Big Awful Texture Locator
Download the latest version here
Find any texture in The Sims 2 that is too big, or is 'awful' (suboptimal texture format)
Find textures in any folder you choose
Filter by width, height, memory size, texture format, or number of mipmap levels
Preview and show details of textures the tool found
Remember 'known good' textures, which are optionally excluded from being shown in the list
Look up the path of the package, and the group and instance of the resource
Copy texture/resource details (right click)
Open the package in the default package editor (double click)
Dark mode/light mode and UI scale adjustable
Native on both Windows and Linux
The Sims 2 has had a long-standing problem known as 'pink flashing' or 'pink soup' when using too much custom content. The Sims 2 is a 32-bit program, which means that it normally has a maximum memory limit of 2GiB (2048MiB) and by using a so-called '4GB patch' you can raise this limit to -you guessed it- 4GiB, this limit might seem pretty large, but due to how the game works you might hit this limit sooner than expected!
Let's say you have 1024x1024 textures (which is the default for Sims 4 textures, and thus also often for 4to2 cc) in RGBA format, these textures will EACH take up 4MiB of texture memory! This means you could possibly only have only a MAXIMUM of 1024 textures loaded in memory before the dreaded pink flashing occurs. In practice, this limit is lower due to other factors.
This tool will help you find textures that take up too much texture memory, and thus (hopefully) help alleviate some amount of pink flashing.
First, download the program from the link above and follow the instructions to open the program.
Now let's get the program looking the way you want: click on the sun/moon button on the top left of the program to switch light/dark mode and click the "UI Scale" number next to it and enter a new number to change the size of the interface.
Set the folder we want to search: at the top bar, search for the 'Downloads:' bar, then at the end click the button with the folder icon and select your folder. Once you've selected a folder the program will instantly start scanning, if you want to restart this scan then at any time you can click the text in the Downloads bar and press enter.
Currently this list will show all textures in the scan folder, which is probably not very interesting. To find some more interesting textures we can add some filters to the texture list. On the top bar, click on the 'Filter' button: this will open the filter list and it will be empty if you haven't added any filters previously.
These filters filter the texture list one by one, each filter removing more textures from the displayed list of textures. To add a filter, click the plus button, and to remove it click on the trashcan button at the start of the line.
To edit a filter, click on the first box to choose the filter type, click on the second box to choose the type of comparison, and select the number in the last box to set the number to compare with.
The comparison type can be < (smaller than), <= (smaller or equal), > (greater than), >= (greater or equal), == (equal), or != (not equal).
The Format filter is different: make a format filter, then click on the 'choose' button and choose the texture formats that you want to show in the texture list.
Let's edit some textures!
In the texture list, find a texture that you think is too big, and either double click on it to open it in the default package editor or right click on it to show a menu to copy the details of the package.
Finally, once you have the package opened in your favorite package manager, edit the texture to be smaller and/or a better texture format, save and ta-da! your game will now use less texture memory.
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