Jimantha P.

25 year old crazy for AI. Do it ethically. Simping so hard for Viktor I'm trying to make an AI out of him.. Programming aficionado. MDNI please it makes me feel like a babysitter.

[jimanthap]

Jim's masterlist

About me: I'm a professional artist and aspiring writer! English is not my first language, so you might find my use of it is a bit... crude. I'm currently obsessed with the Arcane series and I also have a couple weird hobbies here and there.

My website which is under construction

My art.

Fanfiction:

You can replace Y/N for your actual name on my website.

Arcane:

Dais of Love.

Pathological Facade

Virtual Intelligence Knowledge Text-based-Opensource Roleplay

... Or as I like to call it, "Viktor", is my attempt to build AI with no proper hardware! This is just for fun. Please check the repo and roast it!

If you wanna follow his development I sometimes post here, and from now on I'll do it under the #v.i.k.t.o.r tag!

AI?? What the hell is this? Are you a thief??? No, jesus christ, no! All the training data I'm using is my own. My writing, my chatlogs, random thoughts I have.

So... you're not stealing to feed your AI? No! Before becoming obsessed with both Viktor and AI, I was an artist and writer too. And while I'd gladly give my art as training data (please ask first), I 100% get not everyone would do the same. All I'm using to train Viktor is of my own making or AI-generated so far.

I wanna contribute, but I'm not a programmer! Oh, that's so cool, thank you! If you have a couple fanfictions or posts that you think could benefit Viktor that'd be really nice to have them on hand!

I don't want you to use my Arcane fanfiction for training your AI That's fine! I won't use anything without the writer's consent. At first I was going to personally reach out to my favorite writer's to ask for permission, but it was very distressing for me because I was afraid of being blocked and the writer said no anyway, so I guess is just better if I wait for people to personally approach me.

Are you literally making an AI to act like Viktor? Ideally it'd be able to act like anyone but I named him Viktor because he's who inspired me to approach AI and programming. Its a whole story including CharacterAI and its fall from grace, PygmalionAI, making friends in the community and stuff.

Why? Why not?

[nowwheresmynut]

happy 1 year anniversary

[donmecheart]

ɪ ᴡᴏɴᴛ ꜰᴀɪʟ. ɪ sᴡᴇᴀʀ ɪᴛ

[donmecheart]

What if Viktor's scars healed like Sevika's after an arcane explosion

(he has a mental breakdown due to what’s happening)

[nefastidies]

"Doctor, you may begin the process"

[amikoroyaiart]

Some Verstave doodles

[powerbottombrucespringsteen]

This may seem like a very “well duh” post but i do think it’s important to be clear that when trump claims he intends to “deport” U.S. citizens that that is definitionally not deportation. Deportation specifically refers to the civil process of removal a foreign noncitizen to the country where they hold citizenship. Deportation is also, in most cases, a legal punishment in itself and will not result in the deportee being jailed upon arrival to their country of citizenship. Removing US citizens from the US and placing them in jails in countries that they have no citizenship claim to is commonly referred to as “disappearing,” “kidnapping,” or “trafficking” and discussions around trump’s desire to remove US citizens from the country should refer to it as such

[l-1-z-a]

🖼️🏙️ Mortimer Goth in unused SimCity 4 files according to Michael Long

Source: Beta Power Plants, Advisor and UI, I found these images while exploring in sc4 .dat files.

[randomsporefacts]

spore-related assets from the sims 2 freetime. these are interesting because this expansion pack came out in february 2008, quite a few months before spore did

-

i painstakingly found the files and found out how to open the package files properly (used YaPe which i learned about through this post i found, i couldnt figure simpe out)

unfortunately i cant figure out how to export the dds files here, and one to two largest mipmaps on most textures dont display, so youre just gonna have to deal with this crusty screenshot. i know the tool is very work in progress still, but theres a good chance i might be doing something wrong here, so tell me how to fix it if so

anyway. videogameboxep7-spore_txtr (comes from Objects06.package (which had the textures for the objects themselves). from here it actually appears to be some early version of the boxart? like a circle with creature renders in front. i wasnt able to find something similar on hand

however im pretty sure one of the screenshots here is just cropped from this. which is from 2006. lmao

i got tired of looking for any more textures so if theres any other textures i might have missed that have spore in them then let me know

-

the gameplay footage is actually found in Movies/Games/spore as opposed to being in a package file

fortunately this format very easily converts into mp4 files with ffmpeg

heres all of the videos concatenated. indeed this is early 2008 footage! all of the ui is different, other graphics are different, voice clips and other sounds that play through the music seem the same though. some animations are different too?

remarkably the galaxy at the end of this clip is REALLY red and orange. was the color going to change more in different parts of the galaxy?

and yeah these videos are actually 128x128

fun fact, according to sims wiki the music is Andromeda from Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed. and another fun fact, the ea logo cell from the start is something i mostly see in the spore mobile games, but it makes sense itd be in trailers too

i wouldnt be surprised if this whole clip was just an existing spore trailer condensed into several 128x128 video files. im just not super familiar with the trailers admittedly

-

by the way yape does open spore package files, though theres nothing particularly viewable here, and you should just use sporemodder fx anyways. but it has a hex editor and whatever this texture is used photoshop apparently!

[painfully-painful-pain]

i love these backgrounds so much why did they practically stop making them after Nightlife...

I know there's the ones with a small render and a colored background but still 💔 they even stopped with those after Seasons.

[simnopke]

The Sims 2 Legacy Collection: shadow fix

The rerelease of The Sims 2 introduced a fix for the black rectangles under Sims. You may have experienced this bug in the Ultimate Collection version.

As the creator of the Sims Shadow Fix, I was curious to know how it was done. But first, I'd like to explain what the problem with Sim shadows is.

What's the cause of the shadow bug?

When the game works as intended, a Sim shadow texture is a light bluish blob on a white background. It also has transparency, but it's unused. It looks like this:

However, many modern graphics cards render the texture as plain black with transparency:

That's why black rectangles appear under the Sims.

What does my mod do?

My mod is only a workaround for the bug. It uses the transparency to recreate the shadows.

The first versions released in 2015 and 2016 were achromatic, while the original shadows were bluish. Back then I didn't even know why and how my mod worked.

On 2 January 2025 I released new versions based on my research into shaders. I also recreated the original bluish shadows.

How does the Legacy Collection fix the shadow bug?

Thanks to @ivycopur I was able to examine the code. It uses a workaround, just like my mod.

In fact, it looks almost exactly like the really not misty 0.4 version of my mod, which, ironically, is now legacy. The shader code in the Legacy Collection contains the same nonsense. And a bit more.

Code comparison

The left side is the original code extracted from the Materials.package file in The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection. The right side is my code or the Legacy Collection code:

The differences between my code and the LC code:

the debug part: I removed it from my code as players will never see it. The LC has this feature untouched.

alphaBlend srcFactor: despite the difference, it actually changes nothing. Explained later.

The identical changes:

alphaBlend dstFactor,

the same colorScalar has been added,

textureBlend.

Nonsense #1: textureBlend

The textureBlend defines how the colors of the incoming texture are transformed. The first argument is responsible for the color channels, the second – for the transparency.

Originally it's just:

textureBlend select(texture) select(texture)

And it means that the texture is taken as it is.

My and LC code transforms it though. The colorScalar is defined as a partially opaque (40%) black color. The transparency argument takes the transparency of the original texture and darkens it with the 40% factor:

multiply(colorScalar texture)

And this makes sense. The color channels argument takes the transparency part of the texture and makes it pure black, because the color scalar is black:

multiply(colorScalar texture:alphaReplicate)

It's pointless. I could go:

select(colorScalar)

instead. It would be effectively the same.

The texture after the transformations looks like this:

Nonsense #2: alphaBlend

The alphaBlend defines how to mix the source colors (in this case the transformed texture from the textureBlend step) with the destination colors (in this case, the ground under Sim's feet).

The srcFactor argument defines the source color transformations, the dstFaction – defines the destination color transformations. And then they're put together.

Originally it's:

alphaBlend srcFactor(destColor) add dstFactor(zero)

The srcFactor says that the shadow colors are darkened with the ground colors. The dstFactor doesn't really matter because it's multiplied by zero (black). Also, transparency isn't used.

If I understand correctly, you could achieve the same effect with:

alphaBlend srcFactor(zero) add dstFactor(srcColor)

And the final effect is:

My and LC code had to do it differently. The dstFactor says to darken the floor color with inverted transparency:

dstFactor(invSrcAlpha)

It sounds complicated, but the inversion actually means that black becomes white and vice versa. So the transparency texture, which is a dark gray blob on a black background, becomes a light gray blob on a white background.

The srcFactor is actually useless because the shadow texture (from the textureBlend step) is black. So it doesn't matter if you use:

srcFactor(one)

like I did, or:

srcFactor(destColor)

as in the LC code, it will always be black because you can't make black any darker. To make the intention clear, I'd personally go with:

srcFactor(zero)

instead. The final effect would always be:

It's different from the original intended effect. You can even see the difference in the official screenshots:

Source 1 | Source 2

Conclusion

It doesn't look like a coincidence. The cause of the shadow bug hasn't been fixed, and I doubt that an experienced shader creator would come up with such a workaround. There are better ways.

Before you point out that it's against my terms of use to take my code and sell it, especially without credit, hear out. It doesn't matter – EA's policy allows it. And I'm not even angry. It's just funny that they trusted such a messy code. I wouldn't be surprised to see other creators' fixes in the Legacy Collection.

The good thing is that EA has addressed the shadow issue at all. 🙃

[paradoxcase]

Right, so, after reading some error logs, obtaining a copy of the objects.package that shipped with the Sims 2 rerelease, and talking about this with Lazy Duchess, I have a conspiracy theory about why the rerelease is so damn broken

So first, I looked at an error log that was happening in the Enthusiasm Tracker. It was coming from the function that signs sims up for a magazine subscription after they choose that option on the phone. It's a very short function, all it does is 1) check to see if the family has a magazine subscription token, 2) create one if it does not already exist, and 3) set a property on the token regardless of whether 2 was necessary or not. All three of these actions make use of the Manage Inventory primitive, which controls not just sim inventories, but also tokens like this, memories, and gossip. I compared all like five lines of this function to the one in my objects.package, that I have from the Ultimate Collection, and they were exactly the same. But for some reason, in the rerelease, this throws an error. There is no explanation at the level of this function. I kind of scratched my head and thought, maybe they changed how the magazine subscription token works in this version, and forgot to update this function? Or something?

Next, there was an Too Many Iterations error log that had a very obvious cause: for some reason, the active family had over 500 tokens in its inventory. The family inventory isn't listed in the error log, so have no idea what those tokens were, or how there came to be 500+ of them. BUT. The aforementioned magazine subscription token is a token that goes in the family inventory. Maybe these two problems are somehow related. Are those 500 tokens all magazine subscription tokens, or something?

And then there is the infamous error that the game now throws when a sim goes to get abducted. I didn't see an error log for this one, but I was making a post on MTS listing all of the known issues with the rerelease, and someone mentioned there that the issue is not so much with the abduction as it is with other sims reacting to the abduction, and if there are no sims on the lot to react to the abduction, the error does not occur. Someone else then mentioned that the Abduction Reaction Fix mod that I made actually fixes this error. I made that mod, I know exactly what it does. What does it do?

Well, you see, objects in the game all have what is called a tree table, which is a table of interactions and the functions that need to be called when those interactions are triggered. One of the interactions on the telescope is the interaction to run to the telescope after someone has been abducted. But, in the Free Time expansion, a lot of new interactions were added to the telescope, and for some reason, EA decided to renumber all of the functions when they did that. They forgot to update the tree table, which references functions by their numbers, and as a result, the function that was called when sims were supposed to do the run-to-telescope interaction was actually the function that gives sims credit for discovering a new planet. In my mod, I fixed this, so that when sims are supposed to run to the telescope, the proper run-to-the-telescope function is called instead.

So, the error happens when my mod is not installed (when the planet discovery function is being called erroneously) and not when it is (when the run-to-the-telescope function is called instead). So the error must be coming from the planet discovery function. What is in the planet discovery function? It is almost identical to the magazine subscription function. It checks for the planet discovery token, adds it if it isn't there, and then modifies a property on it, using Manage Inventory. So this is exact same bug. And other people are reporting that some sims cannot gain memories - another game function that is handled by Manage Inventory. There is also an error that happens after a sim cooks food - one thing that happens at that point is that tokens and memories are added to the sim's inventory marking that they have successfully (or unsuccessfully) learned to cook that food.

So at this point, my theory is that EA somehow broke the Manage Inventory primitive. It's used all over the code, to do all sorts of stuff, if you break something that ubiquitous and fundamental, of course it's going to cause a whole lot of seemingly completely unrelated errors. Manage Inventory is now going hog-wild, throwing errors, adding hundreds of extraneous tokens to inventories, refusing to give sims memories, and who knows what else. I can feel it, this is the answer

[paradoxcase]

@arcats900:

is there a way to mod this fix in?

Reportedly, the issues that seem to stem from broken Manage Inventory seem to have been fixed by EA in the second patch. So if you update your game, those issues at least should hopefully be fixed.

But to answer your question, no, this problem was in the C++ code, which isn't accessible to modders unless someone decompiles the exe

[lazyduchess]

Also in the loong list of new issues with TS2, SIms now absolutely refuse to switch to their work uniform in OFB businesses.

Wanted to see if they had done anything about the bug where sims faces would reset but can't get them to switch at all, bummer!

[lazyduchess]

Audio Quality fix for TS2 Legacy Collection

Hi :)

Here's a fix for the horrible voice quality in TS2 legacy:

Download on Patreon (Free)

Be warned, it's a 2.5GB zip file as it's ALL the voice lines re-encoded. Patreon servers are pretty fast though.

Just extract the zip anywhere in your "Documents/Sims 2 Legacy/Downloads" folder.

Should work with UC and other TS2 versions too but idk if it'll make much of a difference there.

[lazyduchess]

Tbh, this is probably still worth trying out.

Speech decoding's always been kinda shit even back in UC, would have to see and compare.

[gaylor-moon]

[grippy3000]

fun fact one of the world champions in pepper-eating contests is a trans woman and she actually faced significant backlash because people somehow thought she had a biological advantage. to eating spicy pepper

[grippy3000]

update bc i went back and checked: her name is brianna “the chilli queen” skinner and she set a record in 2017 by slamming back 23 carolina reapers consecutively. she only stopped when told to by the referees, and the next year she stepped down out of boredom. queen

[pettyartist]

Here's a picture of her, by the way

And her super supportive wife

[nentuaby]

The championship, it should be noted, is unisex. Apparently being a trans woman gives you an innate biological advantage over both cis men and cis women.

[vexwerewolf]

The innate biological advantage of being cool as fuck

[hexstrapp]

hes so meow meow

[leoram8209]