Sorry for the bump but what's your current graphics card? You can use a later revision of the Nvidia drivers, but I am not sure as to which AO flag to use for best results.

Hello! I'm having the same problem as the guy above. I have a GDDR5 GT 1030.

It's a crude means of estimating a card's performance, but generally useful. Obviously a 950 is going to have a 650 squarely beat. My PC's old 650 was still somewhat less powerful than my laptop's 1050Ti.

I do know that my 650 did not allow DSR through conventional means, so I had to do a little bit of spoofing with the drivers to get them to allow me to run TS3 in resolutions above 1080p. And of course, that pretty much guaranteed a framerate of 30 or lower. On my 1070, it'll stick to 60 or below. Even with the heavy Reshade effects I can still get framerates in the mid-to-high 20s where the 650 would not have exceeded the mid-to-high 10s.

Looking at other games, I have a limited frame of reference but distinctly remember having to settle for Medium-High settings in GTA V (where Medium is actually the lowest possible setting) whereas the 1070 will quite comfortably stick to 60 at Very High. Ultra and Maximum are possible but will quite often drop the framerate well below 60, which is not something I'm prepared to live with anymore. I can run Just Cause 3 and Fallout 4 at 90 or even 120 so anything under 60 is no bueno as far as I'm concerned.

Interesting- Reshade with Screen-Space Reflections for TS4- wonder if it'll work for TS3?

https://imgur.com/a/AfQcYRe

It should, and it's great to see it made available - I've been wondering what I'd have to do to create rained-on surfaces. Looks like this'll do just fine.

My old laptop had a 650m. Never did any gaming on it, but had TS3 installed with 6 EPs and had little trouble running the game at medium-high settings. Without major visual enhancements, that is. I wouldn't recommend it for heavy gaming, especially not with games released after 2010. Also that Empire of War is looking pretty good, love me a space RTS every now and then. I've heard good things about Star Trek Armada III, might look into that.

Actually @nitromon, after some testing, my GT 1030 works just fine. Not to brag, but for me usually I have no sweat running TS3 and a few expansions. Without v-sync I get like 100fps? 1000 on the menu Also, if you see my latest post on limiting frame rate, right now I'm intending to trade a little more graphics for a little less performance. I turned on HQ ambient occlusion using the Call of Juarez flag, and it looks awesome in-game.

Seems like that technique is more suited for photostories and/or screenshots than anything else. SSR can be rather crude at times as it only uses the screen's contents as a base but it should be reasonable enough at least in some scenarios.

It also has no concept of material properties so it'll give every surface the same shine at the same angle. That means shiny grass, shiny skin, shiny trees. In practice, you'll have to take a screenshot with the shine on and one with the shine off, and then manually composit them together.

A more ideal solution would be a dedicated .asi to inject additional shader effects per-material than a generic post-process injector like Reshade. Have it detect the shaders used on materials, then let the .asi do its thing. Heck, you could probably implement some rudimentary PBR provided the .package files are supplied with requisite textures to account for the pipeline. I'm no programmer but I'm sure someone with the skills could pull this off.

My thoughts exactly. It's certainly worth investigating; the game clearly defines material properties for each visible object, and where there is no appropriate shader data or a specular texture map, it can be assumed the object is wholly unreflective. It would have to be able to read certain file formats used within the game engine, but assuming it already can in a manner similar to what tools like S3PE and TSRW do, making it read RGB pixel values off a texture map seems like child's play.

....then again, how would you make a script (which probably can't be injected into the game itself) identify objects within the screen space and map the appropriate textures onto it? Tools like Reshade can access the final composited image generated by the graphics engine at each frame, and it can access depth buffer data, but it can't hook itself into the game engine to recognize assets. Maybe I'm just talking out my ass though; I'm not a programmer. My rudimentary understanding of how it'd work is that the script would have to hook into the game executable to access it's .packages, then load in all of them and somehow identify not only which ones are currently active within the engine, but also where and how.

Then again, you suggest there might be some form of PBR possible using the existing texture maps but if I recall correctly PBR mapping is based on stuff like roughness and metallicness. TS4's specular maps for example are RGB where each channel defines a different property of the object's specularity. TS3 only has a very simplistic greyscale map where black is no shine and white is maximum shine. So assuming it would be possible to use the specular mapping and, if present, the normal mapping, a rudimentary PBR should certainly be possible.

But I think we both know it's not going to happen because ideas like this get floated all the time, and they always sound a lot easier than they are.

Just a heads-up for AO settings in TS2: AO settings in NVIDIA does NOT work in Free Camera mode. Useless for storytellers and moviemakers if this is the case.

I recall what DexX did with SA GFX when he experimented with the RenderWare engine in GTA San Andreas where he managed to isolate vehicles from other scene objects and used it as a basis for how to selectively shade objects in said game. A variation of it could be used in TS3, and I don't think you have to read all objects in the game, but rather tap into the shaders and inject stuff from there.

Fascinating! I wish I understood what's going on here. It may be possible, at one point, to implement a Reshade-like solution into the game's executable (a bunch of other games have mods that do this, including TS2) and selectively shade. There's a reflective bump mapping shader in Reshade but it's useless because it can't take into account the reflectivity of individual objects. I may have to do some reading up to be up to speed on what this does.

IMO two of the places better shaders would help tremendously would be in (1) improving shading for sims, and (2) seeing if general shadow range can be altered. The Sims 3 IMO most glaringly falls short in these categories compared to other games.

There was some talk here (http://modthesims.info/showthread.p...094#post5495094) from my post onwards about the potential of cracking open the Shaders_Win32.precomp file and seeing if there could be some surgery in possibly transplanting code from its series siblings.

Anyways, on the thread topic- what Nvidia AO setting are people using these days ? I'm still on 0x00060019 as it's the one that shows up best in pictures.

BINGO! Someone on the Officials sent me a bunch of links to MATY, which I hadn't even considered consulting, and referred me to an After Effects plugin that can apparently read and edit precomp files. Haven't had the time to look into it much further but MATY seems to be doing a bit of problem diagnosis here, at least as far as the shadow situation goes. Would be nice to unfuckulate that, which would be possible with the shader file. Then again, there's probably a good reason it broke in the first place and EA might've broken it to make something else work. Might be worth raising the issue at MATY and seeing if they know more about it. There might yet be someone alive over there with a bit of engine knowledge to dispense.

Interesting- do you have the MATY links?

Also, I wonder what would happen if we tried transplanting the original Basegame no-patch Shaders_Win32.precomp file into the current files? There are a bunch of things that were also messed up over the years, the most significant being cross-floor lighting which was broken after WA.

I was also looking at some early-build images for TS3, and I wondering how the lighting on sims might have changed- the shading is much less harsh and there are some things like hair sheen that are not noticeable in the final build.

I don't have a day-one version of TS3 but I'd try it if I did. Most likely the game would throw a fit and die. For one, the upgraded water shaders from LN would be gone and the hologram shaders from ITF would certainly be missing. That pic is interesting though because it shows what seems to be more advanced shading on Sim skin, look at the female's hands. The shading is harsher, for sure, though that may be partially caused by bad placement of light sources. Hair shine also seems to better, like you say, but look at the chairs and wall and it looks straight out of TS2.

The big issue is we ideally want parts of both the original shaders and the final version. Preferably, the improvements of the newer one with the functionality of the older one. I'd also, personally, like to restore the more noticeable cubemap reflections on the glass shader, which is something I noticed when playing a day-one version some years ago. It was just a Sunset Valley starter home, nothing fancy, but I could easily see the world reflected in each of its windows. In later versions, the effect is either gone entirely or so subtle that I can't see it.

These are all the links I have off MTS. They discuss the precomp file but not specifically how to modify it.
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s....msg551704.html
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...,15034.150.html

Interesting, the second link talks about finding the original precomp file lol- looks like if you have the CD, you can grab it from there.