6x7aa

Covid grounded me in the states so I started making stuff I left overseas. By the time restrictions lifted, I had a bunch of stuff I forgot about entirely (and still have forgotten.) Of course I've been seeing these little dudes everyday for months but it only occurred to me just now that this was one of the things. I should finish them, even if it's a lot of work. The hard part is just the UV, I had problems when I made a daruma too but I finished that one just fine, so maybe a rainy day project.

Gotta test how snow falls on it even though I never intend to use it in a place where it snows. :')

I was minding my own business when I was hit by a sudden flash of clarity, went back, jiggled the doorknob so to speak, and now my chainlink fence from last year works. I mean, it worked before but there were some strange shading issues along the top pole. Of course now I can see how flat the chainlink texture itself is so I guess I'm not done.

More corrugated metal. I have the fixed wallpaper, modeled tileables (which, btw, I noticed counter shader smooth lighting doesn't work outdoors???), and flooring now, so I guess I can finally move on with my life and finish all these builds.

I think I might make a flipped triangle corner for that one awning set since I am already here. The piece is meant to sit in the middle of a corner, but it seems silly when it can just as well be an end capping piece if only it had a partner.

While I have finally solved the mystery, I am faced with a potentially bigger problem: it seems despite all my settings and tinkering, my game only uses the medium shadow meshes for all objects. :')

It was, obviously. But the real point is that I have finally conceived that I can make counters without making counters. That is to say, I have made counters in the past but never finished them because I always get stuck on corner counter mesh. Besides, all that effort and in the end, it's just going to be borked in my game. On the other hand, I actually have quite a few surfaces sitting in my wip folders that could be used as static counters. I feel a little stupid for not connecting the dots sooner.

Finally got around to fixing EA's corrugated metal wallpapers, which I needed badly. The edges of the texture were too dark, creating a distracting seam. Also today I learned there is more than one corrugated metal wallpaper, it's just the LN one was trapped in wall sets, which is a category I never go to.

Replaced the mesh with a rug as a first pass test. Animations fire fine despite objects technically being in the way. There are animation height issues with the bobber and stealing coins (I can live with it, all the fountains have different levels of water and shapes, it'd be impossible to deal with), spout effect slots need to be nuked (I deleted them in TSRW but it was not enough -- I think this shipped with its own water spout textures, so I could blank those and see), and I can't click on something if it's under another thing so I'll create some clickable rubbish or a sign or something. If I do that, I can also make a variant that drops the height of some of the effect slots so this can be usable over ground level ponds.

What it ended up being, and I would not have even thought of this if not for stumbling over a brief mention in a post from 2010, was sim pregnancies. I've never had this issue before and nraas has handled a dozen inactive births fine in this save until now. But, I performed some abortions and now everything works again.

Eventually I ended up tracking down the headline in the tuning files and deleting meteor death announcements entirely, which solved it, but what a strange bug.

All of this is great but now I've forgotten what I even wanted this for.

As I was hunting for registers to turn into harmless decor via script swapping, I remembered savvy seller exists. Then I remembered savvy seller has ugly rugs. So, I went through and added an invisible preset to them all. I had forgotten the workflow for how I did my dancefloor invisible preset though I know how I did it (adjustments to alpha threshold, probably), so I just ended up adding a tiny empty alpha multiplier instead. I am sure I will regret this later when I remember specifically why I forgot savvy seller exists. 🥹

Anyway, they work fine enough for me and that's all that matters.

Right now I am nesting Strangetown. I didn't play TS2, only TS1, so I have no fond memories of it. But the version I am playing is very nice, super clean, loads fast. I think this is what I have been wanting, a broad but not dense desert map I don't feel compelled to demolish and rebuild every lot from scratch. Even if I wanted to, every lot feels large, lots of room for activities.