#batl

Happy Christmas everybody! Now for your present, it's updates! Or an updater, to be exact. Yape & Batl can now check for updates, download, and install them, all from within the program. This was (in theory) slightly easier than I initially expected, as the packaging system I'm using (cargo-packager) has support for it natively. Of course there were still a fair share of troubles actually implementing the system in practice (it can't ever be that simple can it).

I've noticed that sometimes people aren't sure where to leave feedback or ask questions. My DMs are always open, but I'm thinking that maybe having something like a discord server might make it easier for people to get help, share suggestions and the like. That said I'm worried about two things: 1. locking useful information inside a non-google-able server and 2. having to keep track of Yet Another Server, since there are quite a few sims 2 discord servers already. That said, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

changelog

bug fixes and improvements

okay maybe not that short ;)

add a 'scan again' button

prevent flashing of the texture popup; this was potentially a pretty serious accessibility concern for people with epilepsy so I've spent quite a while trying out different ways to make it work. The current system is not perfect but it works

put most crashes in the error log instead of discarding them

use the amount of mipmaps when calculating memory, which might be wrong because the game could potentially unload larger textures when zoomed out. If that's the case I'll have to change it again

reduce memory usage by a considerable amount

some small UI tweaks ect.

With that out of the way I want to introduce what I hope to make a persistent feature of my update posts: polls! I'm not too familiar yet with the sims 2 modding communities that exist here on tumblr and in general, and sometimes I want to ask what people find most important and thus what I should focus my effort on, so I'm going to add polls to most of my updates.

Anyways, here is the first poll!

Why?

The Sims 2 has had a long-standing problem known as 'pink flashing' or 'pink soup' when using too much custom content. The Sims 2 is a 32-bit program, which means that it normally has a maximum memory limit of 2GiB (2048MiB) and by using a so-called '4GB patch' you can raise this limit to -you guessed it- 4GiB, this limit might seem pretty large, but due to how the game works you might hit this limit sooner than expected!

Let's say you have 1024x2048 textures (which is the default for Sims 4 textures, and thus also often for 4to2 cc) in RGBA format, these textures will EACH take up 8MiB of texture memory! This means you could possibly only have only a MAXIMUM of 512 textures loaded in memory before you run out of memory completely. In practice, this limit will probably be lower due to other factors.

This tool will help you find textures that take up too much texture memory, and thus (hopefully) help alleviate some amount of pink flashing.

Tutorial

First, download the program from the link above and follow the instructions to open the program.

Now let's get the program looking the way you want: click on the sun/moon button on the top left of the program to switch light/dark mode and click the "UI Scale" number next to it and enter a new number to change the size of the interface.

Set the folder we want to search: at the top bar, search for the 'Downloads:' bar, then at the end click the button with the folder icon and select your folder. Once you've selected a folder the program will instantly start scanning, if you want to restart this scan then at any time you can click the text in the Downloads bar and press enter.

Currently this list will show all textures in the scan folder, which is probably not very interesting. To find some more interesting textures we can add some filters to the texture list. On the top bar, click on the 'Filter' button: this will open the filter list and it will be empty if you haven't added any filters previously.

These filters filter the texture list one by one, each filter removing more textures from the displayed list of textures. To add a filter, click the plus button, and to remove it click on the trashcan button at the start of the line.

To edit a filter, click on the first box to choose the filter type, click on the second box to choose the type of comparison, and select the number in the last box to set the number to compare with.

The comparison type can be < (smaller than), <= (smaller or equal), > (greater than), >= (greater or equal), == (equal), or != (not equal).

The Format filter is different: make a format filter, then click on the 'choose' button and choose the texture formats that you want to show in the texture list.

Let's edit some textures!

In the texture list, find a texture that you think is too big, and either double click on it to open it in the default package editor or right click on it to show a menu to copy the details of the package.