Sunshadow fix for older objects

I've fixed the sunshadows of the Hampton series as well the Ashley stool. If you login to TSR the next time you should get a notification where you can download the updated files. :)

Rustico Dining

The new update is the Rustico Dining with a chair, table, bowl and vases as well preset styles. Grab the set here. I hope you enjoy. :)

World Adventures - Egypt

And finally to complete the overview of the new neighborhoods, here's Egypt! As you can see I had quite a blast taking pictures because there were so many interesting places to visit and discover. See yourself what marvelous job EA has done with this fantastique World Adventure neighborhood!

Create A World Tool

Let's have a look at the Create A World Tool which will be available for download in December at the official site. This tool is used by the Sims 3 team themselves for creating all the neighborhoods. You can choose from a premade terrain to start from but you can also create your own heightmap which you can import. From there you can do further changes to the terrain. There are a couple of tools available with which you can sculpt the landscape in an interesting way.

Click for high resolution image (598.9 KB)

Further you have the possibility to import your own textures to paint on the terrain. There's a limit of 8 textures used per neighborhood section (2x2 sections). However, if you're not satisfied of a texture, you can easily replace it. You can even assign a sound effect to a texture. It's possible to place all kind of trees and other objects as well as effects into the neighborhood. This stuff can be moved and rotated at any wish. So you're basically able to place rocks in the air. :P

My created, but not yet finished, neighborhood with the Create A World Tool.

You can place streets and walkways everywhere and connect them. Their path can be set with bezier curves (like in Illustrator). Lots don't have to be attached to streets but it's recommended to do so to not confuse the game's track system. Lots can be freely created with a rectangle, although there's a maximum size. Whenever you need to make changes ingame, you can do that. There's a button with which you can switch back and forth between the editor and the game.

You can also define areas where the camera and/or sims can't go to. Such areas are automatically created when hills or mountains are too steep.

Well that's it for now. Going again to the editor to place the streets and lots. :)

Edit: Back with having the neighborhood basically finished. But there's actually so much more you can do!

World Adventures - France

I've uploaded some screenshots from France at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ts3simposium/. Enjoy!

World Adventures - China

I've got to show you some screenshots from China of World Adventures! Sorry for not being able so scale them properly. ;)

A sim which just enters a chinese grave.

A river with bamboo at night.

The athmosphere is just incredible! The sky has been improved a lot and has now lots of moving clouds and the light is very colorful. But it's no real weather yet as we saw in Seasons.

The adventures are really cool to play. However, with a cheat you can create your own adventure lots. With a cheat you gain access to a collection of objects to program. You can give an object an action which results from a sim interacting with it and passes that action over to another object. When you're doing this the objects get marked with an arrow.

Simposium 2009

Hey there! I'm currently in San Francisco at Electronic Arts. We (SteveB, Wolfsim68 and me) are invited to test out the new expansionpack World Adventures and as well the Create A Neighborhood tool. Yes, you've heard right, it's possible now to create new neighborhood from scratch! I'll be posting later more info about this. Probably with pictures. Let me run now in the game testing out these cool new things. :o)

Sims 3 Objects with TSR Workshop

Currently we have a closed beta test of TSR Workshop running which focuses on object meshes. Yay! And this is the result I've got so far:

There are still quite a few bugs which need to be fixed first until those objects can be uploaded for download. :)

R.I.P. Hampton Set

I've lost yesterday 9 windows and 6 seatings meshes (and their lower poly detail meshes, this makes 30 ready to import meshes) due to a harddisk crash. It's not possible to rescue the data on it. If I'm going to start over, I dunno yet.

Trees? Trees!

I successfully modified the Italian pine tree! I made it shorter and a bit wider. This is currently only a replacement because no programm can yet clone trees/shrubbery correctly. This is also why the textures aren't changed.

The foliage sways correctly in the wind and also the lower detail mesh works. This tree modding is currently very experimental! Also due to the special software used (a demo, very limited) it's very unlikely we're going to see many new custom trees/shrubbery. :(