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Original Poster
#1 Old 24th Aug 2015 at 8:29 PM Last edited by Qahne : 25th Aug 2015 at 3:57 PM.
Default Strange CASP issue - experts needed
This is a fairly new idea - overlaying CAS meshes so that only one part of the mesh underneath shows through. I have been working on these conversions of Servo for quite a while now, and I hit a snag while getting the bright idea of streamlining it by using the technique EA uses for boots and trousers in TS4. It works great - sometimes.

I have six base meshes, comprising the head to toe body - normal, fanged, and witch, for both genders - classed as skin details, and these are overlaid with a tuxedo and a dress (full body except for the head), classed as earrings. You apply the skin detail, the slider modifications disappear, everything except for earrings disappears, and you're left with one full, naked Servo. Then you apply the earring formalwear and everything disappears except for the head, being fully replaced by the new outfit. This is great because it's very streamlined and still allows for the three different heads sharing a single formal outfit (eliminating the need for several clones of the formalwear, each one just with a different head), whilst also being permanently on display (the flags mean that nothing can override the bare-metal bodies besides these formal outfits - no career outfits, no strangeness when they are naked, you get the picture.)

It works great for some swatches, but some combinations just don't seem to work. At first I thought it may be a texture issue, but after some testing it seems to be a CASP issue. Problem is, for the life of me I can't figure out what exactly the problem is. The CASP resources that work seem no different to the ones that don't work aside from the obvious (diffuse texture TGI, swatch order, thumbnail colour). I can't seem to fix it through cloning from one that does work or anything like that, it's a bizarre issue. I've attached the files below, hopefully someone with a better knowledge of the way these things work will be able to figure out what it is that is causing some to work and some to not work. Here is a listing:



As you can see, it seems fairly arbitrary. I can't find any logic to why some combinations simply don't work. My question is what is it in the CASP resource that seems to cause these differences in behaviour? Meshing and cloning done with with CASMeshTools and package compiled / textures added in Sims4Studio, if it is relevant.

Edit: Problem solved, attachment removed. Will be uploaded to MTS shortly.

Quote:
Originally Posted by jje1000
If this succeeds, then we will have driven a stake through the metaphorical heart of pudding.

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Ms. Byte (Deceased)
#2 Old 24th Aug 2015 at 11:42 PM
Wow, this is really mystifying. I've done a hex comparison between the red and black dress CASPs and found only the expected differences in part name, swatch order, color in the property tags, swatch color, and link to the texture. I tried removing the color tags, changing the swatch color, changing the swatch order - no difference. Looked at the textures but both seem fine. And why would the dress parts act differently for different hat/skin detail colors? (Where's the "I'm stumped" smiley when you need it?)

I saw that if I place the dress first all the colors work, so it's got to be that the hat/fangs/head parts are removing some of the dresses somehow. Why some and not others I have no clue so far, but at least the inconsistency is consistent (if you see what I mean) so there's got to be a reason.

I'll keep looking!

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Original Poster
#3 Old 24th Aug 2015 at 11:57 PM
Thanks, Cmar! That is really bizarre, I was half-hoping I had messed something up somewhere and that it was a really obvious solution. Yeah, there is no actual problem with the dress / tuxedo, the problem is with how the base hat overlays. It's good to know you're looking into it, I'll keep tinkering with the files to see if I can figure anything else out.

The female basic body works for all except one dress colour, so I assumed this would be a safe base to clone from. Trying to fix the male basic body, I cloned the female one using your CASMeshTool, copying only the first swatch, replaced the mesh for the head and the diffuse texture, and the issue was still there. Do you think it could just be behaving randomly, as randomly as it seems? Perhaps it simply doesn't like certain combinations of hex numbers in the TGI block, who knows.

The data entry that allows the mesh items to overlay like that is the region map key - it's set to 0x13 on all of the items. So it seems that the game is somehow determining which items to overlay, since they are both technically on the same region, and only one can be on top? I'm not sure, this is something I discovered entirely by accident, but I suspect there is a cleaner way of doing it - I experimented with changing the region map key to different numbers and instead of the dress / tuxedo replacing the bare body, both were present, clipping into each other. I'm honestly not entirely sure how I got this to work in the first place, so I'm not sure if there is another way of achieving this, but I'm looking into it.

Quote:
Originally Posted by jje1000
If this succeeds, then we will have driven a stake through the metaphorical heart of pudding.

♥ Receptacle Refugee ♥
Now also on Tumblr !
Ms. Byte (Deceased)
#4 Old 25th Aug 2015 at 4:36 AM Last edited by CmarNYC : 25th Aug 2015 at 3:38 PM.
Do you have the updated CASP wrapper dll for s4pe, posted in the tools forum? That decodes the region map and names the regions. The latest few versions of CAS Tools also shows and edits the region data, making it easier to see what's going on. (I saw the version of the CASPs was old, so assume you're using an old version of CAS Tools since it updates them.) The region map assigns each mesh part to a region and gives it a layer number, but I don't yet know exactly how the game decides when to remove parts. All EA told me was that the Base region never gets removed.

Edit: Okay, I tried giving the 'Ankle' region (the meshpart with the main body) a higher layer number in the dress region map than in the witch region map, and that worked, sort of. The dress mesh shows up for all the recolors, but the same set of recolors now has the texture from the witch package. I tried fiddling with the Sort Layer setting but it doesn't seem to help. Progress, I guess.

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Original Poster
#5 Old 25th Aug 2015 at 9:36 AM
I do have the latest version of the wrapper, but I didn't when the packages were first cloned. I had the same problem with the textures not overlaying properly yesterday morning, but I managed to fix it by changing the sort layer on the bare meshes to the same one that boots use. The sort layer on the formal outfits is copied from a full body outfit, if it's any help.

That is good progress, thanks again so much for helping me with this!

Quote:
Originally Posted by jje1000
If this succeeds, then we will have driven a stake through the metaphorical heart of pudding.

♥ Receptacle Refugee ♥
Now also on Tumblr !
Ms. Byte (Deceased)
#6 Old 25th Aug 2015 at 10:05 AM
I'm still having the same texture layering problem no matter what I do with the Sort Layer. Oh well, I'll come back to it later today.

Please do not PM me with mod, tutorial, or general modding questions or problems; post them in the thread for the mod or tutorial or post them in the appropriate forum.

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Ms. Byte (Deceased)
#7 Old 25th Aug 2015 at 3:00 PM
Got it to work! I only tested with the witch and dress packages, will leave the rest to you.

What I did:
  1. In the Witch bare body package, changed the 'Ankle' (main mesh) region layer to 300. You can do this in CAS Tools in the Region Manager tab. I left it at 600 in the dress package so that the dress will override the bare body mesh.
  2. Changed the BodyType for the dress from Earrings to Necklace. (And changed the exclude list for both packages accordingly.)
  3. Set the Sort Layer for the dress package to 17100, which is the 'native' value for necklaces.

My theory is that since earrings come in the game with a Sort Layer of 0, there's something, possibly a bug, that prevents them from layering properly over other items. A bug might explain the randomness of it. Necklaces come in the game with a higher Sort Layer than the value you were using for the bare body. (Forehead Crease has a 'native' value of 2200 but I left it at the shoes value you had set it to.) Could be the game is just picky about which Sort Layer values are applied to which BodyTypes.

I'm going to upload the newest version of CAS Tools shortly. It now has a 'Special Tools' tab that you can make visible by clicking 'Tools / Enable Special Tools'. One of those tabs will list all the Sort Layer values in the game with their associated BodyTypes. Could be useful as a guide.

Please do not PM me with mod, tutorial, or general modding questions or problems; post them in the thread for the mod or tutorial or post them in the appropriate forum.

Visit my blogs for other Sims content:
Online Sims - general mods for Sims 3
Offline Sims - adult mods for Sims 3 and Sims 4
Scholar
Original Poster
#8 Old 25th Aug 2015 at 3:55 PM
Thanks a ton! I'll finally be able to get these finished and uploaded. You're the best, Cmar

Quote:
Originally Posted by jje1000
If this succeeds, then we will have driven a stake through the metaphorical heart of pudding.

♥ Receptacle Refugee ♥
Now also on Tumblr !
Ms. Byte (Deceased)
#9 Old 25th Aug 2015 at 8:07 PM
Glad to help! The conversion looks really REALLY good, btw.

Please do not PM me with mod, tutorial, or general modding questions or problems; post them in the thread for the mod or tutorial or post them in the appropriate forum.

Visit my blogs for other Sims content:
Online Sims - general mods for Sims 3
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Ms. Byte (Deceased)
#10 Old 25th Aug 2015 at 9:10 PM
Just an update - I think I may have figured out why the non-random randomness. It looks to me like the game only recognizes the last four bytes (last 8 hex digits) of the CASP Instance ID, and with other things being equal or not determined, loads a higher instance-ID CASP's resources over those of a lower instance-ID CASP. Your remark about hex IDs and TGIs got me thinking, and after going cross-eyed staring at numbers and finding it to be consistent with the problems, I was able to get the original brown witch hat body working with ALL the dresses by giving the CASP a low Instance ID. (IMO the necklace and regionmap solution is better though.)

On the other hand, just now I got that top that picked up some bottom textures to work correctly by reducing the number of meshparts - changing the instance had no effect. So seems like there's a lot of factors and quite possibly a lot of game bugs.

Please do not PM me with mod, tutorial, or general modding questions or problems; post them in the thread for the mod or tutorial or post them in the appropriate forum.

Visit my blogs for other Sims content:
Online Sims - general mods for Sims 3
Offline Sims - adult mods for Sims 3 and Sims 4
Scholar
Original Poster
#11 Old 25th Aug 2015 at 11:34 PM
Very unusual, I guess bugs like that is why they keep changing these things in their patches? Glad my hunch about the hex number turned out to be useful, it really couldn't have been much else.

I applied your fix to all the items, everything is working beautifully now - just some final polish and they should be up before the weekend!

Quote:
Originally Posted by jje1000
If this succeeds, then we will have driven a stake through the metaphorical heart of pudding.

♥ Receptacle Refugee ♥
Now also on Tumblr !
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