September/October Summary 2020: Custom Worlds!

Sorry for being so late! Ahhh, I can't believe it's been 2 months since my last summary. I really hate how quickly time flies by. ;-; But, like I said in my previous mod post I have plenty of good news to share, and I hope it doesn't disappoint! Because I missed two months I have a lot of info to go over, but I will make it as short as possible.

Modding Discoveries

Custom Worlds: For those of you not following me or Pancake on Twitter, or follow Pancake and I's combined Patreon, I have amazing news to share (with a video!)! We figured out how to: 1) add new lots, 2) add new neighborhoods to existing worlds, and 3) make custom worlds (hidden or on the selection screen)! Now, we are still investigating two of the files that make it appear on the menu selection (they are heavily connected and stop working when we separate them), so are currently overriding two unused BG test files by EA. We are confident we can figure out the last two files, but even if we can't EA has 3 unused test worlds for us (and potentially other modders when we get to releasing the info) to override, and probably more in the future. Or we can make them hidden like Sylvan Glade, there are plenty of options regardless!

I'm sure most of you have watched the video by now, but for those who did not it's a video showing our test world we made when researching and actually selecting it on the menu. It's not our final product by any means, and was just a placeholder while we worked. I can't reveal details on our (first) planned world ATM but I want people to know that once we've got our tools done and made decent progress we will start discussing it, as well as other future plans. For now be aware that this is a long term project for both of us, but won't stop our current WIP mods. 

Speaking of which, we've moved onto the next step in our research, which is making the tools to make custom worlds easier. We've already got the mesh exporter/importer finished, lot cutout finished, and we've got the routing system mostly finished. We've still got a long way to go, but progress is going smoothly so far. Because most of this tool making part is on Pancake's end, I still have time for my own mods as well as our combined mods when he takes breaks. I'll be explaining my progress on current WIP mods down below as usual, but since I spent several weeks on this I'm of course behind. :P

Also, people keep suggesting/asking if Arnie/TheSimsPlus and the two of us will collaborate. We are honestly not sure for several reasons. He hasn't reacted to our discovery yet so I'm not sure if he even knows, but he's been so busy with his beta release that he may have just missed it. But maybe sometime in the future we can bring it up as right now we are working on tools to create our world, so even if we collabed there'd be nothing to do yet for a few months, lol. Well, not entirely true, we already have objects, venues, etc. planned, just need to make those when we get closer to the final product rather than now.

Lights Are Finally Nuked: For my historical/castaway/apocalypse/etc. followers, I've finally nuked lights! Completely wiped them out. It requires overriding the world files, but for those of us who have wanted them long gone, this is now possible. I'll be talking with Pandorasimbox on the best way of adding this to her Timeless mod since I can also do other things with the world files, including removing objects. Below is one of the Newcrest neighborhoods, all along the street used to be lights. 

Custom Bassinets: You can make custom bassinets work like EA's bassinets without overriding them! This one was even easier to discover than all my previous discoveries, and honestly I'm shocked no one has investigated this yet. It still requires overriding a tuning file, but this file allows you to get rid of EA's bassinets, move them around by occult type, etc. Anyhow, I'll be making an injector for this much like the baby onesies to avoid conflicts, but this one is smaller and I've already got it about halfway done. I've taught one person (the fabulous Ingeli/Simverses) how to do it while I work on the injector, and you can checkout the historical bassinets here.

Current Progress/Updates

I've removed the "focus" part from the title because I usually announce mods here as well and they technically aren't a focus until several months later, so it didn't make sense. I might just make a new category later to avoid confusion, lol.

Functional Sewing Machine & Skill

The animations have been completed! Normally I'd show a video of them but the world video is taking the only (functional) spot, so I'll show a clip next time of the awesome animations (Patrons will be seeing this earlier though, once I finish organizing stuff which I'm still working on, it got shoved to the side thanks to the custom worlds, sorry. ^^;). There are a few misc things we overlooked in the animations, like the pitman is not moving, but they will be fixed in a future update. Most of you probably won't even notice it when I show the video clip, but it's minor and doesn't affect functionality, lol.

Anyhow, Pancake, due to a miscommunication, wound up doing a lot of the base tuning for me, so most of what's left is going through to edit details, add the skill and it's files, add buffs and loots for completing projects + misc, some social interactions, and adding all the recipes.

Sword Fighting Mod

I mentioned this after Batuu was announced in several places, but I don't remember if I mentioned it here. Most of you probably know that sword fighting was a future mod to come after my blacksmithing mod because I wanted to have the swords and armor done first for some cool features. I still plan to do all that I wanted, but for now I'm repurposing and editing EA's lightsaber animations to work with swords as the first version of the mod. This will be labeled as it's own style, since it of course differs from the TSM fighting animations, so this way you have two fighting styles when choosing to fight. I'm working on this now because during the SW pack announcement almost every server I was in, and website I visited, mentioned swords to replace the lightsabers, lol. I'd rather someone not take my mod idea because I'd still have to release it regardless, that makes things awkward, so I'll be knocking this out as soon as possible. Unfortunately there's a lot for me to delete and fix, so while it's easy it's still time-consuming.

The Sims Medieval Voices for TS4

I'm sure some of you are like ???? but yes, this is an actual mod Pancake and I have been working on for the last two months, though it's been pushed back a bit because of the custom world and some of the methods we used weren't working as well as we liked. I originally, like many others, wanted Rey's voice to be a mod but then I found out that her voice is incomplete! Can you believe that? Ugh, anyhow, this mod started when I was talking to Pancake about the voice and he said that now that we know it's possible to add new voices we can use a system to put TSM's voices together to match TS4's, as doing it manually is not really an option (there's over 61k files). I also have a few other TSM treats coming your way at some point that have been in the works for a while, probably as a bundle. (Note: It's not possible to add new voices to the CAS UI, it has to be done in-game, but we have a system in place for testing pitches, choosing the voice, randomizing, etc.)

Farming Pack Collab

Yesss, an update for you guys. The leader of the collab had disappeared for a while for personal reasons, but she's back and we've also brought on another animator/modder for the project, many of you will probably know her already (I'll go over the members at a later date as we get closer to V1 release, we're still contacting other creators). We've started outlining our steps and chosen our first few objects to work on. I'll hopefully have better updates on this soon, but just wanted to drop an update for those wondering what was going on. (For the Elders Collab, we've all been a bit busy but are still doing it, just no progress to report to you ATM.)

Other News

I got my tool update from Pancake! That means I can work on Sims animations again. Still no tool completed for TSM objects though, but hopefully soon. Anyhow, everything I mentioned previously is still going on, still following the same path as the last post. I'll hopefully have some mods released soon after being so busy for so long. Oh, and my friend has been busy but is still working on the website in her spare time, and I have to finish up the Discord/Patreon updates this week, or the next. I'm still doubting how I want to organize it and if it's easy to navigate, so I'm kinda blocked atm on what I want to do. 

Tutorials

Custom Styled Looks tutorial:  I didn't get a chance to announce it till now, but S4S's last update fixed the tray cheat!! Feel free to start planning your outfits now while I work on getting this tutorial out. Basically you just dress up your sims and save them to your library. Note that hair is not a part of Styled Looks so don't worry about choosing the right one, but makeup is though.

Various world editing tutorials: Thanks to our research I've also found plenty of things to write tutorials on so people can edit the basics of the worlds themselves. This includes editing/adding/removing VFX, objects/spawners, and some misc other stuff. I don't have plans to go over difficult topics yet, but sometime in the future I hope to.