Twilight Dreams Episode 2 & Bonus

Episode 2: Neighbors

Bonus Video: Opening Credits

*twitch*

That's my eye, twitching. Periodically I get weird eye tics, usually short-lived (a few hours off and on, say). This time it's lasted a couple days, and as you can imagine it makes it hard to concentrate on anything. It's not a constant twitching but it's frequent enough to be really distracting.

But in the meantime I'm at least thinking about the video. I've got the basic filming done, and the shots done for Episode 2 (and a few for episode 3, actually), and am trying to decide if I need more shots and/or filming for the video... I think I may need to just put together the basics and figure it out from there to be sure. I have a couple ideas that I'd need more shots for but I actually might be doing it with what I already have depending on how compositing works out.

It's a pretty short video so you'd think it'd be easier to envision, but I guess I'm feeling kinda uncertain about it.

Anyhow... still hoping to have E2 out this week, despite the slowdown from my eyes bugging me. That might mean 'this weekEND', but close enough.

this week...

...I hope to get episode 2 of Twilight Dreams out, as well as the first video, though between insomnia (which you might think would let me get more done, but no, trust me, it doesn't work that way, at least not with this sort) and recovering from a cold I am not sure how much I can concentrate. I've got about... 1/2 of the stuff shot I need to, or so, actually a bit more I suppose. The episode will almost certainly come out, it's the video (which I'd like to release at the same time but may delay) I'm less sure about, mainly because there's some bits of it I'm not 100% sure on how they'll look.

I've also got some more Saints and Sinners playtime/photos but am definitely not ready for an update there... I played Aaron (middle child) through to teen and he's looking good for heir despite rolling Pleasure on me but his younger brother is not yet a teen and I want to wait at least that long until I pick, since that's going to give me a much better idea of what he'll look like. I'm sure I'll get more play in this week but since the update process involves a lot of photo editing (cropping and captioning) I'm doubtful there'll be another actual update this week. Still, we'll see how I feel... it is only Tuesday.

I need to throw together some custom university students and see if the game's going to make any more on its own (I don't have a no student regen type hack in place, unlike with the town itself... I figure I'm more likely to marry people off to students on average and I don't want to be forever making new ones). I have a replacement live.package and it's got some really strange names in it, I'm realizing, but at least the people I make can be named really average things to help make up for it. And I changed one of the professors' names already because I thought it was very odd... and I might change another duplicate one although I'm kinda tempted to not since there's something funny about having two professors with the same first name.

Bleah. Anyhow, to give you an idea about the state of my insomnia, I'm off to at least take a nap right now, and yes, it's mid-afternoon here.

Saints and Sinners: A Custom Genetic Legacy

Saints and Sinners is my custom genetic legacy: 13 generations of Uglacy followed by 13 generations of Prettacy. It has a Catholic Saints name theme, which should be fun around the time I hit 'Q', and I've got some ideas in mind to keep the legacy family from acquiring a boring amount of cash on hand, including making Generation M restart on a new lot (since they'll be 'founding' the Prettacy half).

Generation 0 ~ Founding generation, Akio Kimura

Chapter 1
Chapter 2

Generation A ~ Aaron Kimura

Chapter 1 [Last large-graphic chapter]
Chapter 2 [Extra length, still smaller in Mb!]
Chapter 3
Chapter 4

Twilight Dreams Episode 1

Welcome to Episode #1 of Tasogare Yume: Twilight Dreams! Twilight Dreams is an episodic anime-inspired Sims story.

Read here.

misc progress notes

Despite insomnia, cramps, toothaches, etc. I have managed to do a few things:

• Finished up building the main Twilight Dreams neighborhood. Well, mostly; there's one lot that's only partly developed but it doesn't need to be more than it is for now.


• Populated the neighborhood, including with a few generic non-important people so my walkbys aren't always feature characters.


• Improved the dithering issues on clothing. Can't fix 'em entirely (like I said, even the Maxis stuff does this to me) but they're better, although there's still one or two things I might yet do another tweak on. I managed to get charcoal working okay, even, although in some cases 'okay' is better than others. I had to totally desaturate it to make it work, though.


• Made sure there's a second copy of everything, including neighborhoods, in my archive directory. I should (and will) burn some stuff to CD but I really need to organize what I have in archives first, since there's actually multiple copies of a lot of stuff.

Still gonna be a bit before I have anything to release but in the meantime, have a picture:

Okay, so, "no charcoal" it is.

I cannot make any of the charcoal clothing not dither into craptacularity.

Seriously, I've spent the last several hours working on the charcoal versions of several things and except for in one single case I've yet to come up with anything that works. The other colours, yes, I can improve, but charcoal? No.

I do not know how the hell they make their own clothes work, either, considering if I directly re-import what they export I also get dithering problems. *eyeroll*

I'm still going to revise the non-Charcoal colours and fix a couple minor flaws while I'm at it. But I give up on the charcoal. Srsly.

I SWEAR I did not used to have this bad a problem. I don't know if Seasons/BV changed things or if it's the new drivers/vidcard or some combination thereof, or if I just never tried to make dark clothing like this other than tshirts before, but... grr... so frustrated.

okay, I think I got it figured out

So, apparently if I check the item by running Photoshop's DDS filter and make sure it doesn't dither poorly, I can predict if it'll look okay in-game, provided I do then go and do my other workaround.

I'll work on rebuilding the clothes soon, using this method. In the meantime, I've removed the links to the downloads and put a note up about it.

In other news, the backstory neighborhood is built and populated fully, and I'm ready to start working on the new one.

I'm probably going to bed soon, though.

more clothing grr

Well, the game is still insisting on compressing (or possibly converting) textures in the game. On most colours this doesn't seem to matter much and unlike before it's not corrupting the FILES, just the displayed texture, but in the darkest colours it looks like total crap.

I'm not quite sure what to do about this at this point. I already rebuilt one dark skirt with a nearly-flat colour to try to avoid this (it and the fixed skirt texture for the one I mentioned the other day are on the website now) so I may have to do that with the others, too. It's a little annoying to look at the in-file graphic and see it be totally fine but have the in-game one be ass, though.

So, my advice, if you downloaded my clothes: don't use the charcoal ones (the dark brownish-black), because it will likely have some very obvious flaws*. I might be able to flatten the colour on them to keep it from happening, but it may be a few days before I get to it. The other dark colours (notably the twilight blue) don't show it as badly but depending on how picky you are you might want to double-check before sending a Sim out into the world with it.

The kicker is that their clothes have issues, too, but because they mostly use mid-range colours it's not very obvious.

So far I've yet to see this happen on the objects, but I don't have a lot of dark objects.

(*This may be partly an ATI issue. I don't have a computer with an nVidia card handy so I can't double-check this, but DXT compression is not native to ATI cards, so there may be some weird interaction between the Sims' use of it and the card. Note that I have other games using DXT where this isn't a problem so I'm only theorizing.)

Today's thought

I think I might be a little too thorough sometimes. Because that neighborhood you got to see a tiny pic of yesterday? That's the BACKSTORY neighborhood. I'm probably going to shoot about 30 pictures total (well, okay, I'm probably going to keep about 30 pictures total) and maybe 10 minutes of video. Naturally I've spent 2 days working on it.

Tomorrow I start the actual story neighborhood.

Izza more update

Okay, first, pursuant to the last post, we are buying a copy of an older version of Sony Vegas, for $42 including shipping. I think it's actually the version I once did download a trial for a few years ago, which I recall having very little trouble adapting to. So hopefully that will take care of any editing woes... I'm about 98% certain that it's got that variable chromakeying, since I found an old tutorial about it from the year it was released, so it should be all good.

Also, here's my progress to date in pictorial form:



Top row: [left] Miho as a teen (with her mom) [right] One of Miho's school friends with her family
Bottom row: [left] Another school friend of Miho [right] A basic shot of the neighborhood TeenMiho is from.

As you can see I've still got some empty lots down. Those represent places people are going (except the blue one, which is obviously gonna be a community lot). Most of the lots you see are slightly-altered duplicates of one another, just shells for background.

Also, in a fit of irony, the one thing I thought had no issues, that being clothes? I discovered today one of the skirts sorta, ahem, doesn't have a texture. I need to go take a look at that and figure out what happened (and upload a corrected file). Cuz, man, having the shape of the skirt but with the barbie nudity plastered onto the shape? Not working for me.

stupid moviemaker

It's no news to me that Windows Movie Maker is not precisely a robust video editor. It's serviceable, if what you want is simple compositing, and I could probably do most of what I want with it, but one thing I'd hoped to do that I just tested turns out to be impractical... partly because of WMM's limitations and partly because of Sims lighting.

New Versions of Flawed Custom Content

All Homecrafter and Object files downloaded from me prior to February 9th should be replaced. Due to renames and/or reorganization, I advise deleting all relevant files, then downloading the new versions and putting them in place. [If you're worried, make backups... but I did this without trouble.]

Existing collections and decorated items should remain unchanged (except as noted below), as the files have the same ID numbers.

What I'm fixing...

(Click to expand.)





(That's all the update you get today.)

And other recolours...

Oh, look. My object recolours have the same compression problems.

*sighs weightily*

Okay. I've pulled all the download links except for the clothing, which I already worked around the compression issues for. I'll be searching through my archives for the original graphics files and fixing the packages as soon as possible.

If you have downloaded ANYTHING from me besides clothing, you will want to keep an eye out for the fixed files. I'll announce them and restore the links when I get a chance to finish up.

Even More about Paint colours

*tears hair out*

So, I used the ORIGINAL bmps that I loaded into Homecrafter for the solid colour paints to fix up the ones that were off... only it turns out that THOSE don't match the IN-GAME versions, probably because of compression issues.

So essentially I have three choices:

a) Rebuild all 880 file graphics (835, I guess, since I'd be starting with the regular paint colours) and reload them into the existing packages using simPE tricks to keep the compression issues from happening
b) Rebuild only those colours that are still the most 'off' (mainly a couple I missed listing the last time through) and say "fuck it" to the colour differences
c) Say "fuck it" and don't fix any of it, because really who is going to notice unless they literally put two styles of paint next to each other...

Of course, given that the files I've already changed (which, by the way, included ALL the 'Paint w/White Kick' files because there was a misnaming problem) have other compression issues, and I was going to fix those anyhow because they are pretty visible, I probably will end up doing a) even though what I want to do is c) because dammit, I want to start playing SOMEDAY. I'm not an obsessive perfectionist, but little things like this do tend to irritate me especially since in theory I built all this crap to NOT have these issues...

Sigh. I need a drink. Of course, I don't have any alcohol in the house...

Addendum on the Paint Errors

...it's more widespread than I thought. I'm not sure how so yet, but I'm now going to be going through ALL the paint colours in ALL their variations and figure it out.

I suppose I could just call it "Manufacturer's variance" and live with it, since few people are going to combine, say, the original paint with the paint w/dark crown and kick, but it irritates me, so I'll probably end up fixing.

Making a list now.

ETA 116 files of 880 were sufficiently different that I feel a need to change them. I think. If I didn't miss anything. Which I hope I didn't.

I have a good list to work off of that should make this easy, and I still have my bases so I'm hoping it won't take TOO long... but I'm not tackling this until tomorrow, cuz I need a break. Plus I'm starving.

And then I get to package them and upload them and THEN I get to repackage the original files! Yay!

In the meantime, if you're using these... I think just replacing the package file with another should work, since the GUID should be the same (I'm not recreating, I'm editing the picture inside the file), so once I get the files uploaded it should be pretty easy to get the corrections in place.

Collections and Replacement textures

Okay, I'm not quite done with the collectionizing. Seriously, it's well over 1000 files I'm doing, so I'm not surprised. More, counting Maxis colours. And I'm not just throwing them in a collections folder... I'm organizing them by hue, grouping like stuff together (e.g., pastel rose, rose, victorian rose go next to each other; pastel rose with white kick can be found with pastel rose with light, medium, and dark kicks; etc.).

I'm also not surprised, though I am a little irked, that I have some non-matching recolours. I will be fixing these and uploading a batch of corrections this week. So if you downloaded any paint walls, you'll want to keep an eye out for that post. I suppose it's actually pretty amazing that most of the colours appear to really be correct, considering how I did it and how spread out the job was, but I really thought I'd set it up so this wouldn't happen. It seems to mostly be darker colours, too (like, a lot of the Black Satin ones are too light).

What I have left to do:

Organize most of the adorned paint (I've done plain and paint w/kick), which currently contains only my colours.
Add Maxis colours to the various paint folders and organize the new stuff.
Collectionize and organize the tile walls.

The floors are all done.

Needless to say I haven't gotten any actual building done today. There's only so long in a row I can stare at little thumbnails, so I did a bunch of reading in between doing organizing. TBH I'm not sure I'll finish organizing today but we'll see. If not it won't be long tomorrow, so I should be able to get back to building then.

I did do one other thing today in one of my breaks from organizing, and that's start making a list of stuff I need to shoot in the background neighborhood, since I'm going to want to do that stuff first.

This is me, being productive

Well, okay, not THAT productive... but even though I usually don't get much Sims stuff done on the weekends (and in fact am about to go play Guild Wars) I did manage to do a couple things. The object recolours were mostly things I did before but the livingroom stuff was done today, and yesterday I collectionized some of the flooring. Today I put together the first building in the backstory neighborhood and put the relevant people in it:



Tomorrow I'll get back to collectionizing (building even one building makes me want to finish it that much more), and maybe put together some more buildings, depending on how long that takes me.

object recolours uploaded

Object recolours (requiring CEP) have been aded to the custom content post. Right now it's just a link to the top folder, which has subfolders, to help save some space. There are pictures (matching the rar file names) to give you an idea of what's available in any given file.

I may make some separate links to the subfolders later if it becomes an issue; I've been thinking of reorganizing by adding contents lists there rather than here anyhow. But for now I'm leaving things as they are.

The README just asks people to not redistribute (and credits CEP), don't fear it. :D

Note: While I'm mostly reasonably happy with these, there's some skins in that have a few flaws... nothing I feel makes them bad, exactly, or I wouldn't have uploaded them, but a few things where I wish I could've done better. In particular I'm not happy with the expensive toilet recolours, though I'm not sure I could've really done much better, either. Some of these might be remade later if I can figure out how to improve them.

Project: Tasogare Yume (Twilight Dreams)

Tasogare Yume (Twilight Dreams) is an episodic Sims story, influenced by anime. The setting is sorta-Japan... things in the setting are based at least loosely on places and character types I've seen in both anime and Japanese drama shows. It's a filtered-through-Westerner-eyes Japan, though, and I make no claims that it's accurate. The character style is also based on anime.

Progress & Stuff

First: Recolours

My custom content post has been updated and slightly reorganized. This link is also always available in the side bar.

Twilight Dreams Teaser