Mod The Sims - Sea, Sky and Light parameters- let's learn!

simsample

26th Oct 2011, 11:31 PM

This is information I've gained by experimenting in-game and also by learning from what other people have reported.

Basegame files:

[Game Install Location]\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\GameData\Shared\NonPackaged\Ini

This folder contains the ini files which have the sea, sky and light information for the game.

Weather types

There are five weather types:
Clear
Custom
Overcast
Partly Cloudy
Stormy

Note- the names are just what EA have chosen to call the files, it doesn't mean that a custom world must have these weather types!

In the basegame files, there are five files for each weather type to govern the parameters of the weather.

They are:
Sky_[Type]1.ini
Sky_[Type]2.ini
Sky_[Type]Light.ini
Sky_[Type]Sea.ini
Sky_[Type]Sky.ini

So, for example- for stormy, we have Sky_Stormy1.ini, Sky_Stormy2.ini and so on.

Sky_[Type]1.ini: Contains 'Tunable Parameters Related to Clouds'. Cloud cover, cloud colour, cloud appearance and cloud direction/speed for cloud layer 1 (the lower layer) are determined here. '[TextureOffsetChangeRate]' Negative numbers will cause the clouds to travel in a different direction.

Sky_[Type]2.ini: As above, but for cloud layer 2 (the upper layer).

atra-virago has some great pictures of how the various cloud parameters affect the sky in this post. (http://www.modthesims.info/showpost.php?p=3706925&postcount=80)

Sky_[Type]Light.ini: 'Color of the directional light in the sky'- sun and moon light parameters, ambient colour and fog thickness/ distance are determined here.

Sky_[Type]Sea.ini: 'Base water color before the sun and sky reflection are added'. Water colour and sun/moon sea reflection colour are determined here.

Sky_[Type]Sky.ini: 'Sky Shader Parameters'. Star brightness, streetlight brightness, bloom, sun colours, sky colours (not clouds, the actual sky!) and horizon colours are all determined here. The probability of this particular weather type appearing is also specified in this file.
Probability weightings:
Clear 0.2
Custom 0.0
Overcast 0.0
Partly Cloudy 0.35
Stormy 0.0
It seems that the higher this number (0 to 1) the more probable it is for that weather to appear. Zero means seldom seen.

In the above files, all colours which are specified are given in RGB values. This can be seen in this tutorial, (http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=388731) where it is discussed how to change those values.

Sea and Sky files

As well as the weather parameters, there are also the following files in the basegame INI folder:
Sea.ini
SkyCommon.ini

Sea.ini: 'Tunable Parameters Related to Sea'. Texture scales, water speed and wave appearance are determined here.No water colour is specified in this file, but there is an important figure- WaterDepthFactor. This determined how clear or murky the water is- how deep you have to go before the water is coloured. In Sunset valley the murk is blue, in Bridgeport grey. There are also refraction and shore blending figures here.

SkyCommon.ini: 'Tunable Parameters Related to Sky'. Sun/moon size, sun/moon path, moon reflectivity, sunrise time and duration, sun bloom are all determined here. There is also a figure for choosing how often a new weather type is chosen (default set to 8 hours).

INI files in EA worlds

The following worlds contain custom INI files, so they have weather/sea/sky parameters that override the basegame INI files.They also have custom colour ramp files (images) that override the weather/sea/sky colours specified in the basegame INI files.

The INI files are different to the basegame files in format- whereas the basegame files each deal with a specific aspect of the sea/sky/weather, the world ini files contain this information merged into a single file for each weather. However, the colour information is not contained in the ini file, it is instead contained in the colour ramps. So, a texture is used instead of the colours being specified in figures.

The worlds that have custom weather parameters are:
Bridgeport
Twinbrook
Appaloosa Plains
France
Egypt
China

Sunset Valley, Riverview, Hidden Springs and Barnacle Bay do not have any custom sky parameters, and so use the defaults.

Bridgeport and Appaloosa Plains each have ten custom INI files and 5 custom DDS colour ramp files. Twinbrook has nine custom INI files and five colour ramps.

China, Egypt and France each have six ini files and two colour ramps.

The INI files that contain the weather information are as follows:
Bridgeport, appaloosa, Twinbrook:

S3_1F886EAD_00000000_560C0FD7012DA7F3%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_967BC6C3B3808C00%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_FE1F6A95A24A604A%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_2C02B3532B64EB49%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_8DEA7AE7631A026A%%+_INI.ini

France, China and Egypt contain only the first two files. This is because they only have two specified weather patterns- one with a probability weighting of 0, one with a probability weighting of 1.

These files contain the following information- star intensity, manmade light intensity, probability weight (probability of that weather type appearing), day time bloom (how much the world 'glows' in the sun), cloud direction and speed, fog parameters.

The other ini files are as follows:

S3_1F886EAD_00000000_3EC0CF0CC4A6540F%%+_INI.ini
Contains world specific parameters such as the colour of the top of walls and which world fly through to use.

S3_1F886EAD_00000000_5E4F8E7B226066CA%%+_INI.ini
Contains tunable parameters related to lighting. Gamma, bloom, saturation.

S3_1F886EAD_00000000_5E20253AF53E517F%%+_INI.ini
Contains tunable parameters related to sky- sun/moon radius, sunset and sunrise time, sunset dimming speed. Also contains the parameter to determine how often a new weather is chosen. For Egypt, this file also contains a line regarding the heat shimmer:

HeatShimmerDistance = 600

That could be added to any custom world as required!

S3_1F886EAD_00000000_7886A7F59355762F%%+_INI.ini
This one isn't concerned with weather- it is the file that governs the camera path for the flythrough when a new game is started in the world. Tutorial for that is here! (http://pasimficandbeyond.wikia.com/wiki/Creating_an_Initial_Flyover)

S3_1F886EAD_00000000_D89F9D186B7BB372%%+_INI.ini
(Not contained in Twinbrook or the vacation worlds)
Contains tunable parameters related to sea, including the figure for water transparency and refraction.
In the Bridgeport version of this file, the part that defines the water clarity looks like this:
; Defines the water depth at which murkiness completely takes over. 0 is always clear(refractively) and any depth above this
; value will be dominated by the Sea Water Color defined by the weather timeline (unless it's being reflective due to fresnel).
; Lower numbers mean murkier water.
; Note that this value gets baked into the verts at geometry generation time, and currently is not getting re-applied per-frame.
WaterDepthFactor = 1.0
In the basegame files, the waterdepthfactor is set to 10. Warning: If you set this figure low as in Bridgeport, you could find that parts of the map edge will show beneath the water. This is not so apparent if the water is deep, but where the water is shallow it could be undesirable

Colour Ramps

The colour ramps look a bit like this:
http://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/5/2/8/4/8/MTS2_simsample_1205937_S3_00B2D882_0076A684_7529C26EE8E2A9E6_IMG.jpg

Not all of them have the figures underneath, but this one is useful as it shows the hour of the day. So, where the six is, that is the part of the colour ramp used for 6am. You can see quite clearly the orange coloured bits to make sunrise and sunset look nice!

Each strip of colour on that image corresponds to a different aspect of the sea/ sky. So, one colours the sea murk, one colours the sun reflection on the water, one colours the clouds, one colours the sun halo and so on.

We don't have a definitive list of what each line of the colour ramps affects. However, some people have done some research into this:
A description of what each line of the colour ramp affects in this post. (http://modthesims.info/showpost.php?p=3547337&postcount=32)
A labelled colour ramp in this post. (http://modthesims.info/showpost.php?p=3834477&postcount=194)
PoisonFrog has done some excellent research into colour ramp function in this post. (http://modthesims.info/showpost.php?p=3834832&postcount=198)

You can recolour the colour ramps in a photoediting program.

In the basegame INI files the hour is specified as well as an RGB colour, like this:

red = 200
green = 90
blue = 50
timeOfDay = 6

red = 100
green = 100
blue = 100
timeOfDay = 12

So colour ramps and RGB values are two different ways of achieving the same effect!

There is one colour ramp for each weather INI file- that's why there are only two colour ramps in the vacation worlds, to correspond to the two INI files. So, you could have pink fog for stormy weather, white fog when it's sunny and orange fog on a cloudy day! The only thing you have to worry about are the transitions- it may look odd if you have blue ambience suddenly changing to yellow, for example. You might want to keep the colour ramps subtle and similar to avoid obvious changes.

The colour ramp filenames are as follows:

S3_00B2D882_0076A684_ECCBBCB773C02131%%+_IMG.dds
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_7529C26EE8E2A9E6%%+_IMG.dds
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_28C841C9462BCDE0%%+_IMG.dds
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_E422CDDE7FE1F25F%%+_IMG.dds
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_F0A86F660985BF20%%+_IMG.dds

The vacation worlds contain only the first two.

:alarm: :!: Note about editing colour ramps- You should save your edited file as a 32 bit A8R8G8B8 file, no mip-maps. If the world crashes, or your colours/ world look wrong, check your alpha and mipmap settings, as if you get this wrong the game will not read the files!:alarm: :!:
Please see post #3 for more information, pictures and links to DDS utilities.

Weather and Colour Ramp correlation

Each colour ramp corresponds to a particular weather type.
:new: Thanks to atra-virago (http://www.modthesims.info/showpost.php?p=3704590&postcount=76) we also know that the correlation between the basegame weather types and the EA world INI files and colour ramps.

The relationship is as follows:

Weather Type,INI file,Colour Ramp
Clear,S3_1F886EAD_00000000_967BC6C3B3808C00%%+_INI.ini, S3_00B2D882_0076A684_7529C26EE8E2A9E6%%+_IMG.dds
Partly Cloudy,S3_1F886EAD_00000000_560C0FD7012DA7F3%%+_INI.ini,S3_00B2D882_0076A684_ECCBBCB773C02131%%+_IMG.dds
Overcast,S3_1F886EAD_00000000_8DEA7AE7631A026A%%+_INI.ini,S3_00B2D882_0076A684_F0A86F660985BF20%%+_IMG.dds
Stormy,S3_1F886EAD_00000000_2C02B3532B64EB49%%+_INI.ini,S3_00B2D882_0076A684_E422CDDE7FE1F25F%%+_IMG.dds
Custom,S3_1F886EAD_00000000_FE1F6A95A24A604A%%+_INI.ini,S3_00B2D882_0076A684_28C841C9462BCDE0%%+_IMG.dds

Thank you to atra-virago for the help with that!

simsample

26th Oct 2011, 11:31 PM

Let's Experiment!

Myself and many others have already experimented with adding custom INI files to worlds, and tweaking certain figures. However, it would be nice to be able to understand fully what each parameter does, and to find out some limits/ extremes.

Want to try it for yourself?

Here are some INI files I made for one of my worlds, which you could tweak and play with:
http://chii.modthesims.info/getfile.php?file=1324400

Here are a selection of colour ramp files, copied from the EA worlds:
http://chii.modthesims.info/getfile.php?file=1243559

The files for specific EA worlds are also attached to this post.

Download the files you would like to try.

:!: BACKUP ANY FILES YOU CHANGE BEFORE YOU CHANGE THEM!
If you plan on importing these into a world, make a safe copy of the world. If you plan on changing the game files, backup the originals first.
This is so that if anything goes BOOM you can put the safe copy back, and no-one will cry. :heyhey:

To import the files:
You can either import these files into your completed, installed world (so that you can test in-game), or else you can import them into a world you are working on in CAW, to test them in CAW.

:new: atra-virago (http://www.modthesims.info/showpost.php?p=3704590&postcount=76) had the idea to test in CAW, as you can use the 'Cloudiness' slider on the 'Time Of Day' panel to scroll through the five weather types. Combined with the 'Time' settings and 'Speed of Time Passage' slider, this means that you can watch your custom weather and view sunrises/ sunsets without loading the game, and with much greater control. The 'Cloudiness slider positions correspond to the weather types as follows (Left-Right):
1=Clear
2=Partly Cloudy
3=Overcast
4=Stormy
5=Custom
http://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/5/2/8/4/8/MTS_simsample-1250188-Bluefunk_00620-Nov-1101.44.jpg
If you unpause the game in CAW and slide the 'Speed of Time Passage' slider to the right, you will see that the sky changes as it would in-game, choosing random weather types each interval and cycling through day/night. At any time you can pause and grab the 'cloudiness' slider, and scroll through the weather types to see what they will look like at that particular time of day (or indeed, to identify which type of weather it is that you are seeing).

BACKUP BEFORE YOU EXPERIMENT!
Make a copy of the file before you edit it.
For in-game worlds, these will be in Documents\ Electronic Arts\ The Sims 3\ Installed Worlds\.

For CAW projects, these will be in Documents\ Electronic Arts\ The Sims 3 Create A World Tool\ UserToolData\ Worlds. Don't forget that CAW projects have three files associated with each world- a .world file, a .Settings file and a folder. Backup all three!
NOTE: If you then save the world in CAW, the game will discard the ini files but the colour ramps will remain. This can cause undesirable graphical glitches such as unnatural colours, unnaturally dark world, transparent water, unnatural glow or a foggy veil. Be sure to re-import the INI files again if you save the world in CAW, and again before exporting the world!

Put your backup somewhere safe, on your desktop or on a flash drive. Then, if you want to get rid of the changes you made you can just delete the world and replace it with the original- much easier than trying to find all the files you imported and deleting them!

NOTE: If you choose to edit the EA worlds, please be sure to Backup these before proceeding. Be warned that future patches may need to read these files, and so you should keep an original in case.
The EA worlds are located in [Game Install Location]\ Electronic Arts\ The Sims 3 [EP Name]\ GameData\ Shared\ NonPackaged\ Worlds.

You need S3Pe:
http://dino.drealm.info/den/denforum/index.php?PHPSESSID=e2hp5t9me2770a7ibf95fc1nb1&board=19.0

Open the [worldname].world file in S3Pe. Click Resource>Import>From file and browse to the location of the extracted files. Make sure 'replace duplicates' and 'use resource name' are ticked. You can tick 'compress' too if you like!
http://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/5/2/8/4/8/MTS_simsample-1243553-Bluefunk_0127-Oct-1101.15.jpg

Click Import, then File> Save. That's it! The resources are imported. You can now test your world in game.

Try: the basegame edited files alone, and then add the colour ramps.

Try: Amending the parameters in the INI files to see what happens.
You could amend the cloud cover as mentioned above, or the speed/ direction. Also play with the fog, change the start and end distances and the curve figure, for each time of day. Example below:

[FogDistance1]
start = 0
end = 500
curve = 0.75
timeOfDay = 1

If you want to experiment with a particular parameter, make ALL of the weather files the same- so make the figures in each of these identical:

S3_1F886EAD_00000000_560C0FD7012DA7F3%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_967BC6C3B3808C00%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_FE1F6A95A24A604A%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_2C02B3532B64EB49%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_8DEA7AE7631A026A%%+_INI.ini

That way, you will be sure that what you are seeing is a result of the changes you just made!

Try: Editing the colour ramp files to change the sea and sky colour.

You need NVidia DDS Utilities to do this, as the files are in DDS format:
http://developer.nvidia.com/content/dds-utilities-83111271645
Photoshop DDS Plugin here:
http://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-texture-tools-adobe-photoshop
GIMP DDS plugin here:
http://code.google.com/p/gimp-dds/

We don't have a definitive list of what each line of the colour ramps affects. However, some people have done some research into this:
A description of what each line of the colour ramp affects in this post. (http://modthesims.info/showpost.php?p=3547337&postcount=32)
A labelled colour ramp in this post. (http://modthesims.info/showpost.php?p=3834477&postcount=194)
PoisonFrog has done some excellent research into colour ramp function in this post. (http://modthesims.info/showpost.php?p=3834832&postcount=198)

:alarm: :!: You should save your edited file as a 32 bit A8R8G8B8 file, no mip-maps. If the world crashes, or your colours/ world look wrong, check your alpha and mipmap settings, as if you get this wrong the game will not read the files!:alarm: :!:
Bakafox pointed out what this will look like in Photoshop.
First, make sure the alpha box is ticked:
http://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/5/2/8/4/8/MTS_simsample-1246769-Bluefunk_0206-Nov-1115.51.jpg

Then choose '8.8.8.8 ARGB 32bpp Unsigned'. Note I have 'no mip maps' ticked!:
http://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/5/2/8/4/8/MTS_simsample-1246770-Bluefunk_0306-Nov-1115.51.jpg

For GIMP it should look a bit like this:

Click 'Save as' and keep the same file extension (DDS). Then click Save.
http://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/5/2/8/4/8/MTS_simsample-1263530-Bluefunk_0308-Jan-1210.53.jpg

If you have kept the filename the same as well as the extension, then click 'replace' to overwrite:
http://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/5/2/8/4/8/MTS_simsample-1263531-Bluefunk_0408-Jan-1210.53.jpg

In 'Compression' choose NONE and choose RGBA8 in the 'format' box. Note, the 'Generate Mip-Maps' box is unticked:
http://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/5/2/8/4/8/MTS_simsample-1263532-Bluefunk_0508-Jan-1210.53.jpg

Leave all other settings as they are, and click ok.

If you are a Photoshop user, PoisonFrog has made a Photoshop colour ramp template. Download it in this post. (http://www.modthesims.info/showpost.php?p=3833756&postcount=190)

Try: Opening the EA worlds in S3Pe, and exporting the following if they are there:

S3_00B2D882_0076A684_7529C26EE8E2A9E6%%+_IMG.dds
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_28C841C9462BCDE0%%+_IMG.dds
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_E422CDDE7FE1F25F%%+_IMG.dds
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_ECCBBCB773C02131%%+_IMG.dds
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_F0A86F660985BF20%%+_IMG.dds
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_560C0FD7012DA7F3%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_967BC6C3B3808C00%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_FE1F6A95A24A604A%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_2C02B3532B64EB49%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_8DEA7AE7631A026A%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_3EC0CF0CC4A6540F%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_5E4F8E7B226066CA%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_5E20253AF53E517F%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_D89F9D186B7BB372%%+_INI.ini

Then import those into your custom world.
I've uploaded the EA world ini files and colour ramps, you can get them from the following links.
Appaloosa Plains (http://upload.modthesims.info/getfile.php?file=1244052)
Basegame INI files (http://upload.modthesims.info/getfile.php?file=1244054)
Bridgeport (http://upload.modthesims.info/getfile.php?file=1244056)
China (http://upload.modthesims.info/getfile.php?file=1244059)
Egypt (http://upload.modthesims.info/getfile.php?file=1244061)
France (http://upload.modthesims.info/getfile.php?file=1244064)
Twinbrook (http://upload.modthesims.info/getfile.php?file=1244066)
Lunar Lakes (http://upload.modthesims.info/getfile.php?file=1273769)
Starlight Shores (http://upload.modthesims.info/getfile.php?file=1287399)
Lucky Palms (thanks Kiwimaus!) (http://chii.modthesims.info/getfile.php?file=1305092)
Sunlit Tides (thanks propackets!) (http://chii.modthesims.info/getfile.php?file=1318942)
Moonlight Falls (thanks propackets!) (http://chii.modthesims.info/getfile.php?file=1322037)
Twinbrook and Bridgeport have remarkably similar INI files and colour ramps!
Note: Sunlit tides, like China, Egypt and France, only contains overrides for two weather states.

:!!: Note on France and China DDS files:
One of the France dds colour ramps and one of the China dds colour ramps have no alpha, and so can sometimes result in blocky shadows on the terrain, as in this image:
http://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/5/2/8/4/8/MTS_simsample-1316787-DDS-No_alpha.jpg
To solve this, the images should be corrected to give the correct alpha channel. I have amended these color ramp and they can be downloaded here if you would like to try them:
Click here for France (http://chii.modthesims.info/getfile.php?file=1316786)
Click here for China (http://chii.modthesims.info/getfile.php?file=1318941)

Report your results!
Take pictures of your results, give figures, share INI files. What I'm aiming for is to be able to write a comprehensive guide about how to get exactly the weather/ sky/ light you want.

Importing Weather Parameters into Packed (Sims3Pack) worlds
If you wish to include your colour ramps and ini files in a packed world (Sims3Pack file), this can be done by importing the ini files and colour ramps into your CAW world file before you export your world to Sims3Pack.
Please note that if you then save the world in CAW, the game will discard the ini files but the colour ramps will remain. This can cause undesirable graphical glitches such as unnatural colours, unnaturally dark world, transparent water, unnatural glow or a foggy veil.
To solve this, you need to either re-import your ini files to the world after saving, or else remove the colour ramps to get rid of the custom weather altogether. The files you should remove are as follows:
http://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/5/2/8/4/8/MTS_simsample-1228760-Bluefunk_00329-Aug-1102.04.jpg

:here: As always, thanks to everyone who has contributed to this in previous threads, and thanks in advance to everyone who contributes here. Please feel free to point out any errors in my information, or to add information. I would like to know if I'm making any wrong assumptions and would like to know what you know! :beer:

bakafox

27th Oct 2011, 12:09 AM

OMG I am so happy you are tackling this! I have 2 projects right now that I'd like to alter and make more gloomy in terms of weather and lighting. I shall be camping the heck out of this thread!

simsample

27th Oct 2011, 12:24 AM

OMG I am so happy you are tackling this!
Um, not Me, but US! I need input, testers and information! :lol:

Jay290783

27th Oct 2011, 12:27 AM

Um, not Me, but US! I need input, testers and information! :lol:
Dunno if I want to try this myself or not.
I copied the file from er Bridgeport? I'm not sure but I put it in my world file and my sea went so see through I could see right to the seabed :rofl: lol
Not what I actually wanted :faceslap:

simsample

27th Oct 2011, 12:57 AM

Jay- hang on, I'm completing a little more. I'm putting up some test files and instructions, gimme a few minutes (or perhaps hours, I think sloooooow! :lol:)

Jay290783

27th Oct 2011, 01:02 AM

Jay- hang on, I'm completing a little more. I'm putting up some test files and instructions, gimme a few minutes (or perhaps hours, I think sloooooow! :lol:)
I will hang on until someone creates a perfect (or as close to perfect) set for Hidden Springs at which point I will download those files.

Otherwise my world will end up more weirdly wonderful (yeah right) than it already is :blink:

simsample

27th Oct 2011, 01:42 AM

Can't promise that, after all your idea of perfect weather might differ from mine! But, I put a set of files up with some instructions, so that we can experiment. :)

Please show me what you find, and what you learn! And don't forget to share your 'perfect' weather! :lol:

auntielynds

27th Oct 2011, 08:14 AM

I've been playing with the water color ini files, trying for a murky green. My problem arises with the water reflection. If you look directly down at the water, it's green. Looking out across the water, the reflection is blue.

http://thumbs.modthesims.info/getimage.php?file=1243631

http://thumbs.modthesims.info/getimage.php?file=1243633

These are the 5 ini files I'm editing, and what I've edited.

http://thumbs.modthesims.info/getimage.php?file=1243634

http://thumbs.modthesims.info/getimage.php?file=1243635

I tried altering the "Color of sun / moon reflection for the sea", which is the second section in the Ini files, with no visible difference.

Has anyone dealt with this issue? Maybe I'm altering the wrong ones, or there are some more that need tweaking.

Jay290783

28th Oct 2011, 01:27 AM

Right I'm going to try with a single file first.
I'm starting with the S3_1F886EAD_00000000_5E20253AF53E517F%%+_INI "Tunable Paramaters Related to Sky" file.
Will see what my little tweeks look like and get back to you.

*fingers crossed*

Would be great if it was first time lucky but will probably be an epic fail.

Edit 1: OK so it seems that although I think my sun and moon rise in more or less the same area of the sky, they seem to set at noticeably different points in the sky.
Weird! :wtf:

Edit 2: Further to my previous edit, I've tracked both the sun and moon and they seem to be at almost mirror points to eachother. Should that be the case? Should the moon move anti-clockwise across the sky and the Sun move clockwise?
I'm sorry if I'm having a duh! moment but would've thought they would begin and end at the same points in the sky and follow the same path :help:
By the way, my file, with its edits, that I have used, is here (http://chii.modthesims.info/getfile.php?file=1243841)
The actual settings I've used are as follows:

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;; Tunable Parameters Related to Sky
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;;
[MiscSkyParams]

;; Radii of the sun, sun glow, and moon in metric arbitrary units
SunRadius = 175
SunHaloRadius = 1500
MoonRadius = 250

;; Number of degrees off the sky's "equator" for the sun and moon. An offset of 0 would indicate
;; tracking the equator exactly. Values approaching 90 become fairly degenerate; with the sun rising and setting
;; near the same pole in the sky. A strong astronomical argument could be made that the Starfield and Sun offsets should be
;; identical, but they can be tuned separately anyway...
SunDegreeOffset = 45
MoonDegreeOffset = 45
StarfieldDegreeOffset = 45

;; Affects the sunlight transitions, especially for shadows.
SunDegreeMovementStep = 10.0
SunDegreeMovementBlendThreshold = 5.0

;; Number of DAYS for the moon to go through a complete lunar cycle
;; Note that changes in this position will yank the moon to a new position in the sky.
LunarCycleTime = 28

;; Moon water reflection size as a fraction of sun water reflection size. This is in sky
;; because it's calculated by the sky because this reflection size value is driven by the
;; sun and moon positions rather than the water directly. 0.0 = no moon reflection;
;; 1.0 = full moons are as bright as the sun. New moons should never reflect regardless of what
;; value is entered here.
MoonReflectionFactor = 0.75

;; This value will skew the sun and moon lighting directions towards the horizon. This currently
;; affects only the light, and not the actual sun or moon position. More oblique angles give more dramatic shadows
;; and lighting. Values approaching zero will spend very little time lighting from the center of the sky. A value
;; of one indicates a homogenous circular lighting track. Values above one will be increasingly averse to horizon
;; lighting.
HorizonLightSkewFactor = 0.3

;; This value will set a minimum distance (in Metric Arbitrary Units) that the sun or moon can approach the horizon.
;; A value of zero indicates no minimum. This value is useful for tuning the maximum shadow stretchiness as the sun approaches
;; the horizon.
HorizonLightMinimum = 1.5

;; This value will affect the abruptness of the sunset dimming effect for sun and moon reflections. Small values
;; indicate long, gradual transitions from full-brightness to dimness; large values indicate abrupt transitions.
SunsetDimmingSpeed = 25.0

;; Modifies the sunrise and sunset time. This will rescale the values fetched from the timeline automagically: the 6:00/18:00
;; timeline values will stay sunrise and sunset, but they'll happen at SunriseTime and SunsetTime instead.
SunriseTime = 6.30
SunsetTime = 19.30

;; How long before sunrise or after sunset does the sun control the light direction? Note that the HorizonLightMinimum can be used
;; to keep the "sunlight direction" above the horizon. This makes it possible to defer the Sun Directional Light -> Ambience Only ->
;; Moon Directional Light transition until after the visual sunset, with a period of "twilight" in between the time the sun
;; goes beneath the horizon and the time the moonlight takes over as the dominant skylight. This value expresses time in hours.
;; It does not cause any reinterpretation of the timeline time keys.
SunDominanceTime = 1.0

;; Pick a new weather type every N hours
WeatherRandomizeInterval = 4
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;;
[Bloom]

;; Must be between -1 and 0
BloomThreshold = -0.97

;; Keep this high (>5 or so)
BloomSlope = 10

[Bloom:Xenon]
BloomThreshold = -0.65

[Bloom:Ps3]
BloomThreshold = -0.65

Anyone have any ideas what the "Bloom is all about? :call:
Also, slightly off topic, I would put the code in a Spoiler Button but I don't know how to. Sorry :(

Edit 3: Just edited the file again so that the SunRadius is 200 and the MoonRadius is 500.
God that Moon is MASSIVE! :blink:

Jay290783

28th Oct 2011, 02:23 AM

*****WARNING!!!!!*****

DO NOT and I mean DO NOT try to set the MoonDegreeOffset to a negative number. I set it to -45 thinking that maybe it would move the placement of the moon.
It did.
It vanished from the sky completely so I presume it's technically underground :faceslap:

I would presume the same would happen to the Sun or Stars if you set them as negative numbers.
One way to have no stars at all perhaps? :report:

Edit 1: Don't set them all at 90. Nothing happens. Both the Sun and Moon stay put permanently and the Stars never appear.

auntielynds

28th Oct 2011, 06:47 AM

I made the moon in Spooky Town incredibly large, I think 600, and it caused major lag at night. I had to roll it back to this;

[MiscSkyParams]
;; Radii of the sun, sun glow, and moon in metric arbitrary units
SunRadius = 360
SunHaloRadius = 260
MoonRadius = 400

I didn't know how to do the spoiler button either, so I opened up Simsamples, in reply mode to check the coding, then backed out of it.

BenC0722

28th Oct 2011, 10:17 AM

I didn't know how to do the spoiler button either, so I opened up Simsamples, in reply mode to check the coding, then backed out of it.

It's easy. For a spoiler tag:

[*spoiler*]Stuff to Hide[*/spoiler*]

but without the asterisks. Although the info button is even better, and it's used like this.

[*infobutton='Insert Title Here'*]Stuff to Hide[*/infobutton*]

Again, without the asterisks. You can also use Preview Post to be sure it shows up just the way you want it to.

More on topic to the thread, I shall be reviewing it periodically. It's very interesting stuff and should be helpful.

simsample

28th Oct 2011, 11:47 AM

Lynds, I think you'll always get the lighter colour on top of the water to an extent, because that's the wave layer of the water. However, if you recolour the ambient light too, you won't have so much of an issue:
http://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/5/2/8/4/8/MTS_simsample-1243979-Screenshot-10.jpg
You can see what I mean here-
http://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/5/2/8/4/8/MTS_simsample-1243980-Screenshot-26.jpg
See how the colour of the sea is determined by the atmospheric colours as well as the sea murk colour.

The file you are using called 3119E691AE6018C1 is from The Sims Medieval, so it would probably be better to use a file with an FNV hash from the Sims 3 instead. What I would recommend is to try the files I supplied above, and then edit the colour ramps to get the effect you want instead of editing RGB codes for a single aspect of the world colour. If you really just want to edit the RGB colours, then try altering the fog, horizon and other colours in these files too:
Sky_[Type]1.ini
Sky_[Type]2.ini
Sky_[Type]Light.ini
Sky_[Type]Sky.ini
The one for sea colour corresponding to the medieval one you're editing is Sky_[Type]Sea.ini. It's possible that the Medieval one could override the files you have listed after it- they all deal with sea, so I'm not sure which weather type the medieval one will override.
I think I would find it easier to recolour an image than to plug in RGB colours!

Jay290783, good info! Did you notice lag like auntielynds reported when using a massive sun/ moon radius? Your findings related to the sun and moon staying stationary are great- could be useful for alien type worlds, perhaps? For the bloom, that's to do with how much things glow in the light (think, EA kitchen counters when the lights are on!).

Good work everyone! :)

Jay290783

28th Oct 2011, 12:07 PM

Did you notice lag like auntielynds reported when using a massive sun/ moon radius? Your findings related to the sun and moon staying stationary are great- could be useful for alien type worlds, perhaps? For the bloom, that's to do with how much things glow in the light (think, EA kitchen counters when the lights are on!).

Good work everyone! :)
Yeah I did. Kept stopping and starting as I was tilting the camera trying to first fin and then follow the paths of the sun and moon.

Also, I Wouldn't recommend putting a huge number for SunHaloRadius.
I had it at er 1500 I think and you couldn't see the sun when it was near the horizon so had trouble determining where it was setting :blink:

I've got it at 500 now and that seems a nice reasonable number so I probably wouldn't recommend higher...
...unless you want an Egypt type world...
...or Tatooine in terms of Alien planet :rofl:

Speaking of which...wouldn't it be cool if we could add multiple Suns and/or Moons to really make it look like an alein planet? I wonder if that's possible. Hidden Springs but in the Alpha Centauri System instead :rofl:

simsample

28th Oct 2011, 04:06 PM

Hmm, it's possible to replace the moon texture, so you might be able to make a texture that looks like two moons. But making them move independantly would be something else entirely!

Margaret Pendragon

28th Oct 2011, 05:09 PM

Thank you for revisiting this information, I have bookmarked this thread! I had long since given up on trying to wrap my head around the information in the older threads, but this is reviving my motivation. I last left off with a problem similar to AuntieLynds: I wanted a bright turquoise water. Editing the INIs achieved that to a degree, the color would show up when looking down at it, but the water would still always appear that same old shade of blue when looking across it.

http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb337/mistyfiedmafiawars/Screenshot-2.jpg

So I had read about the color ramps and downloaded Gimp to try and play around, but with strange results, so shortly thereafter I gave up and went about building my world minus the sky and sea color I wanted.

From what I'm reading here, I need to alter two of the color bars on the color ramp, one for water color and one for murk?

simsample

28th Oct 2011, 07:26 PM

Margaret Pendragon, the only colour for the water as such is the murk- the depth at which this begins is determined by the waterdepthfactor (I added a note about that in post #2 above). However, as my images show in post #15, the ambient colours will also affect the water. So, the sun's reflection colour, the horizon fog colours, the sky colour. Try out some of the EA colour ramps and you'll see what I mean- Bridgeport and Twinbrook's are quite bland, but the ones from France and China have some colours that are quite vivid. If the sky is purple, it will affect the appearance of the sea- so you need to have the colours in agreement, unless you want some absurd alien effects!

Margaret Pendragon

30th Oct 2011, 03:55 AM

Wow, this is super tedious business!

It seems that the greatest changes are accomplished using the color ramps.

First I tried a basic colorization of a color ramp, and came out with this:
http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb337/mistyfiedmafiawars/Picnikcollage.jpg Simsample, this is old news for you, but I thought I'd share for those trying to learn this. I'm not technically-inclined, so I'm proud of this! :D
The first image is the 'normal' coloring. The second is after I altered the color ramp.
As you can see, the full colorization worked. But, it also tinted the lighting slightly, and produced greenish shadows.

According to GloamingMerle's post (referenced in Simsample's 2nd post (http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?p=3679969#post3679969) in this thread), the first three bars on the color ramp have to do with lighting and shadows. So I recolorized the color ramp, but left those first three bars with their original coloring. This was the result: http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb337/mistyfiedmafiawars/Picnikcollage2.jpg

Next up will be figuring out the horizon coloring, so that I can recolor my sky. I haven't had much success with either INIs or color ramps yet, as far as that goes, so any pointers would be appreciated.

bakafox

30th Oct 2011, 06:51 AM

What clock times do 'time of days' match up with.. is 1 6am, or midnight, or what?

Also, where is the file for moon graphic/texture since I see above that it can be replaced...

simsample

30th Oct 2011, 09:20 AM

Great results, Margaret Pendragon! It's really useful to us when we can see pictures of the effects you are getting and what parameters/ ramps you're using, so thanks for posting such clear images! I love that sea colour. See how even the sand looks a different colour- so the lighting and sky parameters really can be used to make a very different feel to a world. Will you be sharing your colour ramps? ;)

bakafox, it's a 24 hour clock- on the colour ramps, 0/24 is midnight, 6 is 0600 hours (6am), 12 is midday, 18 is 1800 hours (6pm). For the RGB colours in the basegame inis, it's the same- if it says 4, it means 4am. If it says 16, it means 4pm. If you use the colour ramps though you don't need to worry about the RGB values.

The moon texture I'm pretty sure I found in Fullbuild0, but there's an override here you can take a look at:
http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=420479

More info here too about recolouring all sorts of things:
http://builders.forumotion.net/t1013-advanced-tutorial-tweaking-your-worlds-custom-sea-sky-rabbit-holes-emitters

Margaret Pendragon

30th Oct 2011, 05:52 PM

bakafox, the moon image can be found from your program directory Sims files.
TheSims(TM) 3\Game Data\Shared\Packages\ and it is the FullBuild0 package like simsample said. As you can see in my screen shot, the file path may differ if you used Origin to install your games. http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb337/mistyfiedmafiawars/fullbuild0.png

I opened that up in S3PE and sorted the files to find the _IMG file with the tag of "moon".

http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb337/mistyfiedmafiawars/moon.jpgsimsample, I'll be happy to share my color ramps after more tweaking. As you can see in this moon photo, my basic colorization of the color ramp even produces a teal sky at night, and that's something I want to correct.

So night sky color, and horizon color, those are the two things I need to figure out. :report:

ETA...you can download my moon DDS from here (http://www.box.net/shared/in0rnasye0iy9xv1ehid)

Margaret Pendragon

30th Oct 2011, 10:24 PM

So, from what I've experienced thus far with color ramps is that the horizon sky color is a HUGE factor in the sea's overall color--which will be a disappointment for those of us who would love the contrast of a bright blue sea and a purple sky. (PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong, I would love to separate the colors for the two...) I'm not sure how big of an affect altering the ambient colors in the INI files would have on this?

I started using one of Egypt's color ramps, as I like Egypt's coloring in the game. Here is my altered color ramp. http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb337/mistyfiedmafiawars/colorramp.jpgUsing GloamingMerle's previous observations about what each bar of the color ramps do (http://www.modthesims.info/showpost.php?p=3547337&postcount=32), I did observe that bars 1-3 pertain to lighting and shadow colors. I'd recommend leaving those alone, or else leaving them for last. Recoloring the entire color ramp will produce weird lighting and shadow colors, which is probably not what you want to achieve.

Bar 4 is the sea color.....but that's only the sea color when viewing the world from overhead, or from up-close. You can see from the color ramp image that I set bar 4 to a bright red, which comes out a bright pinkish-red ingame (so probably still affected somewhat by sky color and/or depth). If you're close to the edge of your map, you'll notice that the 'water color' ends at the edge of the map. http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb337/mistyfiedmafiawars/Screenshot2.jpgGloamingMerle observed that bar 5 is the sun's reflection on the water. However, I could NOT tell any difference in my world, even when changing it to a noticeably different color. In this color ramp, I have that bar set to a lime green color, but I've seen nothing of it yet in my world. Does anyone have any input on what bar 5 affects?

Beyond the edge of the map, sea color is a mixture of the sea color and sky color. Or is this 'murk'/depth? I haven't tried altering depth factors at all yet. It only appears this way when viewed from overhead; otherwise it still depends largely on horizon color. http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb337/mistyfiedmafiawars/Screenshot3.jpg

Finally accepting the limitations of sea color, I found it best to alter bars 8 and 9 to determine the horizon color and most of the sea color, and to set bar 4 to a similar or complementary color for a more uniform appearance. http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb337/mistyfiedmafiawars/Screenshot1.jpg

If you want a darker night sky, blackening the edges of bars 8 & 9 is what you need to do. You'll notice it also makes the stars a lot more noticeable. http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb337/mistyfiedmafiawars/Screenshot-2-1.jpg

The last several bars on the color ramp are, as GloamingMerle observed, "shaders" and are quite subtle. These appear to affect the dome of the sky, which you'll mostly only see when in Camera Mode.

I'm still tweaking, but I'll share my color ramp here soon.

Jay290783

30th Oct 2011, 11:29 PM

Finally had a go at Gimp (http://downloads.sourceforge.net/gimp-win/gimp-2.6.11-i686-setup-1.exe) and decided to edit the colour of the moon to a nice Smurf kind of glow as demonstrated below:
http://thumbs.modthesims.info/getimage.php?file=1244860
If you fancy having that moon in your own world then download the rar file below (http://chii.modthesims.info/getfile.php?file=1244861), open it up and add the S3_00B2D882_00000000_C61E627EBFF91A92_moon%%+_IMG.dds file to your world using S3PE.

Granted it could probably be a lot better, but not bad for a first try if I do say so myself :)

Margaret Pendragon

30th Oct 2011, 11:40 PM

not bad for a first try if I do say so myself :)

Not bad at all, congrats :gjob:

In one of the older threads, I saw someone make mention of the Earth as a moon...one of us should try that!

Jay290783

31st Oct 2011, 12:30 AM

Not bad at all, congrats :gjob:

In one of the older threads, I saw someone make mention of the Earth as a moon...one of us should try that!
Thanks. I do try :lol:

I decided to edit the moon again and make it darker. Looks quite nice if I do say so myself:
http://thumbs.modthesims.info/getimage.php?file=1244879
Once again, just open the RAR file (http://chii.modthesims.info/getfile.php?file=1244882).

Enjoy :cool:

As for the Earth, probably could get a picture of the Earth, paste it over the image of the moon and save it then import the file in to your world and low and behold you should have the Earth in the sky at night.

That's my thinking anyway :blink:

Jay290783

31st Oct 2011, 01:07 AM

In one of the older threads, I saw someone make mention of the Earth as a moon...one of us should try that!
Decided to give it a go and it was surprisingly easy.

If anyone would like to replace the moon with the Earth then I have done it for you as demonstrated below:
http://thumbs.modthesims.info/getimage.php?file=1244897
Just download the RAR file (http://chii.modthesims.info/getfile.php?file=1244899) which consists of the following files:

DDS Image File:
S3_00B2D882_00000000_C61E627EBFF91A92_Earth as Moon%%+_IMG.dds
Tunable Parameters Related to Sky file (to make the Moon - or in this case the Earth - bigger):
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_5E20253AF53E517F_Tunable Parameters Related to Sky%%+_INI.ini

Once again, enjoy :cool:

Margaret Pendragon

31st Oct 2011, 01:32 AM

Decided to give it a go and it was surprisingly easy.

If anyone would like to replace the moon with the Earth then I have done it for you as demonstrated below:
http://thumbs.modthesims.info/getimage.php?file=1244897
DDS Image File:
S3_00B2D882_00000000_C61E627EBFF91A92_Earth as Moon%%+_IMG.dds
Tunable Parameters Relating to Sky file (to make the Moon - or in this case the Earth - bigger):
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_5E20253AF53E517F_Tunable Parameters Related to Sky%%+_INI.ini

Once again, enjoy :cool:

AWESOME!! I was hoping you'd give it a go!

Looks good in game, too. You should upload it as a mod, I have a hunch many people would like it :)

Margaret Pendragon

1st Nov 2011, 01:22 AM

Ok! I've been slaving away for a couple of days now, on just one color ramp. There's still a little tweaking to do. http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb337/mistyfiedmafiawars/colorramp-1.png

http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb337/mistyfiedmafiawars/Screenshot-8.jpg
http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb337/mistyfiedmafiawars/Screenshot-2-2.jpg
http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb337/mistyfiedmafiawars/Screenshot-3-1.jpg
http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb337/mistyfiedmafiawars/Screenshot-4-1.jpg
http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb337/mistyfiedmafiawars/Screenshot-6.jpg
http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb337/mistyfiedmafiawars/Screenshot-7.jpg
http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb337/mistyfiedmafiawars/Screenshot-10.jpg
http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb337/mistyfiedmafiawars/Screenshot-11.jpg
http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb337/mistyfiedmafiawars/Screenshot-14.jpg
Here is the color ramp. (http://www.box.net/shared/iuxyytdlkgclts6ulkj8)

Now how do I approach the other color ramps for other weathers? Does it matter if I only have one, or do I actually need one for each weather type?

Jay290783

1st Nov 2011, 01:29 AM

Now how do I approach the other color ramps for other weathers? Does it matter if I only have one, or do I actually need one for each weather type?
I'll leave that to other people as I haven't even dared attempt colour ramps yet.
I'm just getting ready top post some more moon redraws of Jupiter, Neptune and finally Titan.

After that I'm not sure what else I'll try attempting :blink:

Edit 1:
If anyone would like to replace the moon with the Earth then I have done it for you as demonstrated below:
http://thumbs.modthesims.info/getimage.php?file=1245261
If anyone would like to replace the moon with Jupiter then I have done it for you as demonstrated below:
http://thumbs.modthesims.info/getimage.php?file=1245262
If anyone would like to replace the moon with Neptune then I have done it for you as demonstrated below:
http://thumbs.modthesims.info/getimage.php?file=1245263
If anyone would like to replace the moon with Titan then I have done it for you as demonstrated below:
http://thumbs.modthesims.info/getimage.php?file=1245264

Just download the ZIP file (http://chii.modthesims.info/getfile.php?file=1245266) which consists of the following files:

DDS Image Files:
S3_00B2D882_00000000_C61E627EBFF91A92_Earth as Moon%%+_IMG.dds
S3_00B2D882_00000000_C61E627EBFF91A92_Jupiter as Moon%%+_IMG.dds
S3_00B2D882_00000000_C61E627EBFF91A92_Neptune as Moon%%+_IMG.dds
S3_00B2D882_00000000_C61E627EBFF91A92_Titan as Moon%%+_IMG.dds
Tunable Parameters Related to Sky file (to make the Moon - or in this case the Earth, Jupiter, Neptune or Titan - bigger):
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_5E20253AF53E517F_Tunable Parameters Related to Sky%%+_INI.ini

And I think that's probably enough Moon Redraws for the time being.
I've been toying with the idea of creating two or more moons and then changing the size of the MoonRadius to make it look like two moons.
Will probably have to wait for a few days or maybe until Sunday.
Depends if it works or not :alarm:
Just a pity we can't have two individual Moon images and/or two moons mentioned in the ini file...
...or can we? I might try that as well and see if it's possible :report:

Anyway, I hope you like what I've done so far though.
Me thinks it's beddy byes time now though.

Goodnight everyone :anime:

Night Racer

1st Nov 2011, 04:09 PM

Margaret: Wow thats flawless, Id love to have that lighting in my sim's world. o_o

panther00567

1st Nov 2011, 05:19 PM

Hello,

so I am currently working on a world that, I think, doesn't look good with the Sunset Valley sun-all-the-freakin-time sky in it. So I used SimPE and imported custom Bridgeport ini files that I downloaded from this thread after I installed the world. But if I plan on uploading this world to the Sims 3 exchange or other place when I'm finished, I want the world to be already set with Bridgeport's ini files in it... (The climate for Bridgeport is perfect for my world) How would I go about doing this so that the sims3pack file for my custom world would have the custom sky & weather in it?

Thanks!

Edit: :faceslap: Nevermind. I totally forgot that there's .world files in the CAW folder. Ugh! :rofl: Anyways, thanks for offering these default premade world INI files for people like me to use, who are not good with technical things.

Jasumi

1st Nov 2011, 05:33 PM

Amazing work, Jay290783! Those are stunning!

And to the person who mentioned stars:

[MiscParams]
StarIntensity = 100
ManmadeLightIntensity = 48
ProbabilityWeight = 0.5
DaytimeBloom = 0.2

This is found in three package files...

S3_1F886EAD_00000000_DAA2E7455D05702D%%+_INI

S3_1F886EAD_00000000_020B928B69D9347C%%+_INI

S3_1F886EAD_00000000_14BCCF66ED42DE73%%+_INI

Jay290783

1st Nov 2011, 05:52 PM

Margaret: Wow thats flawless, Id love to have that lighting in my sim's world. o_o
Er was that aimed at me? If so then I haven't edited any lighting. It's just what Hidden Springs has as standard.
Only file I've changed (other than the moon dds file) is the file I've included. All I've changed is sun, moon and star size and position.
Amazing work, Jay290783! Those are stunning!
Thank you. Well I certainly do try. My mum would probably say I'm very trying :lol:

Have you seen my Smurf Moon further up by the way?

That I'm especially proud of. Although I do like the look of Titan and Neptune :)

Jasumi

1st Nov 2011, 06:07 PM

lol I'm not so sure about that one, but the colors/contrast/detail on these planets (and Titan) are quite lovely!

Jay290783

1st Nov 2011, 06:44 PM

lol I'm not so sure about that one, but the colors/contrast/detail on these planets (and Titan) are quite lovely!
Er I'll let you in on a secret sssssh don't tell anyone but they're just pictures of the planets and moon Titan. I didn't actually draw them.

To everyone else though...it's allllllll my own work :lol:

bakafox

1st Nov 2011, 08:20 PM

Decided to give it a go and it was surprisingly easy.

Oh wow that looks great! Thank you!

(Although now I feel like starting the lunar colony idea I had RIGHT AWAY before I've finished any current things!)

Night Racer

2nd Nov 2011, 12:04 AM

Jay290783

2nd Nov 2011, 01:31 AM

Im wanting to test this out, make my own color ramps, but i have a dumb question. How do i open and edit DDS files? >_<
both Windows and photoshop tell me DDS is unsupported. Dose it need to be converted...?

You first need GIMP which can be downloaded directly from here (http://downloads.sourceforge.net/gimp-win/gimp-2.6.11-i686-setup-1.exe)

You then need to download the dds plug-in from here (http://gimp-dds.googlecode.com/files/gimp-dds-win32-2.0.9.zip) and place it in the plug-ins folder. It's not an autoinstaller or anything so double clicking the exe won't don anything. It is actually just the dds plug-in.
The read-me will explain that though.

Once both are installed you can export to file _IMG files which are actually dds files and edit them freely to your hearts content.

Maybe SimSample can add that info to the first posts so people know?

Hope that helps :)

Margaret Pendragon

2nd Nov 2011, 01:38 AM

Sorry Jay, but no. What I said was aimed at Margaret in the post above you. But your results with custom skinning of the moon are awesome too!

Im wanting to test this out, make my own color ramps, but i have a dumb question. How do i open and edit DDS files? >_<
both Windows and photoshop tell me DDS is unsupported. Dose it need to be converted...?

I'm using Gimp, and it didn't automatically support DDS files either, I had to get a plug-in for it to work. You might try looking up DDS plug-ins for the programs you use as well. I found some listings for Photoshop (https://www.google.com/#hl=en&sugexp=kjrmc&cp=12&gs_id=3s&xhr=t&q=photoshop+DDS+plugin&tok=KsX3pJ6oUZZtlZCIPLpquw&pf=p&sclient=psy-ab&source=hp&pbx=1&oq=photoshop+DD&aq=0&aqi=g4&aql=f&gs_sm=&gs_upl=&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&fp=afbc87e2ba92858e&biw=1680&bih=876), so I'm sure you can find plug-ins for other programs as well.

bakafox

2nd Nov 2011, 05:16 AM

Photoshop needs plugin, as does GIMP- and I always had the dickens of a time getting them to work.

For people who don't have PS and have issues with GIMP, Paint.NET is what I've used recently, and it DOES auto-support .dds files.

The downside of Paint.NET is it is a bit more limited that Photoshop or GIMP in some other tool areas... but for very basic stuff and alterations it works like a charm.

simsample

2nd Nov 2011, 01:16 PM

Wow, you have all been making some real progress! Well done to all of you for your efforts, I'm learning a lot from you all! :)

Firstly, I love all of the moon overrides, so I've created a special thread for them in Resources. Please post them all there, so that players will be able to find them easily:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?p=3686924&posted=1#post3686924
Also, that way we can keep this thread to be just about tweaking the sky parameters, as the moon override thing really deserves its own place. :) Well done to Jay290783 and Margaret Pendragon for making those!

Margaret Pendragon, thanks for the colour ramp! Lovely colours. For your question about the weather types- yes, you need one DDS for each weather type, although France, Egypt and China only have two. If you do five though you can have five different weathers- but they can all use the same colour ramp. So you could have the same colours, just different fog/ clouds. Bridgeport is a good example of this, the colour ramps are all very similar, so that you have very little change in sky colouration (and the water stays the same colour throughout). What I did when making five identical colour ramps was just to make five copies of the same file, and rename it five times! So you would rename it to:
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_ECCBBCB773C02131%%+_IMG.dds
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_7529C26EE8E2A9E6%%+_IMG.dds
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_28C841C9462BCDE0%%+_IMG.dds
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_E422CDDE7FE1F25F%%+_IMG.dds
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_F0A86F660985BF20%%+_IMG.dds
As mentioned in post #2. :)

Jasumi, thanks for that- but those hashes you have given are for the basegame INI files, and only the skies for clear, partly cloudy and overcast. I would urge anyone who wishes to override those INI files in a custom world to use instead the foloowing INIs:
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_560C0FD7012DA7F3%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_967BC6C3B3808C00%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_FE1F6A95A24A604A%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_2C02B3532B64EB49%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_8DEA7AE7631A026A%%+_INI.ini
Which as you can see, are the ini files for each specific weather type which each correspond to a colour ramp (attached to post #3). Those files contain the star intensity for each weather type, as well as manmade light intensity, probability weight (probability of that weather type appearing), day time bloom (how much the world 'glows' in the sun), cloud direction and speed, and fog parameters. I've added a note in post #2 to make it clear!

If you're making default overrides that show in every world then it's great to modify the basegame ini files, but for the purposes of modding a single world, I would recommend to use the INI files I uploaded to post #3, as this is the way that EA choose to override the default weather for a specific world. :)

For the question about DDS files, I've already included that information as well as links to the plugins in Post#3. Shows how many people read what I write! :rofl:

From post #3:
:here: Try: Editing the colour ramp files to change the sea and sky colour. You need NVidia DDS Utilities to do this, as the files are in DDS format:
http://developer.nvidia.com/content/dds-utilities-83111271645
Photoshop DDS Plugin here:
http://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-texture-tools-adobe-photoshop
GIMP DDS plugin here:
http://code.google.com/p/gimp-dds/
You should save your edited file as a 32 bit A8R8G8B8 file, no mip-maps. If the world crashes, check your alpha/ mipmap settings, as if you get this wrong the game will not read the files!

That last bit about the Mip maps is important! ;) I hope this helps!

Splatedpumpkin

2nd Nov 2011, 01:51 PM

I've been messing around with the settings, I wanted to have the France weather, but the colour of the water is too turquoise for my liking. When I change the colour ramp in any way when it's loaded up with the world everything becomes intense blue, green & red like this:
http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/4703/borkedcolours.png

Any ideas why?
Here is the colour ramp, I've only made the water colour less green and more blue.
http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/3387/colourthing.png

I used the photoshop plugin to edit them. Before I edited the colour ramp everything looked great.

In another instance I tried to make it so that there was France-like weather colouring in all 5 instances instead of just the first two and that also made everything go red, green & blue.

simsample

2nd Nov 2011, 02:35 PM

Splatedpumpkin, could you attach the colour ramp? It could be that you have the filetype wrong, as previous tests have shown strange graphical errors and game crashing when the incorrect parameters are used. As mentioned before, it needs to be a 32 bit A8R8G8B8 file, with no mip-maps.

Splatedpumpkin

2nd Nov 2011, 05:49 PM

Aha! That was it, everything works great now! I'll def. be trying out more things, it's pretty easy now I've worked it out. I'm definitely gonna continue fiddling, this is great o3o

simsample

2nd Nov 2011, 06:03 PM

Well done for getting it sorted out, we want more pictures of your modifications in action! :)

Splatedpumpkin

3rd Nov 2011, 12:58 AM

If by modifications you mean constantly breaking everything, then here you go!
When I fiddle with ini files (i'm modifying your edited base game files), sometimes this happens:
http://img827.imageshack.us/img827/6387/92852079.png
Any idea what that could be? If I just install yours without fiddling it doesn't occur.

Modifying water is very easy now though following the instructions. I just edit the colour ramp a bit, add it via simPE and evoila! Going to have a go at seeing how much variety there is with water depth, since in my game I couldn't see much difference between 8-10. I want to make a big lake world and having clearer water would work really well. Will try to get good images of each number and transparency so people can decide which one to use easily.

simsample

3rd Nov 2011, 03:12 AM

Hmm, what figures did you play around with when that happened? Fog, maybe- or bloom?

For the water clarity, I think the figure just governs how deep you have to go before the water murk colour takes over- the wording is like this in the remarks in Sea.ini (and S3_1F886EAD_00000000_D89F9D186B7BB372%%+_INI.ini in some of the EA Worlds):
Defines the water depth at which murkiness completely takes over. 0 is always clear(refractively) and any depth above this
; value will be dominated by the Sea Water Color defined by the weather timeline (unless it's being reflective due to fresnel).
; Lower numbers mean murkier water.
I think the last line is a typo, as in my experience lower numbers= clearer water, or at least the water will not get murky until you go deeper. So, if you have a figure 2 in here, shallow lakes will look clear, whereas a figure 10 will make shallow lakes have some murk. Perhaps you could test that for me and see if you get the same results? The default for this is 10, but Bridgeport has 1.0. I think whoever programmed that was reading the 'Lower numbers mean murkier water' bit, as I'm sure Bridgeport was supposed to have really murky water.

Edited to add:

I've added a bit in Post #2 about the correlation between weather types and colour ramps. So that it will be easier to tell which ramp to recolour to go with a particular weather formation!

S3_1F886EAD_00000000_2C02B3532B64EB49%%+_INI.ini goes with S3_00B2D882_0076A684_E422CDDE7FE1F25F%%+_IMG.dds
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_8DEA7AE7631A026A%%+_INI.ini goes with S3_00B2D882_0076A684_F0A86F660985BF20%%+_IMG.dds
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_560C0FD7012DA7F3%%+_INI.ini goes with S3_00B2D882_0076A684_ECCBBCB773C02131%%+_IMG.dds
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_967BC6C3B3808C00%%+_INI.ini goes with S3_00B2D882_0076A684_7529C26EE8E2A9E6%%+_IMG.dds
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_FE1F6A95A24A604A%%+_INI.ini goes with S3_00B2D882_0076A684_28C841C9462BCDE0%%+_IMG.dds

I'm not sure which of the EA weather types each of those corresponds to, I'll have to devise some tests to figure that out. Anyone have any ideas?

Margaret Pendragon

5th Nov 2011, 02:50 AM

I'm not sure which of the EA weather types each of those corresponds to, I'll have to devise some tests to figure that out. Anyone have any ideas?
DOH! I was coming here to ask that very question. I've spent the last couple of days remaking my island in CAW, and was getting ready to attack the color ramps again. I'll play around with it and see what I can find out.

Perhaps colorizing each ramp a different color might help?

simsample

5th Nov 2011, 12:51 PM

Perhaps colorizing each ramp a different color might help?
That could work, using just colour ramps and no weather overrides. That's the way I worked out the correlation between the weather inis and colour ramps. It's just time consuming! I'll try it out as soon as I get time, thanks!

Especially since, I've been plagued by a bug for the last few game versions that I'm sure I wasn't seeing before. Namely, when I put some new weather ini files into a custom world, they work at first but then when I reload the game and reload the save, the sky is just blank with no clouds. I can see the colour ramps okay, and the other parameters like weather randomization interval work too, but just not the clouds/ fog settings. I get the basegame 'clear' sky.

The only way to make it work again is to save, exit to main manu and reload. Then, when I reboot the game, it happens again. Is anyone else noticing this? It makes testing out a new cloud/ fog type very frustrating!

bakafox

6th Nov 2011, 02:36 AM

Ok I am having a couple of problems:

I can't seem to add heat shimmer to any non-egypt stock INI's that I'd like to edit... I loaded Appaloosa and if I pasted in heat shimmer, I had a crash on attempt to load in game.

The other problem I'm having is that whenever I edit the color ramps, whether the 2 for egypt or the four that's AP's to test out, I'm getting very bizarre color/lighting issues. All I'm doing is tweaking hue one way or the other, and maybe one try I tweaked saturation, and I did not alter ANYthing else in the INI files, I just changed up the ramps with a hue tweak- the result was that I had what seemed like a full day's cycle of light to dark every few hours, and when I'd just nudged the egypt ramps' hue, for this example, a TINY bit towards a more greenish orange/yellow (with absolutely no changes to saturation, contrast, or anything else), I wound up with a world that a raver would wince at:

http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/31570_111105221907Screenshot-60.jpg is the base-egypt look for this world around 7 or 8am. The colors progress as a normal day's would.

With the slight hue tweak, at 7am:
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/31566_111105212305Screenshot-63.jpg

At noon: http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/31567_111105212459Screenshot-64.jpg

Around 6 or 7 pm:
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/31568_111105212644Screenshot-65.jpg

Now, I just re-opened the .dds in Photoshop, and am wondering if the problem is that I didn't save these ramps properly, because it has extra bits to it that the ones I altered did not. (am including them as .zip)

http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/31571_111105223036the%20dds%20save.jpg

simsample

6th Nov 2011, 11:02 AM

Bakafox- see post #43 and post # 3:

For the question about DDS files, I've already included that information as well as links to the plugins in Post#3. Shows how many people read what I write! :rofl:

From post #3:
:here: Try: Editing the colour ramp files to change the sea and sky colour.

You should save your edited file as a 32 bit A8R8G8B8 file, no mip-maps. If the world crashes, check your alpha/ mipmap settings, as if you get this wrong the game will not read the files!

That last bit about the Mip maps is important! ;) I hope this helps!

:P How ironic that no-one read my post about me complaining how no-one reads my posts! :rofl:

bakafox

6th Nov 2011, 03:09 PM

Bakafox- see post #43 and post # 3:

:P How ironic that no-one read my post about me complaining how no-one reads my posts! :rofl:

Whoops. Wow I totally did just somehow miss that. *feels extra baka* :faceslap:

simsample

6th Nov 2011, 03:11 PM

:lol: It made me laugh! You know I'm only kidding, I don't really mind, I do tend to write a lot at once, so probably people fall asleep by the end of the post. :)

Let me know if it works though, perhaps that was why you were getting the very vivid colours. If you have the alpha setting right then the colours shoud look toned down somewhat. :)

bakafox

6th Nov 2011, 03:46 PM

You should save your edited file as a 32 bit A8R8G8B8 file

I'm not seeing that exact wording as an option with the PhotoShop plugin-

I'm guessing that the # and then bpp means the bit number/rate, there's nothing that says A8R8G8B8.. the closest I can find is:

8.8.8.8 ARGB 32 bpp | unsigned

Looks like that's the right one so far, am posting it here in case anyone else as noob as me sees the menu choices and goes "WAIT WUT?!"

Loaded them in, and these ones worked like a charm.

simsample

6th Nov 2011, 03:47 PM

Yes, that's the one! :)

Make sure to untick the 'make mipmap' bit.

ETA: Thanks for the reminder, Baka- I've made the text bolder to make it clearer in the first posts, plus I've put some images to show the Photoshop DDS settings in post #3. :)

andrej_8

6th Nov 2011, 06:03 PM

How many INI files can I have in my world? Is the number of INI files limited? Can high number of INI files cause lag?

My color ramps don't worked, so I need to determine the color of sky or clouds in the Ini files from base game. This folder contains 31 ini files. I think, this number is high....

Pleas answer.

Simsample, thank you for this great tutorial!!

simsample

6th Nov 2011, 06:15 PM

andrej_8, if you read the bit in post #2 which begins 'INI files in EA worlds' you'll see that to override the basehame sea/sky/weather ini files you need up to nine ini files and up to five colour ramps:

S3_00B2D882_0076A684_7529C26EE8E2A9E6%%+_IMG.dds
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_28C841C9462BCDE0%%+_IMG.dds
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_E422CDDE7FE1F25F%%+_IMG.dds
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_ECCBBCB773C02131%%+_IMG.dds
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_F0A86F660985BF20%%+_IMG.dds
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_560C0FD7012DA7F3%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_967BC6C3B3808C00%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_FE1F6A95A24A604A%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_2C02B3532B64EB49%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_8DEA7AE7631A026A%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_3EC0CF0CC4A6540F%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_5E4F8E7B226066CA%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_5E20253AF53E517F%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_D89F9D186B7BB372%%+_INI.ini

There is also an ini file that some of the EA worlds have which contains the path for the camera flythrough.

These are the only files you need to override the weather/sea/sky in your custom world; the basegame ini files contain a lot of colour information in RGB figures, but that has been combined into the colour ramps for the EP worlds. The ini files in the basegame have several files dealing with each weather type; there is only one file for each weather type in the EP worlds, as the information is combined to one ini and one colour ramp per weather type, plus four (or five if you include the flythrough file) global files.

If you look in post #3 you'll see some links to download the files from the EA worlds, or you can extract your own from your game files if you like, or download my basegame edited files to play with.

There is no limit to ini files, and indeed there are other parameters such as video camera settings contained in the basegame files in ini form; however if you wish custom weather in your world, the above nine ini files and five DDS files will override all weather types.

bakafox

6th Nov 2011, 06:35 PM

Hrm. Has anyone sorted whether one can add time settings to say, the heat shimmers? I've never dabbled in code/program so don't know if the basic setup for EA's would let one patch in the time stuff from say, fog settings, to the heat shimmer somehow. If I were to try this, would I need to bracket [Heatshimmer]? or do those who've done more editing and tweaking have any other thoughts/advice?

simsample

6th Nov 2011, 10:27 PM

bakafox, if you look at the Egypt files, you'll see that it is added to S3_1F886EAD_00000000_5E20253AF53E517F%%+_INI.ini. Open Egypt in S3Pe or download the Egypt files from post #3 and you'll see it. It looks like this:

[MiscSkyParams]

;;Sets the Heat Shimmer Params
HeatShimmerDistance = 600

;; Radii of the sun, sun glow, and moon in metric arbitrary units
SunRadius = 10
SunHaloRadius = 2000
MoonRadius = 250

As far as I can see there is no fine tuning or time aspect to that; it's either there or not. You can adjust the amount, though.

Jay290783

6th Nov 2011, 10:31 PM

simsample

6th Nov 2011, 10:34 PM

Yes; I've tried it out in my own worlds. And there's at least one custom world can think of that uses this.

It would be good if we could make the heat shimmer vary during the day, though.

bakafox

6th Nov 2011, 10:59 PM

Aye, I was thinking about the varying it, already had messed with just putting that in and playing with Egypt's INI

Out of pure curiosity I did try patching in some 'time of day' code. First I just pasted in the fog time of day stuff and replaced the fog1 etc with HeatShimmerDistance1 and so forth- did not, surprisingly, crash anything, but also did nothing =)

I tried it again, dropping numbers and brackets and just varying the = # and adding a time of day = X under it, but while again having multiple HeatShimmerDistance did not (surprisingly) crash, it didn't work =)

Guess varied heat shimmers through day was too logical an idea for EA? ^_^

Jay290783

7th Nov 2011, 12:50 AM

Margaret Pendragon

12th Nov 2011, 03:18 AM

http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb337/mistyfiedmafiawars/Untitled.png Should I be unchecking 'load mipmaps'? This is in Gimp, when loading a DDS.

Margaret Pendragon

12th Nov 2011, 04:33 AM

And, another question!http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb337/mistyfiedmafiawars/Screenshot-7-1.jpg There is a glow, for lack of a better word, around many objects in my game. I thought reducing daytime bloom would help, but nada. Any suggestions?

kiwi_tea

12th Nov 2011, 09:30 AM

Margaret Pendragon

13th Nov 2011, 01:41 AM

Have you reloaded the ini files after you saved the world? CAW removes ini files when saving. I haven't had time to really test the weather files the way you guys have, but sometimes when I forget to reimport the ini files after I save in CAW I get a standard-looking weather with huge glowy bloom look to my world, much the same as that pic.
I should've mentioned, this isn't in CAW, but an already-installed world. I used the Appaloosa Plains INIs, maybe I'll try importing them from elsewhere :-/

EDIT: hmm, that seemed to do the trick. I guess it's something in Appaloosa's INIs. http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb337/mistyfiedmafiawars/Picnikcollage-1.jpgOn the left is with the unedited Appaloosa files, quite bright and glowy, on the right is with the basegame INIs.

kiwi_tea

13th Nov 2011, 02:40 PM

It seems to happen when you do have colour ramps in a world, but no ini files alongside them.

Jay290783

13th Nov 2011, 03:02 PM

I should've mentioned, this isn't in CAW, but an already-installed world. I used the Appaloosa Plains INIs, maybe I'll try importing them from elsewhere :-/

EDIT: hmm, that seemed to do the trick. I guess it's something in Appaloosa's INIs.
Have you had a look at the AP ini files compared to base game ini files?
Any noticeable differences that could be the likely cause of the glows?

Margaret Pendragon

13th Nov 2011, 04:19 PM

It seems to happen when you do have colour ramps in a world, but no ini files alongside them.Odd. Both were definitely present.

No, I haven't compared INIs just yet--at that point, I was just happy to get back to playing!

Right now my beef is the sunrise. Changing the sunrise time in the INI files isn't affecting what time the stupid sun comes up, it still comes up at 6am.

EDIT, the first difference that I notice is Appaloosa has higher "end" figures for fog, as compared to simsample's basegame edited INIs. Fog isn't something I know much about beyond that, unfortunately. I would prefer not to have it at all except in overcast/stormy weather types.

EDIT, :faceslap: after spending over 24 hours wondering why I couldn't alter sunrise time, I finally remembered I had a moon override in my package folder :faceslap:

simsample

13th Nov 2011, 11:22 PM

Appaloosa does have different lighting parameters (bloom ramp and saturations) to the basegame, not sure if that's it. The fog shouldn't make any difference to the bloom though.

kiwi_tea makes a good point about the ini files being eaten though, I've added a note to post #3 about that to remind people. Thanks for that, Kiwi_tea!

skmt999

14th Nov 2011, 02:16 AM

This thread is exciting! I'm going to keep a close eye on it even if I don't have the time to experiment right now (people quitting left and right at my new job, so I've got more hours than I know what to do with and no brain left when I get home).

I wish there was some way to keep CAW from overriding the ini files.
http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb337/mistyfiedmafiawars/Untitled.png Should I be unchecking 'load mipmaps'? This is in Gimp, when loading a DDS.When creating texture packs, you're supposed to uncheck that button, as Gimp creates new mipmaps based on your save. Otherwise you end up with two or more sets of mipmaps, which cause file size bloat and confusion. I can only assume the same would still hold true for creating anything else in DDS format.

I was wanting to do something similar in relation to the moon.
Was thinking of trying to create two moons at different points in the sky and of different sizes.

Doubt that would work though so didn't attempt it.

Would be great for alien worlds.You know, I have this vague memory of seeing a thread elsewhere about this. I'll have to see if I can dig that up before I forget.

simsample

14th Nov 2011, 01:40 PM

Thanks skmt999- I completely missed Margaret Pendragon's post about the Mip-maps.

You are right, you need to untick 'load mipmaps'. The EA colour ramps do not have mip maps, so if you tick that GIMP will just generate them- which you do not want.

Having the DDS file in the wrong format could cause strange graphical effects, and possibly the glow you see, as well as game crashing.

To clarify, they need to be 32 bit A8R8G8B8 file, no mip-maps.

I put more details in post #3 about that. :)

atra-virago

19th Nov 2011, 11:08 PM

Hi, I've been a lurker for more than 3 years but finally have something to contribute now.

I'm working on a custom world in CAW and wanted to achieve a crisp and golden lighting which is typical to late summer/early autumn here in Scandinavia. So after fiddling about with both the colour ramps and .ini files I think I have figured out, which ones correlate to each of the EA weather types.

In CAW there are five slider settings in the Time of day panel (at least that's what I think it's called in the English version) and I've assumed that they run in the following order:

1. Clear
2. Partly cloudy
3. Overcast
4. Stormy
5. Custom

This assumption is based on observing how the cloud cover and atmosphere looks under each setting - I could be wrong but it also seems like a fairly logical order to me :)

After changing the hue for each colour ramp quite drastically this is the result I came up with:

Clear
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_967BC6C3B3808C00%%+_INI.ini
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_7529C26EE8E2A9E6%%+_IMG.dds

Partly clouded
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_560C0FD7012DA7F3%%+_INI.ini
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_ECCBBCB773C02131%%+_IMG.dds

Overcast
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_8DEA7AE7631A026A%%+_INI.ini
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_F0A86F660985BF20%%+_IMG.dds

Stormy
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_2C02B3532B64EB49%%+_INI.ini
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_E422CDDE7FE1F25F%%+_IMG.dds

Custom
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_FE1F6A95A24A604A%%+_INI.ini
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_28C841C9462BCDE0%%+_IMG.dds

Hope this helps.

simsample - concerning your problems viewing your changes in game, I'm experiencing the same issue when testing in CAW. More often than not all five different weather settings only show the clear weather but I find that reimporting the altered files and reloading CAW corrects the issue. Still, as you say, it makes testing quite tiresome.

simsample

20th Nov 2011, 12:15 AM

Thanks for that, atra-virago- you've saved me some time there! That's good to have a link to each weather type with the file overrides. :) I must admit I never thought of trying the CAW weather slider, I'll take a look in my game and see if I can make the same correlations. If so, I'll add the information into the first posts. :gjob:

For testing in CAW, you are aware that CAW eats INI files? Meaning, if you import your inis to CAW and then save, the ini files will be discarded. The DDS files remain, as do certain other added resources (such as texture overrides and water planes) but inis definitely go. So, each time you save in CAW you will have to re-import the inis. This isn't the same as I'm experiencing in game; there I am just finding that, if I play a custom world I've made, I have to save, then exit to main menu and reload the save to get the weather to show up. Otherwise, the game does not read the ini files (although the colour ramps are working). It does not matter whether I am playing a previous save or beginning a new game, the result is the same. So I just have to save/ reload each game session, not reimport the ini files.

atra-virago

20th Nov 2011, 01:58 AM

Yes, I found out by reading this thread that CAW has an ini appetite but I find it so much quicker to test the results in CAW than in the game itself. Loading up the game is quite a time consuming task on my computer whereas importing the altered files and opening the world in CAW takes less than a minute. Also, I like being able to jump instantaneously to specific hours of the day to see whether the changes I've just applied look good or not. It's a hit-and-run procedure for me :)

I haven't saved yet in CAW as I'm testing the weather changes on a world file specifically set aside for this purpose but I suppose that only changes made in the colour ramps will carry over in an exported world... or do you know of a workaround to include say altered sunrise/set hours?

It's been a while since I actually played the game so I'm not aware of the same issues you are experiencing but apart from the saving problem I can highly recommend using CAW for testing.

simsample

20th Nov 2011, 09:49 AM

atra-virago, I can confirm your findings! It was easy to check the correlation between the cloudiness slider and the custom INIs, but more difficult to prove the link between the basegame weather types. But after editing the basegame ini files, I can say that the sliders do indeed represent the weather types you assumed. Great work! :up: I've added that to my findings in the second post.

Loading up the game is quite a time consuming task on my computer whereas importing the altered files and opening the world in CAW takes less than a minute. Also, I like being able to jump instantaneously to specific hours of the day to see whether the changes I've just applied look good or not. It's a hit-and-run procedure for me :)
It's a brilliant idea, I really never thought to make the correlation between the cloudiness slider and the weather types. I wish they had labelled the slider better! :lol:
Thanks for the idea, I've added it to the third post. :)

I haven't saved yet in CAW as I'm testing the weather changes on a world file specifically set aside for this purpose but I suppose that only changes made in the colour ramps will carry over in an exported world... or do you know of a workaround to include say altered sunrise/set hours?

Yes, just get your world ready, save it and then close the world in CAW. Import the INI files to the world file, then go back to CAW and select the world for export. The INI files will be included in the packed world; it's only saving that makes CAW discard the files. Exporting works fine. :)

atra-virago

22nd Nov 2011, 04:04 PM

It did indeed work - thanks for that very useful piece of information.

Whilst testing my new weather in game I did notice one thing, however, which is this dark line along the horizon:

http://i1201.photobucket.com/albums/bb346/atravirago/Sims/Water.png

Thinking that I'd done something wrong I tried loading a game with EA's default weather settings but that same line was there again which I find odd since I've never noticed it when playing before. The line is not present in either CAW or EIG.

Is it just me who hasn't been very observant and that line has always been there or have I borked something? The only thing I did different when starting the game was setting all the graphics sliders in game to maximum...

Anyways, to get somewhat back to topic I have spent the last couple of days playing around with both colour ramps and ini files. I started with the ramps, thinking that it would be really easy but found that it's in fact extremely difficult to get the times and colours right relying solely on those tiny colour charts. Especially sunrise and sunset ended up being almost impossible to control so instead I'm going to concentrate on the ini files.

Playing around with the two cloud files (in this case Sky_Custom1 and 2) I have the following to add:

Sky_[type]1.ini controls the lower layer of clouds and sky_[type]2.ini the upper layer.

The value set for VisibilityThreshold will determine how dense the layer of clouds is. The higher the value the thinner the layer of clouds - ie. set it to 255 and there will be no clouds at all whilst setting it to 0 will produce a heavily overcast sky.

Sharpness controls the clouds' opacity. The higher the value the 'whispier' the clouds.

Set it to 1 and there will be no visible clouds.

Set it to 0.5 and the cloud layer looks like this (with a VisibilityThreshold of 30)

http://i1201.photobucket.com/albums/bb346/atravirago/Sims/cloud_sharpness_05.png

The sharpness settings are quite sensitive and even changing the value the slightest bit has quite noticable effects:

VisibilityThreshold 30
Sharpness 0.999
http://i1201.photobucket.com/albums/bb346/atravirago/Sims/cloud_sharpness_0999.png

VisibilityThreshold 30
Sharpness 0.995
http://i1201.photobucket.com/albums/bb346/atravirago/Sims/cloud_sharpness_0995.png

Cloud layer 1: VisibilityThreshold 70, Sharpness 0.985
Cloud layer 2: VisibilityThreshold 30, Sharpness 0.999
http://i1201.photobucket.com/albums/bb346/atravirago/Sims/1_thres70_sharp0985_2_thres30_0999.png

simsample

22nd Nov 2011, 10:26 PM

Lovely pictures, atra-virago! They demonstrate the cloud values well! :) I notice that for the EA clear sky, they have the visibility threshold at 255, which gives totally clear. :)

To be clear, the information contained in Sky_[Type]1.ini and Sky_[Type]2.ini is overridden by the five weather files in the EA worlds:
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_560C0FD7012DA7F3%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_967BC6C3B3808C00%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_FE1F6A95A24A604A%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_2C02B3532B64EB49%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_8DEA7AE7631A026A%%+_INI.ini

So, I would advise to edit those and use them in conjunction with the colour ramps to import into your custom world, instead of editing the Sky_[Type]1.ini and Sky_[Type]2.ini files.

The information in there is just bundled into one:
[MiscParams]
StarIntensity = 0
ManmadeLightIntensity = 48
ProbabilityWeight = 0.1
DaytimeBloom = 0.25

[CloudLayer1Params]
VisibilityThreshold=0
Sharpness=0.995
[CloudLayer1ScrollRate]
texCoordU=0.03
texCoordV=-0.065

[CloudLayer2Params]
VisibilityThreshold=10
Sharpness=0.98
[CloudLayer2ScrollRate]
texCoordU=-0.009
texCoordV=0.008
Whereas in the basegame ini files, that information is split between Sky_[Type]1.ini, Sky_[Type]2.ini and Sky_[type]Sky.ini. Of course, in the basegame ini files there are a lot more figures too- all of the RGB values for sky colours- which we don't need to import to our custom world when using colour ramps. :)

I already had some information about the clouds in post #2 under weather types, but I hadn't added that layer one is the lower and layer 2 the upper clouds, so I'll add that with a link to your pictures. :gjob: Thanks for the information! Had you noticed that a negative value for the [TextureOffsetChangeRate] figures will give a reversed cloud direction? For example, from the stormy basegame files:
Cloud 1
[TextureOffsetChangeRate]
texCoordU=0.03
texCoordV=-0.065

Cloud 2
[TextureOffsetChangeRate]
texCoordU=-0.009
texCoordV=0.008

That gives the seething stormy sky effect, with the cloud layers going in different directions and at different speeds. :cool:

For your horizon problem, I think you must have something in the colour ramp wrong, or perhaps a conflict. If you are using Sky_[Type]1.ini and Sky_[Type]2.ini in conjunction with a colour ramp then you should be aware that they are both recolouring the same thing- the Sky_[Type]x.ini files have RGB values pertaining to the horizon, and so does the colour ramp. For that reason you should use the five ini files I mentioned above instead. Here's what the horizon looks like in my game:
http://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/5/2/8/4/8/MTS_simsample-1251039-Screenshot-26.jpg
You can see that there is a definite tint to the horizon, I'm guessing you have that coloured wrongly either by RGB or colour ramp values.

Margaret Pendragon

23rd Nov 2011, 01:33 AM

Is it just me who hasn't been very observant and that line has always been there or have I borked something?
No you're not the only one, but I haven't spent any time trying to isolate it yet. There is one of the sky shader lines in the color ramps that does seem to control a thin area along the horizon, but again I haven't explored it much beyond making that vague observation, so I can't say if that influences the 'line' we're noticing.

Thanks much for your cloud observations...I'm off to play with my clouds now! :up:

simsample

23rd Nov 2011, 02:12 AM

Line number 9 according to this list:
http://www.modthesims.info/showpost.php?p=3547337&postcount=32
BUT: some of the colour ramps seem to have a different number of 'stripes' to others, as they are often hard to make out if they are very subtle. So, you may have to experiment to find the right one.

atra-virago

23rd Nov 2011, 08:06 PM

As I mentioned in my last post I gave up on using the colour ramps as I find them too inaccurate. Although I'm a digital artist I somehow lose all sense of direction sitting there looking at those colour charts not knowing what half of the bars represent and unless there's a really good reason for not not using them I'd rather keep fiddling with the basegame ini files :)

Anyways, to make sure I sifted through my world file just in case I had a leftover ramp lying about in there somewhere which could be causing a conflict with the modified ini files and create that dark line on the horizon... but didn't find anything.

Loading up fresh games of both Sunset Valley and Bridgeport I notice that both of those have the same line albeit not as defined as the one in my world (although that could be due to the fog present in those two worlds):

Sunset Valley
http://i1201.photobucket.com/albums/bb346/atravirago/Sims/SunsetValley.png

Bridgeport
http://i1201.photobucket.com/albums/bb346/atravirago/Sims/Bridgeport.png

Going back to my world with the custom weather settings I then changed the colour of the water to a bright blue which resulted in this:
http://i1201.photobucket.com/albums/bb346/atravirago/Sims/Lightbluewatercolour.png

It seems that the line is the colour of the water before the reflection of the sky is added. Just to test my thesis I made the water the same colour as the sky which did make the line less harsh:
http://i1201.photobucket.com/albums/bb346/atravirago/Sims/Watercoloursameasskycolour.png

So does this mean that in order to have a light blue sky you must also have light blueish sea or am I overlooking something? If the former is the case that would rather limit the realism in my Scandinavian world as the choice seems to be a dark line on the horizon or a sky which is too dark or a sea colour that's too bright.

I did try and change the HorizonLight value to the same colour as the sky just to see if that would have an effect but no, the line happily persists.

I know I must be doing something wrong as your (simsample) horizon looks perfect. I just for the life of me can't figure out what it is *sigh*

theludwig

23rd Nov 2011, 10:50 PM

Is it possible to change your CAW world's sky and sea settings by simply using the ini files of another world? Say, Twinbrook? How can this be done?

simsample

24th Nov 2011, 01:39 AM

@theludwig- yes, please read the first three posts of this thread and all is explained.

As I mentioned in my last post I gave up on using the colour ramps as I find them too inaccurate.
Ah, I misunderstood- I thought you were just mentioning that you'd put them aside whilst you worked on the cloud parameters. :)

Although I'm a digital artist I somehow lose all sense of direction sitting there looking at those colour charts not knowing what half of the bars represent and unless there's a really good reason for not not using them I'd rather keep fiddling with the basegame ini files :)
That's fine, but I'm hoping we can figure out what each line of the ramps corresponds to eventually. I'll have some time to do some more experimenting next week hopefully!

The main reasons I can think of to use the colour ramps are:

EA use the new format INI files and colour ramps in their EP worlds, so perhaps there is some performance advantage;
Because EA use the new format INI files and colour ramps in their world files, we can be reasonably sure that this method won't cause any conflicts should they ever implement weather in a later EP.

So that's why I'm keen to get them working, rather than using edits of the basegame ini files. :)

I know I must be doing something wrong as your (simsample) horizon looks perfect. I just for the life of me can't figure out what it is *sigh*
This has to be something to do with graphics settings; I'm not really seeing the line in Sunset like you are:
http://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/5/2/8/4/8/MTS_simsample-1251290-Screenshot-90.jpg
Are all of your graphics settings on high? I don't recall having a horizon line with my old computer, either.

Jay290783

25th Nov 2011, 12:13 PM

...I know I must be doing something wrong as your (simsample) horizon looks perfect. I just for the life of me can't figure out what it is *sigh*
I am already pretty sure that this is a wasteful post but I was wondering if maybe you have a global override somewhere?
Maybe you downloaded a package containing either a weather ini file or a colour ramp and it's ended up in your sims 3 mods folder?
The only reason I am thinking this is because you mentioned your EA worlds are affected as well.
Either that, or more likely, as simsample mentioned, it might be to do with your graphics settings in game. Maybe try altering them and see if that makes any noticeable difference? And maybe just humour me and check your mods folder just in case?

Sorry if this post was wasteful and you have already tried those things.

atra-virago

4th Dec 2011, 11:41 AM

I've fiddled around and looked everywhere but cannot figure out what may be causing the problem so I'm beginning to think it might have to do with my graphics card. I don't have any global overrides installed and the line disappears if I lower the quality setting for reflections and water in game, so perhaps it's simply my computer not being able to handle the high graphic settings. It would make sense as I normally run the game with medium graphic settings and haven't noticed any horizon lines before. Maybe it's a hint that my intentions of acquiring a new computer ought to be realised soon.

@simsample: ah yes, now it does make sense to concentrate on the ramps :) I'm in the process of finishing my world right now but when I get some spare time I shall see what else I can find out about them.

@Jay290783: Thanks for your reply, it was definately not wasteful but alas no mods were installed so I'm inclined to think it's just my computer which isn't suited to handling the high graphic settings under which the screenshots were taken.

simsample

9th Dec 2011, 04:33 AM

The strip on the horizon is not really that noticeable, though- it doesn't really detract from the sea and sky colours. :)

For the ramps, it's possible that they are less processor intensive. For certain values, such as the fog, some values are calculated by formula:

;; Fog equation is basically:
;; f = saturate(((end - distance) / (end - start))
;; f = pow(f, curve)
;; color = lerp(color, fogColor, f);

It could be that having the colour ramps already in a gradient gives direct RGB colours in Hex instead of having to interpolate the gradient, so pehaps lessening the calculation. Only an assumption, but I would have thought there has to be some reason why EA did it that way right from the start (Vacation worlds) and not by direct file override. I've never tested whether the RGB overrides persist in the next world loaded, but the colour ramps certainly don't, enabling you to play vacation worlds without the main world having the same sky when you return.

Jawusa

10th Dec 2011, 12:03 PM

Hi,
Why is the solution in post#51 only works in clear sky and not in partly cloudy, stormy or overcast sky ?

simsample

11th Dec 2011, 02:21 PM

Jawusa- the solution in Post #51 works for all of the sky types- it is just that when you start a new world, the most likely sky type to be shown will be 'clear', so it will use your custom sky ramps with the EA clear sky cloud parameters.

I think it is a problem with how the game initialises, as I've noticed that sometimes, if I load the game and leave it on the 'choose world' screen for a few minutes, it will show clouds correctly when I then enter my world. I thought perhaps it was an issue with my old computer running out of memory, but my new computer with more RAM still does this so I think it must be a game bug.

Perhaps you could try viewing your weather in CAW, if you are designing weather for your custom world. See post #3 for details. :)

Jawusa

11th Dec 2011, 08:49 PM

It don't works in my game, it only works for clear sky and not for partly cloudy, overcast or stormy sky. I see the fog and the grey sea but there are no clouds on the sky, i reload the save file and the fog dissapearing and the sea colour is default. The active weather is clear and not overcast...

simsample

12th Dec 2011, 11:00 AM

Are you talking about in-game or in CAW here?

If your weather isn't showing correctly after you re-load, then I can think of several possibilities.
1) You don't have your cloud parameters set up to display clouds correctly.
2) Your colour ramps aren't showing a definition between sky and cloud colour
3) You have modded one of the less likely weather types, and the game shows the 'Clear' (S3_1F886EAD_00000000_967BC6C3B3808C00%%+_INI.ini) parameters initially. You have to play the game to make it display all weathers, and that depends upon what settings you have for probability and weather randomize interval.
4) If it's in CAW, if you save then remember that the INI files will be deleted. So you need to re-import them.

If I've misunderstood, perhaps you could post some more detail, attach your INI files and colour ramps and show me some pictures, so that I can understand exactly what you have tried.

Jawusa

13th Dec 2011, 08:40 PM

The overcast sky has no clouds, you can see it. :)
The clear sky works when i reload the save game.
But when i reload the save game in a overcast day, disappears the fog and the brown lighting, it jumps to clear sky.

buildersim21

20th Dec 2011, 05:39 PM

Does anyone know if there's an easy way to get rid of the grey haze that blocks my view of all my lots and terrains when I go into the Edit-in-Game feature of CaW?

Every new world I create and send into the game has this layer of grey that I don't know how to get rid of. I don't know if this is some fault of the developers of CaW or if I'm screwing something up without realizing it.
Apparently there must be a fog layer naturally in the world while creating it, and I can disable viewing it while in CaW. I just can't get it to go away while modifying the lots in-game.
I have to zoom it to see only a few lots at a time to actually see the sizes of the lots, making it impossible to do any proper planning of which building goes into which lot or quick filling of lots - I tend to put lots of lots in my worlds, community and residential (regular and townie - can't create townie lots in the game).

GoofyGirl17

24th Dec 2011, 12:13 AM

Okayyyyyyy I'm really confused :wtf: ....I'm not anywhere on you guys' level :rofl: Im a beginner and I really want to learn how to do all of this stuff and I've actually learned quite a lot so far by experimenting with these color ramps and stuff :blink: However, one thing I really needed help on was knowing specifically what each bar in the last section of the color ramp does because that seems to be throwing me off . Also, in CAW, for some odd reason, my stars don't show up at night and I made my sky a dark purple so that it could but it doesn't :wtf:

:!: One last thing: I'm using GIMP to edit the color ramps and I need to know how to smoothly blend the colors together because everyone else's color ramps look like that....Or to put it simply, what is the best way to edit these color ramps in GIMP? Please help!!! :cry: :help:

simsample

24th Dec 2011, 01:43 AM

buildersim21, I just answered this question here:
http://www.modthesims.info/m/showthread.php?p=3734888#post3734888
That problem is due to the world having colour ramps but no sea/sky INI files.

GoofyGirl17, the best way to discover this is to make your colour ramp bars a very vivid colour, and then test in CAW or in-game to see what has changed. Then I could add your findings to the thread to help others. ;) For the stars bit, what do you have your star intensity set to? If you have very thick for the stars may be obscured.

For GIMP, the best way to edit the colour ramps is the same as for any other program- select the bar you want to change and change the hue, saturation, contrast, etc, of that area. You could also try recolouring it completely with a gradient fill to get different colours at different times of day.

GoofyGirl17

26th Dec 2011, 11:01 PM

Thank you so much for that information simsample. However, my results have come out even weirder now that I have attempted to actually recolor the ramp adn do everything else completely :blink:
Yes, I have re-imported the INI files as you said but things look really weird and not how I want them to look :rofl:
Here is a description of what I want my world to look like: A springy bluish-green ocean (R=11,G=244,B=142) with the same color sky, and pink clouds (R=246,G=10,B=104). :p
Pretty simple you would think, right? Well, below are the images taken in game and you will see some of the weird results I've been getting :faceslap:
So how do you think I should go about in correcting this? :help:
In the first image, my night sky is supposed to be that way but there are barely any stars in the sky :(
In the second image, the color underneath is exactly the color I want for my ENTIRE ocean....Is this where it has been hiding?
In the third image, the color underneath is what I am seeing for the entire ocean in CAW.....Weird, huh?

vgbookworm

29th Dec 2011, 09:31 PM

Kay so just quickly clarify, what exactly needs to be done to add our colors to a world. Go into the .world file and import the new files?

simsample

31st Dec 2011, 07:28 PM

GoofyGirl17, having the colours appear unusually saturated is sometimes a symptom of an incorrect file format on the ramp files. Try saving them again, using the 32 bit A8R8G8B8 DDS format. See post #3 for more details.

vgbookworm- Yes, import the resources to your World file (either the CAW world file or the installed World file). If you import to the CAW world file be aware that saving will cause some resources to be lost, so be sure to import after saving and before exporting.

GoofyGirl17

1st Jan 2012, 05:49 AM

Thank you, Simsample. What does that file look like in GIMP?? Because I can't find that 32 bit A8R8G8B8 DDS format file anywhere!! :(

simsample

1st Jan 2012, 12:55 PM

You have the DDS plugins? See post #3 for links to download the plugins for GIMP. There are screenshots showing you what to look for too.

GoofyGirl17

1st Jan 2012, 10:51 PM

Yes I have the DDS plugin or else I wouldn't be able to bring up any of the ramps at all. But when I save it, I don't see that file anywhere. Even in the file extension section, so I just leave it as is ( a DDS file). I have GIMP 2.6.11
Could you tell me step-by-step where I should go to find this file? lmao :lol:
It would be greatly appreciated and I will report back if I find any improvement :lovestruc

GoofyGirl17

2nd Jan 2012, 02:45 AM

In GIMP, I am able to save the files just as they are

simsample

2nd Jan 2012, 05:30 PM

GoofyGirl17, I put some screenshots up in post #3 to help you; please try it out and let me know if the ramps work (I haven't tested any GIMP generated ramps out in-game yet). Note that you will have to re-make your ramps, as once you have saved then at the wrong compression the colours will remain oversaturated- so begin with one of the EA ramps, recolour it and then save.

GoofyGirl17

3rd Jan 2012, 10:28 PM

I'm so sorry if I am becoming a nuisance to this thread lol (Honestly, sorry if I am) but CAW failed to load my world after I followed your instructions using the screenshots you posted for GIMP....I would give up and use Photoshop but every time I download it, it says it may be harmful to my computer so I just cancel the installation and continue trying to work with GIMP.
Question: Am I supposed to be editing the custom color ramps that we downloaded or one of the color ramps from the EA worlds?
Well, I edited both and as soon as I changed the format to ABGR8, I was unable to load my world. I get a message about it being unable to load the file and "Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt."
I did exactly what you told me to (Tell me if I messed up somewhere):
1.) I edited one of the ramps in GIMP, which was just a regular custom ramp from the folder that I downloaded which you provided for us.
2.) I went to "Save As" and kept everything the same except for the format (ABGR8) and pressed save
3.) I went to S3PE, opened my world, imported the color ramp and re-imported the INI files from the "Base Game Edited Files" folder and pressed save
4.) I went into CAW, and then that's when I got that error message :faceslap:
I also made sure I ticked the right things in S3PE like "Replace Duplicates", "Compress", and "Use Resource Name".
I also made sure that the "Load Mipmaps" option was un-ticked as well
What am I doing wrong? :(

GoofyGirl17

8th Jan 2012, 09:41 AM

I'm not sure if that screenshot about how that file looks in GIMP is correct becuse as soon as I changed my edited color ramp to that file (Format:ABGR8), I was no longer able to open my world. Now even when I change the format back to normal, my world still won't open.
I haven't been able able to open my world in days......
Who else is using GIMP? And could they please explain how it worked for them???
Please help. I'm following exactly what this thread says .....do you think this could because I just recently bought Pets?

simsample

8th Jan 2012, 11:31 AM

Hey GoofyGirl17, don't panic!

As most people can't get on to this site every day, sometimes you have to be patient and wait for a reply. Also, if you read post # 3 you will see that I have written in large letters 'BACKUP ANY FILES YOU CHANGE BEFORE YOU CHANGE THEM!'. This is so that if you get into a situation where you break something, you can always retrieve a safe copy. It is important that you read all information, as this thread is a learning thread- that means that we are still experimenting and gathering data, so you have to be prepared to experiment yourself and click different things if the first thing you try does not work. :)

I have changed the images in the third post- try out the settings I have there. Test with rgba8 instead of abgr8- both are unsigned and uncompressed, but the channel data is just in a different order. That should hopefully work! I seldom use GIMP, so I am learning too with that- I just had to search on the Internet to find a different solution for you, so next time you get a problem try doing that yourself, and then you can let us know what worked for you! ;)

Don't forget to backup; also, if you want to remove the weather you can just open your file in S3Pe and delete the resources that you previously imported. :)

GoofyGirl17

9th Jan 2012, 02:55 AM

Ohhhhhhh okay, sweet!! Lol Thank you so much, simsample. :rofl: Sooooo sorry I panicked there and next time I definitely will go to the internet and search harder because I started searching and totally lost hope after a while so came back on here and I thought the thread died for a minute!! :lol: I thought that was the end for me learning how to do these things :giggler: (Sometimes it's embarrassing being a begginner like me lol) Well, I'm off to test this out and I'll let everyone know what does and what doesn't work ;) I'm totally going to be apart of more of these learning threads to learn more things.
EDIT: And yes, I saved a copy of my original world but I was so worried why I couldn't get into my other copy lol (I have no idea why hehehehe :rolleyes:) Once again, thanks for the reassurance and explanation, simsample!! :)

simsample

11th Jan 2012, 10:21 PM

Ah, we are all beginners at something, I've only learnt about CAW by reading what others have found out, and by messing with files myself. :)

I hope you get your skies to work, show us some pictures if you do! :)

simsample

14th Jan 2012, 09:05 PM

Some new information!

Atavera (http://www.modthesims.info/m/13223) has found that CAW is set up to automatically export these files with a world; please click here for information. (http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=466283)

Mera Benzema

19th Jan 2012, 07:06 AM

Why am i not understanding anything? :cry: I came here just to see how can i make my Sunset Valley world look like Bridgeport's cloudy weather but i didn't get anything. :| Can you help me please with showing a simpler way that i can understand? Please. :help:

simsample

19th Jan 2012, 11:16 AM

Mera Benzema, possibly you aren't reading the right bit? The instructions and files for impoorting the EA weather are in post #3, and the Bridgeport weather files are attached there for you to download. You just need to backup SunsetValley.world and import the Bridgeport weather files into it.

Be sure to backup- this is so that if you ever want Sunset Valley back the way it was, you can restore it easily!

bakafox

24th Jan 2012, 08:26 AM

Ok, there is something I'm not quite understanding, and that's the stuff involving moon and sun paths- I've noticed that the moon in particular goes WAY ABOVE easy viewing, and I'm trying to make a world where it's easier to see without having to basically tank a camera down to earth level and point it almost straight up for most of the night- is there any way to make the moon 'lower' somehow so that it's much more easily viewed from various points?

simsample

24th Jan 2012, 04:39 PM

Baka, try changing the moon offset figures in S3_1F886EAD_00000000_5E20253AF53E517F%%+_INI.ini.

;; Number of degrees off the sky's "equator" for the sun and moon. An offset of 0 would indicate
;; tracking the equator exactly. Values approaching 90 become fairly degenerate; with the sun rising and setting
;; near the same pole in the sky. A strong astronomical argument could be made that the Starfield and SUn offsets should be
;; identical, but they can be tuned separately anyway...
SunDegreeOffset = 20
MoonDegreeOffset = 10
StarfieldDegreeOffset = 20

Let me know whether it works or not. Also, post some pictures if it works!

bakafox

24th Jan 2012, 09:37 PM

Baka, try changing the moon offset figures in S3_1F886EAD_00000000_5E20253AF53E517F%%+_INI.ini.

Let me know whether it works or not. Also, post some pictures if it works!

I did try those offsets (should have mentioned I'd already worked with them, sorry!)- unfortunately for my hopes, they don't actually make things run closer to the ground- though they do technically make the moon or sun more visible longer... from some sides of the world.

Really couldn't get screens that were good at illustrating exactly in and of themselves, so I made a terrible presentation graphic:
http://i1209.photobucket.com/albums/cc389/bakafox/Sims%203/notationgraphic.jpg

So, it basically just scoots your moon or sun's setting point closer to the rising one.. which means while it's sort of lower in the sky, it doesn't actually travel across your world so much, so the angles of viewing get a little more limited.. you can see it longer, without having to tilt way up, for the day/night so long as you're facing rather towards the rising point and only a bit to a side of it.

Am wondering now if the height you set your terrain map might be something to look at- my worlds I tend to make 300's, is there anyone out there with a 100 or 200 map that can report about how high/low their moon and sun seem to the ground and how much they have to crane their metaphorical necks to see it when it's around 10-2, not just a few hours after rising or a few hours before setting?

simsample

25th Jan 2012, 12:08 AM

Hmm, interesting, thanks for the diagrams! I understood you perfectly. :)

Perhaps there isn't a way to change this then- the other figures in the sky tuning file are mainly dealing with light and shadow.

Interesting idea about the terrain heights- I'll test it out when I get chance. :)

bakafox

27th Jan 2012, 06:06 AM

I'm about to start tweaking INI's again, but wanted to start with a post on my problem, in case someone else already has ideas I've missed. I'm actually testing as I write up this post (because otherwise I'll forget to MAKE this post), so please forgive grammatical errors and tenses if I've lost track a little.

I've got my world set up to be a pretty gloomy world, not really bright during the day hours. I'm needing to see if something can be done for the lighting at night, short of throwing streetlights all over, because it is WAY TOO DARK by about 8pm. It may be fairly 'realistic' in some ways, but it's terrible for any kind of storytelling/screenshot purposes.

Here's a standard, generic-time-of-day, daylight shot of island when weather's fairly nice:
http://i1209.photobucket.com/albums/cc389/bakafox/Sims%203/Howell%20Island/More%20Sepia/Screenshot-2.jpg

And here's an overview around 8:30pm in fairly nice/clear weather:
http://i1209.photobucket.com/albums/cc389/bakafox/Sims%203/Howell%20Island/More%20Sepia/Screenshot-4-2.jpg

The overly dark feel isn't as totally apparent though at distance.. so I've zoomed in to be closer to some lots at the same time (8:30):
http://i1209.photobucket.com/albums/cc389/bakafox/Sims%203/Howell%20Island/More%20Sepia/Screenshot-5-1.jpg

For the basic sky/lighting .ini I'm using France's, the only alteration I made to that is I reduced moon reflection to .70 and made weather change every 6 hours. I'm using bridgeport's files, edited, so that I have multiple weather types and could alter the water.

I'm not noticing anything in sky params that would really deal with lighting that I can tell, there's just the bloom rates. So I am guessing I need to edit all the weather/sky .INI files, or find something somewhere else that would deal with ambient lighting

In the sky/weather files I am looking at raising the manmade light in the Misc Parameters for clear skies:
StarIntensity = 180
ManmadeLightIntensity = 35
ProbabilityWeight = 0.2
DaytimeBloom = 0.2

However this just lead to brighter areas directly around buildings (as I suppose must have been expected) and not to an overall ambient brightening so things weren't pitch black farther from lots.

ManmadeLightIntensity=70
http://i1209.photobucket.com/albums/cc389/bakafox/Sims%203/Howell%20Island/More%20Sepia/Screenshot-7-1.jpg

And for giggles, here's the intensity set to 180:
http://i1209.photobucket.com/albums/cc389/bakafox/Sims%203/Howell%20Island/More%20Sepia/Screenshot-8-1.jpg

So that's from 30 in earlier to 70 to 180- which is handy for those making brighter cities, but not what I need to make a spooky foggy world good for folks who like making stories.

I also did try shuffling the daybloom numbers a little, but honestly by halfing or doubling, didn't see any differences in lighting in a fast test.

However I just found the file S3_1F886EAD_00000000_5E4F8E7B226066CA%%+_INI which I wish I had earlier, since it looks like it IS the generic lighting code.
[Lighting]
SunlightScale = 1.0;
AmbientProbeScale = 1.0;
LightProbeSaturation = 0.4;
GrayscaleProbeIntensity = 0.5;
BloomRampIntensity = 1.0;
BloomRampThreshold = 1.3;
Gamma = 0.4f;

I am going to start a second post with my playing with those, since this one's probably getting a bit long for one post.

bakafox

27th Jan 2012, 08:29 AM

Ok so back to the file S3_1F886EAD_00000000_5E4F8E7B226066CA%%+_INI which looks like it IS the generic lighting code.
[Lighting]
SunlightScale = 1.0;
AmbientProbeScale = 1.0;
LightProbeSaturation = 0.4;
GrayscaleProbeIntensity = 0.5;
BloomRampIntensity = 1.0;
BloomRampThreshold = 1.3;
Gamma = 0.4f;

I am going to now show 2 screens for 3 different settings, the first being at those defaults, the second being at double those (except gamma), and the third being half the default (except for gamma):

http://i1209.photobucket.com/albums/cc389/bakafox/Sims%203/Lighting%20INI%20Tests/Screenshot.jpg
http://i1209.photobucket.com/albums/cc389/bakafox/Sims%203/Lighting%20INI%20Tests/Screenshot-10.jpg
http://i1209.photobucket.com/albums/cc389/bakafox/Sims%203/Lighting%20INI%20Tests/Screenshot-1.jpg

http://i1209.photobucket.com/albums/cc389/bakafox/Sims%203/Lighting%20INI%20Tests/Screenshot-3.jpg
http://i1209.photobucket.com/albums/cc389/bakafox/Sims%203/Lighting%20INI%20Tests/Screenshot-12.jpg
http://i1209.photobucket.com/albums/cc389/bakafox/Sims%203/Lighting%20INI%20Tests/Screenshot-3-1.jpg

Can see that there are differences- now I need to jog around and see what exactly will change what. A downside so far is that nothing is based on time of day here- so if I make the night brighter, I'm also making the day much brighter.

First though, I also did not mess with the Gamma previously, so I'm going to tweak that now for 2 screens, one doubled, one halved for the numeric, I have NO idea what the f might do so am leaving it.

http://i1209.photobucket.com/albums/cc389/bakafox/Sims%203/Lighting%20INI%20Tests/Screenshot.jpg
http://i1209.photobucket.com/albums/cc389/bakafox/Sims%203/Lighting%20INI%20Tests/Screenshot-3.jpg
Doubled below!
http://i1209.photobucket.com/albums/cc389/bakafox/Sims%203/Lighting%20INI%20Tests/Screenshot-6.jpg
http://i1209.photobucket.com/albums/cc389/bakafox/Sims%203/Lighting%20INI%20Tests/Screenshot-8.jpg
And the halved:
http://i1209.photobucket.com/albums/cc389/bakafox/Sims%203/Lighting%20INI%20Tests/Screenshot-10-1.jpg
http://i1209.photobucket.com/albums/cc389/bakafox/Sims%203/Lighting%20INI%20Tests/Screenshot-12-1.jpg

I have a harder time seeing much change doing those gamma number changes.

Now just going to play with one setting, new code where I raise the LightProbeSaturation from .5 to 2-
SunlightScale = 1.0;
AmbientProbeScale = 1.0;
LightProbeSaturation = 0.4;
GrayscaleProbeIntensity = 2.0;
BloomRampIntensity = 1.0;
BloomRampThreshold = 1.3;
Gamma = 0.4f;

Already noticing that with this setting, it's brighter day, and also there's a pronounced (when on max speed) jolting of how dark some trees suddenly turn as day goes on.

http://i1209.photobucket.com/albums/cc389/bakafox/Sims%203/Lighting%20INI%20Tests/Screenshot-15.jpg
http://i1209.photobucket.com/albums/cc389/bakafox/Sims%203/Lighting%20INI%20Tests/Screenshot-2-2.jpg

Higher is clearly brighter during the day to me, but night it doesn't seem to change much with this option, though it might just be harder for me to tell since the room I'm doing all this in has gotten darker since I started. I think I may take a break from posting for now- but even if I forget to post more here or am delayed doing it, I plan to keep ALL my tweaks/edits of this page as an album.

The descriptions of each picture will tell what the code was for them, in case it helps as a reference, so here's the URL for this file's album, added to until I get tired of it and/or throw my computer out a window: http://s1209.photobucket.com/albums/cc389/bakafox/Sims%203/Lighting%20INI%20Tests/

Breaktime Nao! :beer:

EDIT:
Hm, looks like these will be tricky to play with. I found that light settings that look ok from a distance are often terrible up close during the day, may have to go back to the drawing board:
http://i1209.photobucket.com/albums/cc389/bakafox/Sims%203/Lighting%20INI%20Tests/Screenshot-9-2.jpg
Above pic was with
SunlightScale = 1.0;
AmbientProbeScale = 1.3;
LightProbeSaturation = 1.4;
GrayscaleProbeIntensity = 2.0;
BloomRampIntensity = 1.0;
BloomRampThreshold = 1.3;
Gamma = 0.4f;

And my buildings are horrible shiny and edged with bright blue where it'd be darker shadow colors.

simsample

28th Jan 2012, 10:27 AM

Great work Baka- this will be most useful!

Out of interest, in the Egypt version of 5E4F8E7B226066CA the figures look like this:

[Lighting]
SunlightScale = 1.0;

AmbientProbeScale = .7;
LightProbeSaturation = .5;
GrayscaleProbeIntensity = 0.0;
BloomRampThreshold = 1.3;

;; These parameters are currently not working
BloomRampIntensity = 1.0;
Gamma = 0.4f;

With a remark that the Bloom ramp intensity and gamma aren't working. For you pictures with the gammas changed, I can't really see any difference- although perhaps it's really subtle? In Bridgeport those do not have a comment against them though.

The main problem with all of these settings as far as I can see is that of course the E4F8E7B226066CA is global so it applies to every weather type, so if you manage to make one weather type gloomy using all of these then they all are!

For Jericho what I did was to control the gloominess with the colour ramps. For example, this is sunset (6pm) on the 'clear' weather setting:
http://i1213.photobucket.com/albums/cc472/JerichoWorld/Legacy/Bluefunk-2012-01-26-222734108511.jpg

And this is 2pm on the 'stormy' weather setting:
http://i1213.photobucket.com/albums/cc472/JerichoWorld/Legacy/Bluefunk-2012-01-23-1320.jpg
As you can see, that's pretty dark already- but the only difference between the two are the fog settings, cloud cover and colour ramps. So not sure if that's possible for what you're trying to achieve. Perhaps you'd have to tweak the colour ramps for the night times, to make things lighter?

I'm interested that you were noticing a difference in the lot lighting for the ManmadeLightIntensity though. In my tests I could see no (or at least, very very little) change in the lot loghting or street lighting when changing that figure, but there was a difference in the moon brightness. For ManmadeLight Intensity=0 the moon vanished (although you can see a dark disc against a cloud), and for ManmadeLight Intensity 50 the moon was brightest. Going above 50 seemed to make no difference, so I'm guessing the range is 0-50 for that one. It would make sense for that to be moon brightness, since the DaytimeBloom setting to me seemed to predominantly change the sun/ cloud brightness. So those three settings:
[MiscParams]
StarIntensity = 200
ManmadeLightIntensity = 48
DaytimeBloom = 0.25
Each of which are present in the weather inis (so can change with the weather) perhaps just deal with sky.

bakafox

28th Jan 2012, 01:14 PM

...So not sure if that's possible for what you're trying to achieve. Perhaps you'd have to tweak the colour ramps for the night times, to make things lighter?

I'm interested that you were noticing a difference in the lot lighting for the ManmadeLightIntensity though. In my tests I could see no (or at least, very very little) change in the lot loghting or street lighting when changing that figure, but there was a difference in the moon brightness. For ManmadeLight Intensity=0 the moon vanished (although you can see a dark disc against a cloud), and for ManmadeLight Intensity 50 the moon was brightest. Going above 50 seemed to make no difference, so I'm guessing the range is 0-50 for that one. It would make sense for that to be moon brightness, since the DaytimeBloom setting to me seemed to predominantly change the sun/ cloud brightness. So those three settings:
[MiscParams]
StarIntensity = 200
ManmadeLightIntensity = 48
DaytimeBloom = 0.25
Each of which are present in the weather inis (so can change with the weather) perhaps just deal with sky.

Hrm. Well I already am working with ramps- but I have to admit, I'm doing kind of 'cheap' ramp edits- mostly I ran a sepia filter over Bridgeport ramps a few times to get my coloring. (I'm afraid my personality is made of equal parts perfectionist, procrastinator, and impatience, plus a heaping spoonful of insomnia- which leads to some...interesting shortcuts, mistakes, memory lapses, and delusions)

Have zipped my ramps and current INI edits up for you to take a gander at if you want to- AND have a beta test release of Howell Island up temporarily at http://www.bakafox.com/stuffness if you'd like to drag that out of the box and shake it around to see those INI in action on intended setting.

As to the whole manmadelightintensity... I didn't even think to look up at the moon, but I could swear there were differences in the radius around the lights around those pictures I took. Will have to look again once I have slept a few hours-- also will play a little more with those other settings again.

bakafox

29th Jan 2012, 06:24 AM

SimSample, when you say that the moon brightened, did it also make the landscape a little brighter at night? I'm unable to spot any difference in lighting for the island, but I'm not so sure that it isn't my monitor callibration or general tiredness that's interfering.

simsample

29th Jan 2012, 10:26 PM

bakafox

29th Jan 2012, 11:05 PM

Thanks Baka- will test out your world and ramps as soon as I get chance (have been rather pushed for time this last week!) :)

No, there was no noticeable difference in the landscape brightness for either the manmade light intensity or the daytime bloom figures. I've attached some images, they were taken in CAW but the effect was the same in-game.

Ok thanks!
Seems to be a lot easier to make pretty tropical/bright worlds than gloomy, Silent HIll-esque ones- which just follows my usual trend of trying to do the hard stuff before simpler when exploring new Sims content to try making :lol:

GoofyGirl17

3rd Feb 2012, 02:50 AM

Hellooooo!!! :D I know its been FOREVER since I been on but its just that I been so busy so I hope you didn't think I ditched the thread :lol:
Well, my update on my world is pretty good actually :)
I decided to use Paint.net and for some reason, I noticed more accurate results when saving them to that specific file sooo I have no idea what that was all about lol
So if anyone is having trouble with their colors, even when saving them to the right file in GIMP, then try Paint.net to save your ramps :p
-Also, whenever I try to change the color of bar 9 (sky horizon when sun is near) the same color as the sea color (in my case, the same color as bar 4 and 5), the sea becomes different colors when the camera is faced with a different angle :wtf:
So what I did was leave that bar the same color or a pinkish color and everything was back to normal.
I don't know why that is, but I would think it's best to have these bars different from each other if there's a problem in CAW or in-game. So in the short, I only changed bars 4 and 5 ,which at first, was giving me the worst of problems for such a small change lol....Now, It's a simple change with accurate results-the way it should be lol
Well,thanks guys! :anime: Here are some pictures below of the effects it had in CAW...I love the "glow" of the water at night :giggler:

simsample

3rd Feb 2012, 09:58 PM

I'm glad you got the effect you were after, GoofyGirl17! I'd like to see some larger images though- the ones you posted are tiny!

Conorsim

5th Feb 2012, 11:09 AM

*blinks*

I've always wanted to incorporate adverse weather changes in my worlds, and I've been spying this thread for quite some time. Once I gte a full afternoon off I'll tackle it :lol:

PoisonFrog

8th Feb 2012, 11:56 PM

I don't think this has been mentioned before...

I was playing around with the fantastic new WorldBuilderCS from atavera (http://www.modthesims.info/m/13223) found in the tutorial by simsample (http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=468279), and came across a great weather find in the Metadata Effects called billowycloud & billowycloudsfx. I was wondering why I couldn't get my overcast and stormy weather to look the same as the CAW versions...I think this is what was missing(INI tunings and color ramps aside).

These cloud formations are massive and thick enough to cut with a machete. I lowered both 300 units to get a fog effect for these screens ...

http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/34325_120208184824Screenshots.jpg

http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/34326_120208185005Screenshot-8s.jpg

:turtle:

Edit~ I added a slideshow showing these weather effects to the bottom of my blog(which is linked in my sig) for anyone who wants a closer look. I'll leave it up for a few days...

bakafox

9th Feb 2012, 01:27 AM

Oh man. Now I want to get that working more than EVER for when I get desktop back! That kind of cloud is exactly what my halted-due-to-INI-fail spooky victorian world needs! (well, plus actually sorting the lighting so it's sepia/faded without being so dark at night that bats are grounded)

simsample

9th Feb 2012, 01:21 PM

What a great find, PoisonFrog! Those clouds look great, especially for around tall mountains!

Baka, check out the new diff patch atavera has released in the CAW modding thread. :)

bakafox

9th Feb 2012, 02:54 PM

Yup, Atavera used me as new patch guinea pig about 5 minutes after I posted here LOL. So I've been playing! Now I just need my desktop back so I have my *files* for the Creepy Island ^_^ (Thank goodness for laptop, although now before I fix Creepy Island need to finish the Avalon builder island I just started to kill time while desktop was unavailable..... I may have a CAW addiction problem)

bakafox

13th Feb 2012, 08:59 PM

Ok.. I am having a last issue with Howell Island. I have a lovely red moon for the sky- however, the reflection of the moon in the water is white. I can't figure out if this is something changed by INI or color ramp, and what lines of color ramp if it's that are for the moon? Some are noted as being for sun, but sun's reflection is fine and kind of reddish-orange in my current ramps.

simsample

14th Feb 2012, 02:00 AM

It's colour ramp, bar 5 according to my notes so try that one, and if not try the next ones to it! (Sometimes it's hard to see the bars if they are very dark, so there's a good possibility I miscounted). I think the sun and moon reflection colour are governed by the same bar. :)

bakafox

16th Feb 2012, 09:57 PM

I'm finding it impossible to get a good red reflection for sun/moon- has anyone managed this? No matter how dark crimson I have the ramps turned to for 4 and 5 (or just 5, have tried both ways) the reflection on water of the sun becomes a pale/hot pink, not red, and the moon's reflected light continues to be white for most skies. I'm totally lost, since some weather types it's not as white, but I can't figure out why/how/what the heck I did anymore.

I did successfully get over all lighting darker during day without making night too dark, but am beginning to think that and the red moon image is about all I'll be able to manage.

simsample

17th Feb 2012, 12:48 PM

Try increasing the black in the bar, rather than making the colour a more intense red, maybe? I'll take a look as soon as I get chance. :)

bakafox

17th Feb 2012, 09:30 PM

Will try again, though I had been darkening after making it a red-orange (I really want it to not be true red too), not just upping saturation. For some lighting the bar is so dark by default it can hardly be seen- I even in some cases brightened it, so I coudl see what I was doing, then darkened it back to where it hardly was visible, just had reddish-orange tint.. but still generally looks pink during day, or white at night O-o

Margaret Pendragon

19th Feb 2012, 06:43 AM

(well, plus actually sorting the lighting so it's sepia/faded without being so dark at night that bats are grounded)
Sepia light? Sounds cool!

Anyhoo, I'm actually having some uber-saturation issues with my sea along small parts of shoreline, as Goofygirl displayed in an earlier post (http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?p=3736982#post3736982) in this thread. I have double-checked and re-saved my color ramps as Simsample suggested in the post immediately following hers, and my Gimp settings exactly match those shown in post #3 regarding Mip settings. The problem still persists. Altering the shoreline in these areas doesn't seem to affect the problem. Could the issue be in my INIs, perhaps? Any ideas?

See the super-turquoise around some of the edges of this volcano?

http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb337/mistyfiedmafiawars/Screenshot-30.jpg

This problem exists in a couple other small areas in my WIP (world in progress) but for the most part they all look fine.
http://i1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb337/mistyfiedmafiawars/Screenshot-31.jpg

I am guessing I can disguise most of them with some plant life, but I'd really like to understand what the issue actually is :blink:

kiwi_tea

19th Feb 2012, 07:08 AM

Margaret Pendragon

19th Feb 2012, 07:15 AM

As I understand it, a lot of coloration is applied to the sea in reflection. Perhaps it is only applied to the water *surface*, and where that water surface doesn't exist you see an unmodified ocean colour? I'm not sure if I'm on the right track or making sense, but that strikes me it might be the issue. A trick you can do with the new caw, if you have the right world for it, is to apply a Pond Tool water plane *just* above the sea level (or lower the sea level and apply it). The "breaking" of the water surface is much reduced in Pond Tool waterways, because their surfaces cut right into the shoreline.

No, you are sort of making sense :) Before I applied my color ramps, I encountered some areas where the water surface was just...missing. I got around that by altering the shoreline in those spots. so maybe I just didn't alter the shorelines enough in this case. Perhaps it's simply more noticeable with my vivid water color and that's why I'm just now noticing it in these other areas. Thank you for your insight.

I saw the CAW updates and have been putting off reading about it or installing it until I had more time ...I guess I will have to find time sooner, rather than later. :rofl:

simsample

19th Feb 2012, 03:15 PM

I'm not sure placing another water plane would help, as the CAW water planes will continue to the extent of your buildable terrain, so you will have a 'square' of visible water (whether you put it under or above the sea level).

Better would be to resculpt the land to fix this; I know it's a flaw with the way the water surfaces work, as I've had it in my own worlds and EA has it in theirs (even Lunar Lakes, I notice along the canals). I think you're right about it being more visible because of the bright water murk colour. Maybe you could disguise it with some rocks or plants, if you can't get rid of it (which is what I always do!)! :lol:

Margaret Pendragon

20th Feb 2012, 03:13 AM

I can't comment on the first method of using the 'new' tools is CAW, as I've yet to implement them. Kiwi's reasoning as a basis though does seem sound. Simsample you may also be correct though, as I previously corrected this issue with shoreline changes, without realizing it was the same issue. It may've just been more apparent after I started playing with sea and sky colors again. Gofflamick! I don't wanna disguise it! but I guess I must in some areas. Playing more with the shorelines DOES help this issue, so that is at least a partial fix.

I wouldn't call it Done yet, but the sea color problems are less-apparent after shoreline terrain changes. No disguising yet :)
http://i1225.photobucket.com/albums/ee396/missiejohnston/Screenshot-32.jpg
See, you can still discern the super-saturated sea color areas at the shoreline, but they're not as ...offensive.

bakafox

20th Feb 2012, 04:53 AM

... Gofflamick! I don't wanna disguise it! but I guess I must in some areas. Playing more with the shorelines DOES help this issue, so that is at least a partial fix.

I wouldn't call it Done yet, but the sea color problems are less-apparent after shoreline terrain changes. No disguising yet :)
http://i1225.photobucket.com/albums/ee396/missiejohnston/Screenshot-32.jpg
See, you can still discern the super-saturated sea color areas at the shoreline, but they're not as ...offensive.

An idea I was pondering, for implementing in my Arr! Island full build with better tropical lighting, was to maybe try and come up with a coral reef texture for the areas that have that shallow mis-reflection, and just make them shallower- since using clear water, it then might make sense for the brighter water, since it IS oft brighter in reefy shallows.

Considering my headaches making Howell's gloom and doom look, I am already a bit frightened to tackle tropics to begin with :rofl:

EDIT:
Also! For people using New CAW and who make volcanoes, or apocalyptic worlds- Something neat I discovered when testing effects.

There are the new 'explosion' effects- they are basically pretty fireworks, an while the colors may not be perfect, I found that if you place them, because game is paused until a playable family is made, they are frozen bright (blindingly so) flashes of light til finally game resumes and they finish off.

This makes for an interesting volcanic eruption, or nuclear bomb, start to a world for story purposes.

Margaret Pendragon

20th Feb 2012, 06:16 PM

Also! For people using New CAW and who make volcanoes, or apocalyptic worlds- Something neat I discovered when testing effects.

There are the new 'explosion' effects- they are basically pretty fireworks, an while the colors may not be perfect, I found that if you place them, because game is paused until a playable family is made, they are frozen bright (blindingly so) flashes of light til finally game resumes and they finish off.

This makes for an interesting volcanic eruption, or nuclear bomb, start to a world for story purposes.Interesting, I will have to have a look at that. For my volcanoes I've been using the tall water splash effects, placed just under the surface of the water, for a "steam" effect.

kiwi_tea

20th Feb 2012, 07:43 PM

I think ep2roofsmoke is the largest smoke available now for volcanoes. It's what I'm using, alongside the tall water splash.

bakafox

20th Feb 2012, 10:35 PM

Interesting, I will have to have a look at that. For my volcanoes I've been using the tall water splash effects, placed just under the surface of the water, for a "steam" effect.

The Science steam also is good for volcanoes

Margaret: The explosion only happens the once, so the seething steam and smoke can still be the 'remnant'. Once the world's been entered and it unpauses, the explosion does not happen again, or at least did not for me, even though I passed over areas repeatedly in case it was 'plays once when you go over it'.

simsample

20th Feb 2012, 11:35 PM

Baka, Margaret and Kiwi- I think this information would be great for people to know, how about starting a new thread for this? Then people could post images and tell what effects they used to make volcanoes and other features in CAW.

Since we now have the unlocked CAW it will be really good to have a reference, and I think it would be useful for non-CAW people too (as the effects have corresponding fog emitter counterparts I think, for use on lots). :)

kiwi_tea

10th Mar 2012, 06:33 AM

It appears that the leaked patch of the magic EP contains moon phases, and the patch also appears to break custom moons (Port Piston has a big ugly black circle in the sky). Something to watch out for.

Edit: Right, it appears sometimes, but mostly not. What I suspect is happening is that it's drawing the full moons from moon.dds, but doesn't have any textures for the other phases.

simsample

12th Mar 2012, 01:42 PM

Oh, good! I'm glad that we'll have moon phases (the moon phase info is already there in S3_1F886EAD_00000000_5E20253AF53E517F%%+_INI.ini), but of course this might mean that some current worlds with moons might need some retrofitting. I wonder if they'll fix Lunar Lakes? :lol:

Margaret Pendragon

15th Mar 2012, 04:16 PM

Moon phases? Giggity!
You're probably right in that it will need additional textures.

kiwi_tea

16th Mar 2012, 04:09 PM

If there was an ep7 in the works, and I'm not saying there is... ...and if it contained moon phases, and I'm not saying it does... ...my uncanny uninformed intuition would say we should rest assured that EA knows about the issue - not that I'm saying there is an issue - and they're making sure that the system - should it even exist - does not conflict with custom moons.

simsample

17th Mar 2012, 10:37 PM

...my uncanny uninformed intuition would say we should rest assured that EA knows about the issue
*simsample kisses kiwi* :lovestruc

Riptide651

17th Mar 2012, 11:18 PM

I honestly feel like a noob, considering this an entire discussion about the topic and I'm probably asking a real simple question:

There are 5 different types of weather: Sunny, Slightly Cloudy, Over Cast... etc. etc.
How does the weather change because from my experience playing I haven't seen change in weather at all unless its a difference of like the weather at 3am vs. 6pm.

kiwi_tea

17th Mar 2012, 11:35 PM

Which world are you talking about? Weather usually changes every 8 hours, but the default inis are very plain. You'll find more variety in a world like Bridgeport.

Riptide651

17th Mar 2012, 11:57 PM

IN any, Ive played them all extensively except Starlight, I dont seem to have weather.

I just am asking this because I think it is key to help me understand how this works and how to apply it.

simsample

18th Mar 2012, 12:50 AM

I think you are probably describing the bug where clouds do not show sometimes. This occurs in Sims 3 and in CAW, in both custom and EA worlds and seems to be a game bug.

If you play the world fot a while, then save, exit to main menu and reload, the clouds will usually show up. If not, exiting the game, deleting caches, reloading and repeating the save>exit>reload usually works. For CAW, usually a reboot of the program will fix this.

Riptide651

18th Mar 2012, 03:36 AM

Also, I'm trying to import the Bridgeport .ini files and color ramps into my world, but I cant seem to find the files they are supposed to replace, in S3PE, all I'm getting ins the /IMGs and such

Also, I'm sorry if I'm a noob, but I'm a bit new to this soo...

simsample

18th Mar 2012, 04:03 AM

Also, I'm trying to import the Bridgeport .ini files and color ramps into my world, but I cant seem to find the files they are supposed to replace,
They won't replace any files in your custom world, unless you already imported some sea/sky files in previously, and have not saved the world in CAW.

Riptide651

18th Mar 2012, 04:05 AM

Oh, so I just place them in there and thats it?

What about the .ini's?

simsample

18th Mar 2012, 04:09 AM

Yes, just import them to your CAW world file using S3Pe, and save in S3Pe. Don't save in CAW though or else the ini files will be deleted and you'll need to reimport them.

Riptide651

18th Mar 2012, 04:13 AM

I Don't know if it was mentioned before but is there a way to keep the .ini files while saving the world? Also, if so where would you place them.

OK, I imported the .dds files and opened my world, and although I got the effect of Bridgeport Weather The water became completely see-through.

simsample

18th Mar 2012, 04:32 AM

Only if you rename them and place them in a special folder. Details here:
http://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=466283

Riptide651

18th Mar 2012, 04:32 AM

OH, whoops, I did this before you replied:

OK so I imported the .ini files into the .world file itself and I saved and closed CAW, and reopened it, and the same effects were there that were there when I saved it :)

simsample

19th Mar 2012, 05:04 PM

So it's all working? Great, well done!

Riptide651

20th Mar 2012, 04:55 AM

Just a question. Does a 0.0 probability mean it wil NEVER occur or sometimes? and for the.ini files and the ramps, if I don't need one, can I remove it altogether?

alice4artz

20th Mar 2012, 11:18 AM

Hey:) First I want to thank you guys for all the amazing info you posted here it's very helpful. However I still don't understand quite a lot ^^

So this is my first attempt to change the weather for my world. I wanted to create a very sunny and bright environment so the first thing I did was to change the SunlightScale to a higher value. This caused the objects to be brighter which looks quite natural on the smaller objects. Unfortunately the distant terrain looks completely ridiculous:

http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o24/betty65/glowingterrain.jpg

Is there any way around this or should I edit some other values to get the effect without having glowing distant terrain?

Riptide651

20th Mar 2012, 03:39 PM

alice4artz

20th Mar 2012, 04:22 PM

As far as I've read, the glow has to do with a number called bloom. I believe it's mentioned in the. First few pages but I don't understand it too well, I left it as is. I'd wait for sims ample and not Listen to me anyway

Nope, I didn't touch bloom, just the [Lighting] SunlightScale . The regular objects aren't glowing, just the distant terrain. It seems the highest value you can set it to is 2,5 until it starts looking really odd.

simsample

20th Mar 2012, 07:00 PM

Just a question. Does a 0.0 probability mean it wil NEVER occur or sometimes? and for the.ini files and the ramps, if I don't need one, can I remove it altogether?

From my observations it seems that it appears very seldom, as the probability figure seems to be a weighting rather than an actual probability. However, I need to do more testing to actually say for sure. The EA vacation worlds have only two weather types, and for France one of those is 1.0 and one is 0.0. So I'm assuming that they wouldn't have bothered doing the second weather type at all if it wasn't going to at least show up some of the time. But, you never know with EA...

alice4artz- I think you're going to have to reduce the Sunlightscale to get rid of that. The daytime bloom only seems to affect the bloom on the sun/sky, and not so much on objects, from what I've seen. Maybe the distant terrain has a high specularity? Are you not noticing that objects like tables and kitchen surfaces are glowing with that setting also? There are some figures called 'BloomRampIntensity' and 'BloomRampThreshold' that might be worth looking at, I haven't experimented with those yet. Maybe those bloom settings were what Riptide was referring to?

Riptide651

20th Mar 2012, 11:22 PM

SO if I removed it it would use the defaults for custom?

Also: I was checking out my world, Sturgeon Bay, in EIG and whenever I zoomed out the opposite side would cover witha white screen. Any Ideas? I don't think its weather I think it has something to do with graphics.

simsample

21st Mar 2012, 12:44 PM

Yes, any weather types not modded should use the defaults, but of course you may hardly ever see them depending upon your custom probabilities.

For the white screen, can you show a screenshot?

Riptide651

21st Mar 2012, 04:31 PM

Ok so here's what happened: I was looking at Jericho (Beautiful World, btw :)) an I noticed you included a map. So I thought it was a good idea to include a so-far map of my world to show how its coming along. Unfortunately, when I zoomed out This white screen covered my world:

In the picture, only half of my world is visible:

http://i.imgur.com/FRZJc.png

TO make the map I had to make 2 parts. Your world is big, how did you do it?

Also, for some reason after the new patch in CAW, the fog option sometimes stops working and so does the weather sliders.

simsample

21st Mar 2012, 05:18 PM

My Jericho map was made in-game not in CAW, and was created from around 16 or so images all spliced together. You can see this if you look closely; the perspective of the buildings and objects looks odd as a result. You might be able to get a better shot in CAW by changing the LOD transition in camera settings, but in-game you have no way of getting rid of the fog.

The fog/weather options is a bug that occurs in-game and in CAW; the way to solve it is to restart CAW.

Riptide651

21st Mar 2012, 10:28 PM

The thing is is occurs every time I use it. So if someone happened to zoom out in-game, would they see it? Because I want to make it as playable as possible.

simsample

21st Mar 2012, 10:48 PM

When playing a world in-game, once you get the clouds working for that session, it sticks. The problem is getting the clouds to show in the first place! This glitch exists in the EA worlds too; for example Starlight Shores and Lunar Lakes have lovely clouds, but sometimes it's necessary to reload a save to have the clouds show.

In CAW, the problem seems to occur intermittently, but rebooting the program always seems to solve it.

Riptide651

21st Mar 2012, 11:23 PM

Well not the clouds, would the giant white/black screen be visible?

simsample

22nd Mar 2012, 12:41 AM

Okay, I think you're talking about something different to me! What giant black/white screen? Can you show a screenshot of this?

Riptide651

22nd Mar 2012, 01:12 AM

OK, I posted the pictures previously because that demonstrates the problem. You have seen my world, so you know it isn't just that tiny little bay in the picture, it is much larger. When I zoom out, a large white screen begins to cover the opposite side from which I am viewing. I occurs in EIG too just it is black there instead.

Also When I meant the fog, I meant the option under View in CAW which allows to unmurkify (if thats a word) the water so its see-through. the fog is sometimes automatically off when I load a world even though the program says its on and it wont turn on unless I restart it.

simsample

22nd Mar 2012, 02:17 AM

Oh, you're just talking about the draw distance? I thought you were talking about when the different weather types don't show in game or in CAW when you use the 'cloudiness' slider.

The white 'screen' you're talking about is just a limitation to the distance CAW will render at; it won't draw things in the extreme distance. So if you zoom right out, parts of the map will vanish. In game it is similar, but of course you cannot hide the fog so the viewer will just see a foggy haze anyway. This is why I did my map in-game, by taking lots of quite close images and stitching them together. If you zoom out far enough to get the entire map in, you lose the world in fog (or reach the extent of the draw limits in CAW).

It's not something that is likely to bother people who play your world, since they are not likely to want to zoom out that far.

Riptide651

22nd Mar 2012, 02:45 AM

OK, thanks :)

PoisonFrog

31st Mar 2012, 12:39 AM

*n00b warning*
I haven't had much time to play with the weather files up until now, outside of a few quick tweaks to the ini files and adding Billowycloudfx in CAW.

I'd like to make some flavor packs for weather as package files, so anyone who plays my world(or any world without embedded ini files) can change the weather to suit their preferences. Could probably make a folder named 'Weather' in the Mods framework and rename all the package files therein to .page. Then change .page to .package if you want to activate a particular weather formulation. I like the flexibility that grants the individual player.

Mainly, I want to know if I should still package according to Claeric...
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=388840
and if I make them as packages, will I still be able to easily embed them into a world file, later?

Another thing I'd like to do is make a precision(better backdrop) color ramp designer as a layered PSD file, where you could add gradients and slide them laterally to adjust the timing and focus(among other things) of custom made gradients.

I'm curious as to why the ini files fail to load at times(save game and weather change). I had this happen numerous times at first, then made a set of ini's with only the probabilities and daytime blooms altered...in 5 weeks these have never failed to load.

Interesting that you can use altered Medieval files, too...
:duck:

simsample

31st Mar 2012, 06:18 PM

Mainly, I want to know if I should still package according to Claeric...
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=388840
and if I make them as packages, will I still be able to easily embed them into a world file, later?
For making an override, Clearic's method of editing the basegame ini files would still work, but you would need to manually change the RGB values. If you are planning to import these files to a world in future, I would go for the EP colour ramps and ini files rather than modding the basegame inis. The main reason for this is that this is the way EA have done sea/sky overrides for all of their worlds, so there may be a performance advantage. Also, anything EA have used in their worlds will most likely work with future EPs too, so that's a good reason to do it that way. The colour ramps work fine when bundled with the ini files into a package, and you can just import the contents of that package into a world at a later time.

Another thing I'd like to do is make a precision(better backdrop) color ramp designer as a layered PSD file, where you could add gradients and slide them laterally to adjust the timing and focus(among other things) of custom made gradients.
That's a good idea, but it's already quite easy to select an individual gradient in a DDS to change it. Remember that they are small files; each gradient is only a few pixels high. If you make a PSD then users will need to flatten that image to make their DDS, as using the wrong format for these ramps can crash the game!

I'm curious as to why the ini files fail to load at times(save game and weather change). I had this happen numerous times at first, then made a set of ini's with only the probabilities and daytime blooms altered...in 5 weeks these have never failed to load.
It seems to be just the cloud pattern that fails to load; the colour ramps, weather intervals and lighting settings load fine. It's a bug that happens with the EA worlds too (France and Lunar Lakes are two I can think of where I've particularly noticed it). So if you only change daytime bloom then you won't notice it!

Interesting that you can use altered Medieval files, too...
:duck:
The weather files seem to be mostly similar, but there are a few files in Tamlo31's download which do not seem to exist in the Sims 3 files, especially when imported into worlds.

Alan_Gast

8th Apr 2012, 12:37 PM

Hey - I was just wondering about the Clear, Custom, Overcast, Partly Cloudy & Stormy parts of the China inis. Will they alternate, like say, Bridgeport does to foggy/overcast days, or will they just remain the same all the time?

If they do, would I be able to keep the regular China weather in my world, but have Bridgeport foggy days too? I vaguely remember reading about this somewhere, so sorry if I'm missing something obvious! :)

simsample

8th Apr 2012, 01:24 PM

China and the other vacation worlds only have a custom clear and partly cloudy sky. For China the probability weightings are set to 1 for clear and 0 for partly cloudy. So it is extremely likely that China will use the China clear sky, and unlikely that it will use anything else.

I presume that China will occasionally use the basegame default skies for the settings that it doesn't have overrides for, but I've never played it long enough to prove this.

If you want to use a combination of Bridgeport and China, try using the China files for clear/ partly cloudy, and the Bridgeport files for overcast, custom and Stormy. If you change the probability weights to be equal, then they should all show up at different times randomly.

Alan_Gast

8th Apr 2012, 04:08 PM

Ok, cool! Thank you. ;)

Conorsim

11th Apr 2012, 05:46 PM

I've been trying to figure this out all day ... and I still don't have a clue :( So please excuse my ignorance!

I've read the first few OPs thoroughly, but as I said I'm still very much confused. Simsample, I download the extracted files from Twinbrook and Bridgeport, saved them to my desktop etc etc. Backed-up everything (wouldn't want to lose me lovely world :rofl: )Imported them to my world fine. But, in game, I've a weird graphical issue:

http://i1131.photobucket.com/albums/m545/Conorsim-/Screenshot-623.jpg
http://i1131.photobucket.com/albums/m545/Conorsim-/Screenshot-624.jpg

http://i1131.photobucket.com/albums/m545/Conorsim-/Screenshot-625.jpg
http://i1131.photobucket.com/albums/m545/Conorsim-/Screenshot-626.jpg

As you can see, everything looks fine from Map View, but when I zoom down ... :wtf: And it's only those two textures; the mud texture that also forms the base etc for the lane ways in the world, and also the pebbles texture (from Hidden Springs).
This glitch occurs with both BP and TB files (I tried them seperately - I don't plan for them to stay, was just trying stuff out to see how it'd look). Strange though how the textures look fine in CAW. :blink:

Also, do you know of any pre-set ini files that would be suitable for, eh, an Irish world :pint: After playing around with the Bridgeport settings in CAW and seeing it in action in-game, I think they'll be suitable. It's just the camera flyover intro thing that I may want to get rid of... :blink:

Sorry if I'm being a bother, I'll revise the 1st page again tonight, if I've time. I just need a head start, that's all :giggler: I've learned how to import the files into the world, so at least that's a start! :lol: Thanks if ya can help. :lovestruc

simsample

12th Apr 2012, 11:52 AM

Hmm, that's odd; have you tried deleting your CAW caches, game caches and world caches? Does it happen if you import any other files apart from the Bridgeport and Twinbrook files? Both of those are quite similar and very foggy, so it could be that there is an issue with the way your computer renders the fog. Also, make sure you are importing the DDS colour ramps as well as the ini files, as those are necessary. It does look to me as though that's an error in your world though- does it occur if you remove the files altogether?

The flyover is containted in S3_1F886EAD_00000000_7886A7F59355762F%%+_INI.ini, just delete that one to get rid of those.

For Irish weather, I really like the France ini files- the clear one has some nice clouds and gives a nice colour to the grass. I used that one incombination with one from China and the foggy ones from Bridgeport in a world I made for my daughter, and it was quite similar to the weather you get in the UK and Ireland. So maybe try those?

Conorsim

14th Apr 2012, 04:12 PM

Hmm, I'll see about deleting those caches. I've only imported the files from Bridgeport and Twinbrook, so I wouldn't know about any other files :(

I'll try everything you've mentioned ... thank you sample :) & I'll get back to ya about it :Pint:

i saw drones

14th Apr 2012, 11:27 PM

I really just wanted to pop in and say thank you to everyone for their invaluable information in this thread. I have long wanted custom skies/seas etc and could never figure it out. Like so many things in life, all it took was slowing down and correctly following instructions, haha. So again, thank you :) My new world thanks you too, for its sexy new sunsets :P

simsample

14th Apr 2012, 11:50 PM

Well done i saw drones- we would all be interested to see some images of your skies, and of course you are welcome to share your ini files here too if you like! :)

PoisonFrog

16th Apr 2012, 01:17 AM

Finally finished the Color Ramp designer that I alluded to in an earlier post. This has what I consider to be a more accurate timeline indicator along with a layered arrangement that should significantly reduce the
time it takes to construct color ramps. All EA color ramps are included as layers...thanks to simsample for providing those.

This assumes that you have the DDS plugin.

Photoshop:
All layers are precisely aligned so as to allow fast interchanging of color ramps between layers.

Zoom to around 600%

Use selection tools(Magic Wand Tool with tolerance set to 1 & Rectangular Marquee Tool) to select the row or section of row you wish to edit on the 'Designer' layer. Copy & 'paste in place' from included EA color ramps, or design your own gradients. Use the selection tools 'add to selection'(for the wand) and 'intersect with selection'(with marquee) modes to enable multiple & partial row selection(s), respectively.

As per simsample, when you have finished with the color ramps on an image, flatten the layers, save as a 8.8.8.8 ARGB 32 bpp DDS file, with no mip maps.
Maybe an easier way to do this would be to open up the DDS file you are replacing and copy and 'paste into place' the final flattened PSD image and simply select save.

Also, the original weather type and last 3 instance characters of the original files are used as layer names where applicable.

Let me know if there are any corrections I need to make...
:sheep:

4-18-12 Updated

I've uploaded a new version that includes a graph overlay, a flashbar builder and override package along with other tweaks...
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/35278_12041814240901.jpg

http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/35279_12041814275902.jpg
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/35280_12041814282203.jpg
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/35281_12041814284304.jpg

I'll be writing a tutiorial for this in the upcoming weeks, but for now I should mention that if you want to alter a section of one of the included EA colour bars there are two ways:
The first is to simply select the colour bar section you want to change with the Rectangular Marquee Tool(Photoshop), add a new layer and then use the Gradient Tool inside the selection...this will make an abrupt blend.
The second way is to select the full colour bar and then add opacity stops set to 0% to both ends of your gradient and apply in a new layer...this results in a smooth blend.
By putting your alterations in new layers, you have the ability to shift them laterally to get perfect timing using Edit>Free Transform with the altered layer selected.

Note: The included Weather Override uses the 7529C26EE8E2A9E6 dds(all other weather profiles have been deactivated) and is nominally set for full blackout...you need to replace the dds in S3PE with one that has a colour bar or flash bar in the slot you want to research.
:)

simsample

16th Apr 2012, 05:32 PM

Looks interesting! I can see that this will be handy. Would you be prepared to write a tutorial with pictures? If so, we could put this in the tutorials section. :)

PoisonFrog

16th Apr 2012, 06:59 PM

Looks interesting! I can see that this will be handy. Would you be prepared to write a tutorial with pictures? If so, we could put this in the tutorials section. :)

Yes, I could do that. It will probably be 3-4 weeks, though, as I'm just starting to get seriously into weather structures. I want to create some custom weather flavor packs...and have some other research/experimentation to do. Good graphics and intelligible scribbling comes slow to me, too.
:turtle:

Do you think the Medieval ramps should be included? There's one set posted somewhere on this forum. Is there more than one Medieval world?

simsample

16th Apr 2012, 09:47 PM

Sure, you could include the Medieval ramps- to my knowledge there's only one set, but I don't have Medieval so perhaps someone else could confirm. :)

i saw drones

17th Apr 2012, 12:43 AM

I did some tests to see what each of the layers on the ramp does, and I came up with an admittedly pretty crappily labeled ramp. Some things I am not sure about, and could probably think of better descriptions for some of them, but it's a start at least :)
http://i251.photobucket.com/albums/gg318/i_saw_drones/ColourRampTemplate.jpg

I did notice that things like the colour of haze which is reflected on the water is different in 2 directions, with one layer each, and I think that is the same for clouds too, so you can have gray clouds in one direction and pink clouds in the other if you want. Its all very customisable, and I loved seeing what tiny tweaks made a big difference in the look.

Working with the colour ramps has been much much easier for me, possibly because working with colour in general is easier for me than with hex or RGB numbers etc.

And here is a little video of my partly cloudy colour ramp in action
http://awesims.tumblr.com/post/21235621479/sunset-partly-cloudy-sorry-i-know-its-a-little

PoisonFrog

17th Apr 2012, 12:59 AM

That's the most comprehensive description I've seen so far. I wonder how the bars correlate to the RGBs in the basegame ini files.

Edit:
That gives me an idea...make a colour bar that alternates between two colors(say yellow and red) on each progressive pixel(which equals 12 sim minutes), this should create a flashing effect ingame at high speeds and make it easier to study each individual bars function.

Edit 2:
Made a test package with this colour ramp and set the game speed to ultra. The first bar looks like it's terrain lighting...
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/35271_120416231736Flash-Bar-1.jpg
I'll make an override for each of the 21 colour bars, and upload the full set tomorrow for anyone wanting to research...
:)

i saw drones

17th Apr 2012, 02:02 AM

To get to this stage I went through bar by bar changing the colours to solid neons to visibly see what each thing did. Some bars are more opaque than others, some are blended with other layers to create mixed effects, especially the clouds which have quite a few bars of varying opacities

simsample

17th Apr 2012, 10:27 AM

Good idea with the flashing bar, PoisonFrog! I'll have to try that out, I made the ramp bars neon like i saw drones suggests, but even then some were not detectable.

i saw drones, I've linked to your colour ramp guide in the first posts, and I've linked to PoisonFrog's Photoshop template too. Thank you both for those! :)

PoisonFrog

17th Apr 2012, 03:59 PM

I'll put information as to the function of the 21 colour bars here. If anyone has info to add, let me know. Here are some preliminary findings, I'll update periodically...

Colour Bar Functions:

Light Colors

1) Directional light and shadows...normal time cycle. This is based on the suns current position in the sky. Needs to be darkened before sunset or there is an abrupt shift in light/shadow direction when the source changes from sun to moon.
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/35297_120419152106Bar-1-43.jpg

2) Ambient light...may be Bloom. Seems to be a 12 hr per color cycle & limited to 2 colors. Looks to be the main nighttime luminance in EA colour ramps. I used a blue/white flashbar in these pics...
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/35299_120419154636Bar-2-day.jpg
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/35300_120419154703Bar-2-night.jpg

3) Indirect/Reflected sunlight? Horizontal lighting..strong on trees, sides of building structures and steep
terrain..weak elsewhere. Not a normal time cycle. Usually pretty dark in the EA worlds.
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/35282_120418170022Bar-3-703.jpg

Water Colors

4) Water color...uses a normal time cycle, so it's possible to have many color changes throughout a 24
hour period.
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/35301_120419161042Bar-4-cheeselake.jpg

5) Sun & Moon Reflections on Water...normal time cycle. This pic is a yellow moon reflection...
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/35308_120420162337Bar-5-59.jpg

Sun Colors

6) Sun color...normal time cycle.
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/35283_120418173445Bar-6-4.jpg

7) Halo color...May not be activated. Found this in the 0x5E20253AF53E517F.ini: SunHaloRadius = 0 //this does not do anything
I have checked twice with differing parameters and found no color detection in photoshop.

Sky Colors

8) SkyLight > Sky mid region...normal time cycle. Exhibits nighttime color banding problems. Strongest influence near sun. All 4 of these components are most prominent at sunrise/sunset.
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/35284_120418182924Bar-8-7.jpg

9) HorizonLight > normal time cycle...banding. Strongest influence near sun.
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/35285_120418185958Bar-9-9.jpg

10) SkyDark > Sky mid & top regions...normal time cycle..banding. Although the pic doesn't show it well, the dome of the sky is red, too. I made a camera mod some time ago that increases pitch, so I can see it...no sense posting a pure red pic, however. Strongest influence away from sun.
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/35286_120418192151Bar-10-13.jpg

11) HorizonDark > normal time cycle..banding. Strongest influence away from sun.
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/35287_120418194933Bar-11-15.jpg

**************************************************************

*See note 1 below*
SkyDark, SkyLight, HorizonLight, HorizonDark was the component order in the basegame ini's. While the light/dark is hard to call due to interpolation and locational blending...the sky/horizon differentiators are easy to spot and clearly don't match up with the early ini orderings. Components 9 & 11 in this group are horizons as evidenced by the screenshots, which were posted after testing of each bar to avoid errors. Bar 9 would be named SkyLight if I used their order and bar 10 would be HorizonLight.
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/35310_120421002049Bar-9-108.jpg

As to the light/dark nomenclature, here is a screenshot at the beginning of the sunset with bar 8 yellow. The top is the sunset, the bottom is the diametrically opposed region at the same time. Since the yellow is strongest by the sun, that would make bar 8 SkyLight following the rules layed out in note 1. It would then follow that bar 10 is SkyDark. http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/35311_120421145149Bar-8-110.jpg

Finally, a screenshot of bar 11 with sunset top, and diametrically opposed region bottom. Again following the rules laid out in note 1, that would make this HorizonDark, and subsequently bar 9 would be HorizonLight.
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/35312_120421155605Bar-11-114.jpg

Cloud Colors 1

12) ColorWRTSunDark This bar is the darkest of the 5 at night, even darker than the shadow bar on EA colour ramps...so it would have to be SunDark..and it follows that 14 is then HorizonDark

13) ColorWRTSunLight The sky dome has clouds showing green here, that's how I know its sky and bar 14 is horizon.
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/[email protected][/email]
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/[email protected][/email]

14) ColorWRTHorizonDark

15) ColorWRTHorizonLight
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/35316_120422004954Bar-15-135.jpg

16) ColorWRTShadow You can tell by looking at the EA colour ramps that this is shadow

*See note 2 below*
There are 2 similar ini files in the basegame(Sky_Clear1 & Sky_Clear2), so components 12 - 16 & 17 - 21 should both be cloud colorings. WRT=WithRespectTo methinks...

Cloud Colors 2

17) ColorWRTSunDark

18) ColorWRTSunLight

19) ColorWRTHorizonDark

20) ColorWRTHorizonLight

21) ColorWRTShadow

*See note 2 below*
I haven't figured out why they have duplicated the cloud components or how to determine under what circumstance(s) each set will be used.

Notes:

[1] Taken from Sky_ClearSky.ini in basegame:

Sky Colors

These are the colors used for the sky. There
are 'dark' and 'light' components to the sky
color, which correspond to the sun's position
in the sky. These are interpolated across the
sky so that the position where the sun is
gets the 'light' color and the position
opposite the sun gets the 'dark' color. The
light and dark colors are in turn blended
from day, sunset and night colors.

**************************************************************

Horizon Colors

These colors are used for the sky at the
horizon. They work the same as the Sky color
with Day/Sunset/Night plus Light/Dark
variations. The results of sky and horizon
blends are in turn blended together based on
the pixel's altitude from the horizon line.

[2] Taken from the Sky_Clear1.ini file in basegame:

Cloud Colors

Clouds' color is obtained by interpolating between two values: color based on just the position of
of the sun (ColorWRTSun) and the color based on how close the cloud is to the horizon (ColorWRTHorizon).
The "ColorWRTHorizon" color component dominates when the cloud is near the horizon and the "ColorWRTSun" color
component dominates when the cloud is elsewhere (i.e., away from the horizon). The horizon component is
useful to give a different coloring for the cloud when it is near the horizon.

The "ColorWRTSun" and the "ColorWRTHorizon" components in turn are obtained by interpolation as discussed below.

Cloud's color considering only its position relative to the sun ("ColorWRTSun")

"ColorWRTSunLight" is used when the cloud is exactly at the position of the sun and "ColorWRTSunDark"
is used when the cloud is diametrically opposite to the sun. The actual values for "ColorWRTSunLight" and
"ColorWRTSunDark" vary over the course of the 24-hour day cycle and are obtained by blending the values specified for the
times of day.

**************************************************************

[This precedes the two horizon components and has no heading-PoisonFrog]

Cloud's color based on which half of the hemisphere it occupies relative to the sun.
This color term only has a strong effect on horizon clouds.

It is only strongly polarized to Light or Dark when the sun is also near the horizon.
During midday the horizon clouds will take an average of the Light and Dark values.

HorizonLight is used when the sun is shining from behind the clouds.
HorizonDark is used when the clouds are diametrically opposed from from the sun.

SommarBlomma

20th Apr 2012, 12:27 PM

I successfully incorporated Twinbrook INI files into a world I'm working on, because Twinbrook weather seems to be a bit duller than default, I wanted this look in my world. Well, I see the cahnges in how the sky and water looks, but suddenly i noticed a strange thing: I see the borders of the world, the sea bed is green (well, it has to be green, as I use Starlight Shores light grass as my basic layer, but the sea bed was not visible before, and now the water is so transparent. Looks ugly. What shall I do about that? Or is it just a glitch?
Here's the screenshot

simsample

20th Apr 2012, 01:39 PM

Thanks for your input, PoisonFrog- I've added a link in the first posts. Very useful, your images will help a lot! :)

@SommarBlomma- Do you have the Twinbrook colour ramps imported too? If you have some files missing you can get strange results with the water transparency.

If you are sure you have all of the Twinbrook files in, then try importing S3_1F886EAD_00000000_D89F9D186B7BB372%%+_INI.ini from Bridgeport in as well- but edit the WaterDepthFactor to 10 or greater to see if that will obscure your sea bed.

SommarBlomma

20th Apr 2012, 02:59 PM

That seems to be the same in original Twinbrook, too. I opened its lite version in CAw, changed the base layer to that texture, and there was such a transparent sea bed on the outskirts of Twinbrook, too, maybe the water there is such transparent. In Twinbrook and in my world it looks the same: transparent, with small vawes, and very reflective at some angles. Anyway, I'll try that with Bridgeport file.
And one more question: will Twinbrook INI files cause earthquakes to happen in my custom world? (should have thought about it before importing files, just forgot)

simsample

20th Apr 2012, 04:38 PM

Well, there is no change to the water transparency in the Twinbrook files, as the file that governs that (S3_1F886EAD_00000000_D89F9D186B7BB372%%+_INI.ini) is absent. So Twinbrook uses the default setting which is WaterDepthFactor=10. However, the Twinbrook fog distance is set to be close on some of the weather types, which means that the fog affects the water (making it foggy but transparent, and removing the water 'murk' which the WaterDepthFactor controls). Adding the Bridgeport water file will allow you to change the default setting of the WaterDepthFactor but whether it is enough to counteract the fog settings, I don't know. If it fails then you have two remaining choices- 1) Make your water deeper and paint the seabed, 2) Change the fog distances for each weather type.

For changing the fog distances, if you look at the Twinbrook Clear file 9S3_1F886EAD_00000000_967BC6C3B3808C00%%+_INI.ini) you will see this:
[FogDistance1]
start = 10
end = 3000
curve = 1
timeOfDay = 1

[FogDistance2]
start = 30
end = 2500
curve = 1
timeOfDay = 6

[FogDistance3]
start = 30
end = 4500
curve = 1
timeOfDay = 8

[FogDistance4]
start = 30
end = 4500
curve = 1
timeOfDay = 16

[FogDistance5]
start = 30
end = 4000
curve = 1
timeOfDay = 18

[FogDistance6]
start = 10
end = 3000
curve = 1
timeOfDay = 20

The start figures are very low; 10-30. If you experiment with raising those figures (100-500 perhaps) then you'll see that the water will become less transparent/fog affected, and the water 'murk' will take over. You just have to find the start and end point that gives the effect you are after.

For the earthquake question- No, these files have nothing to do with that. Earthquakes happen with the Firefighter profession, I think.

levini

29th Apr 2012, 10:38 PM

I do not know if this issue was addressed (I read but didnt find anything about it) but I am having a problem, When I import the ini files and ramps from any EA world, I get this
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/35379_120429171845Screenshot-2.jpg. It only appears when I zoom in to the lots. BTW, I did not edit the ini or the Ramps at all in this world.

simsample

2nd May 2012, 05:22 PM

Which files exactly are you importing, levini?

Conorsim

5th May 2012, 06:47 PM

PoisonFrog

5th May 2012, 07:12 PM

Hi :)

I'm just wondering, is there a way to reverse or undo, if you've added files to a world (for experimentation, of course) and now you want to try new ones? Previously I've just backed up the world file and experimented, replacing the original world file back etc etc. But is there a way to just ... wipe all the changes? I hope that makes sense.

I do my weather as override packages. You can turn them on/off by renaming the file from WeatherTest_001.package to WeatherTest_001.page as an example. That way you can keep as many weather configurations as needed, and activate them quickly. They can also be embedded in a world file...and they are easy to share.
:duck:

GoofyGirl17

6th May 2012, 10:04 PM

So I've been customizing my world using the bridgeport INI files and color ramps,and the only thing I've really had a problem with is my water. I've finally, after soooo many times, gotten the color I wanted for my water. However, the water is really transparent. I can see so much of the seabed and everything. The color of my water is visible but only at the "bottom" of the water (if that makes sense?). I raised and lowered the WaterDepthFactor and achieved very little effect. I then saw an old thread about changing the fog distances. I raised and lowered the start distances but it made little difference. If I changed the ends, my water color changed to a totally different color :( And ofcourse, making the start and ends the same, results in extreme fogginess and blurriness. SO that didnt work either. I compared all of the other wheather files and all of the numbers are very inconsistent and I dont understand the pattern (if there is one). I am using the Custom file since that is the only file that achieved the water color effect I wanted (why? Idk), therefore, the end numbers are all the same, at 1000. My question is: What do I need to set the fog distance numbers to in order to have the same water level/opacity of a Clear or Partly Cloudy file, and not have that transparency??? As of now, I am stuck and don't know what to do. Please help. Thanks

simsample

7th May 2012, 12:04 PM

Just delete the files, Conor. Open the world in S3Pe and sort by tag, then remove any with the _INI tag. Also, remove the colour ramps- they look like this:
http://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/5/2/8/4/8/MTS_simsample-1228760-Bluefunk_00329-Aug-1102.04.jpg
Sort by type and then group to find those easily.

@GoofyGirl17- I merged your post with this thread, since you are asking a question on this topic. :)

To have opaque water, make sure the S3_1F886EAD_00000000_D89F9D186B7BB372%%+_INI.ini has WaterDepthFactor = 10; this is the default value. Then try making the fog start at 500 and end at 2000. That should give you the water colour back. If you want less fog or no fog at all, try copying the fog figures from the basegame Sky_ClearLight.ini file.

Mmonroe

29th May 2012, 09:03 PM

Hi! I've been lurking for a while now, and I've tried making my sky more sunny/saturated/bright, but I ended up with green skies instead lol.
You guys seem to be great at this! Perhaps could you upload a mod or something for a more hued/tropical sky/water for download? I've seen a few on here, but they're not as good /sunny enough. I know a few people that would like to have prettier skies aswell, but it's hard to do! if you don't take requests,thanks anyway, the explanation is very detailed (:

simsample

8th Jun 2012, 01:29 PM

Mmonroe, this thread is designed to help you to create your own! It would be no fun if we were to just give you the files, would it? :lol:

Anyway, there are already a few custom weather/ sky mods uploaded to this site, if you care to peruse the downloads section. If there is something specific you are stuck on with making your own files, perhaps you could show us some pictures and upload your files, so that we can take a look and help you?

Ketheira

10th Jun 2012, 03:25 PM

Hey! I just tried the color ramps out. Here's a pictre of the one I used:
http://imgur.com/aoP9F.png

But I ran straight into a problem the first time I opened my world in CAW (and I still can't see what it is, after reading the whole post again... and again). Sorry guys I have to ask you about this. This is how I work before the problem shows:

1. First I make sure the world is looking correct in CAW (I have not exported it yet, I only test it in CAW) if not, I replace it with the backup files.
2. I go into Photoshop and make the color ramp the way I want it.
3. I save the .dds and this is how it looks like...
http://imgur.com/pfRLW.pnghttp://imgur.com/edQH5.png

4. After saving I start S3PE and open up my test-world.
5. I enter Resource > Import > From File and choose my .dds-file(s).
http://i.imgur.com/nv7ta.pnghttp://i.imgur.com/336Si.png

I tried naming all 5 types of weather-ramps just in case at one point, but still I get the greenish result.

6. Then I Save and open the world in CAW. And it sure has changed, just not the way I wanted it to. The water it so transparent you can see straight to the bottom, and when I look from above the water it looks really green:
http://i.imgur.com/z5aVN.png
From a lower point of view though - it just snaps into normal color again (though the water is still more or less fully transparent).

What is it that I do wrong? :help:
PS. I know this probably is a very long post for a really small problem, but I put up all the images and info anyway. Better safe than sorry so to say. :rolleyes: I hope you've got all you need to help me out here.
Also I tried to use the Appalosa Plains color ramp that I downloaded as well (and saved the same way as the others) but still the same result. I have to replace the backups to make it normal again every time.

bryannam97

12th Jun 2012, 08:34 PM

Okay so I think I understand all the steps but I cant seem to find ProgramFiles/ElectronicArts/TheSims3/Gamedata/Shared/Nonpackaged/Ini. So I go to Documents/ElectronicArts/Thesims3 and there is no gamedata file in there.? And I realize Documents isnt ProgramFiles but I dont understand by what it means by ProgramFiles. Please reconsider these direction thank you very much!!

bryannam97

18th Jun 2012, 08:38 PM

Im stuck on the part on how to add your custom water to one and only one world.
When i go into s3pe and try to open my [already exported] world by going to Documents/ElectronicArts/TheSims3/InstalledWorlds its not there. i guess i never REALLY installed it but how would i install it? please and thanks

auntielynds

19th Jun 2012, 03:17 AM

Once you export your world, a .sims3pack is generated in your Sims 3 Exports folder. Double click it, and it will install to your game. Installing your World without Uploading to the Exchange (http://customsims3.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=127)

Arisuka

28th Jun 2012, 01:02 AM

My goodness this all seems so complicated... Well, it's time to sink or sail! :lol:
So I have a northern, coastal themed world. I'm currently using Simsample's Jericho .ini-files, which I love! But I'd just want to add a bit more aerial mist to the air, for a really coastal feel.
To explain, I took two pics in CAW with the 'Time of Day' tool!

So in this first picture the air is really foggy, but still the objects can be seen very clearly.
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/36407_120627195306SkyExample1.jpg

The thing I'd want want is in this second picture. The air looks more misty, and also, the objects seem to look misty too.
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/36408_120627195336SkyExample2.jpg

Any ideas what to tweak and how to add/decrease the mist in the air...? :blink:

Kiwimaus

30th Jun 2012, 12:24 PM

Here are the files from Lucky Palms.
Simsample, if you want, you can take the file in your third post :)

This thread is great !

simsample

1st Jul 2012, 02:26 PM

@Ketheira- that green colour usually occurs when you have a colour ramp loaded without its corresponding INI file. Make sure you have all necessary files imported, see the first posts for details.

@bryannam97- if you want to make an override for one world only, you do not need to use the files from the game installation- just use the files attached to post #3 to start with, and edit those. Full details in that post also:
http://modthesims.info/showpost.php?p=3679971&postcount=3

@Arisuka- You need to change the fog distances in one or more of the ini files:
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_560C0FD7012DA7F3%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_967BC6C3B3808C00%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_FE1F6A95A24A604A%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_2C02B3532B64EB49%%+_INI.ini
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_8DEA7AE7631A026A%%+_INI.ini

Each of those files corresponds to one weather type, so if you want constant for you would make them all foggy, but for occasional for you would make only one or two foggy. For Jericho I have one stormy, one foggy but light, one foggy but dark and two relatively fog free weathers. The fog distance varies too, so that they are different degrees of fogginess- only one of them has close fog, so that the water looks foggy too.

As a guideline, look at the images in this album to see what the fog distances will do.
http://s7.photobucket.com/albums/y288/Bluefunk/Sims%203/SeaSky_Parameters/
The name of the files gives the figures I used- for example, Start500End5000.jpg means I used a start distance of 500 and an end distance of 5000 to get that effect, like this:
[FogDistance1]
start = 500
end = 5000
curve = 1
timeOfDay = 1

Note that if you have very close fog, for example start 100 end 500, you will see that the water becomes transparent and takes on the colour of the fog. This may or may not be desirable!

The images that have names beginning with FogCurve are showing the effects of changing the fog curve figure. Yes, I have images for all of the sea/sky parameters, but haven't had time yet to write up a proper tutorial. It's on my list of things to do, number three after live and earn money, I promise! :lol:

Note that there is a time of day parameter too; that relates to hours so timeOfDay = 16 gives the fogginess at 4PM. I think you could add or remove sets of fog numbers according to how you want it to change, so for example if you wanted to specify that it gets foggy once every two hours, you could insert blocks of numbers and change the time of day to specify this. But remember the more changes you have, the more it will lag on low-end machines.

Remember also that the ProbabilityWeight will determine how often you see that weather type!

@Kiwimaus- Thank you! I added it to the first post, very useful. I really want that world! :)

Edited to add: Is it me, or does Lucky Palms only have four weather files, but five ramps? Kiwimaus, could you please check whether you missed an ini file? Thanks!

Kiwimaus

1st Jul 2012, 06:18 PM

I have sorted by type and found these nine ini-files (see screenshot)

The ini-file S3_1F886EAD_00000000_8DEA7AE7631A026A%%+_INI.ini
is not included in Lucky Palms.

simsample

1st Jul 2012, 06:41 PM

How odd; I've just been gifted this world so I looked at my copy too, and it definitely isn't there. We've seen the Vacation worlds which only have two colour ramps and their corresponding weather inis, but I've never seen an EA world which has five colour ramps and only four corresponding weather inis.

The S3_00B2D882_0076A684_F0A86F660985BF20%%+_IMG.dds ramp is there, so the 8DEA should definitely be present. If the game tries to randomly select that 'Overcast' weather, there could be some strange effects seen- usually a colour ramp without the INI will cause an undesirable tint to the world.

Fiona=hazel

8th Jul 2012, 12:39 AM

To all of you who wrote this:

Thank you.

Since ive never ever did anything in sp3e other than changing values. this is such a success for me. Ive tried, and tried to get rid of that creepy Bridgeport water color, and finally did it.

So, even though It may not be an official tutorial, everything you wrote works magically :) It took me time *5hrs to read and understand, actually its written in simple words :)

Once again, from a pure beginner - THANK YOU

simsample@ you are such a nice guy!

simsample

8th Jul 2012, 09:15 PM

Well done for making it work, Fiona=hazel! Don't forget to show us some pictures! ;)

Thanks for the nice words. :)

Ketheira

14th Jul 2012, 06:43 PM

After some help I finally saw where to download the .ini files and now it looks great!
http://i.imgur.com/pDemK.png
Now I only need to make the weather effects, and change whichever of the .ini files that create the weather changes every hour (or export the original), and I'm done with my Survival Island. Thanks for a great thread! :up:

simsample

17th Jul 2012, 06:04 PM

Nice work, Ketheira! It looks great. :)

You could share your ini files in this thread, if you were so inclined. ;)

simsample

19th Jul 2012, 09:25 PM

For everyone currently making custom weather for their world, this little object may help you.

cmomoney has made a Time & Weather Change Mod (http://modthesims.info/download.php?t=481816) which can be used to switch between your weather types. So, you can view all five of your colour ramps in-game without having to wait for the skies to cycle randomly!

kiwi_tea

23rd Jul 2012, 07:24 PM

Has another had an experience where the entire world becomes purple/fushia upon shifting to a new tuning? I had this one in Port Piston but it disappeared. Now it's happening in Grimschurch, and I've seen others report it.

It doesn't happen consistently. I keep checking if I'm missing a colour ramp or something, but don't seem to be.

simsample

25th Jul 2012, 03:07 PM

@kiwi_tea- which colour ramps and ini files are you using? Could you attach them or send them to me so that I can take a look at them? What I'm thinking is that you have a ramp in there that is giving you this effect, as EA did one like this.

kiwi_tea

28th Jul 2012, 07:11 AM

Was it Bridgeport? Currently I'm using Bridgeports with *very* minimal tweaks.

simsample

2nd Aug 2012, 04:50 PM

Yes, Bridgeport is one that has the purple sky with green shadows for the 'special/custom' weather type.
http://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/5/2/8/4/8/MTS_simsample-1313415-S3_00B2D882_0076A684_28C841C9462BCDE0.jpg

S3_00B2D882_0076A684_28C841C9462BCDE0%%+_IMG.dds

kiwi_tea

3rd Aug 2012, 06:01 AM

Right. I've obviously got muddled and set it to appear inappropriately and VERY rarely. 0-0 Thanks simsample.

simsample

3rd Aug 2012, 06:11 AM

If you don't like it, substitute it for another one- that ramp is a bit odd, I have to admit! But it's fun to have an unusual weather pattern appear very occasionally, so maybe use one of the files from the other EA worlds (Lunar Lakes maybe) as a basis for your very rare weather type. Even setting the probability weight to zero won't prevent the weather from showing at least once in a while, so you're better off having a sky that you like in there!

crazstar

5th Aug 2012, 01:00 AM

Hi, I was wondering if I wanted to just change the night sky of a world with custom weather to let's say, lucky palms, which file is responsible for the night sky?

kiwi_tea

5th Aug 2012, 12:50 PM

So it turns out that the "special" weather I can't tune away is not supposed to occur in normal gameplay.

Does that actually occur in normal game circumstances? No mods that might be mucking things up? I'm pretty sure I know what you're talking about, and I believe it was something we implemented for the mummies curse in World Adventures where the sky turns crazy colors and the clouds go a little nuts. It was never intended to occur outside of those conditions.

SimGuruGraham

So just to confirm, I'm not the only one who on VERY rare occasions has been struck by this during normal play?

Also, it sounds like it's plausible that Bridgeport's sea opacity is supposed to be tuned to 10 like all the others, not 1.

Also the non-loading cloud layer is fixed in Seasons.

simsample

5th Aug 2012, 04:19 PM

Hi, I was wondering if I wanted to just change the night sky of a world with custom weather to let's say, lucky palms, which file is responsible for the night sky?
Hey crazstar, it's tricky to change just the night sky with the colour ramps, as they control the gradient of the lighting throughout the whole day. Take a look at this ramp:
http://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/5/2/8/4/8/MTS2_simsample_1205937_S3_00B2D882_0076A684_7529C26EE8E2A9E6_IMG.jpg
See the numbers underneath, those indicate the times of day (0600- 6am; 1200- midday; 1800- 6pm; 2400 or 0- midnight). And each little stipe of colour indicates an aspect of the sea/sky/lighting, so one shows the light colours for the sky, one for the shadows, one for the sea depth colour. So, if you look at the 6 and 18 positions, you will see that these positions correspond to sunrise and sunset, so you can see that some of the stripes have orange colours at this position, because the sea reflections, sky and shadows will change colour at those times. So, to change just the night colour, you need to change the stripes at the point between sunset and sunrise (1800 to 0600 through midnight). That is difficult to do in a photoediting program as the transition has to be a smooth gradient (fade from one colour to another with no 'seams' or 'jumps'). You might find it easier to just make the entire gradient from scratch, or change the hue/saturation of the entire colour ramp (or one stripe). Also, the colours at night are all very close to black- you can just make out dark blue in some of those stripes, but making a subtle change will have a big impact on the feel of the world.

Another thing you could do, if you are planning to make an override for the basegame weather (so one that shows up in all worlds unless they have a custom sea/sky, like Bridgeport) is to edit the basegame colour files, as those have RGB values instead of colour ramps, so the game does the transitioning itself from one RGB value to the next. This thread may help with that:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=388840
You need to change the sky colours as opposed to the water colours, so you'll be looking at the Sky_{skytype}Light.ini files.

If you are just wanting to change the skies for a single world though, I would definitely recommend colour ramps as that is how EA have done it (and so you know it will most likely still work with Seasons!).

So it turns out that the "special" weather I can't tune away is not supposed to occur in normal gameplay.

Does that actually occur in normal game circumstances? No mods that might be mucking things up? I'm pretty sure I know what you're talking about, and I believe it was something we implemented for the mummies curse in World Adventures where the sky turns crazy colors and the clouds go a little nuts. It was never intended to occur outside of those conditions. -SimGuruGraham

So just to confirm, I'm not the only one who on VERY rare occasions has been struck by this during normal play?

Also, it sounds like it's plausible that Bridgeport's sea opacity is supposed to be tuned to 10 like all the others, not 1.

Also the non-loading cloud layer is fixed in Seasons.
Not sure I agree with SimGuruGraham here- for a start, the purple colour ramp is not even present in the vacation worlds, as they all have just two colour ramps (clear and partly cloudy) and so will use the basegame default for the other weathers (although the default probability weight for the other weathers is zero). So theoretically you would see orange sky for the vacation worlds, not the magenta. You can see the orange sky in Cmo's 'orange sky' image here:
http://thumbs2.modthesims.info/img/2/5/4/5/4/5/7/MTS_cmomoney-1309151-redovercastdawn.jpg
There is nothing in the vacation world files that links to the magenta colour ramp.

Does he perhaps mean that each world has a special sky for the Mummy's curse? That would make sense- Bridgeport, Twinbrook, Lunar Lakes, Lucky Palms etc., all have the magenta ramp- and all have the probability set to zero for that (so you shouldn't see it normally). However, you pointed out that you were seeing this sky in Cmo's thread:
http://modthesims.info/showpost.php?p=3914010&postcount=89
Which means that you were using a mod that affects this; so your results will not be as in the unmodded game. And if you are playing a world with custom ramps then you do have mods that will affect this. Also, if you have tweaked your probabilities in your colour ramps then you could possibly see the custom/special sky. What is the probability weight for that ramp set to in your world?

About the sea opacity- what makes you think that? Bridgeport actually has an extra ini file, in which this is the only figure changed- so I think it unlikely that it was a mistake. As Bridgeport has the grey, murky water I always assumed that they made the WaterDepthFactor less to make the 'murk' show up more. Though, if you are referring to the way that the water goes transparent when there is fog present then that is down to the fog distance- you can see that in action here, where the image names indicate the start and finish fog distances:
http://s7.photobucket.com/albums/y288/Bluefunk/Sims%203/SeaSky_Parameters/
I think there is a rendering conflict- the game can't render the water depth colour and fog colour sinultaneously, so one has to take precedent. On my current PC with an NVidia card, that is the fog, although it always looked slightly different on my old Radeon.

kiwi_tea

6th Aug 2012, 12:37 AM

Okay, thanks for an informative response and set of corrections.

Primarily problem is that I've had the purple sky crop up before, in custom worlds, without using cmo's mod. Very rarely, though. When it first happened, in Port Piston during normal gameplay after export, I thought my video card had died. Probability weight of 0.0, which should eliminate it, right? I've double and triple and quadruple checked that that's the setting I'm on many times.

And right. Graham said the opacity issues were possibly a rendering issue, so that was probably what he meant.

simsample

6th Aug 2012, 02:21 PM

Looking at it again, I think he's definitely meaning that the 'special/custom' sky will show up only during the mummy curse- so that's great to know! :) Thanks for the information Kiwi.

Primarily problem is that I've had the purple sky crop up before, in custom worlds, without using cmo's mod. Very rarely, though.
What probability weight was used for the 'special/custom' sky on those worlds? In my custom worlds I've played with all of the probabilities, and have it so that all five sky types will show up often. But in the EA worlds and vacation worlds I don't think I've ever had the custom sky show up in normal gameplay- and I played Sunset and Bridgeport for several generations. They all have probability weight of 0.0 for the 'special/custom' sky.

Probability weight of 0.0, which should eliminate it, right? I've double and triple and quadruple checked that that's the setting I'm on many times.
Well, I'm not sure about that, either. I assumed that if the probability figure was a true probability, then they would have called it just 'probability'. The fact that they have called it 'probability weight' led me to think that it may not be a true probability- so 1 does not mean certain and 0 does not mean impossible. I'm thinking from what I've seen that the 'probability weight' just makes something more or less likely- so 0=very unlikely and 1=very common. For sure, having a sky with a probability weight of 1.0 does not mean that you'll never see any other sky type! But I haven't managed to get a 0 probability weight weather to show up- although that could mean that it's just very very unlikely, not that it's impossible. The fact that you say you're seeing it points to this, too. So it could be that EA just never tested their worlds for long enough to see it happen! Another thing that occurred to me is that I don't know the scale of the probability weight- again, I'm assuming that it is 0.0-1.0 because that's the range seen on the EA ini files, but it's possible that you could use negative numbers- I've never tested this. Some of the parameters in the ini files have a remark next to them giving detail, but not for the probability weighting. And, it could be a relative figure- so if you have five inis with probability of 1, they would all show up equally (although randomly) and the same for if you weighted them all at 0. So if that were true then you'd be much less likely to see the 'special/custom' sky if it were set to 0.0 and all others set to 1.0 than you would be if you had it set to 0.0 when all others were set to 0.1. So, it's a case where we don't really understand it enough! Maybe those are some questions you could twitter to Graham! ;)

Graham said the opacity issues were possibly a rendering issue, so that was probably what he meant.
Not sure what they could do about that; wait for hardware (or maybe drivers) to catch up perhaps!

crazstar

7th Aug 2012, 04:34 AM

Thank you for the information! I guess I'll have to experiment a bit :)

simsample

8th Aug 2012, 11:48 PM

Let us know how you get on, crazstar!

Conorsim

23rd Aug 2012, 09:36 AM

Hi simsample :)

Having a bit of bother with INI files (again). When I import them into my world, and export, the file is substantially smaller than what it should be, jumping from 90MB to 50MB. Before, there was no issues with importing the INI files into the world but now, as well as the world becoming "smaller", it refuses to load up in game ("serious error has occured".)
I'm pretty sure I'm doing everything right... but I have no idea why this is happening. I didn't modify the INIs or anything, I used the Twinbrook weather INIs and the France colour ramps (your modified one you offered me). I still don't fully understand INI files yet anyway, so I suppose there's a chance I'm doing something (obviously) wrong.

Thanks if you can help! :)

ETA: No, wait, I got it working again. Don't know how :wtf: :giggler: But anyway, just to say that the INI file you edited (the France one) so to fix the blocky textures, still has the blocky textures for me :| Just thought I'd let you know! :D

Alan_Gast

23rd Aug 2012, 03:33 PM

* hmm, that's quite strange. I'm using the new France colour ramp with China .INI files for the overcast weather type in my world and there are no blocky textures. By the way, it was a dodgy colour ramp, not an .INI file. Maybe that's your problem! ;) Try clearing your caches and re-downloading.

I'm glad you got it working, but it would be good for the future to know what caused the error so you can avoid it. Make sure you keep a backup, they definitely come in handy! I find it's best to save a tiny island, and then import your files into THAT world to see if everything is functioning correctly, before you try them out in your own world.

Conorsim

23rd Aug 2012, 06:03 PM

Hello Alan Gast :)

Really Ssorry if I'm not terming stuff right. Better than saying "thingies" :P But yes it is a colour ramp!

I'll mess around with it some more tonight when I get the chance, and I'll do what you suggested and report back. Thanks! :)

propackets

24th Aug 2012, 12:15 AM

Hi, long time lurker for several years now.

Here are the ini and color ramp files for Sunlit Tides if anyone wants them. Haven't tested yet, just did a quick extract.

No ini or ramp files present for Overcast and Partly Cloudy and Apocalypse/Custom.

Also includes the camera ini: S3_1F886EAD_00000000_7886A7F59355762F%%+_INI
so you might want to remove that if you wanna import.

Volvenom

24th Aug 2012, 09:36 AM

I have been working with this for a while. Yesterday I downloaded those programs and patches to unlock the hidden features here (http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=468279). That tutorial is great. I didn't read it on before hand, I just went on doing it. I wanted to try PoisonFog's codes for stormy clouds at the base of a mountain. It turns out to be too much for me. After all there wouldn't be any clouds or lightning in clear weather.

I have edited the sun to never really drop down below the horizon. It still does a bit, but I can see the light from the sun all the time. I think I still have something to go on there.

I'm making an island far far north with midnight sun and stormy weather. So I have been working with the waves. I need much more of them. They are a bit symmetrical and very patterned at the moment. A bit of natures randomness would be nice. The waves are also a bit harsh. How do I fix that?

I have only changed 2 color ramps so far. You can see the sun and waves below.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8427/7849673090_8052f3f640_c.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/79594931@N03/7849673090/)
Sunat01hours (http://www.flickr.com/photos/79594931@N03/7849673090/) by Volvenom (http://www.flickr.com/people/79594931@N03/), on Flickr

simsample

25th Aug 2012, 01:10 PM

But anyway, just to say that the INI file you edited (the France one) so to fix the blocky textures, still has the blocky textures for me :| Just thought I'd let you know! :D
Conor, are you using China colour ramps too? I noticed that one of the china ramps also has no alpha channel; I've uploaded it to the third post here. It has the same number as the France ramp though, so if you are using it then you would have renamed one or other of them. Try looking at the colour ramps that you are using in a photoediting program and checking whether they have a valid alpha; if you can't do that then attach them to a post here and I'll look at them for you. :)

@Alan_Gast and conor: Don't forget that Cmo's mod is great for testing out colour ramps in-game too!
http://modthesims.info/d/481816

@propackets- Thank you very much! I'll attach them to post #3 also. That's interesting that they only have the two overrides, just like they did for the WA vacation worlds. It does look as though they made this world with a vacation resort in mind- maybe they like Twallan's Traveler mod!

@Volvenom- Looks very nice so far, perhaps you would share your ini settings for the midnight sun, as I know many people would like to do that. :)

For the waves, what settings do you have so far? I know when I was changing my inis to make Jericho's water flow in a different direction, I found that if you have the BigWave angles lined up it can give choppy water, so try rotating one of them slightly.

Volvenom

25th Aug 2012, 11:19 PM

Sorry for not including the files, it was a bit late :)

I used the Bridgeport files originally. I wonder if there was something wrong with the correlation table in the 2'nd post? I wanted to get rid of the custom files for Bridgeport. So I deleted the ramp with purple and green, and the ini file labeled Custom. Hope I didn't do something wrong.

Please tell me what you think.

Conorsim

26th Aug 2012, 10:10 AM

Sample, I've now decided not to include INI files/colour ramps in the world because my plan was to upload the world today, as I'll be busy tomorrow and the next day - and then for the next 9 months! I really just want to get this world out of the way before School. I'll probably regret it but, ah sure..!

The colour ramp is the fixed France colour ramp, so I don't think that requires me to attach it here for you..? I don't know, it's strange: Alan_Ghast said he was having no issues with that colour ramp. I wasn't using the China ones at all... just the France colour ramps and the twinbrook inis. Again, I'd say it's something simple or whatever but I really have no clue :oops:

But anyway yes I've decided not to include them because with Seasons, overcast & rain will be available anyway with Spring, I'm sure. Maybe. IDK :p
Thanks again.

Alan_Gast

26th Aug 2012, 10:47 AM

If it's not too late, I put together the files you wanted, maybe you'd like to test them out?

http://www.mediafire.com/?d53p583kaop9569

Conorsim

26th Aug 2012, 11:05 AM

Hi Alan :) Wow thanks a million! The world is half uploaded in the launcher but I can easily stop it and I'll try out those files now to see how it looks, thank you!!

Edit: just tried them out there Alan, and no, I still get those blocky textures. It's a pity and I just don't understand why it's happening.. I doubt it's my graphics but you never know. My poor PC has caused a lot of graphical problems in the past but even so I still get those blocky textures on my bro's laptop too. Still, thanks so much for all your help!!

Alan_Gast

26th Aug 2012, 12:01 PM

Ugh, that's a shame! You could try it with the china colour ramp rather than the France one, IIRC they are very similar.

Also, this may sound silly, but are you remember to tick 'compress' 'replace duplicates' etc. in s3pe?

EDIT: Yep, I don't have the blocky textures. This is the same area shown in the example pic in the post (it's from my world.) I don't have them anymore...Hmm.

http://i829.photobucket.com/albums/zz216/alanmcdiddy/saywhuuut.png

simsample

26th Aug 2012, 12:26 PM

I used the Bridgeport files originally. I wonder if there was something wrong with the correlation table in the 2'nd post? I wanted to get rid of the custom files for Bridgeport. So I deleted the ramp with purple and green, and the ini file labeled Custom. Hope I didn't do something wrong.
The correlation table is correct, but I think you've got your inis mixed up. You have them labelled as follows:
clear S3_1F886EAD_00000000_FE1F6A95A24A604A%%+_INI.ini
Partly Cloudy S3_1F886EAD_00000000_967BC6C3B3808C00%%+_INI.ini
Overcast S3_1F886EAD_00000000_8DEA7AE7631A026A%%+_INI.ini
Stormy S3_1F886EAD_00000000_2C02B3532B64EB49%%+_INI.ini

They are actually as follows:
Custom S3_1F886EAD_00000000_FE1F6A95A24A604A%%+_INI.ini
Clear S3_1F886EAD_00000000_967BC6C3B3808C00%%+_INI.ini
Overcast S3_1F886EAD_00000000_8DEA7AE7631A026A%%+_INI.ini
Stormy S3_1F886EAD_00000000_2C02B3532B64EB49%%+_INI.ini

So you have your clear labelled as partly cloudy, your custom labelled as clear and no partly cloudy at all. :)

For the sea parameters, you've changed practically everything and I'm not even clear on what a lot of that stuff does! :lol: But the main bit which could be responsible for the sea looking choppy is this:
; Angles (in radians) and heights for big waves
BigWave1Angle=3.5
BigWave2Angle=2.5
BigWave1Height=0.1 ;;0.2
BigWave2Height=0.15 ;;0.3

; Time and world scales for big waves
BigWave1TimeScale=7.0
BigWave2TimeScale=12.0
BigWave1WorldScale=0.05
BigWave2WorldScale=0.1

You have it set to this:

; Angles (in radians) and heights for big waves
BigWave1Angle=1.0
BigWave2Angle=2.0
BigWave1Height=0.8 ;;1.5
BigWave2Height=0.5 ;;2.0

; Time and world scales for big waves
BigWave1TimeScale=15.0
BigWave2TimeScale=25.0
BigWave1WorldScale=1.0
BigWave2WorldScale=1.5
You've made some pretty big changes to some of those figures, such as the time scale and world scale of the waves, so what I would suggest is to modify them gradually to see what the changes are. Like, try setting the BigWave1Height at double what it was (0.2) first to see the effect. :)

I wasn't using the China ones at all... just the France colour ramps and the twinbrook inis.
Well, there are two colour ramps for France, but Twinbrook has inis for all five weather types, so that could be one cause maybe. Are you getting the blocky texture if you try other colour ramps, for example the ones from my Jericho (from the Jericho download page) or the Bridgeport files untouched?