Recolor suddenly goes wonky

[bluetexasbonnie]

I received a message from a user about a sudden problem with one of my recolors. Has anyone else seen any similar problem with any recolor? Any clues about causes?

I have downloaded your Once Upon a Blue Moon set (though I believe I originally got it from thesorceressandcompany.com) and it is wonderful. I love the recolours of the Maxis willow. Unfortunately, not long after I created a new lot with them on it they began flashing blue. This happened during game play, one moment they were the colour they should have been the next they were flashing blue. I had not exited the lot between them being normal coloured and the flashing. The lot across the street had the same trees and it too was flashing blue.

Oddly, I have a smaller willow mesh as well that uses the same recolours and those all continued to display correctly. It was just the standard, unaltered Maxis mesh that was having the issue.

About this same time I suddenly became unable to open the decorative > sculptures and decorative > mirrors portions of the buy catalog without the game crashing. All other areas appeared to be unaffected.

Through process of elimination (the standard removing files in batches and testing, repeat until the problem is found) I was able to narrow the issue with the catalog down to your Maxis willow recolours. Have I mentioned I love these recolours? I really do. In fact the lot (the whole hood really) won't work without them! lol.

I have tried redownloading and installing (deleted the previous versions) the package files. The issue persists. I went ahead and tried extracting your textures from one of the trees and placing it on a new recolour in SimPE object workshop just to test if it was an issue with recolours on that mesh in general. This recolour seems to work. The catalog is working, the tree is not flashing blue, etc. I did not wish to do this with the rest of them without your permission (and will of course delete the one I did should you wish me to). I am also not able to even provide error logs that may help track down why the issue occurred in the first place as the game does not seem to be creating any sort of an error. Just crashing. :/

I am baffled as to how a recolour could cause this, yet, as I said I thought I would give you a heads up and ask your permission to go ahead and use your textures from the remaining trees on new recolours as those seem to be working for me.

If there is any other help I can offer tracking down what may be happening should this issue occur for someone else, please let me know. I do love this set and would love to get these trees working in my game.

[HugeLunatic]

A couple thoughts. Are the recolors seasons compatible? And does the user have seasons? (I've not done anything with recolors/seasons so I have no idea) And what about the LOD90 for hood view? I vaguely remember a post about a recolor causing issues, but I'll be damned if I can remember where or find it. :/

[bluetexasbonnie]

I have no clue about 'Seasons compatibility', nor if she has it. I will invite her to participate in this discussion.

The recolors in question, if I understood correctly, are for the Maxis willow tree. I only recently started playing Seasons (only recently started playing sims after a long 'vacation'). Not sure if I have ever had a tree recolor in play over the seasons. Would have thought at worst, it wouldn't change, but more likely would revert to whatever the original non-leafy version was.

I have seen various issues with LOD90s in the base game environment. So far I personally have never caught an LOD90 misbehaving (other than as the result of my own ineptitude) in any expansion packs.

[Gwenke33]

I think what the user described was very much likely to have been due to the non-Seasons compatibility of the recolour. Regular recolours of trees do flash blue in any other season than that which uses the same as the summer texture. (The birch uses the same texture for spring as summer, for example, so it won't flash blue in spring but will flash blue in autumn and winter. I'm not sure about the willow and I don't have the game with me right now.).

All existing resized versions that I know, however, specifically draw the summer texture of the trees and will therefore not flash blue, but remain the same throughout the seasons. I think this explains the issues described in the first two paragraph. How this may have caused crasing upon entering the decorative catalogue is beyond me, however.

Here is Echo's tut on making seasons-compatible trees: http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=245117.
You make seasons-compatible recolours in a similar way - make a template as if making a new seasons tree as described by Echo, then clone that template without changing the CRES name, and delete everything but the texture and txmt and mmat resources.

[bluetexasbonnie]

Thank you. I have never read that tutorial, because I thought it was ONLY about making Seasons trees.

[Genlisae]

Sorry it took me so long to get here, things got hectic. I am the user who was having difficulty.

I have not had the opportunity to look into this issue again but I do have Seasons and after a few hours of playing the recolour I made also had the same issues. Right down to crashing the game when I went to open the catalog. Very perplexing, though I expect there is a conflict somewhere else that is causing the issue. Perhaps with one of the several "resized" Maxis willows that I have. Why that would effect the decorative catalog, I don't know, further investigation is needed. I will go over that tutorial and try again on the recolours. Thank you all for the information and especially BTB for looking into it.