Monday started early....

Let me give this post a full title: "How I came to not watch Dr. Horrible, ended up with wet pillows, and had Monday luck start early but leave late".

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.

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.)

What I'm fixing...

(Click to expand.)





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

grrrrr

Okay, I am going to hunt down whomever at Maxis decided how to map bedding textures to objects, and STAB THEM WITH A RUSTY FORK.

So, I made 27 custom bedspreads, and had to throw away all but 4 because it turns out that the texture mapping on the single bed side uses the right third or so of the double bed side. What kind of crack were they smoking???

(The four I kept were recolours of one of the flowered bedspreads, so it wasn't an issue.)

So, I'm currently working on trying to make sure I've got the right saved selection for the duplicating part, so I can try to match up patterns... and in the meantime, I am going to be doing simple recolours of the textured creamy bedspread just to give myself some variety. I had some before but because of the way I separated things out there was a line down the middle of the single bed so I'm doing something a little simpler (I'd tried to take the top folded-over part and make it a separate colour but it was funking up things, so I'm leaving it the same colour as the main part.)

Needless to say, this turned out to eat up most of the time I was planning on putting into CC today. However I did get some other random things loaded (curtains and painting/poster recolours, the latter of which had two I might need to redo because of the way they are mapped).

Our plans this weekend are to spend some time (re)playing Final Fantasy 7 so I might load walls during battles since my sweetie will be the one with the controller. Also I figured out a new way to do the carpet that pleases me better though I want to do test loads of both styles to make sure it looks right, but if it does, I'll be able to recreate the carpet and add a new style (short and shag, essentially) pretty quickly -- yay for Photoshop Actions.