#modding

[kirain]

This company is so unserious, I love it.

The time has finally come, my console friends! Though I do have the game on PC, I do prefer my nice, comfy console, so this will be great! Thank you, Larian, for everything you've done. And thank you to all the wonderful voice actors and to the modding community as a whole!

Let the chaos begin!

[greenspirit-lb-ace-blog-blog]

Vergil with dark blue dr Faust (cutscenes)

[coffestamps]

i haven't posted in a bit, so here is my boyyyy

[milliondollarnooboo]

I wish you the best! This is amazing. Even though I no longer play on Mac I always dreamed of something like this. I’m so excited to see the progress you’re making.

SimPE for Mac

Yeah, I have not been posting lately because I am spending 8 to 12 hours a day, every day, working on a Mac version of SimPE. I made Xcode cough up a lung trying to use it on SimPE. SimPE is just too big and too complex. I am now programming on VS Code, which is far more robust, and has a far pickier compiler, so I spent days fixing all of the new compiler errors to get back to a working core. Right now it opens a package file and extracts the contents. It identifies the file types. Thanks, Quaxi, for creating the xml file listing all 100+ file types the Sims 2 uses! Next up is getting it to display the actual filenames. My ancient programming skills from 20+ years ago are slowly resurrecting. It is slow going. I will be going at this for months. I may never reach full SimPE functionality, but if I can get recoloring and Sims editing to work it will be better than the nothing that Mac users currently have. The bad news is that I am building for MacOS 12 and later, so older Macs may not run it.

Wish me well in this endeavor!

[marcusbrutus]

now that the switch 2 is out i just want to remind everyone NOT to pirate games and NOT to mod their consoles. please give the billion dollar company 500 dollars for the console, 80 dollars per game, and 20 dollars for the privilege of playing a game you already own.

absolutely DO NOT mod your 3DS, which is actually very easy to do. do NOT go to this subreddit that keeps an up to date guide on how to mod your 3DS and will provide community support if you need help. if you don't want to risk your own 3DS, absolutely DO NOT go to etsy or ebay where you can find already-modded 3DS's for about $250.00. absolutely DO NOT support these modders and small business owners who restore these consoles and who are trying to make nintendo games as easily acceptable as possible. yes I know it's tempting because this is half the price of the switch 2 (or free if you choose to mod it yourself) and you'll be able to download every single 3DS, DS, GBA, SNES, and NES game ever made as well as DSiware and 3DSware but PLEASE think of nintendo PLEASE support the billion dollar company they just want what's best for you!!!

[kaasiand]

I had a vision

[mizartz]

three of them

[b0tster]

do i srs have to upload the full campaign of halo 1 in its entirety for 2 bitmap edits and a single model swap for steam workshop to register it 🥲

[jessica2193]

The elegance of this man… 💚✨

I am, of course, completely and utterly normal about him. 🫠

You can find the mod HERE

[beanbytt]

I made a mod that replaces every instance of Loop (from In Stars and Time) with a plush counterpart!!

[bon-the-angel]

i got bored and put shadow in yakuza kiwami 2

[s0ckh3adstudios]

A few months earlier....

So this was a short test of me trying to practice modding In Stars and Time!! Just did a short little scenario to test out the dialogue boxes and little symbols needed to make them work, made a map from scratch, etc. Made this little cutscene! Obvs using what was already in game because again. just a test

I'd honestly really like to do more ISAT modding stuff. Me on my way to spearhead a modding community for ISAT. in mods and time.

[simnopke]

The Sims 2 Legacy Collection: shadow fix

The rerelease of The Sims 2 introduced a fix for the black rectangles under Sims. You may have experienced this bug in the Ultimate Collection version.

As the creator of the Sims Shadow Fix, I was curious to know how it was done. But first, I'd like to explain what the problem with Sim shadows is.

What's the cause of the shadow bug?

When the game works as intended, a Sim shadow texture is a light bluish blob on a white background. It also has transparency, but it's unused. It looks like this:

However, many modern graphics cards render the texture as plain black with transparency:

That's why black rectangles appear under the Sims.

What does my mod do?

My mod is only a workaround for the bug. It uses the transparency to recreate the shadows.

The first versions released in 2015 and 2016 were achromatic, while the original shadows were bluish. Back then I didn't even know why and how my mod worked.

On 2 January 2025 I released new versions based on my research into shaders. I also recreated the original bluish shadows.

How does the Legacy Collection fix the shadow bug?

Thanks to @ivycopur I was able to examine the code. It uses a workaround, just like my mod.

In fact, it looks almost exactly like the really not misty 0.4 version of my mod, which, ironically, is now legacy. The shader code in the Legacy Collection contains the same nonsense. And a bit more.

Code comparison

The left side is the original code extracted from the Materials.package file in The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection. The right side is my code or the Legacy Collection code:

The differences between my code and the LC code:

the debug part: I removed it from my code as players will never see it. The LC has this feature untouched.

alphaBlend srcFactor: despite the difference, it actually changes nothing. Explained later.

The identical changes:

alphaBlend dstFactor,

the same colorScalar has been added,

textureBlend.

Nonsense #1: textureBlend

The textureBlend defines how the colors of the incoming texture are transformed. The first argument is responsible for the color channels, the second – for the transparency.

Originally it's just:

textureBlend select(texture) select(texture)

And it means that the texture is taken as it is.

My and LC code transforms it though. The colorScalar is defined as a partially opaque (40%) black color. The transparency argument takes the transparency of the original texture and darkens it with the 40% factor:

multiply(colorScalar texture)

And this makes sense. The color channels argument takes the transparency part of the texture and makes it pure black, because the color scalar is black:

multiply(colorScalar texture:alphaReplicate)

It's pointless. I could go:

select(colorScalar)

instead. It would be effectively the same.

The texture after the transformations looks like this:

Nonsense #2: alphaBlend

The alphaBlend defines how to mix the source colors (in this case the transformed texture from the textureBlend step) with the destination colors (in this case, the ground under Sim's feet).

The srcFactor argument defines the source color transformations, the dstFaction – defines the destination color transformations. And then they're put together.

Originally it's:

alphaBlend srcFactor(destColor) add dstFactor(zero)

The srcFactor says that the shadow colors are darkened with the ground colors. The dstFactor doesn't really matter because it's multiplied by zero (black). Also, transparency isn't used.

If I understand correctly, you could achieve the same effect with:

alphaBlend srcFactor(zero) add dstFactor(srcColor)

And the final effect is:

My and LC code had to do it differently. The dstFactor says to darken the floor color with inverted transparency:

dstFactor(invSrcAlpha)

It sounds complicated, but the inversion actually means that black becomes white and vice versa. So the transparency texture, which is a dark gray blob on a black background, becomes a light gray blob on a white background.

The srcFactor is actually useless because the shadow texture (from the textureBlend step) is black. So it doesn't matter if you use:

srcFactor(one)

like I did, or:

srcFactor(destColor)

as in the LC code, it will always be black because you can't make black any darker. To make the intention clear, I'd personally go with:

srcFactor(zero)

instead. The final effect would always be:

It's different from the original intended effect. You can even see the difference in the official screenshots:

Source 1 | Source 2

Conclusion

It doesn't look like a coincidence. The cause of the shadow bug hasn't been fixed, and I doubt that an experienced shader creator would come up with such a workaround. There are better ways.

Before you point out that it's against my terms of use to take my code and sell it, especially without credit, hear out. It doesn't matter – EA's policy allows it. And I'm not even angry. It's just funny that they trusted such a messy code. I wouldn't be surprised to see other creators' fixes in the Legacy Collection.

The good thing is that EA has addressed the shadow issue at all. 🙃

[lazyduchess]

TS2 Extender for Legacy Collection

Hi :)

I've been poking around in the new Legacy Collection release for The Sims 2.

I started work on a small mod that currently adds the following:

Borderless fullscreen support

Toggle to skip intro videos.

Firstborn Syndrome Fix (Fixes broken RNG in general)

Experimental restored Lua features for modders.

Download on Github

Installation is simple, head to your game's installation directory -> EP9 -> TSBin and extract the contents there, alongside the game's executable. You can tweak the mod's features via notepad by editing the included .ini file.

Now let's hope EA actually addresses the other millions of issues the release has...

[untrustedlifegamedev]

I genuinely just want folks to check out my modpack

Its basiclaly a dreamlike, Ever-Changing Minecraft Metropolis full of liminal/surreal spaces to explore! Ive been working on it for like 10 months. Still gets constant updates too.

If you are into any of those liminal walking sim/horror games, you would like this, i think. Most of the spaces were built by me and a friend of mine.