Hi there! You are currently browsing as a guest. Why not create an account? Then you get less ads, can thank creators, post feedback, keep a list of your favourites, and more!
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#1 Old 23rd Jan 2009 at 5:17 PM
Default No custom meshes possible in The Sims 3!
Parsimonious and others who attended the Creator Week at EA have revealed that The Sims 3 is set to lack the capacity to import custom textures and meshes!!!!!!! It won't be built into the game.

So unless EA changes this in a later EP we will be stuck with the objects and clothes that EA gives us, and just the ability to recolour them using EAs supplied textures/patterns.
Advertisement
One horse disagreer of the Apocalypse
#2 Old 23rd Jan 2009 at 5:40 PM
I am sure Wes will see to that just as soon as we have our hands on the game files

"You can do refraction by raymarching through the depth buffer" (c. Reddeyfish 2017)
Blenderized to Pieces
retired moderator
#3 Old 23rd Jan 2009 at 10:26 PM
In have faith that the talented people in the community will be able to develop modding tools for the Sims3. I only 'play' the game long enough to test my creations, so if EA prevents us from making our own stuff, I'd lose interest in their product.

One ominous cloud on the Sims3 horizon is that the Sims2 store is probably a sign of things to come. Perhaps EA intends to be THE paysite for downloads.
Instructor
#4 Old 23rd Jan 2009 at 10:52 PM
Yeah, just because it's not officially supported does not mean it can't be done. There's no 'official' provision for custom meshes in TS2, either.
Eminence Grise
#5 Old 24th Jan 2009 at 6:32 AM Last edited by Srikandi : 24th Jan 2009 at 6:45 AM.
Quote: Originally posted by TickleOnTheTum
Parsimonious and others who attended the Creator Week at EA have revealed that The Sims 3 is set to lack the capacity to import custom textures and meshes!!!!!!! It won't be built into the game.

So unless EA changes this in a later EP we will be stuck with the objects and clothes that EA gives us, and just the ability to recolour them using EAs supplied textures/patterns.


They have revealed nothing of the sort. They have revealed that it won't be built into the game, yes; no surprise. That it lacks the capacity to import them, no.

How many forums have you spread this nonsense on? :/ I've seen this post on at least three.

I am curious, I have to say, as to whether the Sims 3 team was so delusional as to suppose that the recoloring tools included in the Sims 3 would actually satisfy modders and players who are accustomed to full meshing and texturing capability. The fact that they invited actual meshers and texturers to try out tools that allow recoloring ONLY suggests that they were at least somewhat delusional :/ Doesn't require much exposure to the currently most popular sims 2 mods to understand the difference between what players want and what you can do in-game in sims 3.

But hopefully they learned something from what they were told at the Creators Camp.

Edit: btw, I have to ask... as a nosy person, interested in the politics of Sims mod sites Will understand if I don't get an explicit answer, though.

Why were there representatives of pay sites like TSR at the creators' camp, but not of MTS2? Because of anti-EA statements? Like what?

And, why does Snooty Sims not allow links to TSR? Yes I know that has nothing to do with this site... just noticed it, and, well, nosy

Hope that's still on the Traits list for my SimSelf!
Test Subject
#6 Old 26th Jan 2009 at 4:25 AM
It's silly, there will be away, what worries me more is that it could be considered a violation to the terms of use.
Eminence Grise
#7 Old 26th Jan 2009 at 6:28 AM
Eh I haven't seen any indication that EA plans to go out of its way to throttle CC. Would be a pretty dumb business move. THey're just not being particularly helpful... yet

Actually, with the news coming out about layoffs, they could all be more concerned about holding on to their jobs than the concerns of us modders :/
Field Researcher
#8 Old 26th Jan 2009 at 8:25 PM
I think we can. The Sims 2 couldn't either, but "we" make it. And, the Collector's Edition came with 2 cars, if is the same in Sims 2's pre-order, is can be a "possible" right?
Lab Assistant
#9 Old 27th Jan 2009 at 10:11 AM
I doubt it very much that Ea will change a winning concept...
eg. they make the game, the communities mod the game, and makes it even more fun, thus creating more buzz bout the game, and that makes it sell even better...
Ea knows this...and they knew it from the beginning of the very first one they made..
So no... i don`t think they will leave it out...

but even if they did do it...well...
When there is a will, there is allways a way....
It may not happend the first few days..maybe not the first month, but there will be a way to mod it....
It dosent matter if the game lack the capacity to import custom textures and meshes or not...
there is allways a way.
Field Researcher
#10 Old 27th Jan 2009 at 11:38 PM
Duschenka, yeah, I agree. But, this time, I don't think that EA will "give some help at the start"

It's alright to make mistakes you're only human. Inside everybody's hiding something. Take time to catch your breath and choose your moment. Don't slide.
Warrior Gryphon
site owner
#11 Old 28th Jan 2009 at 3:01 AM
Inge, wes isn't the only one who knows how to decode file formats you know

And yes, we will find a way - as people have noticed, Sims 2 doesn't "officially" support custom meshes either.

I doubt we'll see any help from EA on this topic.

Story books are full of fairy tales, of Kings and Queens, and the bluest skies.
Test Subject
#12 Old 1st Feb 2009 at 6:30 PM
I have read several things on Parsimonious sims, site...

Link here http://www.parsimonious.org/rev/revother.shtml

Quote:
Sharing Sims 3 CC elsewhere Another concern raised by one or two creators is the question of whether or not Sims 3 custom content will be sharable on their own websites, the answer is yes. All the custom content packages created can be easily accessed in your My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 3 subfolders and can be published online just as for older Sims content.


Also read

Quote:
Custom Content Filesizes Since Sims 3 is set to lack the capacity to import custom textures and meshes I had rather hoped, expected perhaps even, that the filesizes of custom content would be significantly reduced compared to Sims 2. Having smaller files benefits everyone because players can spend less time waiting for downloads to complete and sites like ours do not have to bear such horrendous bandwidth expenses. Sadly it seems this is not the case with many texture presets, furniture and clothing items being in the order of 200-400kb. Disappointingly this is also the case for walls and floors - items which have generally been small in the past. Houses are in fact larger than for Sims 2 - a typical CC-free Sims 2 house would be in the order of 2-3Mb, for Sims 3 we can expect that to be around 30-50% larger in filesize.


one more thing in that section,

Quote:
Sadly the situation for mesh artists and those who create mods, does not seem very rosy for Sims 3. Based on past experience it is unlikely that we will receive support from Maxis and in general the associated creation processes will be considerably more complicated than for Sims 2.

For example; the process of creating new Sim body, hair and accessory meshes will need to be adaptive to fit the scaling of Sim's bodies - something that is obviously tricky even for Maxis as I witnessed at least one exploding mesh during my week at the Camp!

I'm confident there will be community initiatives from talented programmers under way as soon as the game is released to try and assist with these issues along with catching up to the tools 'missing' from Sims 3 (texture importing, freeform wall & floor texturing, clothing and furniture).

Nevertheless I must register my note of scorn at some of the Maxis team for their assertion that 'The community is so clever and innovative, you guys will figure it out!' as justification for their note providing enough custom content tools.

Undoubtedly we collectively will, but it will be an extremely challenging process for many creators like me, who do not enjoy slogging through complex help guides for incomprehensibly technical programs, tearing our hair out in frustration just to do what could be, if Maxis were to help us, relatively simple custom content design work.

It is after all, supposed to be a hobby, not all of us are being paid to design Sims custom content. It will in turn also inevitably be frustrating too for downloaders who will lose out on the level of content they are used to.

Perhaps many who particularly focus on building and decorating will even revert back to The Sims 2? That's not to say all the developers we met had the same 'you'll figure it out' attitude.

The Executive Producer of The Sims 3, Ben Bell stated as the event concluded, that he intends for Maxis to release the developer tools to the community, the first of which will be a neighbourhood editor. I sincerely hope that this does occur and I for one will be enthusiastically encouraging Maxis to make good on this!

I am sadly aware, however, that they have intended to release additional tools in the past which have never seen the light of day (some of us are still optomistically hoping for the Furniture version of Bodyshop promised in early 2006, or the Sims 1 behaviour editor rumoured to be surfacing in 2002).
Warrior Gryphon
site owner
#13 Old 2nd Feb 2009 at 5:18 PM
Yup, I've read that and that article was probably why this thread was created. Doesn't really bother me much

Story books are full of fairy tales, of Kings and Queens, and the bluest skies.
Lab Assistant
#14 Old 3rd Feb 2009 at 1:57 PM
I read this article and at first I was like "okay, I'm already skeptical about buying this game", especially after reading the part about the limited registration bull, and EA's not making it better with this. After I got addicted to CC for Sims 2, I can never play the game again without it. Besides, making things and sharing it with the community is sometimes more fun than playing game. But now, I'm just in a mood to just sit back and see what happens. I'm not even interested running out there and getting the game hot off the shelf like I was with Sims 2 (I need some time to upgrade my computer first).

Anyhoo, I know someone will find a way to mod the game or maybe even make SimPE compatible with Sims 3. The game seems so promising, but the set backs are...

Quote: Originally posted by Delphy
I doubt we'll see any help from EA on this topic.

They helped with Sims 1 and 2? Interesting.

My true dream is to: *get into the medical field *speak fluent Japanese and Spanish
One horse disagreer of the Apocalypse
#15 Old 3rd Feb 2009 at 4:15 PM
I don't know the history of help with Sims 1, but I know they gave a lot of info at the Sims 2 pre-release stage to the Datgen team. Also they gave direct help to me when I asked for some information about Persondata fields for one of the EPs. But towards the end every time I was put in touch with whoever was in a position to help, they were always just about to be moved to another project and never finished passing over the information they were going to. It's like no developer ever stays with The Sims after they have programmed their own bit of it.

"You can do refraction by raymarching through the depth buffer" (c. Reddeyfish 2017)
Test Subject
#16 Old 14th Feb 2009 at 12:45 PM
I'm new here but I'm just wondering if anyone here can explain to me in simple terms how custom clothing is going to work with the new body shapes? Taller, shorter, skiny fat, there will be a much larger range. Not just 2 like before.Would that mean you would need a morph for each bodytype? Thanks.
world renowned whogivesafuckologist
retired moderator
#17 Old 14th Feb 2009 at 3:23 PM
JM999 - We really have no idea until we get our hands on the game and can pick apart the mesh formats. Because it's a range using a slider rather than a set body type like we have in TS2, I suspect it's going to be a bit more complicated than just having separate morphs. I also don't think there's actually a height slider - just fitness/fatness and muscular/scrawny.

my simblr (sometimes nsfw)

“Dude, suckin’ at something is the first step to being sorta good at something.”
Panquecas, panquecas e mais panquecas.
Blenderized to Pieces
retired moderator
#18 Old 14th Feb 2009 at 8:04 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Inge Jones
I don't know the history of help with Sims 1, but I know they gave a lot of info at the Sims 2 pre-release stage to the Datgen team. Also they gave direct help to me when I asked for some information about Persondata fields for one of the EPs. But towards the end every time I was put in touch with whoever was in a position to help, they were always just about to be moved to another project and never finished passing over the information they were going to. It's like no developer ever stays with The Sims after they have programmed their own bit of it.


You are correct. EA hires on 3 and 6 month contracts. Very few ever are hired on permanently. What they have is a rotating herd of programmers who work on one little bit until their contract expires, and they are released from employment at the end of their contracts. A few months later, they are back again but working in a different section and game. The various sections don't see much of each other. Only top management ever knows what the whole company is doing. EA operates on a 'cell' structure where each little part only knows it's most immediate work environment and the one management contact person.

How do I know this? My son is one of the 'rotating' herd of programmer employees. He even has been hired on permanently only to lose that job when EA bought a competitive game out and had to do some cost cutting to recover its expenses so when his section was cut, he was let go back into the rotating employee herd of programmers. EA doesn't care. Programmers are a dime a dozen in Silicon Valley.
Eminence Grise
#19 Old 18th Feb 2009 at 5:33 PM
Which explains the reproduction over and over of the same bugs and problems in EPs... no institutional memory
Test Subject
#20 Old 18th Feb 2009 at 9:42 PM
What I've Always wonder about The sims 3 was if they will allow "SC4 Terrains" ?
if they don't, then it'll be very boring ...
Fat Obstreperous Jerk
#21 Old 19th Feb 2009 at 2:56 PM
All information we have on the subject so far suggests it will likely be considerably more boring than TS2, and the novelty value probably will wear off fast. Also, you can haz SECUROM: SPYWARE EDITION.

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I cannot accept, and the wisdom to hide the bodies of those I had to kill because they pissed me off.
Mad Poster
#22 Old 23rd Feb 2009 at 9:39 AM
Wes has personally told me he thinks that figuring out the various codings and such for ts3 will be no harder than it was for ts2.

"When life gives you lemons, see the lemons, feels the lemons, BE THE LEMONS!"

Take a look-see, hmm...? Go on, click them:
The Super Mario Project, Nintendorks Island-Celebrating 2 Years Online!
One horse disagreer of the Apocalypse
#23 Old 23rd Feb 2009 at 5:22 PM
Well no one really knows until the game comes out and we can see the relevant files.

"You can do refraction by raymarching through the depth buffer" (c. Reddeyfish 2017)
Test Subject
#24 Old 2nd Mar 2009 at 11:53 AM
I remember when sims 2 first came out and every was recolors then there was a really basic mesh edit and now look where we are. You don't just pick things up right away it takes time. We will not know until MONTHS after sims 3 comes out (maybe weeks)
Test Subject
#25 Old 4th Mar 2009 at 10:55 AM
Quote: Originally posted by TickleOnTheTum
we will be stuck with the objects and clothes that EA gives us, and just the ability to recolour them using EAs supplied textures/patterns.


I read somewhere that we'd be able to import our own textures and patterns into the game.
Locked thread | Locked by: HystericalParoxysm Reason: OMGONOEZWTFBBQ
Page 1 of 2
Back to top