#s3ss update

New Uncompressed Sim Textures patch from "Just Harry" that forces CAS quality textures onto sims. Comes with an obvious increase in memory usage, highly recommended to use DXVK

ImGui window now tells you to save if you have unsaved changes

Before:

After:

Woo! Multiple new patches and a big revamp/patch to the games lighting system!

New stuff:

Startup Warning Dialog Fix - Fixes a dialog that either fails to be created or fails to appear and causes the game to look like it's black screened, made by "Just Harry".

^ This and the CPU Optimization and Expanded Crash Log patches are now enabled by default (thank you Swiffyjk for this and some banger readme changes!!)

Disable Store Featured Items Download - Blocks the game from downloading the featured store items listing, preventing thumbnail downloads into the FeaturedItems folder.

Uncompressed Compositor Textures - Forces material compositor textures to use uncompressed A8R8G8B8 instead of DXT1/DXT5. Similar to the Sim Textures patch but for other things, DXVK is recommended to avoid memory issues.

Lighting Quality Patch - Improves interior lighting: higher lightmap resolution, softer shadows, blur and a janky multisampler that might be worse than the default but I spent too long on not to ship it. Highly recommend playing with the various lighting settings in the settings tab alongside this as you can DIY your own lighting mods and lighting is fun and neat and cool. I would recommend turning drop shadows off at least as I find they look really gross.

The last three are experimental patches, they'll graduate into proper patches eventually.

Updates/Changes:

Update to smooth patch precise with help from LazyDuchess!!!, a few things tweaked and a new option to only tick at most once per frame.

Intersection optimization patch removed (RIP), this wasn't a wise patch to begin with and ended up breaking a few things (was faster because it just threw out half of its calls)

That's all! S3MM soon etc. etc. I will probably expand on the lighting patch as I had "fun" working on it, I'd also like to mess w/ the diffuse and specular probes/system for crispy reflections etc.

Huge credits to Just Harry for the majority of this update! None of this would have happened with them!

Changes:

All patches should now work on all platforms. EA no longer has to suffer! Going forwards I will try and make all of my patches multi-version and stop being lazy 😅

Smooth Patch Dupe removed

Smooth Patch Precise added

Experimental GC Finalizer Throttle patch added (couldn't think of a nicer name)

Bugfix release! Fixes:

Rare crash with CC lots due to refpack weirdness

Mimalloc settings saving issue (this took waaaay too long to figure out)

Rare/weird issue where for some users the .ini would be saved in random places like SYSWOW????

Bug fixes!

Fixed several persistent ini saving and loading issues

Temporarily disabled preset system as it was bugged and corrupting peoples ini's

Patches now automatically re-apply themselves (debounced 2 seconds) if a sub-setting was changed (woops)

Sub-settings also now correctly save

Known issues:

Win11/10 users with Core Isolation and/or Hypervisor-protected Code Integrity (what a name) will have issues with the IAT hooks not hooking, this fails gracefully and wont cause any issues asides from those patches not enabling.

I may do a settings system rewrite? Or maybe put it off for another year or 12.

The mono tunable editor (not MonoModder, that's a separate thing) is mostly done code wise and will hopefully be coming out soon-ish.