Hi everyone!

So for the past few months I've been working on a snow replacement mod which of course made me go all "Ohh this might be possible and this and that!". So to begin with, what would you guys expect/want/miss in ts3 currently regarding snow to be added?

Personally I came up with more advanced "Snow" renderings. So, for example, trees would no longer have a white ugly texture, but instead, they'd have a little snow hill thingy at the tree's stomp (Does that make any sense? :P) And some snow on pine trees

Now, I'd also like some feedback on the replacements I've made so far which you can right see in the thumbnail section!

I'm not sure I see everything you are trying to convey with your pictures but I think you have given the snow a better textured appearance than the flat snow covering of the before pictures. The snow covered area around the firepit is greatly improved by your addition.

Yeah, I'm having trouble comparing the befores and afters even if it is pretty obvious that there's been improvements. Especially in the last picture I can see it looks better than usual. A list of changes and improvements so far would be nice I guess.
Anyway, I always find the snow texture on the windows to be a bit excessive. You can barely see through them and I don't think it's ever quite that bad in real life. I suppose it's also strange that the tops of objects are so heavily affected by snow while nothing happens on the sides....do you reckon it would be possible to have some sort of exterior wall decals that are only visible during winter? Either way I definitely like the more textured look the snow now has.

Maybe it's possible to change the texture and depth on roads too? It's ugly but traffic does usually turn snow into a dirty brownish goo and I suppose it'd be good for realism to see those tracks more.
I'm also not entirely sure what those ice drips/cones/titties on the underside of the roofs are called but I can't imagine they'd show up as much as they currently do in the game. Don't those take weeks to even begin forming?

https://www.google.com/search?q=ici...chrome&ie=UTF-8

Check out some of the amazing photos. (!!!)

https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1...iw=1536&bih=754

I think the ones in the mod look great!

yeah, I wrote this at midnight after 3 glasses of wine so... let's not do that again next time! lemme start again! With some good images this time. As a graphics designer I should've known better!

What has changed?

• Snow terrain now has a new texture.
• Snowy/frozen windows got revamped.
• Snow has better sparkles now
• Icicles now aren't as super bright and have a new texture
• Porches and objects that have big footprints now don't have this weird grassy and foggy texture. Instead, this is now the same snow texture as the snow terrain

Now, the porch being fully snowy is... not as realistic. But the way it's been coded in would only allow me to replace the texture of 4 tiles, which is then repeated over the entire porch or porch-like area. I figured this was probably a better way of doing it Any tips on this I'm all for!

What I'm working on currently/still needs doing

• Ice on ponds to be more realistic and nicer looking
• Having some snow dots on foundations and walls as far as possible. Image here for a better understanding
• Maybe tweaking the windows a bit to be less intense?
• Trees having more depth in the snow. See stump area where the snow goes a bit higher
• Making trees actually the same correct color white See image with pine trees
• Making a new mesh for icicles so they don't look like they could stab someone just by looking at it
• Any suggestions made here in the thread Something script-y is fine too!

@AGuyCalledPi (I almost tagged you with your old username, still need to get used to that! :P) It's funny you mentioned the whole dirty roads because I actually had that included but after talking to people in Scandinavia and showing them this, apparently according to them, with EA's roads, Ea's roads are actually more realistic. But if anyone else thinks it's actually better i'm all for it I am however planning on making normal map changes.




I'm actually currently scripting this in! So possibly this is possible, but gotta dive more into it I can't, however, promise this would work on objects but there's only one way to find out

EDIT: I did want to share an old WIP I shared on my tumblr a while ago where you can see how much I softened the snow: https://greenplumbboblover.tumblr.c...inuing-the-snow

So uhh just a clarification, that road image was an old image. I took the textures out because of reasons described above so it's just normal EA roads

Looks pretty great overall. Those dirtier road textures aren't working, I can see why it's better to stick with the EA ones. But anything you might do with normal mapping will help a lot. I don't think I mentioned it because I wasn't sure if it'd be supported but I think everything that supports normal and specular mapping should absolutely have it. EA weren't consistent in this and I wouldn't be surprised at all to learn that most of the world environments are still without normals.

Still can't help but feel the windows are too snowy, though.

@Lyralei
I really like all the improvements you made. Actually I love the snowy windows and your version looks so much more beautiful than ea's mud. Everything looks so good, I'd love to have it in my game <3

These new pictures and list display the improvents your mod makes much better. It looks like vast improvement over what EA gives us.

Thanks guys! I'm still debating whether I'd make the snowy windows less intense or not but we'll see!

Right now I'm coding in that snow foundations and walls will have snow but we'll see how that will turn out :P

Wow, Lyra, ambitious project! The new snow textures look great. I believe with the sims, a blend between realistic and not too realistic is important. I like the roads, I wouldn't want a bunch of filthy snow. Hate it irl, wouldn't like it in Sunset Valley. I like the windows a bit foggy and frosty. It is probably not realistic, and EA over does that, so a compromise is good.

I don't know if this is even possible, but there are some lots where the snow looks very shallow, kind of murky. I heard it has to do with how the world was created, and is probably only remedied in CAW.

(BTW, thanks for the shout out for Mentoring4Builders in Discord)

Thanks Attuned! I really appreciate the feedback!


Hrmmm do you happen to have some examples for me? I think I actually found the mesh that EA uses in order to generate different snow plane meshes, so I can see what I can do

About the trees...
Sort of bad news. I was talking about giving the trees a better snow-y mesh or even texture. However, because EA made it in such a weird way, the game will only recognise 1 tree type. With that I mean, you could add 5 palm trees to your lot, the game will only think there's only 1 palm tree on the lot, so that doesn't really help unfortunately... You can read more about it here: http://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=633127

Regarding the colours, this also seem to be shader-defined. Meaning, that it's super hard to get by and I probably need to do some more research on that, but there could be a chance that won't be included either in this mod.

ANy additional snowy requests?
I got a few from people here they are:

• MOAR (deeper) SNOW!
• Shoveled roads and sidewalks!

The more requests the lovelier!

Re-redesign idea for the windows
I did some more research on how windows react in the winter. And since it's getting colder here in the land of the cheeselords, I actually totally realised that most houses are warm enough to create this wet, but cold, effect on the windows:



If I were to go with this, rather than the current window design (See post 5 In this thread) would that be better? Any thoughts are welcome!

I think the EA effect in your post #5 shows the condensation effect you're considering just with less full coverage. I thought the effect on your post #5 was intended to be the water forming into crystals. I think if you completely obscure clear parts of window it would not have a good look.

Thanks for the reply! Also sorry for it taking literally a week to reply... been some busy days.

Hrm I think if you play enough with the alpha map, the coverage could still look good. The thing EA did was making a condensation effect that feels a bit half-assed if I may say so. Also because their alpha map is waaaaay too heavy for the effect itself. So I do get your concern on it though! But I'll share some pics of the result here for some feedback whenever I get to it

Just a thought here, since i've had quite a few people who were wondering when I was going to release it since it already looked done to them Would you guys be okay with me releasing 2 versions of this mod?

Version 1 being either today or Wednesday and would only be a texture replacement seen in this thread.
Version 2 being a more scripted "enhanced" version but also would require someone without a low-end pc to run it.

Thoughts?

In case anyone missed it, Version 1 is now available here: http://www.modthesims.info/download...634199&posted=1

That's how I'd do it, keep building on that first version and let people decide which one is best for them.

Very cool! Thank you

yeah currently I'm working on some updates for V1, since I did get some good feedback from it! One being that the road normals seem a bit *too* extreme, which I totally agree with. so will possibly edit this the following weeks!

Just wanted to leave an update on the coding bits. Because the coding bits are boring to share Anyways, to the coding bits!

So because of some batching issues and whatnot, snow won't be added to every single tree in the game, just some. This ironically enough did open my eyes by thinking "This idea would blow up computers!" So it's good that the in-game code has it's limit that way.

Secondly, I was thinking of having crops to be replaced by at winters that actually looks realistic. Most crops in reality of course could survive winter just fine, but most don't. This doesn't seem to be this difficult though given how it's just a game object

Am still trying to figure out what to do with the foundation layer where I'd add snow to them. This is... interestingly done in EA's code so I can't make any promises.

Now, to get to the end of this super long post. If you guys have anything you'd like me to add, please let me know!

Happy Holidays!
Lyralei, I was just trying out your Better Snow mod and I really love it, the snow is so pretty!
But after looking around my sims house I noticed that the snow around the front door and gate is staying the same as like around the fire pit.
Thought you'd like to know and I do love the improvements!
Thanks!

Heya! Sorry for the late reply! 

I checked in my game but I wasn't able to recreate the issue. The only thing I could think of was that you might have accidentally downloaded both my "No more ugly snowprints" and "Snow but better" mod. Because these two will really conflict with each other and I think what will happen then is that it falls back to EA's texture. 

Let me know if that helps!

I am using just the one mod - snow but better.
Perhaps it's my graphics settings? I'll play around with it and see if I can make it work.
Thanks so much for your time!