It looks like the vector texture theory was correct:

http://linna.modthesims.info/download.php?t=343036

That and fifty other AI bugs regarding behaviors. It becomes more and more apparent that the "traits" which were so acclaimed in all the reviews are virtually meaningless in the effect they have on AI behavior except under certain rare conditions, so until people like Pescado can come up with an FFS suite like the one for TS2, removing moodlets is likely the only way to get sims to act like their personalities say they should (albeit manually) or at least prevent them from being entirely dysfunctional.

It's almost as if somebody important on the AI team jumped ship at the last moment and the remaining staff removed a truckload of functions during that "delay" because they couldn't figure out how to debug it or something.

Gee, maybe all of this stuff will be magically fixed on Tuesday.

The moodlets effect what was called the aspiration level in TS2 (the vertical green or yellow bar) for the duration shown under the moodlet, so yes short term memories would be an appropriate description.

I just noticed that Ctrl-Clicking on a moodlet removes that moodlet from your sim when testingcheatsenabled is true. RLD.

Couldn't think of a better place to post. Hope this is the appropriate forum....if not, sorry for causing the moderators the inconvenience of removing it (or me, as the case may be).

I wonder what other things are ctrl-clickable.....

I agree in principle and disagree in practice because while it is true that a game with bad game play and mechanics is technically speaking a waste in every sense, at the end of the day, I hate games (mind you I talk about my own opinions here purely out of a desire for self aggrandizement and not to offer an alternative example). I could not put it better than to borrow from J. M. Pescado's comment in another post about games and toys. If it is not a toy, it is not for me. If it sucks as a game but makes a great toy, I will jump on it any day.

I am the kind of gamer who doesn't even bother trying to play a game as is out of the box. The first thing I do after installing is use the cheats. The second thing I do is look for the modding tools, and the third thing I do is look for the mods. I approach any computer "game" like I used to approach Legos (back when they only had a few block shapes, for any of you youngsters here). Considering the number of main stream RPG and FPS games that come with unlimited modding tools included (some even come out with APIs and SDKs!), I think the smart (non EAxis mentality) developers understand the validity of this "play style", and many is the game that still enjoys a strong fan base due to its moddability (that's not even in the dictionary....) but was unanimously panned by critics and players alike for its out of box limitations.

I only started playing TS2 last year after the last expansion had come out when, after having grown tired of trying to brighten up and depthafy (I made that word up) a recent top rated next gen RPG (with a great modding tool), I discovered accidently and to my utter surprise and shock just how aesthetically pleasing and potentially interesting TS2 had become with all the CC and mods. I had completely written the franchise off in 2000 after taking one look at a screen shot and hardly even noticed the second installation's arrival on the scene. I almost soiled myself when I saw some of the almost photo-realistic CC sim textures and, um, er, well, some of the mods, shall we say. I became suitably addicted right away, had amassed upwards of 16,000 package files within a month, and the only reason I didn't dive into scripting myself is because of the general weirdness of the proprietary language and the fact that almost everything I needed had already been made by those such as the aforementioned personage, and finally because TS3 was coming out and that would certainly be a major leap forward wouldn't it of course. Oh yes certainly..........

er....

I have to admit I have become briefly addicted to TS3 already, and I think that that one black haired pony tailed towny girl from the theatre is actually kinda cute (the one in the poster on the outside wall, she is your band mate if you do the musician career, at least for me), so the dough-boy look doesn't bother me. I actually managed to get my very first two sims, a self and a custom designed partner, to give birth to offspring, happened to be female, that has become in the end more attractive than Mom, on whom I thought I'd done a pretty good job all things considered, admittedly after a toddler and child period marked by some serious soul searching. So unless the fundamentals of the new look completely turn you off, there is hope. And limited as they are, the few cheats currently available are enough for my budding needs, currently limited to sleep deprivation and age-transition-murder (though I find less homicide required in TS3 vs TS2 because as someone else mentioned above, at least the TS3 sims are believably ugly and dressed compared to the overall escaped-from-the-asylum look in TS2).

But everyone's comments about becoming bored after the first positive impressions started wearing off also apply to me. I think this will be temporarily mitigated by "letting go" of families that have become maximized and starting a few new families on completely different tracks. The key disappointment for the time being is that you really are forced to start with a family or group of roommates and have them work different schedules otherwise you end up with the problem mentioned by others vis a vis drooling on your keyboard at speed 3 (4) while waiting for work to end.

Now, if, as I read somewhere, it is in fact impossible to script TS3 because of the encryption, then that is basically a show stopper. I will purge the abomination from my hard drive and probably defecate on the CPU heat sink of the brand new machine I BUILT only so I would have the fastest possible rig before the game came out (I will do this with the power on, of course). However, if on the other hand, it turns out that the "encryption scare" was just that and in fact the scripting paradigm has magically become object-oriented and you only have to override a class or do some inheriting to turn Pleasantview into Nightmare on Elm Street or what have you (not my taste, just an example), then I will likely have to be physically restrained, my computer locked away, and force fed from an IV drip to avoid death by starvation and lack of sleep, if I am not first evicted from my home or stabbed by relatives.

Just my two cents anyway.

But now I get what you are saying. Getting the objects into the game and getting the textures into the game are, unlike TS2, largely two entirely different processes for CAS or build colorable objects. You could import an untextured object as long as it had the regions defined/named properly, which is precisely what the TSR tool says it will do.....doh   Got it Still, that method would be missing the baked shadows and normal maps step which would have to be included or the imported objects would stick out like a sore thumb.

Edit: but (probable) baked shadow maps appear in the drop down menu in one of the screen shots. Interesting. Perhaps that means they are successfully reading the in game file format without conversion.

Actually, objects can be colored in many ways other than UV maps, and "materials" (usually parameters related to the object's interaction with light) are not always synonymous with textures (they are two different things in, for example, Blender), and games traditionally do not rely on "materials" as much because they can be computationally intensive and are thus more common in 3D for stills or animations. There are also numerous other projection methods, planar, cylindrical, you name it. Shaders (which are synonymous with materials in some apps) can be used instead of images or materials or in combination with them. UV mapping just happens to be the most efficient for 3D gaming or at least the most commonly used because, I guess, it better utilizes the memory resources of the graphics card while using very little processing time. Assigning separate images to regions on a single object is right off the bat a less efficient way to do it assuming separate graphic assets were loaded for each region and might cause a hit in graphics performance. However, on the other hand "procedural" is currently the rage in optimizing game engine performance. Making something "procedural" is taking game elements or assets that were formerly hand made, such as animations, and calculating them at run time to move some of the burden from the graphics card to the CPU and cut costs and time for asset creation (this example obviously not being used extensively in TS3 where they seem to use the same animation assets from TS2 and most animation transitions still segue first to a "default" state before going on to the next move, the toddler being the most obvious where he/she walks to the potty, sits down, slides, gets back up, then sits on the potty...).

Despite all this, it is obvious from looking at CAS that separate "images" (whether actual bit map image files or some other device) are assigned to separate regions. That they can't be resized using a slider and the subsequent blurriness in game seems to rule out the possibility that vector graphics are being used, but that is not definite. Looking at the wood textures, for example, they appear to have a lower number of colors used, so it almost does seem as if they were using a vector graphic format which would be much easier to procedurally adjust to diverse geometry at run time, would take up much less memory, and would explain the ability to easily alter individual colors within a given texture pattern. It would explain the "cartoony" look of many game objects. The more I think of it, I would implement this using vector graphics and then rasterize them on the fly. For those who are lost on this, raster graphics means the normal ones you make in Photoshop etc. made from pixels, vector graphics are stuff like Flash or Illustrator that use line, curve, and area definitions to describe the image so no matter how much you zoom in you never see jagged edges.

So anyway, point being that I think more is going on under the hood than one might have expected. My gut feeling is that "recolors" isn't going to be as easy as the standard method of generating or reusing a UV template and dressing it up in Photoshop or whatever. I would not be surprised if vector graphic "patterns" were the only form of texturing accepted for many objects with the exception of, obviously, UV mapped bump/normal maps and also perhaps a UV mapped grey scale image for "baked" shadow details that may be what they are doing to mitigate some of the flat bland cartoonish quality. Those last two would obviously have to be generated at the object modeling stage because whereas normal maps have until now been usually fudged from the basic color image map, the TS3 patterns have no information in them which could generate normal maps. So for the really high end object creation you would have to model a detailed object, generate your normal map and baked shadows, then reduce polycount (and detail) for the object you actually import to the game, which is the standard method for next gen games at the moment.

This is all just to give everyone an idea of what the TSR people would have to be tackling to produce what they claim they are producing. If they succeed, you would be hard pressed to come up with a better tool, politics aside.

If TSR gets the texturing correct than that may be significantly more than an object viewer/importer/exporter as the game seems to be doing something quite new with the patterned textures which makes one wonder how they are doing it in the first place. Do they (EA) just apply filters to change RGB values at runtime? Are they even using UV mapping? Is it some kind of vector graphics trick? My head spins trying to imagine the mechanics of it....and what a hassle it would be to create, say, clothing with regions somehow properly "defined" to accept in game retexturing. Whatever else the problems are, this particular feature strikes me as possibly a first in gaming technology. I know of no 3D graphics format which has such definition capability built in, off hand. I don't think it could be reverse engineered without tech specs.