There should not be anymore light whatsoever as a result of using that file.  I'll be happy to repeat this again if you require.

The native shaders, are called "native" because they are built into the game.  Thats the way the game looks.  The amount of light with or without the RLSshader.package should be identical. 

I don't believe there is any good reason to use the "Gunmod Shader" version at this point.

TS2 is gonna slam your CPU no matter what you do, all that Simming is very calculation intensive. It's not the meshes in any case, those will affect framerates and texture swapping more than anything else, and thats largely videocard dependent.  The only time I've seen the Maxis Bluescreen for any extended period is immediatley after either a resolution/refreshrate change or immediatley after returning to the game from being alt-tabbed out of fullscreen mode.  Sounds like something is resetting your display somehow. Odd.

By 'bluescreening' do you mean reverting to the Maxian GreyBlue background or do you mean Windows BSOD?  Video drivers should help, but I would be very concerned about your case temperatures in that situation.

The RLS-Shader.package never had any effect AFAICT on the overall light settings. It is all controlled by the various text files.  The 'native' shaders that are enabled are simply the ones built into the game.  I don't know enough to assess what exactly gunmods shader package DOES do, but what it doesn't do is control anything regarding indoor lighting.

FWIW this project was not abandoned per se, simply done.   I fixed the files, they work for me, and for everyone who used them and bothered to report back.  I didn't have anything to add at the time and got distracted by other gaming interests.  I never posted this on MTS2 because well... I didn't ultimately feel like it.  I decided that if I did I'd feel responsible to support it, and I knew I wasn't going to follow through on that.  I find it a little more than disheartening that in a post where I specifically asked that people who download the files post any kind of comment on its performance less than 10% of the downloaders did so.

Thanks to those of you who have participated in the discussion it is appreciated, and I'll continue to contribute what I can.  I'm not a coder or modder of any kind really; Just a guy who started reading a bunch of text files and pasted them back in a revised order, and then tried changing a couple numbers in a logical fashion to restore a lost result.  Glad it worked, cause I was pretty much out of ideas at that point.

What a dick.

Thanks for looking... my curiosity was mor that he is claiming that the shader package is doing those spec highlights, where you said that hadn't been implemented.  Whaddya think?

I couldn't really say one way or another. I suppose its possible, but it would depend on whether or not you were already playing the game with maxed settings, as this mod does very little without that.  I wouldn't advertise it that way though.

@Hegelion Your points about Monitor Calibration are right on, its a concern I've had about putting this out but I didn't really know how to discuss it.  I have a 6 year old Viewsonic CRT and I keep it at 75 bright and 90 contrast with 6500K whitepoint.  It is very common for non-artist/photographer PC users to not consider whether they are receiving colors as intended by the artist.

@Argon  Well thats an interesting point.  You are the only person I know who'd be able to identify that though, and I'd like to keep the mod compatible for those w/o OFB and FFS as well.  If you mind doing me a favor and looking at that beta release thread from Chocolate Pi @ MTS2... woodchuck has posted some video samples and I'm not sure what to make of them.

k, thanks Blue.  What would 'a problem' look like? for future reference that is.

Hm, thank you.  How do I go about 'disinfecting' my custom sims if I wanted to move them to a cleaned up hood?

How serious is this really?  What is the risk level?  The neighborhood seems to load fairly quickly.  I don't really tend to have a lot of generations as I usually keep my sims adults perpetually.  Is this worth borking all their relationships to the Maxis chars to clean up ?

Not even one... Hrm...


If I perform the moveout process on LOAS on my whole neighborhood and then bin all the empty lots, and put it all in a fresh neighborhood, will all the dupes be gone?

So what is the consequence, if any , of this?

So... I'm not sure I understand this.

I've been playing on a 4th neighborhood I made by binning every stock Maxis in the 3 default hoods and placing them in teh fresh one.  So if I am following this, the neighborhood fil;e sare now filled with a ton of dupe dummy files that got brought to preserv memories and things.  So, how bad is this? and is there anyway to repair this without nuking all my new custom chars relationships?

Funny.  Do you also have all the RLS-*.txt files in there?

Well JS, Those lights don't do that in my game:



So all I can suggest is that you have some hack/mod that is altering lighting behavior in some manner.

The one cheap overhead light called 'Lunatech' that is the little black can, is broken.  Gunmod couldn't make it function normally so he modded it into a pinpoint spotlight.  Other than that I've not seen any issues.

With that blanket I was wondering if it might be that it has some invisible component above the ground level that would be blocking the light.  Again, I've not seen issues like these in my game at all.

This is true, as well as adjusting your video card's gamma setting for the 'overlay'.  TS2 is sorely lacking a brightness/gamma slider so you need to do it on the hardware side.  I can't say I find things too dark at all, and well jsalemi's screenie above is just whoa.

Thats pretty wild, Gonna check a few things out and be back. Thanks.

Well.. at least 26 people have downloaded a version I posted,  and 5 have posted here, 3 with impressions.  I guess I'm not surprised, but I suppose no news is good news. 

I believe this is false.  First off, smaller textures are only loaded because the software thinks it can.  If either they werent available or it wasnt an option they wouldnt be at all.  Secondly the amount of VRAM is not the absolute limit on available texture memeory.  A certain amount of system RAM is reserved to be used for video textures as well.  For AGP this is known as the Aperture qnd is configured in most BIOS/CMOS.  But even should that amount be exceeded the result would not be blank textures, the result would be excessive swapping between texture memory and the system pagefile, or HD thrashing as its sometimes called.

I feel that the game engine is very conservative about its scaling, which is sensible to protect the lowest common denominator, but in any other game, if you choose 'High' textures... that's what you get regardless of performance.  I'd like to get the engine to let me actually choose rather than it "optimizing" on the fly. 

I haven't given up yet.

Yes all high.  In 1024x768 with 8x AF set in drivers.

The problem Im trying to fix only occurs on lots with a LOT of stuff on them.  At some point the engine decides it just is not going to use the highest textures for certain objects no matter what.  I don't want it to do that.

Its definitely for textures, take a look at the file.

But I think perhaps you misunderstand me.  I want the game to not load the lower detail versions at all, ever.  I realize it makes no difference when zoomed out, but IME if the game has loaded the LOD textures it will choose not to switch to the higher ones when it is under load, particularly on Sims themselves when they change clothes during those situations.  So I am trying to not give it that option.  I do think that what I posted above is working.  But I'd sure like to hear from anyone else who's tried it.

In some cases that may be so, but I find when there are a ton of textures present, if thegame has ever loaded a lower LOD version it will keep it if it needs/wants to.  I'm trying to not give it access to those textures at all.  It also so happens I'm playing in 1024x768 as I found that at anything higher the game seemed to start using LOD textures much faster.  Maybe I can go back up if this tweak is working right.

Thanks to all of you who've posted thus far!

@jsalemi:  This modification makes no change at all to the CEP, in fact it even has the proper line in the lighting.txt to enable the optional *.nlo's.  The only thing might be that if you're flat replacing your lights folder you'd be moving away the \CEP3_CustomLights\ folder as well.  Mine is empty, but if you had stuff in there and didnt recreate that then you'd lose those effects yes.

I do not have that blanket object, if you'd link to it I'll check it out.  But as I've not observed this behavior on any other object (yet),  I'd wonder if it were not some property of that object set improperly?

The morning twilight works fine in my game; It lasts the full hour between 6 and 7am.  Perhaps you have your gamma set too low to see the difference, but I can post screenies if necessary.

@jsalemi & jordi: Regarding smartlights-nl... Gunmod initially had recommended this and then retracted and insisted it not be used at all. I can't figure out why as it seems to work.  The only time I observe it acting oddly is if a Sim both enters and leaves a room under the influence of an action.  For example JMP's macrotastic cleaning.  For good meagure though I have renamed it to "z-smartlights-nl.package" to be certain it loads after any other hacks to avoid conflict.  Of course all my hacks are in one folder, if yours arent you need to make sure its in the last folder as well.

@Argon:  I appreciate the feedback.  My following observations indicate that the RLS-shader.package does not remove the censor blur on lots thats have not first been loaded with Quaxi's.  It does strangely seem to maintain it, but on a fresh lot it does not work.  Any thoughts?  Also regarding the LOD issue please see my other new thread in Peasantry and tell me what you think.

Ok, as a tangent to my lighting thread, I think I may have a fix for this matter as well.  I'm hoping a few of you will test this as well.  This will cause a significant performance hit on most all machines so you may want to drop down one order of magnitude on your screen resolution (i.e. 1600x1200-> 1280x960->1152x864->1024x768->800x600).  Also do NOT attempt this if you have less than 128mb of video RAM or you are just plain asking for trouble.

In %Program Files%\EA Games\The Sims 2 %Latest Expansion%\TSData\Res\Config\  you have a file called LODconfig.txt

What I'd like folks to try is commenting out all but the top two entries so it looks like:

LOD  0 600
LOD  1 500
#LOD  2 450
#LOD  3 400
#LOD  4 350
#LOD  5 300
#LOD 15 250
#LOD 20 200
#LOD 30 100

Based on Argon's comments, and my concurrent observations, it would seem that the two highest LOD's are based off the pure original textures.  I think to be safe you might also want to make this same change in the same file in the Base Sims2 Config folder a well as your latest expansion.  This tweak should work with any combination of expansions or lack thereof.  My observations indicate that this does in fact block the game from reducing texture quality at all, but at a trade off of increased texture swapping and reduced performance.  I'd like to be certain that I am not merely hallucinating this improvement, so if a few of you clever souls wouldn't mind messing with this too, I'd be much obliged.