More Awesome Than You!

Because TS3 has fallen short of awesome in my opinion, i think i'll be sticking with TS2 for the moment.

That being said however, i never turn up my nose at the opportunity for moar objects, and so was wondering if anyone had considered the possibility of converting some of the more basic ts3 objects (tables, bookcases, maybe bathtubs (?) etc) into ts2 objects? Does anyone have any idea if this would be a horrendously difficult process?

I wouldn't know, but I'd (rather morbidly) love to be able to convert the tombstones over. I assume we need to wait for something so we can actually pull the meshes/textures from the game, unless it exists already or something.

Those items *ARE* TS2 objects!

lol, er... what exactly does that mean?

obviously my brain has been replaced by snot this week.

A lot of the TS3 objects look like converted TS2 objects.

But the TS3 ones must have been subdivided or something to give them more polys

TS3 objects appear to be of generally lower quality than their TS2 equivalents. For instance, the bar glasses are hexagonal rather than round, unlike TS2. While some items are better, for the most part, outside of lighting improvements which significantly improve how they look, the TS3 objects are actually of degraded quality, which becomes apparent if you examine closely.

So i can't have that modern looking bookcase in my TS2 game then? pity...

About TS2-TS3 contents transfer:

Eek, they should have made monotonous recolouring as one of the options (which I wanted it in TS2 before its come-out) while repository recolouring system as a plurally alternative system of the old custom recolouring!    :huh:

But for clothing, it seems they utilise bevel and overlays to separate different major parts of clothes for repository recolouring.  That's just something I've been wanting before the emergence of TS2.


I think the opposite should also go, to add TS2 stuffs into the TS3 and vice versa. :}


About Polys:

Lower polys can still be some alternatives to TS2 for certain usages anyway.
I'm unsure if that's a sign of repository meshing in an object mesh container.

Also, let's consider that EAxis is preparing the game a certain range of HW spex to run for the targetted audience.
The game has to deal with a whole neighbourhood/town they call it now.


About graphics:

Honestly, I think the pond/water tool's graphic looks better than the TS2, yet it's sucks it's the TS2 neighbourhood water for its completely non-transparent under-surface gradient.  It'd be great it's a matrix gradient for it.  So, the "organisms" in the water can be partially visible as well.  But, the same goes back to their planned scope HWs of the most audience.

Just hope sooner or later the file formats can all be sorted out, so we'll see what can be done about them.


about response to the OP:

Winklesim,

May be cautious if EAxis may sue anyone for such sharing even when such conversion can be done.

I haven't seen anyone actually say that... mostly we've been discussing the fact that a lot of the objects already exist in both games.

Unfortunately, I can't help you actually back-port that bookshelf.

But, that doesn't mean that it's impossible.

Good question! I like some objects from TS3 too.

I'd like to see some of the clothes -- particularly the separate top jackets and bottoms -- converted from TS3 to TS2.

EA threatened the same thing with the Stories objects. They're still available for download here and nothing has happened. People here don't exactly pay a lot of attention to EA.

There are a few items from TS3 I really like too, but the more I think about it the less use it seems to be if someone were to adapt them for TS2. The things I was most interested in were the trees and shrubs, because as far as I know there is very little CC for that. I asked about it, and was explained that they are actually flat meshes that turn with the camera.

If most of the TS3 objects have been remade with lower poly count, they probably would not look good in TS2 at all, but more like CC anno 2005 off of TSR. Also, if I remember correctly, I have read something on here about the meshes not being the same scale, so that they would have to be re-sized. After that they'd need retexturing to be recolourable the old fashioned way. In other words, a lot of work for objects that are not even all that pretty.

If TS3->TS2 porting ever happens, clothes would probably be more interesting to do than furniture, because the new meshes look more shapely, even in the skinniest stage. At least I find the limbs looking better. But then there is the fact that they are made to be expandable, while in TS2 they would have to be "frozen", so they may be ridickulously simplified because of this and not look too great in TS2.  If you wanted to mix-'n-match the conversions with regular TS2 clothing, a bit of tweaking would probably be necessary as well, and all bottoms would need shoes or feet added. Still, it would be great to have meshes that gave TS2 sims nicer looking hands. I know there are replacement feet, but I have never seen hands, which something in my brain tells me is because hands have more complex animations. Would that be a problem with converted TS3 meshes? Maybe the arms would have to be replaced?

More separate shoes, dammit.

Both games are based on 1 meter scaling

Scale is totally the same, yes.

I'm not sure what the state of affairs is with TS3 meshing, but as soon as you can import the meshes into a 3d editor, you can also export them from there into a ts2-digestible format and take it from there. I believe import for Milkshape already works, doesn't it? One would just have to cobble together some "flat file" textures from the ones in ts3 which are in bits and pieces -- probably not complicated, but I imagine it's rather tedious.

Some TS3 items look really rather crappy (the sinks! the tubs! argh!) -- I was wondering whether they really did that to save some polys or just out of sheer laziness/lack of taste, seeing as other objects (several of the windows for example) are almost like their TS2 equivalents, only with *more* detail and not less. And an average house will have significantly more windows than bathtubs, wouldn't it?

Been done.

 http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=360739

Mapping the UV wouldn't be tedious. But making the textures from scratch might be, even though it would probably be easier and far better in quality to do it that way than to hunt down usable bits from TS3.

Er, no. That is a conversion from TS2 to TS3 -- the OP is asking about the other way around.