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These days I spent lots of time fixing lot skirt shader - and it turned into something more. I was to rewrite many game shaders to get consistent look of terrain and snow, and now, it's ready to be published!
Attempted to fix inconsistent lighting, implemented transparent lot skirt roads - so that they match the rest of lot skirt terrain, more and more!
Improvements
Consistent lighting - lot skirt, lot terrain and roads now match.
All lighting states compatible - dusk, dawn, seasonal changes work well.
Every lighting mod compatible - works even with maxis lighting.
New snow shaders (lot skirt, lot terrain and roofs) - fixed ugly shading, proper reaction to every lighting state.
Fixed lot imposters - now their terrain is rendered as well as possible.
Transparent lot skirt roads - now it's possible to use road textures with transparent cuts so that it matches lot skirt terrain.
Now reflective pond water doesn't require pools - its reflections work by reflective plane placed in lot corner.
Neighborhood roads have light snow pass.
Included
Lot skirt shaders
Lot imposter shaders
Lot terrain shaders
Lot lighting fixes (requires RPC)
Roof shaders
Bright CAS fix
Extended Standard and SimStandard shaders
Neighborhood road shader
Pond Water Overhaul
NOT Included BUT Compatible
Better Nightlife
Sea Water Overhaul
Accurate Neighborhood Lighting
Soft Shadows
WIP
Multi-road neighborhoods (I will add it later, sorry!)
Installation
Put the contents into your downloads folder (contains default replacement of maxis roads making them transparent, you may delete these files if you use road default replacements). Remember, my shaders must be loaded last to prevent conflicts!
Snow Lighting
Light snow:
Heavy snow:
Neighborhood roads
Vanilla:
Mod:
Fixed lot imposters
Before:
After:
Lot skirt roads
Default texture:
Transparent texture:
Consistent lighting
Radiance (maxis shaders):
Radiance (my shaders):
Reflective Pond Water
First step - choose respective to lot size reflective plane:
Second step - place it in the lot corner so that the plane covers every lot tile:
Third step - enjoy reflective ponds; there's no need to keep pools or something like that in the scene, reflections work independently:
1763 Townhouse -or- Modern Apartments
RL British Regency (London, 1763) floor plan, found HERE (...scroll down to "No. 16")
As a single family Townhouse:
9+ bedrooms - 6 bathrooms - space for 4 cars
as authentically furnished as I could get with no cc (so, very lightly furnished!)
As 5-unit Apartments:
3 and 4 bedroom units - space for 4 community cars
amenities include lounge areas, bar, pool table, poker, playground, grill and picnic area
modernized and fully furnished
2-Step Foundation - No-SLOPE Basement
- No CC -
Read more on my BLOG »
Cross-posted to MTS and Simblr.
No Custom Content Included
Lot Size: 50X20
Lot Price: Townhouse = $340,908 ~ Apartments = $562,434
Rent Range: $2,595 - $4,860
Credit due to all the amazing modders who took time to create these amazing mods. None of these are mine. Also, shoutout to pleasantsims who made an amazing list filled with so many essential mods for a better game. Most of the ones i use are from that list.
Anti-Corruption Mods; mods that will help you prevent neighborhood corruption. these are a must have!!
No Corrupt Death : suppresses the corrupt death memory.
No unlink on delete : when moving tombstones, the game no longer deletes the sim in question.
Anti-Redundancy : elimnates spawning of unnecessary redundant NPCs.
Sim Blender : ultimate sims 2 management item ; acts like a “god” / IS A MUST HAVE.
Toddlers:
Baby bottle replacement : replaces the ugly green bottle with a clear one filled with milk.
Accessible toddler high chair : global mod that allows sims to access any high chair from left & right sides. custom chairs work as well.
Build & Buy Mode:
OMSPs : allows you to place more decorative objects in more places.
Rug Texture Fix : fixes the wonky ugly textures that happen to rugs when places off-grid in game.
Television Placement Mod : allows you to adjust the placement of tvs, can be moved up and down on walls like paintings.
Walk-Through Blocks : allows sims to walk around and through objects; useful for small lots.
Business Mods:
Business Mod : fixes a ton of issues with Open for Business. Get this only if you’re interested in starting a business with your sim.
Townie Budget Mod : townies no longer are able to pay for things they cannot afford. adds to realism.
Computer Mod:
Monique’s Hacked Computer : allows online shopping, sims to have bank accounts, and much more.
Education Mods:
Semester Changes : makes University 8 days instead of 24; if you’re interested in making semesters smaller for faster playthrough
Faster Homework : finish homework in 15 minutes instead of an hour.
Fix Mods:
Extended Family treated as Family : allows the game to recognize second cousins, first cousins once removed, great grandparents, great grandchildren, and great aunts and uncles as family members. No more dating distant relatives!
No Sim Loaded : removes useless “sim loaded” tokens and other garbage that slows down your game and causes lag.
Pescado’s Apartment Hack : fixes a lot of issues with apartments.
Smart Beds : forces the bed ownership system in the game to actually work. Sims will autonomously use the bed they have the most ownership of.
Hobby Mod:
Professional Blogger : sims who have maxed out enthusiasm in a hobby will earn money during the time they blog.
Job Mod:
Level Numbers Added to Job Titles : adds the job level next to the job title in menu screens. Very handy for quickly seeing what level your Sim is at in their career.
Memory Mods:
Memory Manipulator : the Memory Manipulator allows you to edit the memories of the currently selected sim. Now you can edit memories directly through an in-game menu
Met New Great Grandchild Memory : this mod gives the memory of meeting a new great grandchild.
Misc Mods:
Watch TV from All Chairs : allows your Sims to watch TV from chairs facing any direction at least 10 squares back from the TV – even if they’re facing sideways or at 45-degree angles.
Marriage Last Name Chooser : allows you to choose the last name of two Sims getting married.
Camera Mod:
Gunmod’s Camera Mod : necessary to view your skies and skylines. Allows you to view the far edges of your hood and have a top-down view, plus many more camera angles.
Pregnancy Mods:
Pregnancy Relationship Change : for when a sim’s pregnancy first shows and those around her realize she’s pregnant. Allows a Sim to figure out a baby is not “his” if he has high enough logic skill points.
Quiet Pregnancy : no longer get the pregnancy chimes after try for baby. Pregnancies will be a surprise!
Young Adults Can Enjoy Maternity : this is a suite of mods that allows your Young Adults to get pregnant and have babies in University, plus a host of other functions.
Relationship Mods:
Autonomous Casual Romance (ACR) – allows your Sims to autonomously woohoo, try for baby, make booty calls, and perform a whole host of romantic interactions. gives your Sims more freedom to make their own romantic decisions and creates a lot of drama and fun in your neighborhood. Highly recommended! It’s one of my favorite mods.
Just Be Friends Social : teens and up can ask romantic interests to “just be friends,” and then all crush/love flags between them get cleared.
Skill Mod:
Comm Skilling : controlled sims, NPCs, and townies may gain skills while visiting community lots. Enthusiasm may now be gained on community lots and while visiting.
Townie Mods:
Townie Body Diversity : any spawned townies have a chance of being either fat or fit. Every Sim is no longer thin.
Townie Move-In No Memory Loss : townies will keep all their memories when moving into a playable household.
Must Have Tools:
Sims2Pack Clean Installer : Sims2Pack Clean Installer is a tool, mainly for lots. It categorizes, catalog, and removes content, as well as preview files before installing.
Bulk Rename Utility : Software that lets you rename files ; a lot of package files come with ( ) , [ ] , +, - and even _, files with different symbols can make the game take longer to read and therefore taking more time to load.(if help is needed, leave something on my ask, i’ll help you)
The Compressionizer : let’s you compact all your custom content, making them smaller in size.
This isn't like an official download post as not all of it is mine (but there will be downloads :D) but more like a list of light map and shader mods I personally use for my game to make it look just how I wanted it and I no longer use my old Shader Fixes due to the amount of new shader mods that has come in.
This will be long so under the cut it goes.
1. Lighting Mod: Cozy Home Lighting Mod + Night Light Map Fixes
Goes without saying, I use my own lighting mod. Most of the other shaders won't look right without some kind of lighting mod.
I use Cozy Home, which is the newest mod I did. It's better to read it from the README because this is too long to put here.
The lighting mod also contains fixes to the Light Maps for both lot and neighborhood so they're less blue. Otherwise night lighting will not look right.
README | DOWNLOAD
-----
2. Neighborhood Shaders and Light Maps: @spockthewok's Reflective Water + @simnopke's Accurate Neighborhood Terrain Lighting + @criquette-was-here's Neighborhood Road Transparency Fix
What Will has been putting up, from the purple soup research to the object limit findings, and now the reflective water shader has been incredible. He's managed to do it much more beautifully than I have (as I can't really do much more than color scalar changes and combining mods together on the shader end of things). I prefer this over Voeille's water mod because the ocean does not go black with reflections off.
Make sure to get the version labeled dreadpirate as that one has @criquette-was-here's Better Nightlife mod integrated already.
The next part of this roundup is the Accurate Neighborhood Terrain Lighting, which fixes the shadow weirdness in the impostor (if you use the version with Criquette's Neighborhood Lighting Remedy integrated, which I recommend if you use any of my lighting mods). I personally use the strong-lightingRemedy version.
Finally, there's the Neighborhood Road Transparency Fix, which fixes the transparent areas on the sides of neighbourhood road, so the objects and decals below becomes visible and ‘cut-off’ effect disappears.
DOWNLOAD HERE: Reflective Water | Accurate Neighborhood Terrain Lighting | Neighborhood Road Transparency Fix (6.2.1 on the list)
-----
3. Lot Skirt Shader: @christaskyy's Improved Lot Skirt Shader
This new shader improves on the lot skirt rendering to be closer to the neighborhood view along the surrounding area after the lot boundary. This also means, with the right lighting mod configuration (ahem!), the roads match better. Not perfect, but better than before.
The lot skirt mod was made using my original shader fixes so this already contains @simnopke's Sky Fix and @criquette-was-here's Winter Road Fix.
The original link leads to Boosty, which causes issues for a lot of people so I am instead linking to their alternate link to the download. Make sure this shader loads after the Extended StandardMaterial Shader that will be linked later on.
DOWNLOAD HERE
-----
4. Terrain Tile/Pond/Pool Shader: Aquamarine Pond Water + No Blue Snow
Now, this one is my work. I based this shader on Moi's Water Mod, but adjusted the colors (especially with reflection off) to be similar to Targa's old water mod. I wanted the colour to be something that isn't solid black without a swimming pool.
This contains both the terrain tile shaders and the pool shaders, which I took inspiration from the old Gunmod shader for but updated for Seasons. The shader also contains the night snow fixes as well, so the snow will not be blue at night.
Note that this is incompatible with water mods like Voeille's water mods or mods like @lazyduchess's Lot Lighting Fixes. I can't get Lot Lighting Fixes to personally work right and the snow issues personally don't bother me as I don't really play a lot of winter seasons.
DOWNLOAD HERE
-----
5. Roof Shader: Slightly Brighter Roofs + No Blue Snow
I find many roof shaders too bright so what I did for this was just remove the bluish cast on the material shader part and made it just a touch brighter than Maxis, so you can still use roofs that aren't made with brighter roof mods in mind.
This again has the no blue snow fix integrated.
DOWNLOAD HERE
-----
6. Standard Shader: @crispsandkerosene's Extended StandardMaterial Shader
(Photo is stolen from Crisps)
C&K has already written up a list of what this shader does. I personally use the version with @lazyduchess's Bright CAS Fix. For the lot shader portion, make sure Christa's lot skirt shader loads after this, or delete the lot skirt shader portion in Crisps' file using SimPE.
DOWNLOAD HERE
-----
7. Sim Standard Shader: My Edit of @crispsandkerosene's Extended SimStandardMaterial Shader
Just an edit I did of @crispsandkerosene’s SimStandardMaterial shader because I liked a setting somewhere in between the vanilla maxis setting for the scale lighting and the one in the Brighter SIms version.
You can read C&K's post for more information about the shader.
Nopke's mod allows the shadows to even show up as shadows, while LD's soften them so that the outlines are not too harsh. I use dark for Nopke's mode, and No Overlap 100 on LD's.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Autism Representation written by an allistic: My name is John Autism and I like the designated autistic interests
unintentionally autistic character written by the creator who hasn't really thought about whether or not theyre autistic: I wish I could be human like the way everyone else is but I know they can tell I'm not. And I know they're right
Hello everyone, you may have seen my wonderfully useful no face slider april fools post - It's now time for something a bit more... everyday. This is what I was actually making before goofing off there for a bit. It's a full-face slider for well, face size.
It shrinks/increases the size of a sim's facial features (eyes, brows, mouth and nose) as a whole without altering the outer margins of the face where it connects to the neck/scalp, and I'm hoping the images above illustrate this a bit more effectively than I'm currently describing.
Available in both bodyshop and CAS
GET IT HERE
As always, if you spot any issues let me know and I'll try and fix them asap
I've had this in my game for a while, but for you guys, I added traits and made every little detail BCON configurable, because I know many of you would like to set everything just how you want it. Enjoy!
Download Page
For @maksplaygroundsims2, @tedsies, @grilledcheese-aspiration, @katatty and others
Hi everyone! This is an experimental (WIP) mod that makes lot skirts in TS2 looking like neighborhood terrain. TSCS inspired me to create this mod; as far as you remember, TSCS has visible neighborhood decals from lot view. It is set in assembly code so that TSCS lot skirts use neighborhood techniques for mapping. Original TS2 doesn't have such functionality. LD attempted to immitate that via fake neighborhood deco but it was created for particular terrains only. So I decided to attempt editing lot skirt shader and got some results; it adds cliffs, rough and meduim stages and improves shores from lot view! Though it is not perfect as it has some misconsistency with lighting (original lot skirts also do) and doesn't repeat the neighborhood terrain mapping but I think it's more practical than neighborhood deco. Hope you like it!
Features
Adds neighborhood decals (cliffs, rough and medium terrain) to lot skirts.
Decals are also visible with snow states.
No blue snow fix is included.
Works for every neighborhood automatically.
Supports lighting mods (dusk and dawn states).
Looks better with default replacements.
Installation
Put the .package file into your Downloads folder.
Compatibility
Incompatible with shader mods that modify lot skirts so rename the file adding "zzzz" prefix to make it load last to prevent conflicts if you use many shader mods.
Doesn't conflict with other no blue snow mods that modify the rest shaders (roofs, lot terrain).
Known Issues
May look weird in dusk and dawn states using some lighting mods (still have no idea how to fix that).
Seam between lot skirt and lot terrain (original TS2 lacks lot edge blend technique like in TSCS to make smooth transition between lot terrain and lot skirt).
Lot imposter terrain paint may be invisible sometimes for unknown causes.
Terrain Types
Recently it has been discovered that it's possible to create new terrain types. My shader contains standard terrain types (temperate, desert, dirt and concrete) and uses dependence of textures on lot texture so if you add custom terrain types it's required for my shader to have added such dependencies otherwise my shader will look buggy for your custom terrain types (you are free to contact with me for more detailed information).
DOWNLOAD
Vanilla:
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Sorry for disappearing - my phone decided to go to silicon heaven a few weeks ago and because I have 2FA set up, I couldn't log in to my accounts until I got a new phone :/
Anyway, I just wanted to give an update on that water mod I showcased a while back, as it's basically all I've been working on.
This is going to be a long one, so I'm going to make use of that post cut feature for once. I don't mean to be a tease, but there will be a download link provided below :)
Firstly, the good news is that I managed to fix mirror reflections!
I did have to switch back to using the vanilla OceanReflection effect to do this, instead of the ScreenReflection one used in Castaway (for reasons I'll explain later), but fear not - the water is still visually identical and is just as reflective as Castaway.
In fact, I managed to get everything to reflect in the water - check out those roads and clouds!
And yes, even Sims are visible in the water!
It's kind of hard to see because of the ripples, but Chloe Curious is indeed present in that reflection.
Another benefit of using the vanilla OceanReflection effect is that Castaway's shaders aren't required for the reflections to work. This means the plugin will work with the vanilla water shaders, or a different water mod like Voeille's, if you prefer the look of those.
Something else I've tried to do is reduce the visibility of that annoying gap that can be seen between the lot skirt and the ocean's surface. It's not perfect by any means, but it's certainly an improvement over vanilla imo:
Unrelated to the ocean, but I was made aware of the fact that pools don't reflect the terrain. This has also been fixed:
I'm happy with what I've produced so far, so I've published the mod on my GitHub if you're interested in giving it a try:
https://github.com/spockthewok/TS2ReflectiveWater
There are two files available to download. One is the plugin itself, which patches the game to allow for the extra reflections and reduces the lot skirt gap, and the other is a modified version of Castaway's ocean shaders. I've provided a version of the shaders that incorporate the edits from dreadpirate's shader fixes mod too. Again, these shaders are completely optional - if you only want the extra reflections, you only need to download the plugin!
What about pond reflections???
Okay, this is where I have to give the bad news. Pond reflections are not currently included, because they're an absolute nightmare to figure out.
For a body of water to be reflective in TS2, it needs either a reflection plane (which is what the ocean has), or a reflection camera (which is what pools have). Lot terrain has no such functionality to support this in TS2 (ponds are classed as terrain tiles), so Castaway added a load of extra functionality to make ponds reflective.
It's not feasible to backport all of Castaway's new code to give ponds their own reflection method, and even if it was, it introduces another problem with the game's engine - it really does not like two separate reflection contexts using the same render type.
If you ever happen to look at Sims 2's various reflection functions, you'll see several magic numbers being thrown around. These are the game's render types, and the number that corresponds to each type is defined in the same shader code as the pink soup (I'm never going to be able to escape it). Here are a few examples to feast your eyes on:
Remember the issue with the mirrors? That was related to this. Basically, if the ocean and mirrors are using the same render type for their reflections, the game can't figure out which reflection belongs to who and the reflections start fighting each other to be displayed.
How did Castaway solve this? It didn't, mirrors are broken in Castaway too, because everything is using render type 2 (ScreenReflection).
They mostly work if they're placed indoors, but place them outdoors and, oh boy...
Likewise, if you patch the ocean to use the pool reflection render type, the pool reflections start fighting with the ocean reflections for dominance.
So, if we can't create a separate reflection context for ponds because there aren't enough unique render types to use, we're stuck trying to get ponds to use an existing reflection method.
Let's start with the simplest one - the ocean's reflection plane. If you recall the issue with ponds from my previous post, that was caused by this same plane. As discussed, ponds don't have a way to render reflections, so the reflection visible in the pond was actually created by the ocean and therefore being displayed at the ocean's height, which is why the reflections appeared super far down.
Unfortunately, the game only allows one ocean plane at a time, so if you try to create a second one at the pond's height, it just replaces the ocean's plane. This does give accurate pond reflections, but at the cost of cutting off the ocean reflections:
I did try and hijack the reflection plane used by the neighbourhood water as it shouldn't technically be in use in lot view, however all this did was give me a one-way ticket to crash city :(
Evidently, we need a method that supports rendering multiple reflections at varying heights at once, which leaves us with two options (to my knowledge):
The reflection camera for pools.
The reflection camera for reflective floors.
I don't think floor reflections are a thing in Sims 2, despite there being code for a reflection camera in the game's binary, so who knows if it even works. The floor shader code contains this quote:
"reflective floors are currently dead. might ressurect them in an expansion pack"
Great, now we're down to pools as our last hope.
As you probably know, if ponds use PoolReflection, they appear black without a pool present on the lot. Maybe if we lift this restriction, things will start working? Think again:
I have no idea why there is a chess table(?) baked in to the reflection texture.
I guess that makes sense - the game also isn't creating the pool reflection camera, as it only does so if a pool exists. What if we allow the camera to be created regardless of the presence of a pool?
While doing this allows ponds to now 'reflect', the reflections are still broken, being displayed at the wrong height and sliding around with the movement of the camera. It expects to be given several bits of information to work properly, such as a node for it to be attached to, the bounds of the pool, and the depth of the water - all things ponds are not giving it.
Compounding this is the fact that ponds have very little functionality to work with to provide this information. You can get the elevation of the water (which I suppose could be used as the depth), but other than that, all there really is is a way to check if a specific terrain tile is a pond tile.
This creates all sorts of headaches, like how to differentiate between multiple ponds on a lot, getting the width and height of them, what the camera should be attached to, yada yada yada...
It was at this point that I started to wonder - is this really even worth it? Sure, placing a pool tile on a lot to get pond reflections working is a bit janky, but would whatever Frankenstein's monster of a pond reflection system I might be able to create be any less janky?
For this reason, I have decided to take a short break from pond reflections, as I was starting to get a metaphorical concussion from banging my head against the keyboard to try and figure something out. I know it's disappointing to hear, but hopefully the fancy new ocean reflections will soften the blow somewhat.
If anyone has any suggestions for pond reflections, I'm more than happy to hear them :) I'll return to the trenches soon...
I have released a new update for the plugin that attempts to fix that weird bug in the vanilla game where the skybox reflections would break and get 'stuck' when the season is anything other than summer.
Not sure how I'd never noticed it before, because it happens surprisingly often. Thanks to @lowedeus for making me aware of it :)
Before:
After:
Isn't it strange how autumn (the season is internally called autumn rather than fall, interestingly) has a unique 'cold' looking skybox, but winter doesn't?
The issue was caused by the game's lighting manager - it checks that it's been given either the string "day" or "night" so it can choose the correct skybox reflection for the time of day, except in seasons other than summer, it is instead given the season name. Obviously "spring"/"autumn"/"winter" are not "day"/"night", so the reflection would never change!
There is no "summer" string, so I assume that the summer season is just the game's default day/night cycle from before the Seasons EP, but with some extra temperature functionality added on top. This would explain why it's the only season where the reflections don't break.
There's a rare chance that the lighting manager won't be prompted to update the reflections when the weather changes for whatever reason, so you may see a clear sky reflected in the water when it's actually raining and vice versa. It's a bit annoying, but the reflection will fix itself the next time the lighting manager triggers an update.
Sorry for disappearing - my phone decided to go to silicon heaven a few weeks ago and because I have 2FA set up, I couldn't log in to my accounts until I got a new phone :/
Anyway, I just wanted to give an update on that water mod I showcased a while back, as it's basically all I've been working on.
This is going to be a long one, so I'm going to make use of that post cut feature for once. I don't mean to be a tease, but there will be a download link provided below :)
Firstly, the good news is that I managed to fix mirror reflections!
I did have to switch back to using the vanilla OceanReflection effect to do this, instead of the ScreenReflection one used in Castaway (for reasons I'll explain later), but fear not - the water is still visually identical and is just as reflective as Castaway.
In fact, I managed to get everything to reflect in the water - check out those roads and clouds!
And yes, even Sims are visible in the water!
It's kind of hard to see because of the ripples, but Chloe Curious is indeed present in that reflection.
Another benefit of using the vanilla OceanReflection effect is that Castaway's shaders aren't required for the reflections to work. This means the plugin will work with the vanilla water shaders, or a different water mod like Voeille's, if you prefer the look of those.
Something else I've tried to do is reduce the visibility of that annoying gap that can be seen between the lot skirt and the ocean's surface. It's not perfect by any means, but it's certainly an improvement over vanilla imo:
Unrelated to the ocean, but I was made aware of the fact that pools don't reflect the terrain. This has also been fixed:
I'm happy with what I've produced so far, so I've published the mod on my GitHub if you're interested in giving it a try:
https://github.com/spockthewok/TS2ReflectiveWater
There are two files available to download. One is the plugin itself, which patches the game to allow for the extra reflections and reduces the lot skirt gap, and the other is a modified version of Castaway's ocean shaders. I've provided a version of the shaders that incorporate the edits from dreadpirate's shader fixes mod too. Again, these shaders are completely optional - if you only want the extra reflections, you only need to download the plugin!
What about pond reflections???
Okay, this is where I have to give the bad news. Pond reflections are not currently included, because they're an absolute nightmare to figure out.
For a body of water to be reflective in TS2, it needs either a reflection plane (which is what the ocean has), or a reflection camera (which is what pools have). Lot terrain has no such functionality to support this in TS2 (ponds are classed as terrain tiles), so Castaway added a load of extra functionality to make ponds reflective.
It's not feasible to backport all of Castaway's new code to give ponds their own reflection method, and even if it was, it introduces another problem with the game's engine - it really does not like two separate reflection contexts using the same render type.
If you ever happen to look at Sims 2's various reflection functions, you'll see several magic numbers being thrown around. These are the game's render types, and the number that corresponds to each type is defined in the same shader code as the pink soup (I'm never going to be able to escape it). Here are a few examples to feast your eyes on:
Remember the issue with the mirrors? That was related to this. Basically, if the ocean and mirrors are using the same render type for their reflections, the game can't figure out which reflection belongs to who and the reflections start fighting each other to be displayed.
How did Castaway solve this? It didn't, mirrors are broken in Castaway too, because everything is using render type 2 (ScreenReflection).
They mostly work if they're placed indoors, but place them outdoors and, oh boy...
Likewise, if you patch the ocean to use the pool reflection render type, the pool reflections start fighting with the ocean reflections for dominance.
So, if we can't create a separate reflection context for ponds because there aren't enough unique render types to use, we're stuck trying to get ponds to use an existing reflection method.
Let's start with the simplest one - the ocean's reflection plane. If you recall the issue with ponds from my previous post, that was caused by this same plane. As discussed, ponds don't have a way to render reflections, so the reflection visible in the pond was actually created by the ocean and therefore being displayed at the ocean's height, which is why the reflections appeared super far down.
Unfortunately, the game only allows one ocean plane at a time, so if you try to create a second one at the pond's height, it just replaces the ocean's plane. This does give accurate pond reflections, but at the cost of cutting off the ocean reflections:
I did try and hijack the reflection plane used by the neighbourhood water as it shouldn't technically be in use in lot view, however all this did was give me a one-way ticket to crash city :(
Evidently, we need a method that supports rendering multiple reflections at varying heights at once, which leaves us with two options (to my knowledge):
The reflection camera for pools.
The reflection camera for reflective floors.
I don't think floor reflections are a thing in Sims 2, despite there being code for a reflection camera in the game's binary, so who knows if it even works. The floor shader code contains this quote:
"reflective floors are currently dead. might ressurect them in an expansion pack"
Great, now we're down to pools as our last hope.
As you probably know, if ponds use PoolReflection, they appear black without a pool present on the lot. Maybe if we lift this restriction, things will start working? Think again:
I have no idea why there is a chess table(?) baked in to the reflection texture.
I guess that makes sense - the game also isn't creating the pool reflection camera, as it only does so if a pool exists. What if we allow the camera to be created regardless of the presence of a pool?
While doing this allows ponds to now 'reflect', the reflections are still broken, being displayed at the wrong height and sliding around with the movement of the camera. It expects to be given several bits of information to work properly, such as a node for it to be attached to, the bounds of the pool, and the depth of the water - all things ponds are not giving it.
Compounding this is the fact that ponds have very little functionality to work with to provide this information. You can get the elevation of the water (which I suppose could be used as the depth), but other than that, all there really is is a way to check if a specific terrain tile is a pond tile.
This creates all sorts of headaches, like how to differentiate between multiple ponds on a lot, getting the width and height of them, what the camera should be attached to, yada yada yada...
It was at this point that I started to wonder - is this really even worth it? Sure, placing a pool tile on a lot to get pond reflections working is a bit janky, but would whatever Frankenstein's monster of a pond reflection system I might be able to create be any less janky?
For this reason, I have decided to take a short break from pond reflections, as I was starting to get a metaphorical concussion from banging my head against the keyboard to try and figure something out. I know it's disappointing to hear, but hopefully the fancy new ocean reflections will soften the blow somewhat.
If anyone has any suggestions for pond reflections, I'm more than happy to hear them :) I'll return to the trenches soon...
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Did you know sims in this game are supposed to autonomously tease eachother for their bad memories just like how they congratulate their good ones? Unfortunately they broke the teasing feature in a patch at some point.
To be exact, the teasing was broken with Nightlife. It never worked anymore after as the error they introduced was never caught in any patch after that.
A while ago I have released a mod that fixes this as well as issues with the Congratulate interaction where Sims could congratulate each other on bad memories. Here’s the link. Look for “Stupid Congrats and Tease Begone!” :)
For anyone wondering what went wrong: Firstly, Maxis changed the Guardian BHAV in a way where the game would never recognise a memory to be negative because the wrong Temp value got checked.
And secondly, they also reworked a large table with all sorts of constants for each social interaction, likely switched some places around and accidentally gave Tease the “Kiss of the Vampire” values, which of course are all wrong (e.g. leading to Teasing increasing the Attraction Score, or unintentionally locking the interaction from children).
I have returned from a grueling 48-hour adventure deep within the Maxis mines, and have witnessed unspeakable man-made horrors with my own two eyes — the object limit is very real and there is nothing that can be done to fix it! The end times are upon us!
Okay, I'm being slightly dramatic. It could be fixed fairly easily, but not with a simple patch, and likely not without access to the source code (anyone else tired of hearing that excuse?).
The issue is that the limit isn't localised to purely the Build/Buy menu — it's integral to every aspect of the game that involves objects. Here are just a few examples of the game's functionality that would need modifying to remove the limit:
Sim pathfinding and routing.
Mapping tree tables to objects.
Interacting with objects.
Manipulating objects within lists (reading/writing/deleting them).
Objects being unselectable in the Build/Buy menu was also a result of this limit and I managed to fix it very quickly, but because The Sims 2 is a house of cards with the limit as its foundation, everything started falling apart almost instantly.
"So, what is this limit?", I hear you ask. 32,767. Yes, you read that correctly. The game is only willing to accept object IDs up to a meager value of 32,767. In computing terms, this is the maximum value of a signed 16-bit integer. It can store many more objects than this in a list, which is why you can still see all your 4t2 objects in the catalogue, but it isn't designed to recognise this many IDs and thus can't do anything with them.
Why are integers signing things? Are they famous or something?
'Signed' refers to the fact that these are integers (an integer is just a whole number btw) that can represent both positive and negative values — negative numbers have a negative sign before them, hence the term 'signed'. An unsigned integer is therefore one that can only represent positive values.
While they can both represent the same total of different values, the range of representable positive values differs. Using 16-bit integers as an example:
Unsigned: 0–65,535
Signed: -32,768–32,767
This shows that both can represent 65,536 different values, but the range of positive values for signed integers is half of that of unsigned integers. Object IDs cannot be negative, which means Maxis deliberately chose to use signed integers as a way to cut the ID limit in half.
The cherry on top of all this is that the game is manually converting 32-bit numbers into 16-bit numbers to enforce this limit. This is why I could fix objects not being selectable in the Build/Buy menu easily, as all I had to do was patch out the conversion. Could EA do this across the whole game themselves if they wanted to? I imagine so. But then again, if I had billions of dollars, I probably couldn't be arsed either.
What's an object ID?
An object ID is just a number from 0–32,767 that the game assigns to each new object it places into a list, presumably starting at 0 and incrementing by 1 for the next object. It would appear that CC objects are given IDs first, which is why it was solely Maxis objects becoming unselectable after passing the limit.
Sims and objects are stored in separate lists, but I believe they both contribute to the overall limit. My single piece of evidence for this is that I experimented switching between several hoods and observed that the IDs of objects in the Build/Buy catalogue fluctuated across them. Objects in hoods with subhoods attached had higher IDs than in those without.
What was causing the Build/Buy menu crashes?
The same thing I explained in my original post (the game trying to access null pointers), except the creation of these null pointers was no accident and not the result of something going wrong.
The game merely checks whether the ID for the object it is looking at is above 32,767, and if it is, it deliberately sets the pointer to its address to 0. This would be fine, if it didn't then try and access this nullified pointer immediately afterwards!
I'll cut Maxis some slack here, because surely no one would be crazy enough to want more than 32,767 objects in their game, right guys? How could they ever have predicted such a scenario? (2004 was a simpler time).
Wait, so you were wrong about there not being an object limit? Not so cocky now, are you?
Whoa there, cowboy — hold your horses. If I may direct your attention to this excerpt of an email I sent to @teaaddictyt on the 22nd of April 2026 at 13:42 BST:
As you can see, I was right all along!!!
In my defence though, we thought the crashing was the only thing we had to solve, which is why I missed the completely obvious 16-bit conversion that was occurring within the functions I patched. Unfortunately, I am only human, but I understand if you want to destroy all the spockthewok posters I know you have hanging on your walls...
In light of these new findings, if you want to hear my updated opinion on the existence of the object limit, watch this video.
Is your patch useless?
Yes, but also no. It's not fixing the object limit (I should probably rename it tbh), but it is fixing those annoying crashes caused by it.
At the moment, not having the Build/Buy menu crash when you try and use it is the best we can do. It's up to you which you find more annoying — crashing, or not being able to buy x number of objects in the catalogue. Like the 4GB memory limit, this is going to be an additional constraint we'll have to learn to accept :/
Another alternative would be to join me and the 12 other weirdos who play with no CC, and never have to worry about any of this. No? Oh well, it was worth a try...
Will you ever actually fix the object limit?
If it's even possible without the source code, then not by myself, no.
Because of the number of core areas of the game that would need patching, I don't trust myself not to miss something and have the game explode. Unless someone wants to assemble a modding strike force to try and tackle the issue as a team over several months, I'm not touching it with a 10-foot pole (for your safety and for mine).
Should Maxis go on trial at the Hague for crimes against humanity?
Probably.
Anyway, that's all from me, apologies for the false hope :( One small positive is that I did manage to map out a reasonably large chunk of the game's code while I was frantically searching for solutions, which should make my life easier when looking at your requests. I feel like I need to successfully complete some of them now to make up for this dud!
Will
(Thank god I didn't look at this for my dissertation, I would have failed my degree).
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