More Awesome Than You!

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.

(http://i47.tinypic.com/2lw2ecl.jpg)

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.

Yes, I tried the Create a Pattern tool and although I'm not a creator I was very disappointed with it as well. I thought I could short cut stuff so I had an immediate idea for a custom design. I went into photoshop and cut one of my images into several layers, leaving the background blank for transparency. Then I realized that the Create-A-Pattern tool doesn't allow any images to be used other than .jpeg or .bmp which meant that I couldn't use the transparency features that .gif or .png allows which meant that the tool wasn't as nice as I thought it'd be. Maybe I expected too much, I don't know.

I still decided to give it a chance but as I started playing with the shapes that the tool gave me, it wasn't really helping me with moving layers around, changing colors and allowing for modifications- so I gave up and uninstalled it unsatisfied.

What did I expect from this tool? Maybe to be more like any rudimentary photo modifying editor that would allow for custom images to be quickly made into patterns so that it would be able to transfer to the game. I expected a selection tool, paint bucket, paintbrush, copy and paste- simple things like that. But again, maybe I expected too much.

You definitely can import png files with transparency set on them in as stamps. I've done it with those girl shapes I used for the pattern in the image I posted above.

If you use JPEG for this, your pattern is guaranteed to be crap, as it will get shat on twice: First when it is mangled into a JPEG, a lousy format for preserving fine details, and then mangled again when the blurry mass of poo is rendered into a DDS: DDS compression effectively halves the resolution of an image because every pixel is chunked into a 4-pixel chunk, meaning that any details smaller than 2x2 are smudged. All in all, this is a tool that lives up to its name: CrAP.

I agree with you Pescado. After trialling the tool, I think I'd prefer to do patterns the old way. :-\

I have been messing around with this today and have found a work around for the bottom layer being un-editable. Leave it white. Just take one of the other stickers like a pattern or square put it on the second layer, scale it up to fit the whole square, and color it whatever you want. This way you only have editable layers in game and the bottom layer is ignored.  Using the supplied images seems to make a pretty good pattern, with clear images in the game and smooth textures, but I am still trying to get high quality imported images to work. Will come back with further progress later.

I've found after I made a pattern, the background looked fine, but the yellow detailing on it that was yellow in the CrAP tool appeared differently in-game. It turned into a yellow that fades into orange, rather than straight up yellow.

Also, being able to use certain textures in the pattern would be nice, like a metal or a wood, instead of just flat.

I haven't had that problem. Have you checked the graphics settings on your game?

I play with everything set to maximum. Unless the patterns exported from CrAP aren't to be used with highest settings, I'm not sure what's up. But I uninstalled TS3 and "friends", I got TS2 recently, so I can't really test this out.