They Claimed To Have Fix The Pink Soup…

Just re-signed at MTS after years and went to uppdate profile. This gives some proportions..

Experimenting with Replacing the Default Sims 2 Face Mesh

So, after uh, whew, months(!) of experimenting with attempting to change the default face mesh in Sims 2, I’m here to basically share what I’ve found to be possible, what I still am struggling to get working, and what parts of my findings are still useful for a LOT of modding and custom content purposes, even if I couldn’t achieve my initial goal. I’m really tired of this project and I’d rather move on to doing stuff that are more doable (and more quickly doable) for my gameplay goals, rather than trying to do what seems to be a gargantuan task for my level of skills. 

In this post I’ll mostly focus on what is doable *in principle*. There’s lots of subtleties and tricks in getting things to look decent (well, at least I think I got it to look decent) which I won’t go into. Or try not to. I go into tangents a lot.

I’ll also not go into step-by-step details. Mostly because I suck at it but also because this post will be super long anyway. If you wanna know, ask!

For those who just want a brief summary: What I could get to work: a default replacement face mesh, with working templates and sliders, for adult sims. Though the procedures are the same for the rest of the ages.

What I still have trouble with: Basically, getting the game to recognize different parts of the face. This means applying the templates to different parts of the mesh, and, of course, genetics, don’t work yet. I have ideas about what could get it to work, but I’ve failed to do it so far.

Awesome things you could still do: My major finding here is that face animations can be applied to *any* CAS object. Clothing, accessories, and of course, nude skins (see below, this was an outfit with a bit that changes with eyes, proof of concept). This means that you can have specific sims with additional face parts and/or accessories and clothing that respond to face animations, or alternatively, you can have skin tones/body morphs that have face pieces which will not mix together between the parents, but are still heritable (with some limitations)

Oh, and full disclosure, the tools I used were simPE and blender 2.9. Nothing else. Don’t know how to do other stuff.

Thank you @simnopke , @rudhira , @withlovefromsimtown​  and many others for your help and encouragement in all this! I think there’s potential for some really good modding here.

Keep reading

Sims 2:

Because I'm working on a simple solution, but idk if its still an issue.

1000 likes! OK that is a cool round number. Glad people found my list useful. I am kind of surprised that this many people are interested in the things I share other than that. If anybody has more interesting stuff like that, like neatly organized sims info that's scattered around, do send it my way.

SimPE Material Definitions Index:

DW link for a more legible layout. Another thing I made for myself and might as well share. Definitions have links to wiki. If I made any errors feel free to let me know.

Further Reading:

Texture Mapping – Wikipedia.

Materials in general – Unity Manual.

In SimPE – PixelHate's Guide to Material Definitions [TXMT].

Definitions:

Material Type: StandardMaterial (stdMat).

alphaRefValue – (I forgot)

deprecatedStdMatInvDiffuseCoeffMultiplier (idk)

reflectivity

stdMatAlphaBlendMode – Alpha Layer Settings (Responsible for Transparency).

stdMatAlphaMultiplier

stdMatAlphaRefValue – Reflection?

stdMatAlphaTestEnabled

stdMatBaseTextureAddressingU – Base Texture Settings (The Main Texture).

stdMatBaseTextureAddressingV

stdMatBaseTextureAlphaReplicate

stdMatBaseTextureEnabled

stdMatBaseTextureName

stdMatCullMode – Backface Culling Mode.

stdMatDiffCoef">0.8,0.8,0.8< - Diffuse Reflection – Coefficient [pretty sure. Isn't that Albedo?].

stdMatEmissiveCoef">1.00000,1.00000,1.00000< - Emissivity Coefficient.

stdMatEnvCubeBlurFactor">0.000000< - Environment Cube Map Definitions.

stdMatEnvCubeCoef">0,0,0<

stdMatEnvCubeLockedToCamera>0<

stdMatEnvCubeMode>none<

stdMatEnvCubeTextureName

stdMatFillMode>solid<

stdMatLayer>0<

stdMatLightingEnabled">1<

stdMatMinLightRangeHint">4<

stdMatNormalMapTextureEnabled – Normal/Bump Map Settings.

stdMatNormalMapTextureAddressingU

stdMatNormalMapTextureAddressingV

stdMatNormalMapTextureName

stdMatSpecCoef">0.53,0.53,0.53< - Specular Reflection & Specular Map Settings.

stdMatSpecMaskTextureEnabled

stdMatSpecMaskTextureName

stdMatSpecPower">1e+002<

(Not in SimPE - Albedo Map)

stdMatTextureCoordAnimMode">none<

stdMatTextureCoordAnimNumTiles">1.000000,1.000000<

stdMatTextureCoordTfAnimOrigin">0.500000,0.500000<

stdMatTextureCoordTfAnimRotSpeed">0.000000<

stdMatTextureCoordTfAnimRotStartEnd">0.000000,1.000000<

stdMatTextureCoordTfAnimRotWaveform">triangular<

stdMatTextureCoordTfAnimScaleSpeed">0.000000<

stdMatTextureCoordTfAnimScaleStartEnd">0.000000,1.000000<

stdMatTextureCoordTfAnimScaleWaveform">triangular<

stdMatTextureCoordTfAnimTransEnd">0.000000,0.000000<

stdMatTextureCoordTfAnimTransSpeed">0.000000<

stdMatTextureCoordTfAnimTransStart">0.000000,0.000000<

stdMatTextureCoordTfAnimTransWaveform">triangular<

stdMatTextureCoordTileAnimSpeed">0.000000<

stdMatUntexturedDiffAlpha">1<

Interesting. Very good to know, thanks.

This is a big one.

May I add, skip Chrome for browsing, if you haven't done so. Firefox is much better anyway.

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

Oh, that's interesting. first time I'm hearing that claim. Now i understand what happened. in my legacy edition copy, I did notice a change to the graphic settings, but thought it was done by someone else, not EA. on the log it states that I have a slightly different card than what I actually have, and it did surprise me they didn't add mine to the pool, i was wondering what's that about. I tried to add mine manually, worrying its absence would cause issues, but it didn't change when I've added mine. I had no problems with it, so I just left it as it is.

Side note: I left this copy for testing (and forgot about it actually), I don't play it if I can help it, so there are hardly any mods on it.

Okay, I compared the Graphics Rules.sgr and Video Cards.sgr with the Ultimate Collection

They did EXACTLY what my brother has been saying for months but people have been debating him over it and didn't want to believe him

The new video cards.sgr doesn't include ANY new graphics cards. Wanna know why? Because the game doesn't fucking care. He has been saying for months that it doesn't care and that adding it via GRM doesn't do anything, it can actually potentially make it worse.

What they DID do is take out all the hacky stuff in the Graphics Rules.sgr to prevent the game from turning on and off certain settings depending on your hardware and software config. That's what I did as well, months ago, because he said it is the smarter solution.

I'm not a gamer, so I'm probably late to the Fallout London party, but this looks amazing.

I look at this and I see conversions.

Here's another good review, this time by a brit:

How To Dreamwidth: A Primer

the more friends ask me about dreamwidth, the more i realize i know a lot about this site that isn’t super obvious at first glance. so here is a primer for those of you thinking about making a dreamwidth account. this post ranges from your really basic starter tips to the completely esoteric things that come from using it for a decade.

2023 note: This post was written in 2018. While most of this post is still true, various features may have been changed or updated in the years since.

a what now? dreamwho?

Dreamwidth is a code fork of LiveJournal. A code fork means that they took LJ’s code (which used to be open source) and went their own direction with it. They still use the basic ideas behind LJ’s codebase, but have changed and improved upon it in various ways.

The core difference between DW and other websites is privacy isn’t an afterthought, but the central feature. You can lock posts, filter them to a select group, or make them visible to only you. I recommend reading through this section of DW’s FAQ for more on this.

When you make an account, you can subscribe (ie follow) and grant access to other users. Both of these are one-way – if A subscribes to B, that doesn’t automatically grant B access to all of A’s locked posts. Here’s more on this.

DW in general can be kind of confusing for people who have only used tumblr, but their FAQs are pretty good on the whole, and they’re searchable. If a website feature is confusing, start there.

okay, i have a journal. now what?

Customize it! DW doesn’t have all the latest and greatest features, but you can still make it your own. Here are some useful tips.

You can change your layout from Organize > Select Style. Mobile support is hit or miss, unfortunately, but there are some nice default layouts that work with it. You can also use this style for Practicality which makes DW fully mobile-friendly. If you’d rather design it yourself, Tabula Rasa is completely stripped down.

You can get premade DW layouts at the dreamwidthlayouts community. If you have trouble with your code, ask over at style_system.

Edit your profile! This is where you put your usernames for other social media sites, tell people a bit about yourself, and mention your interests. Your interests will be part of the interest search; it’s one way to find people.

Upload icons! Free accounts get 15 icons; paid accounts get 100 icons, premium accounts get 250 icons. You can use one icon in each entry and commment you make. It’s good form to put the maker of the icon in the comment section if you didn’t make it. If you got it from someone on tumblr, you can even link their blog using the code <user name=username site=tumblr>. (This works all across DW!)

While you can’t make pages, you can set a post to stick at the top of your journal, much like Twitter’s pinned tweets. Here’s how to do it.

You can also change how Dreamwidth itself looks, if you don’t like the red. Go to Account Settings > Display. Most other site display preferences are on that page.

While you’re here, look through the Account Settings > Privacy page. By default, your public entries will be included in site searches. You can turn it off at the bottom of the page if you want. You can also set it so your entries are automatically access-locked or private as well.

This got very long so the rest is behind the cut. (Now you really know I’m legit.)

Keep reading