#ts4 faq

[pixelplayground]

Hello! Would you show us a screenshot from your game without re-grading (I think that's what you said it was called) vs. using that shader please? I'd love to see how much of a difference it makes before I attempt to work it out myself lol. Thank you in advance! <3

Hello Nonny, sure. Ray-Tracing is what I use. It makes all the difference.

01 - vanilla

02 - color settings

03 - light (re-light)

04 - depth (ray-tracing)

Voila.

[pictureamoebae]

Heyy! I hope you’re ankle is feeling a little better. I wanted to reach out. I am also dealing with srwe issues now, which I never did until recently. I’ve done some testing and searching based off of your responses. A few things I’ve tested — with and without mods, reshade installed/uninstalled, fresh install of ea/sims 4, without swre. I saw that there was an open report with ea (I clicked me too) but I’ve tried and tested on every mode, and windows key. With and without srwe. The white border freezing only happens with srwe. I saw another response about a windows update, so I backed up my computer. Reimaged/reset my entire computer with a clean install of windows and the issue is still persisting. I’m not sure if there’s anything else I can try?

Thank your helping our community, you’re appreciated!!

Hi! I'm so sorry you're experiencing that issue too. Someone in my discord server said they've been able to fix it with SRWE by running the game and SRWE as administrator. You may also have to run EA App as admin too. They mentioned something about running it all in compatibility mode as well, but didn't say for which Windows version - that part might not be necessary. I'd try running it all as admin first to see what happens.

It almost sounds like in the last big update something has changed with how TS4 utilises or renders the window or viewport, but I'm just wildly speculating, it might have nothing to do with that. Hopefully they're looking into it.

[pictureamoebae]

is it better to have uncompressed sim textures on or off in the settings? i don't really understand what it means.

For the best quality you want to turn uncompressed sim textures ON.

There are two sets of sim textures available in the game: one set is saved with compression to save file size, the other set is saved without compression and therefore has a larger file size.

Compression is good for slower computers that don’t have a lot of vram (vram is the amount of gb of ram your video card has), because textures use vram to load and it’s a finite resource. However, compression introduces what are known as artefacts into the texture. In practice this means they start to look lower quality, a little rough and blocky.

Uncompressed textures come without any of that compression, so they don’t have any artefacts and look exactly as they did when the maxis team created them. The downside is they are much larger in size, and therefore take up more vram to load.

TS4 was made with quite low end systems in mind because its players skew quite young and aren’t always typical gamers who play other demanding games, and so don’t always have great PCs. That’s why they offer a lot of lower quality settings, to help those people out so they can still play the game. But, even the high quality settings aren’t as demanding as a lot of other AAA games, for the same reason.

So turning on uncompressed sim textures should be quite doable for a good majority of people. Certainly, if you can run the game on higher settings you’ll be fine with them on. If you start to have performance problems, turning off uncompressed sim textures can be a good place to start because of the instant benefit to vram.

[pictureamoebae]

The new debug items: a tip!

You’ll notice with the new environment debug items from the rebrand patch that sims will often walk straight through them. Sometimes that’s quite handy, but other times it can be annoying. There is a solution!

When placing down any of the items you want sims to walk around, grab any random, regular decorative item from the catalogue and hide it in the parts of the debug item you don’t want sims to walk through. You can use the resize options - in this case [ - to size the item down so it will be properly hidden if needed.

You might need to use a few hidden items in different places, and of course you can add some of the regular rocks and plants and other items around the outside too.

This way sims will path around those hidden items (and the rocks and plants) to avoid them.

With a little clever placement you can make it look like sims are properly walking through open gates or under arches or around cars/towers/new rocks etc, even though it’s all smoke and mirrors.

It’s best to do this after you’ve finalised the placement of your debug items, because if you decide to move them later you’ll have to move all the little hidden objects as well. That’s not the end of the world but it could be tedious!

[pictureamoebae]

Hi! real quick, the milkcrates and boxes you made won't be placed down; the game says something about anchors?

Did you download Stefizzi’s meshes first? I mean, I guess you did since they’re showing up at all for you.

I just placed one of the crates yesterday, so it’s not that a game update broke anything I don’t think. Your game is fully up to date, yes? I can only think perhaps it’s a conflict with something else you have installed. Perhaps try temporarily removing all your other cc and mods, except for Stefizzi’s meshes and my recolours, and see if you can place it then. And try in a new game as well, in case it’s a corruption of some sort.