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We’ve been busy working on technical documentation to share with you on best practices for Custom Content and Mods and details about how the game works. We’re happy to announce that this can now be found here: TS4_Custom_Content_Guide.zip
The Sims 4 is a large game, so we can’t document everything about it, but we’ve included information about a few key things we thought you’d appreciate.
We hope this accelerates your progress. Please continue to ask questions in the forums, and we will do our best to answer them.
Note that the .tdesc files in the TuningDescriptions directory are XML, i.e. human readable text files. You can also use tdesc browser.
Also note that the simsmodsquad-novelist.package included with the examples has a nonstandard compression type – if you run into issues trying to re-save that package, copy + paste its contents into a new package instead.
Quote: Originally posted by SimGuruModSquad
The reason why the re-saved package is not working is because the compression type for the records have been modified from “Internal Compression” (0xffff) to “zlib” 0x5a42. But the data has not been recompressed as zlib, so the game tries to decompress as zlib and fails. So this will be a bug in s4pe where it is not propagating the compression type properly.
I don’t think we use that “Internal Compression” compressor very much (or at all) in the shipped game packages, so that is probably why the bug has not been noticed before. The novelist package was hand created so it probably just inadvertently ended up being created with an unusual compression setting.
For an overview of other documentation published by Maxis, as well as links to the current TDESC download, see here: Maxis Info Index
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Update 2015-12-04: Tdescs for 1.13.104: post | zip
2015-11-05: Tdescs have not changed for the current patch (1.12.118), see here.
This also contains the post-patch XML tuning in the old (uncompressed) format: post | zip
Quote: Originally posted by SimGuruModSquad
As you have noticed, we changed the format of the combined binary tuning resource. As an optimization it is now in binary format, note that the game runtime still supports loading of XML.
Attached is a zip that contains the XML version of the combined tuning resource, as well as the tdesc files for version 1.5.139.
Update 2015-03-29: Combined XML tuning for EP01: post | zip Update 2015-03-29: Combined XML tuning for GP1 (Outdoor Retreat): post | zip
They were pretty stingy with resource data format descriptions. For my purposes the CASP/Part Data documentation is helpful but I wish they'd included the GEOM format among many others.
Please do not PM me with mod, tutorial, or general modding questions or problems; post them in the thread for the mod or tutorial or post them in the appropriate forum.
Visit my blogs for other Sims content: Online Sims - general mods for Sims 3 Offline Sims - adult mods for Sims 3 and Sims 4
I suspect part of why it is more complete in one area than another is probably the people involved. I'm guessing we got the programmer who did the python integration and probably not the designers of those file formats. I'm rather happy so far with what we got. I've been part of many modding communities and most companies are very closed when it comes to file formats and modding. I remember getting help from the NWN2 team for the binormal and tangent calculations and that was cool but we didn't get much documentation for mesh file formats.
Here we actually got an example though unfortunately it did not actually work out of the box. It can always be better and it would be great if they can help more. I think if we can make a concrete list of exact pain points we will likely have a better shot at getting that information.
To me it seems the not-working-out-of-box-ness is the same issue that they asked about on the forums recently – so when they’re saying now that they'll fix this with a patch soon, that's actually very positive news in my eyes =).
I can only recommend going there and asking them specific questions – the ModSquad account (not sure if it’s always the same person) has been very straightforward and responsive so far. Also about things he couldn’t answer himself (e.g. lot sizes); he said he’d check and get back, and he did.
Stuff for TS2 · TS3 · TS4 | Please do not PM me with technical questions – we have Create forums for that.
So how does one open the xml files to edit them, and where are they?
The documentation only provides examples of creating new xml files, not editing the combined Maxis ones (as editing them would cause the tuning mod to be incompatible with any other mod that edits the Maxis files and, apparently, create longer load times).
The combined XML tuning file mentioned in the tutorial is 0x62E94D38-0x00000000-0xF1352E740C4710BA in SimulationDeltaBuild0.package in case someone hasn't found it yet. As mentioned in the document, it shouldn't be overridden directly, but I found it useful to just copy and paste from there as basis for my changes instead of creating from scratch.
#8
7th Sep 2014 at 10:26 PM
Last edited by livinginfinite : 7th Sep 2014 at 10:40 PM.
Posts: 2
Quote: Originally posted by velocitygrass
The combined XML tuning file mentioned in the tutorial is 0x62E94D38-0x00000000-0xF1352E740C4710BA in SimulationDeltaBuild0.package in case someone hasn't found it yet. As mentioned in the document, it shouldn't be overridden directly, but I found it useful to just copy and paste from there as basis for my changes instead of creating from scratch.
That's very helpful, thanks for that.
Has anyone found a good way to find the ID for various things? (Such as from the novelist example, statistic_Skill_AdultMajor_Writing has ID 16714)
EDIT: Okay, I found what I was looking for by ctrl+f'ing the aforementioned combined XML tuning file. That is a seriously huge text file!
The combined XML tuning file mentioned in the tutorial is 0x62E94D38-0x00000000-0xF1352E740C4710BA in SimulationDeltaBuild0.package in case someone hasn't found it yet. As mentioned in the document, it shouldn't be overridden directly, but I found it useful to just copy and paste from there as basis for my changes instead of creating from scratch.
Ah, thanks. I've been a bit busy with work, so I haven't had the time to go poking through the Sims 4 packages as much as I'd like.
New tdescs for the 2015-01-13 patch available here (directlink). Please make note of the additional info by SGEugi today -- XML tuning for Outdoor Retreat must have a group ID of 2.
Stuff for TS2 · TS3 · TS4 | Please do not PM me with technical questions – we have Create forums for that.
I know it's a stupid question, but how do I edit the XML tuning files? I am right now in the Alien abduction tuning file and I see a lot of numbers. What do these numbers mean and in what way do I need to change these settings? I want to make reverse what EA did with the Aliens in the last patch. How do I do this?
You should probably read the tdescs, they ought to tell you what each number means. If you have more specific questions, can you make a separate post please?
Stuff for TS2 · TS3 · TS4 | Please do not PM me with technical questions – we have Create forums for that.