Announcing a new era for my patterns (and my annual Advent calendar)!
I have been very quiet this year and so far have not released any new CC. But I have not been idle. I have been quietly working on something big behind the scenes.
When you want to make a pattern for the Sims 3, you can choose between 3 tools: TSR Workshop, Delphy's Pattern Tool, and EA's Create-A-Pattern Tool. TSR Workshop and Delphy's Pattern tool both create only RGBA patterns, meaning they have one texture file that has specialized colors to indicate recolorable areas (called a mask image).
EA's Create-A-Pattern tool can create RGBA patterns as well as another variant, the HSV Shift pattern.
What does HSV Shift mean? HSV stands for Hue-Saturation-Value, which is a commonly known color model. For Sims 3 patterns, the color model is used to shift the colors of a base texture a certain way. This allows several colors to change at once. You can create very colorful patterns this way and it's great for gradients or patterns with an expanded color palette.
The HSV Shift pattern variant uses a base texture (or several even), that is then targeted by a separate mask image. This way, you can change several colors at once, as opposed to the RGBA mode, which only allows direct manipulation inside one image file. This also allows the contrast and color relationships of the base image to stay intact.
Sadly, the CAP tool is known for outputting quite buggy patterns, and it is a chore to fix them manually. Also, it does not offer much control over the recolorable areas.
In the past, I attempted to deconstruct and analyze the HSV Shift pattern structure to figure out if there was a way to manually recreate them. It was very confusing, and after some trial and many errors, I decided to give up for now.
Fast forward to this year, where I was determined to give it another go.
And I persevered and unlocked the secrets of the HSV Shift pattern this time. I learned that it is not feasible to craft these by hand, because there are several calculations involved and it's way too tedious to do this by hand every time.
I tried to work with the CAP tool, but it was frustrating me and the manual editing involved just to get the patterns working was boring and repetitive.
So I cobbled together my own pattern tool that could do the necessary formatting and calculations required for HSV Shift patterns for me. I call it Sims 3 Pattern Creator. It uses a special environment to run in that makes it impossible to share, but I can use it to make amazing patterns for your Sims 3 game.
I meticulously analyzed basegame patterns, TSRW patterns, Delphy's Pattern Packager patterns and CAP patterns and compared them to each other to figure out a working way to do this.
Patterns created with my custom tool come in sims3pack and package format, and include a handy info text file that contains a few stats like for what category you can find it, what default colors it has and more.
Furthermore, the preview thumbnails take into account the more contrasting in-game lighting, so the thumbnails imitate how the pattern will look in-game and are more representative of how it will appear in-game than patterns created with other tools.
Because it is now much more convenient for me to use my own tool, I will be using it for my patterns going forward.
I tested both packages and sims3packs and can say they work without issues on my end, however they are still considered experimental.
Going forward, I am retiring the _big label in favor of using _large instead. I have always felt this term was more fitting to use in conjunction with the terms medium and small, but I didn't want to change this out of the blue. Now that I am using a different tool, it feels like this shift is significant enough to warrant the change in the logic and now can also be used to differentiate those patterns from my older ones.
Once I convert my findings into digestible information, I plan on sharing more info regarding the HSV Shift patterns, but for now, my Advent calendar has my full focus.
TL;DR:
I created my own custom pattern tool (which I cannot share, sorry!) to be able to make HSV Shift patterns (and the regular kind too). You can get your hands on these experimental patterns starting December 1st, 2025 when my Advent calendar goes live. I hope you enjoy the 24 daily treats this year!
