TSR has already a Workshop for CC...

[J. M. Pescado]

Heh. Big if, really. But I concur with the Grey Fatness. Tools are not good or evil, they are just tools. I actually prefer enemy tools. There's just something deliciously ironic about smiting your enemies with their own toys.

[timelycorruption]

Wow, I think I lost a few brain cells from reading part of the thread about the workshop.  Cyclonesue asking if she could put her own textures on objects?  Hello what rock have you been under for the last year?  Tabbylou and some others going gawsh I'm sooo glad to know we'll actually be able to make CC for TS3.  Awfully misinformed bunch for being in bed with EA as so many people like to think.

But PsychoSue MUST HAVE RUST!
She NEEDS rust, man.

Hehe, I don't mind that she likes that look.  One of my TS2 sims has a nifty little converted factory loft apartment slash robot shop thanks largely to her stuff.  I was just amazed at the level of "durrr" coming from FAs/SAs there.  EA has been trumpeting the ability to import your own textures forever.  I wasn't nearly as surprised by Tabbylou's idiocy though since her idea of a kid's bedroom set is one where you've apparently glued Sesame Street wallpaper to the surface of every piece of furniture in the house and stuck it all in the kid's room.  

Tabbylou makes me laugh. I asked for game installation related help once and she basically stood there, wringing her hands until I wound up fixing the problem for myself.

[Scotty]

Why does reading the T$R forums give me such a huge headache? :::whimpers:::

[anonymouscoward]

If TSR gets the texturing correct than that may be significantly more than an object viewer/importer/exporter as the game seems to be doing something quite new with the patterned textures which makes one wonder how they are doing it in the first place. Do they (EA) just apply filters to change RGB values at runtime? Are they even using UV mapping? Is it some kind of vector graphics trick? My head spins trying to imagine the mechanics of it....and what a hassle it would be to create, say, clothing with regions somehow properly "defined" to accept in game retexturing. Whatever else the problems are, this particular feature strikes me as possibly a first in gaming technology. I know of no 3D graphics format which has such definition capability built in, off hand. I don't think it could be reverse engineered without tech specs.

[GelatinousSubstance]

An object can't be coloured without some kind of UV map (material) applied to it - 3D rendering 101.

I would assume that each "Region" has a name and material assigned, ie: head, body, material, surface, etc...
With each material name, a basic UV map is applied. So, yeah, depending on the number of regions and names of those regions per model, one could at least give the basic colouration to the model.

Take one of the shirts for the female for example - the one that looks like a strap-shirt with a long sleeve shirt underneath. that shirt has two regions, and those two regions must have a material name assigned to them. One could theoretically create their own object with those two regions named identically (but arranged differently), and possibly have the same effect within the game even though the regions aren't placed identically.

It's really just a matter of knowing the naming scheme of the objects and knowing how to get them into the game.

[anonymouscoward]

Actually, objects can be colored in many ways other than UV maps, and "materials" (usually parameters related to the object's interaction with light) are not always synonymous with textures (they are two different things in, for example, Blender), and games traditionally do not rely on "materials" as much because they can be computationally intensive and are thus more common in 3D for stills or animations. There are also numerous other projection methods, planar, cylindrical, you name it. Shaders (which are synonymous with materials in some apps) can be used instead of images or materials or in combination with them. UV mapping just happens to be the most efficient for 3D gaming or at least the most commonly used because, I guess, it better utilizes the memory resources of the graphics card while using very little processing time. Assigning separate images to regions on a single object is right off the bat a less efficient way to do it assuming separate graphic assets were loaded for each region and might cause a hit in graphics performance. However, on the other hand "procedural" is currently the rage in optimizing game engine performance. Making something "procedural" is taking game elements or assets that were formerly hand made, such as animations, and calculating them at run time to move some of the burden from the graphics card to the CPU and cut costs and time for asset creation (this example obviously not being used extensively in TS3 where they seem to use the same animation assets from TS2 and most animation transitions still segue first to a "default" state before going on to the next move, the toddler being the most obvious where he/she walks to the potty, sits down, slides, gets back up, then sits on the potty...).

Despite all this, it is obvious from looking at CAS that separate "images" (whether actual bit map image files or some other device) are assigned to separate regions. That they can't be resized using a slider and the subsequent blurriness in game seems to rule out the possibility that vector graphics are being used, but that is not definite. Looking at the wood textures, for example, they appear to have a lower number of colors used, so it almost does seem as if they were using a vector graphic format which would be much easier to procedurally adjust to diverse geometry at run time, would take up much less memory, and would explain the ability to easily alter individual colors within a given texture pattern. It would explain the "cartoony" look of many game objects. The more I think of it, I would implement this using vector graphics and then rasterize them on the fly. For those who are lost on this, raster graphics means the normal ones you make in Photoshop etc. made from pixels, vector graphics are stuff like Flash or Illustrator that use line, curve, and area definitions to describe the image so no matter how much you zoom in you never see jagged edges.

So anyway, point being that I think more is going on under the hood than one might have expected. My gut feeling is that "recolors" isn't going to be as easy as the standard method of generating or reusing a UV template and dressing it up in Photoshop or whatever. I would not be surprised if vector graphic "patterns" were the only form of texturing accepted for many objects with the exception of, obviously, UV mapped bump/normal maps and also perhaps a UV mapped grey scale image for "baked" shadow details that may be what they are doing to mitigate some of the flat bland cartoonish quality. Those last two would obviously have to be generated at the object modeling stage because whereas normal maps have until now been usually fudged from the basic color image map, the TS3 patterns have no information in them which could generate normal maps. So for the really high end object creation you would have to model a detailed object, generate your normal map and baked shadows, then reduce polycount (and detail) for the object you actually import to the game, which is the standard method for next gen games at the moment.

This is all just to give everyone an idea of what the TSR people would have to be tackling to produce what they claim they are producing. If they succeed, you would be hard pressed to come up with a better tool, politics aside.

[anonymouscoward]

It's really just a matter of knowing the naming scheme of the objects and knowing how to get them into the game.

But now I get what you are saying. Getting the objects into the game and getting the textures into the game are, unlike TS2, largely two entirely different processes for CAS or build colorable objects. You could import an untextured object as long as it had the regions defined/named properly, which is precisely what the TSR tool says it will do.....doh   Got it Still, that method would be missing the baked shadows and normal maps step which would have to be included or the imported objects would stick out like a sore thumb.

Edit: but (probable) baked shadow maps appear in the drop down menu in one of the screen shots. Interesting. Perhaps that means they are successfully reading the in game file format without conversion.

[Tacuitacitum]

Lots of technical stuff

I was inclined to think that the clothes at least might be UV mapped because I'm getting 'bleed' of areas (such as belt colour 'bleeding' into the clothes, and pattern edges being blurry - on highest detail level), which is common if your texture map for your UVs is small. That said, I've never experimented much with vector texturing, and that does explain being able to change the colour without eating insane amounts of memory. It's possible the vectors are rasterised but still quite small, which would cause the blur. If vectors were used in Splotch I'd be inclined to think they'd use a similar system for Sims 3, although Splotch wasn't quite so blurry to me.

If it's materials, then it's going to be quite difficult to take out of game - usually materials are set by the software, rather than by an external file, unless Sims allows access to its material/shader files?

For a straightforward object then cubic, planar, spherical texture projections would would just dandy - I can forsee lots of beginner objects having horribly skewed textures if people have to make unique UV-projections, or attempt to map a complex object with a simple projection.

If we're able to use normal maps for detail as opposed to a rediculously high poly, then that's awesome as far as speed ingame is concerned, and it's (afaik) standard for games that want large amounts of detail but not at the expense of speed. At the same time, unless Blender allows you to create normal maps by projecting the high poly onto low poly, I'm not sure of any free 3D apps that have that feature. (And now that the major 3 3D apps have been bought by the same company, their prices are probable soon to rocket)

Are you suggesting that one creates a seperate map for baked shadows (say, ambient occlusion-like shadows as opposed to direct cast shadows, which would be impossible to know without a lightsource) which is then layered over the pattern texture? That's quite nifty - I haven't noticed it myself, but then I haven't been looking for it. I suppose that's exactly the point - subtlety. Is there any ambient occlusion between objects, btw?

How about Sims skins? They're horribly bland at the moment, but of course one can't make a set of individual skins - they've got to be slider-able, and would presumably need to be default replacements. Unless there's a very simple darken/lighten/levels/whathaveyou tool, I'm not sure what format you'd need to make the skin with.

[rufio]

Coconut weighs in on this issue.

[Inge]

Coconut does not have the full facts.  Based on the facts she probably does have, I can understand her point of view.

[rufio]

You mean in terms of technical limitations?  I do think it's weird that they are so intent on getting everyone to download it, though.

[Inge]

I am not sure they are any more eager to be appreciated for their tool than anyone else would be?  We'd all like to think what we make is getting downloaded a lot.  There's real people making that tool, and they're gonna feel rewarded if people enjoy their work.

[jriggs]

Besides, their reputation has been so tarnished and I am sure that that has affected their subscriptions so I can understand wanting to snag as many downloaders for this tool as possible just so that they can try to bring in fresh meat who might have a "See, TSR isn't so bad now" attitude.  Plus, one of the problems that people have had with them for long is that they use the free tools that others have made and the knowledge that has been gained by the free community to create and SELL content.  This time they are hoping, I would guess, that by getting a tool out there they will at least not have to deal with that argument anymore.  I would still rather get a tool from some other source just because I would rather not support that effort.  If it works well and there isn't a freesite alternative I won't pass it by out of spite though.

[DaSpecialone]

EA has alluded to allowing "authorized" co-conspirators  paysites cc creator site(s) several times in the past year--saying something similar to "CC will be available via the exchange and authorized EA distributors."   Items that you submit for CC on their exchange become their property (& thus their authorized distributors as well) to do as they will.  So no more creator usage agreements once you submit your work to EA.

Thus it seems EA turns into the "paysite" protectors.  As such it is completely feasible that TSR (and/or others) might have some type of working relationship with Eaxis.

[TashaYarrr]

If so, once the details emerge it's going to be an absolute shitstorm.

[Inge]

Noooo, there's just gonna be lots of nice free modding tools and nice free stuff made with them.  And a few pay things, too, just like there have always been.

[keirra]

Coconut posted about the TSR tool here.

[TashaYarrr]

keirra, I think that link was posted upthread a few posts.

Inge, I should've been more specific: I'm referring more to the idea that *if* this alleged partnership existed, and if that 'authorized distributors' verbiage is accurate, then EA could be in essence saying that all freesites were 'unauthorized'. I was probably following the logic a few too many steps (not to mention there are a lot of 'ifs' that I don't necessarily believe) without explaining myself.

[DaSpecialone]

keirra, I think that link was posted upthread a few posts.

Inge, I should've been more specific: I'm referring more to the idea that *if* this alleged partnership existed, and if that 'authorized distributors' verbiage is accurate, then EA could be in essence saying that all freesites were 'unauthorized'. I was probably following the logic a few too many steps (not to mention there are a lot of 'ifs' that I don't necessarily believe) without explaining myself.

That is how I took it too...that any one else who decides to do free content (or pay) that isn't "authorized" will basically be violating EA's new rules.

[Inge]

Well anyone who wants to turn the EULA into a weapon of words can work themselves up into a dither about the legality of this type or that type of CC.   As far as I am concerned the Simming world is gonna carry on as it's always done, with EA either encouraging all CC of any type however made, or at the very least turning a relaxed and amiable blind eye to it.   All this hair splitting is pretty much last century's fad, as far as I am concerned.

[sparkleisacolor]

Not sure if anyone has checked this post from SnootySims out: http://www.snootysims.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=29745

[Marhis]

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.

Agreed.  Another Virgil line -- "haud ignota loquor" -- pertains to what you said, methinks (as it were, you speak things that are not unknown).  Nothing is truer than the truth.

[Merlin]

We are happy to report that our Workshop tool is progressing nicely. Much of the necessary research has been completed and we have begun the process of putting it all together and to make some magic happen. In an effort to speed things up and make sure the community gets to see custom objects in the game sooner rather then later, we have decided to make the backend part of this project open source. Together with the likes of Delphy, Inge_Jones, Peter L Jones, Echo, jfade, atavera, Mootilda and Karybdis (to name a few, others to follow) we will pool our knowledge together and solve the challenges ahead of us as a collaborating team. More updates to follow

http://www.thesimsresource.com/workshop/news/view-post/post/11576/TSR%20goes%20open%20source%21

I think they have nothing..

[Marhis]

Ah, ok, so the tool will be made by Delphy, Inge, Peter, Echo, jfade, atavera, Mootilda and Karybdis. This makes sense  .