Has anyone else messed around with the Create a Pattern tool? While I'm glad we finally have an official tool from EA for creating patterns I have some serious gripes about it:
1) You can't change the background color of your pattern in CAST in the game
at all. You get 4 other layers for overlays that you can all change separately in CAST but the most important thing, the background layer, you just have to pick one color and are stuck with. If you want the same design on differing background colors you have to make a separate pattern for each background color.
This severely limits the usefulness of this tool and will lead to useless file clutter where people create 8 different versions of their patterns just as there were multiple versions of every damned texture under the sun in multiple colors in TS2. I thought the whole point of the CAST in TS3 was to get away from this?
2) The image compression it uses is lossy.
Really lossy. Like artifacts on a solid color lossy. The amount of artifacting you get varies from pattern to pattern but some of them look really bad in the game.
This pattern I made has artifacts on the solid color purple background I gave it in the tool. Those artifacts aren't from the jpeg, they appear that way in the game. It didn't appear that way when I was creating the pattern in the tool so somewhere along the way the image got compressed all to hell and now looks like shit. Actually, I don't think the still picture does it justice. It looks worse when you see those artifacts plastered all over a wall in the game.
3) You
have to install them with the launcher. If you extract the sims3pack files the Create a Pattern Tool makes to package they get seriously borked and don't work right in the game. I made 4 patterns that I all extracted to package and put them in one of my mods folders. 3 of the 4 didn't show up and one showed up 3 times with 3 different backgrounds, two of which were not the background color I set. Don't know what that was all about but I deleted the packages and installed the sims3packs via the launcher and they worked just fine after that.