Hi, Christa. First of all, thank you very much for the fantastic shaders you shared. I have a note, two bugs that I'd like to report, and two questions. This is a long message (sorry), but I numbered each topic to make it easier to read.
Some of the issues that I first noticed have been reported (I wanted to make more tests before I wrote to you, and that worked in my favor), so they're not listed here unless there's something else that I haven't seen being mentioned. Before anything else, this is what I have in my game: after the latest update to your mod, I kept only 3 other shaders, all of which you said you didn't incorporate into yours: criquette's better nightlife (the regular version, not the one that uses code from Voeille's water shaders), nopke's accurate nh lighting, and lazyduchess' soft shadows. I also use spockthewok's asi plugin for reflective water (but not his CS water shader), and veronavillequiltingbee's cozy home lighting v2.0.
[1] - NOTE about terrain lighting during snow accumulation. One issue has already been reported, and the other I found it's not caused by your mod
In my original draft, I was going to report 2 issues with the lot lighting during snow accumulation. One was the flickering terrain, which more than one person has reported since then.
The other was the lot lighting still getting darker than the neighborhood during snow accumulation, but I found out that it was not caused by your mod or any other shader, in fact, but by Voeille's snow replacement from her "No More Blurriness" set (and also this edit with resized textures by @vegan-kaktus). The texture causing this issue is named "snow-light-pass1_txtr". In Voeille's/Vegan-Kaktus' replacement, this is what it looks like (LEFT), vs the original texture by Maxis (RIGHT):
It's basically setting a dark overlay on the lot terrain when it accumulates snow.
I'm only including this here in case you get reports of mismatched lighting in this specific situation, only so that you and others may know that it might not be your mod or even any undetected conflict between shaders that's causing it.
Removing the package file immediately fixed the issue, but that's not strictly needed, and that's why I'm tagging @vegan-kaktus. For my own game, I simply extracted their default texture for "snow-light-pass2" and replaced "snow-light-pass1" with it. Others may wish to simply delete the resource for the "faulty" texture on the package file and use the (blurry) one made by Maxis. Voeille is no longer active, but VK might wish to do the same as I did or even create a new texture to replace the "faulty" one. This was the result after editing the file: seamless transition, as you intended:
[2] - Bugs
[A] Terrain Paints (partially reported by a commenter on your post):
The mod is causing the thumbnails for terrain paints to be all pink, instead of showing a preview of the actual paint. Regardless/despite this issue, it seems* that most of them work correctly, EXCEPT for the 5 "Sparse Flower" terrains from Celebration Stuff. These terrains are made of 2 textures, one being a base shared by all of them, and one named "detail", which contains the actual flowers. So with your mod, the game is ignoring the "_detail" textures, and showing only the grass base:
This is why I wrote that it SEEMS like these are the only terrain paints affected, because there might be other paints that should look different due to a complementary texture that's now being ignored, but those 5 are the ones that immediately caught my attention, as they're missing their distinctive feature.
[B] Reflective Plane objects (bugs and unable to delete once placed)
(It seems like I had an issue with FRAPs while taking the screenshots for this issue, and only now I noticed that I don't have any pictures to illustrate them. Hopefully, the text will be enough)
No matter in what corner of the lot I place them in (despite using the correct size for the lot), the reflections aren't really aligning with the objects they're reflecting, showing further away or deeper into the pond than they should, as if those objects were floating.
I also found that the planes are'nt updating the reflection for day/nighttime, instead only showing the time of the day during which they were placed on the lot.
There's also an issue that by simply clicking on them in the buy catalog, and moving them across the lot grid, without actually clicking on the mouse, the reflection plane "stucks", and overlays the any other(s) placed there previously. Not only are they not updating for nighttime, but I suspect they're not updating at all, because once this happened, I could see on (some of) the reflection plane(s) that green overlay that follows an object before you actually place it on the lot. This suspicion grew because it was nighttime when I browsed the plane objects in the catalog again (when they "stuck", despite not being actually placed), because while the original reflection plane showed daytime, the new one was showing nighttime, and neither changed when day broke.
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[3] Questions
[A] About SimStandard shaders
You wrote that your mod now includes Extended Standard and SimStandard shaders. I'm assuming you meant the mods by crispsandkerosene. I wasn't using those mods yet, but reading the description for the Extended SimStandardMaterial shader, there are 2 versions of it, one of which makes sims brighter. Then there's also @veronavillequiltingbee's edit of that mod, which also makes sims brighter, not quite as bright as CK's original settings. Would you mind telling us which version you used for your mod, or if you made your own adjustments to it instead, what changes you made, please?
[B] How faithful to the neighborhood view are/can the textures shown in lot view be?
I had edits made to the "neighborhoodterrain.ini" and "terrain.ini" files to change things like the size of the beach skirt and the slope angles that cause the game to use the cliff texture, but I noticed that they're different in lot view, with textures like cliff and the secondary grass (named "dry" in the game files) being applied on the terrain at much lower altitudes and degree of inclination (for cliff) and much closer to the road pieces (for the "dry" grass) than in nhood view.
In lot view, does the game (re)calculate what terrain texture to apply, instead of using the same point of reference as it did to apply those same textures in nhood view?
In the map shown above, it doesn't really bother me -- it was only a better example to show the 3 types of textures for Lush/Temperate terrains. However, in my downtown map, I have this area close to the water, where I place deco embankment pieces, and while in nhood view that area displays the regular grass texture (the one that neatly matches the default grass from lots), in lot view, it's applying the "dry" grass texture, no matter what changes I make to those .ini files to change how far back from roads an area must be to be able to apply this texture. This is only an issue because it causes a mismatch between the terrain of the lot I placed in that area between the road and the water, and the neighborhood area immediately next to it:
From the lot view of this map, the "dry" grass texture is also being applied to any slopes, no matter their height (and closeness to the road), despite, again, this area not using that type of grass when seen in neighborhood view:
For now, I made a default replacement for the "dry" grass terrain, mixing it a bit with the regular grass so it won't look as rough and jarring in lot view, while still preserving the texture variation intended by Maxis, because I like this feature. Still, while this isn't a bug in your mod, I'm trying to see what my options are here, specially due to the mismatch shown in the previous picture, but I'll understand if you don't want to look into this issue I'm having.
Again, thank you very much for your mod (and sorry again for the huge message). Your work opened up so many possibilities, and it's surreal that this is the type of mods are being made for a 22 year-old game.
Hi!
Thank you so much for your extended feedback!
Reflective planes
All of bugs you mentioned - I don't have such troubles in both original game and Legacy o.O
I guess you may have placed the planes incorrectly, or something conflicts maybe.
My planes are based on murano's reflective floors, but mine are hooked to simple mirror reflection, not murano's additional shaders (so It should work without his shaders, but you can test it if you want).
Extended Materials
I used vvqb's edit, but I found out that forgot to include shader for sims, long story. I will make several versions maybe. Didn't want to include it at all, but snow pass shader for snow on objects lies in the same path - so I must include it (silently cries).
Snow
I know about dark texture in default replacement mods - this is the reason I don't use it. Gonna create my own defaults in the future.
Many people also reported to me about flickering snow. Strangely, I observe it in original game, not Legacy, but I'm working on it. The main cause is depth - the sequence of objects the game must render and inconsistency in its settings. It is also connected to white clips near holes and green ones near curved pools.
Broken maxis paints
Maxis lot terrain shader contains two samplers - for general texture and for detailed texture. The difference between them is that of scale - detailed texture is less blurry, and it is visible only if the camera is close to the ground - if it's far, the detailed sampler gets invisible. Another words, it works like overlay (so they decided to create grass texture with separated on the detailed texture flowers, lol).
Many terrain defaults use the same texture for those two samplers. Personally, I don't use maxis terrain paints and don't want to provide compatibility to that - I'm preparing my own textures replacement, and that detailed texture seems to me useless, that's why I got rid of it.
As for thumbnails, It was scripting mistake, forgot to incude it into shader file, so thumbnail generation breaks. It will be fixed the next update.
Lot skirt texture mapping
Lot skirt terrain can't match the neighborhood terrain because of different rendering engine properties - they are completely different meshes. For example, neighborhood terrain has settings based on distance from water (used for sand) and roads (used for rough and medium layers), paint map tables (.ini files), while lot skirts don't have such functionality completely.
So, I used angle calculation for cliff and rough samplers (but with lower angle), and calculation based on distance from lot for medium sampler. Snow and sand still use FF (fixed function - simplified syntax with stages, less functional and more easy) technique with correspondent UV maps - so that sand keeps its positions. Tried to use VSPS (vertex pixel shader - programmable shader, more functional but more heavy) for sand, but I couldn't get it to work well - it gets smoother transitions, but uses lot height, not absolute height of mesh, so it caused sand migrate up to lot and cover everything below lot (if the lot is placed higher than water).
Another situation in Castaway Stories - it has completely different rendering engine for lot skirts. It is hooked to neighborhood techniques and their paint map tables - so that lot skirt fully repeats the behavior of neighborhood terrain. BUT it also has loads of new code (sea level, many data that original lot skirts lack), generation of new alpha maps, etc, etc... Sadly, it's impossible to port in original game.
Lot terrain mismatch
Originally lot skirt uses multiplying of diffuse lighting and color coefficient. To try to match, I used light maps - the benefit of it is lack of adjustable coefficients and compatibility with any lighting mod. But it seems to be not so stable as it gets dark if the terrain is sloped, etc. So now I'm looking for the best solution - would try original lighting.
As for the terrain itself - in CS it has so-called "lot edge blend" - an additional mesh, part of lot skirt, that is blended with lot terrain using alpha transition. Original game doesn't have such functionality and it can't be ported unfortunatelly.
But I decided to modify lot terrain shader so that it has the same calculations as lot skirts do, and it made the lot terrain to match the lot skirt paint. Painting above that is still possible!
Lot terrain paint matches lot skirt terrain paint:
See lot grid:
Also added sand paint for beaches - so that it stays on the shore even if you remove the sand terrain paint by tool, and looks smoother and matching to the lot skirt sand. Also still possible to draw it by terrain paint tool.
Default terrain paint:
Partly removed default terrain paint:
Completely removed default terrain paint:
Upcoming days I'm working on the next update, so stay tuned and feel free to tell me if something's wrong!
