Hi there ^^ Testing your ASI plugins that struggle with pink soup and they solved it for me, as I have 40+ GB CC. That's awesome job! Looks like you dive deeply into TS2 assembly code so I wanna ask something. Are you interested in investigating reflections in The Sims 2 and The Sims Castaway Stories? Seems they have different properties so reflections in TSCS work well without any hand like pool tiles. It would be a nice mod that would implement reflection rendering in TS2 from TSCS.
Hi!
I have been looking into this for the past couple of weeks and I've started to make some actual progress with it, so I thought I'd give an update :0
The reason Castaway's water look so nice is that it uses the screenspace reflections used by mirrors. Sims 2's oceans use a separate effect called "OceanReflection", but Castaway removed this completely.
I've managed to map this reflection effect to the water in Sims 2 and allowed the game to reflect all of the scenery, as opposed to only the terrain and a few objects, just like Castaway:
(All of these screenshots were taken using Castaway's Materials.package file).
Unfortunately, it's still quite buggy :(
Because mirrors are not expecting to use the same reflections as the ocean in Sims 2, they're kind of broken:
Pond reflections are also borked:
(The pond reflections don't require a pool btw, this was just the best lot to demonstrate the bug).
Castaway completely overhauled the water generation and rendering, so water is composed of 8x8 grids with fancy dynamic waves, rather than being one flat plane as in TS2. It's not really feasible to port this functionality through patching, but I'm going to try and figure out how tf to get these reflection bugs fixed as best I can.
My guess is it's something to do with the reflection cameras/image projection, but I can't see any obvious differences between TS2's and Castaway's code there.
Stay tuned!
Will
Hi! Good job! I also tried to disable visibility filters in OceanReflection but neighborhood plants weren't rendered on long distances. So far, I decided to try using render target ScreenReflection like in TSCS. And it works well BUT it requires an additional reflective plane with inverted normals. I used murano's reflective floor, upscaled it and inverted its normals. Combining the shader with ScreenReflection (instead of PoolReflection or OceanReflection) and that plane it got rendered really well. And in the end - it makes ScreenReflection to work well but requires placing that plane on the lot. I believe that TSCS has the same (or quite similar) logic - its planes of pond and ocean have additional reflective plane that is invisible or with inverted normals. But it is generated along with the ocean/pond geometry as well. Looks like if we add the same logic to original game we can get clear reflections like TSCS. I mean, we need an ASI plugin that does such: TS2 must create a reflective plane (invisible or with inverted normals) along with ocean and pond (and pool) geometries. *offtop i'm so sorry* I'm in progress with a mod that makes lot skirts looking like a neighborhood terrain but it doesn't behave the same way as neighborhood (because I just made a vertex-pixel shader mod). I looked at the code of TSCS and found out that TSCS lot skirts use neighborhood techniques for mapping. Maybe you would be interested in that too.
