just given the way recolors work in general in TS3.

Anyway, hope it's useful.
aikea_guinea: (Default)
[personal profile] aikea_guinea
I originally put this tutorial together for [personal profile] century_eyes, but I thought I'd go ahead and repost it here in case anyone else could get some use out of it.

If you primarily use package files for your custom content and have noticed increased load times and/or lag in your game, follow this tutorial to combine your CC into fewer, larger packages to fix the problem.

Combining packages... )

You can combine combined packages, and it's ok to add more things to your combined packages at a later date.

I'd suggest instead of making one huge package of all your CC to have four or five, only because when I tried to make a single package things started to blow up. I've got Objects, CAS (hair, clothes, makeup), Patterns, and my own crap as their own packages.

I've not combined Default Replacements (never sure if I'll switch those out or something), my hacks, and AM/story progression.

Very easy, and holy shit it makes a huge difference. My game now loads as quickly as it did before I had any CC in it, and no longer lags at all.

This is the original thread on MATY.

Anach has offered up this additional information, which is very useful:

1. If you have a merged a mod and wish to update it with a newer version, you will need to re-merge the entire package, or you will usually experience game breakages.

2. The game imposes a limit of 200MB on its own merged packages (dbc), however a package can be anysize, and the only limitation is processing time (larger takes longer) and filesystem limits.

3. Try to keep your total number of mod packages under 100.

4. You can also remove ICON type files (junk files used by sims3pack) and "THUM" (thumbnails) if you wish the game to generate its own thumbnails rather than use the ones provided in the package.

More Useful Information from [personal profile] darlas_mom:

"When I tried this, I ended up getting the scary-as-hell "Service initialization failed (0x065d0274)" error and had to uninstall and reinstall.

It turned out a piece of CC I'd installed that day right before doing this was bad (because the game still didn't work until I removed it, cleared my cache files again and then rebooted), but I'm still scared to try this again...uninstalling and reinstalling takes me forever because then I have to download 500+ MB of patches all over again. :-/

Just wanted to make you and others aware of this possibility, so that if it happens to anyone else, they don't panic."

In other words, make sure you don't have any corrupted CC before attempting this.

For anyone getting the 'Materials Materializing' error:

"I have some extra info that might help people who run into the "materials materializing" error. It seems that it occurs when patterns are combined with other items. And also if CAP patterns are turned into package files. So combine patterns just with other patterns, and leave CAP patterns sims3pack. I delete CAP files as fast as i can because they have brought me only troubles."

(Thanks for reminding me about this, Jolanda.)

__________________________________________________
(Originally figured out by someone Anach on MATY.)
aikea_guinea: (TS3 - Aikea - Green)
[personal profile] aikea_guinea


Creating Default Replacement Skintones for TS3


Follow the link for the tutorial! Feel free to ask questions here or there.
Tristan: "I didn't think you could come up with something like this on your own. Although 'Club Crimsyn' is something I could see you having a hand in."
Chris: "The 'Y' makes it hip."
Tristan: "Yes, if you say so."











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