I hate to be 'that guy' but it's Playdough* (Or Play-Doh if you mean the brand)

ᵂʰᵒ ᵃᵐ ᴵ ᵏᶦᵈᵈᶦⁿᵍ ᴵ ˡᵒᵛᵉ ᵇᵉᶦⁿᵍ ᵗʰᵃᵗ ᵍᵘʸ

ʜᴇɪʟ ɢʀᴀᴍᴍᴀʀ

Oooops my bad. So sorry.

xD no worries! I was intentionally being an ass!

We're into the real shit nowadays like realtime volumetric sub-surface reflective bump-lighting. In TS4 objects are completely flat with only a bit of specularity and a bit of normal mapping. Lighting-wise TS4 has jack shit on TS2. Specular maps and bump maps were already common when TS2 came out. And TS3 has cubemaps that are generated on the go per room, whereas TS4 has a prerendered texture with some painted-on light sources. The only "fancy" effect TS4 has is how the outdoor light creates shadows indoors, but TS3 had that too in a slightly less detailed form.

Well you see, it has to be able to work on EA's own servers.

I would imagine many players aren't going to play with colorful pets because it requires some actual effort on the player's behalf. One of the major issues with CASt was being recolor everything, which elongated the creative process. Unless a player is feeling extra creative, I doubt many will use the CASt tool for pets extensively. They'll pick a breed and edit it a little, it not end it there altogether, and be done with it. The novelty will eventually wear off.

Unlike with furnishing a house, since there's more things to style than an animal, as since having different design considerations for designing a wall, a bed, a floor, and a chair to all look good both alone and as a unit, or having to recolor a shirt, pants, and a shoes to form clothing or an outfit, compared to simply designing animal fur.

I'm not really sure why people drool over the CAS of pets. Didn't it exactly work like in TS3, minus push&pull and move-around mechanic? Not that I know, but don't see really much of a difference how we could color and with splash our animals in with cast.

Yeah, I'm more looking forward to being able to teach our dogs 'tricks'

That one TS2 mod has never looked so realistic.

Owner: "Take care of the baby".
Dog: "tilts his head" *woof woof*
Owner: "Oh yeah! I forgot how to use my common sense. Babies are glued to the cribs, duh! I indeed taught him a 'useless trick'"

omgwtfbbq <3

Go figure! If the talk was about remodelling furniture and clothing assets If they actually spend that tool on that or both, you can just visualize how the response of groups would be opposite.

I just can't wait till LGR gives sick burns on this expansion pack. Especally his wit on dogs-disallowed-to-be-on-beds and the CAST. Oh boi, he is gonna shred it to tears!

Speaking of disallowed dogs on beds, they surely didn't have enough resource/budget to reanimate how sims are position on beds to leave space for those poor doges. Sad face.

I think that shows how little planning EA put into it. It’s like they forgot that 4 years ago they vilified the color wheel from Sims 3 and painted it as that game’s main problem. Well now we’re at this place where they are selling us on customization features that years ago were not good enough to be a priority of any kind for the current Sims title. They may be able to pull a fastie on the naive players who either weren’t paying attention back then, or simply weren’t around back then, but I vividly remember how hard they pushed to make color customization something the fan boys&girls praise for being removed. Now it’s the best thing ever. Personally, it makes my head hurt and I have to leave the website. I just don’t have the patience for the constant hypocrisy over there on the official forums.

Completely agree.
Btw, I just recognized your username. I need to say that I really like your posts on the official forum They always sound calm and rational, but have really good points. I always enjoy reading your posts

Thank you!

Well call me stupid because I'm actually more interested in how the pets look than a bunch of fancy stuff for my sim's house. Everyone has their preference for how they play the game or what they like to spend more time on in the game, and its no reason to call someone stupid for enjoying something you don't.

The CAP colouring tool might be useful to create more unique pet coats, even without the crazy colours, but considering it's not likely that people will actually use the feature very often, it doesn't seem like something they should have prioritized with their cut-into-oblivion budget. Imagine if they had prioritized adding more pets instead, more interactions, pet jobs, competitions, expanded the vet career and made more live careers for sims in the pack. I don't think people can even use the colouring tool to change the colours on the pet clothes, unless I missed something? It's one of those instances where you as a sims fan just facepalms big time. I don't get it. is it really that much easier to make the stupid colouring tool instead of adding real gameplay content? Really?

It's likely they felt is was a priority because players begged for it, but players want it everywhere else, not just create a pet.

I'm sure they can change the sims sleeping/lying pose to have their legs inside of the actual bed, 90 degrees from their body (like it is in TS1), then add aditional bed state where the space for dogs is provided beneath the sim, and then just animate the dog hopping on the bed (transition animation) since they already have dog lying animation.

Like it's a week of work on one man... fml
They are THAT lazy!

Yeah, it's like EA doesn't get why people wan't CAST and similar features, that they simply don't understand the reason behind it. Their thinking seems to be 'lets throw a new shiny colouring feature in there' without trying to understand how simmers actually play the game. Or they truly only target the game towards people that go 'oh cool a new tool that we haven't had before' 'oh you can paint pets now, how advanced'.

Plus, nobody ever responded with a word "because...", followed by "I liked and love recoloring pets and their coats" whenever they requested the tool to return. I haven't came across I comment on the feedback forums that somone would ask the tool to return for that particular reasons instead of over for recoloring clothig and furniture. Sure, it can be added for giving insane customization for pets, but you just stop it by skipping the important part for what it was intented to be used in the past.

That is because there is no practical reason to recolor pets, only situational. However, there are always reason to recolor multiple kinds of clothing or objects. Having limitless possibilities to color a cat does not interest me in the slighest, but a door that has a great shape but not great colors to match the actual house? Yes please!

Their thinking seems to go along the lines of that everything created by the official team is better by default than whatever we make. Why would the customer need a tool to recolor clothes and furniture if what the game provides is already the pinnacle of what can be done? Who would settle for the second best?!
Okay, I'm exaggarating, but that's the gut feeling I get from the show-don't-touch mentality (ever since Sims 3: World Adventures, actually, but more intense nowadays). There's San Myshuno with the apartment shells, the uneditable special lots and lately the noncontrollable pets because players cannot be trusted to capture the soul of a living animal when they pull the strings. Only the Sims 4 engine can. Remember how in the lifestream they promised a blog post that will make clear for everyone why noncontrollable pets are the best way to play? Instead of saying that making them controllable would have been too much effort for a too small group of players wanting that. I could have lived with that last one. I didn't bother looking up their educational blog post.

I tell myself the "you don't get it, let us enlighten you" is just marketing talk, displaying confidence in your product and so on. But sometimes one wonders...
Especially with threads like "No REAL cemetaries in the new EP" popping up. There seems to be an understanding among some fans that it's only the real thing if EA did it, not modders, not the player. If we showed them our spreadheets for college play, custom built cemetaries and seasonal mods they'd be called "workarounds". Something lesser. Me, I prefer the "lesser" stuff. I still miss the custom door locks that were so much more intricate than the official ones we've got now. And I prefer my old parenting methods (that may or may not include handbuzzers) to the EA interactions where a scolding results in instant value adjustment for the child. Heck, I tried "time out" once on a teen and instead of becoming angry the target sim got focused with the moodlet description telling me how helpful he believed that was. Grateful for punishment? Um, sorry, for that kind of stuff I use WW.

I'm getting OT here, so I'll stopp. Bottomline is I still enjoy Sims 4, but the staff's self-entitlement gets on my nerves. (Still hoping it's really just marketing talk.)

Two new teasers which show three different kind of health issues pets can have.

I know it gets said over and over again, but I honestly have no idea why the promote promotional material that's coming within the next few days. Just drop the trailer.