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Mad Poster
#26 Old 17th Jan 2018 at 11:33 AM
Just CFE. I think I built it on a 1:1.33 scale using the Fox Plaza building as a reference:

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Alchemist
#27 Old 17th Jan 2018 at 11:35 AM
Quote: Originally posted by Don Babilon
Off topic, but I can already feel Grijze Pilion frantically going through his screenshots. Expect a picture-laden overkill post in 3...2...1

Oh dear, at first I didn't know who he was... Then I saw his screenshots... For someone who isn't very picky about graphics, I'm amazed.

Just call me Nikel
Field Researcher
Original Poster
#28 Old 17th Jan 2018 at 12:41 PM
@GrijzePilion That's good to know, I wonder if it would be possible to layer AOs. IDK, use the Nvidia inspector and then reshade on top of it? Probably would just conflict each other or reshade would overwrite whatever inspector is doing. I really like the mood of that apartment photo. The colors remind me of the sixties/seventies though, I know you prefer the bright 80s. Btw, I downloaded your reshader presets! I just have to turn off the bloom cos my eyes are sensitive.

@Poisi Seems like Wasset is using Nilxi's clouds or possibly made a minor edits to his cloud base. Anyway, if you want to keep Nilxi's cloud you could always chose the download where are those files are separated and not put Wasset's cloud base in your game. Nothing else of those downloads will conflict.

@tunafishfish
Mad Poster
#29 Old 17th Jan 2018 at 12:52 PM
Quote: Originally posted by MeowMixPls
@GrijzePilion That's good to know, I wonder if it would be possible to layer AOs. IDK, use the Nvidia inspector and then reshade on top of it? Probably would just conflict each other or reshade would overwrite whatever inspector is doing. I really like the mood of that apartment photo. The colors remind me of the sixties/seventies though, I know you prefer the bright 80s. Btw, I downloaded your reshader presets! I just have to turn off the bloom cos my eyes are sensitive

I think ReShade overrides the Inspector AO, but I'm not sure. I suppose you can disable the ReShade AO and use Inspector in its place, considering the framerate hit is significantly smaller that way.
As for the apartment, I agree. It's an older pic and it looks a lot different now. Ironically enough, the high-end 80s look I'm going for is actually not very colourful at all, with lots of stark blacks and whites instead of bold colours. I guess my shader preset kinda reflects that fondness I have for contrast. I intentionally made it so that it's very in-your-face. Usually when it's sunny both outside and in The Sims, I open my curtains all the way and throw the brightness on my monitors way up. It's a really incredible experience sometimes, with how realistic this game can be sometimes.

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Lab Assistant
#30 Old 20th Jan 2018 at 3:34 AM
Bump, because I really need this.
Mad Poster
#31 Old 20th Jan 2018 at 1:34 PM
Oh shit, nearly forgot to post these:

day, on


day, off


night, on


night, off

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Field Researcher
Original Poster
#32 Old 21st Jan 2018 at 7:01 AM
@Disspleased Are you looking for anything in particular? Or just more info about the shaders and ambient occulsion?
@GrijzePilion that is your reShader on and off? So comparing vanilla game to tweaked ambient glow, ambient occlusion, depth of field, ambient bloom, depth overlay, motion blur, depth haze, FXAA, lens flare, chromatic aberration and film grain?

That lighting is gorgeous in the night pic.
Mad Poster
#33 Old 21st Jan 2018 at 12:46 PM
Yeah that's fully on versus fully off. Had to change or two values to get the focal distance and skybox coloration right, because I don't know what caused that damn green sky but I wasn't having any of it.

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Instructor
#34 Old 22nd Jan 2018 at 8:17 AM
Quote: Originally posted by GrijzePilion
Just CFE. I think I built it on a 1:1.33 scale using the Fox Plaza building as a reference:


I'm drooling over it (your build, not the Fox Plaza ).
Mad Poster
#35 Old 22nd Jan 2018 at 12:47 PM
I could upload it if you want @Floraflora2, but it's really nothing more than an empty shell with some windows painted on. It doesn't include an interior, any purpose, or 12 German terrorists.

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Scholar
#36 Old 22nd Jan 2018 at 2:00 PM
Sims 3 is already a gorgeous game. Sometimes, while my athletic sim is jogging for hours on end, I tilt the camera up and watch the world go by like, "wow." I'm on running on medium settings and it's still amazing to see the rolling hills go by and to see the sky turn pink and watch the sun set. I've played Sims 4 and I've seen "Let's Plays" run on really high-spec computers and it can not compare. @GrijzePilion, that's a beautiful build and while I can see the appeal of your lighting mods, it can't add much more than was already there.
Lab Assistant
#37 Old 23rd Jan 2018 at 4:24 PM
@tunafishfish I agree! I'm not the biggest fan of bloom in games since it tends to make me a bit nauseous. And the sims 3 can be absolutely gorgeous, and a bit silly. Maybe that's just my nostalgia though lol, since I played a lot of the sims 2 pets on console and I still think it's pretty, if a bit dated.
Mad Poster
#38 Old 23rd Jan 2018 at 5:38 PM
I like the game as is also and do not want to change gorgeous clear graphics into blurry ones.
Mad Poster
#39 Old 23rd Jan 2018 at 8:49 PM
Sometimes when I turn the filter off, for whatever reason I might have for doing so, I'm confronted with how old this game has really gotten. TS3 has really nasty aliasing, and the color palette is really dated. There's also an unnatural sharpness to everything. I've never been quite sure how to put into words the issues I have with TS3's graphics but everything has a really flat look to it and it's always bothered me. It's not quite as bad as TS4, but still worse than comperable titles like Fallout 4 or GTA V. It should speak for itself that 5+ years of difference is responsible for this, but art style has a lot to do with je ne sais quoi and that je ne sais quoi makes the difference between an old game I could not give two shits about and a timeless one.
ReShade places TS3 firmly in the latter category; I can't imagine being half as interested in it without. Nevertheless, the outdoor lighting model still sucks ass and I won't be happy until I get to fix that too.

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Lab Assistant
#40 Old 24th Jan 2018 at 4:45 PM
@GrijzePilion

Every video game has an art style. Sometimes you like it, sometimes you hate it. Sometimes you have things you like and things you hate.

Heck, even my favorite game has one thing I loath about its art. The entire game is designed to look like it's on paper, and has paper texture overlaid on the images. When you're standing still or going slow? Gorgeous! Running fast? Blurry mess. The sims 4 has a very cartoony style that for the most part I like, but I dislike the gameplay itself. Sure, there are some stuff I wish was in the sims 3 that it has. Don't we all?

That being said, I do dislike a lot of the default water and skies, and the default skin and eyes. And the lighting with trees. But as my motto says:

'Never judge a game by it's graphics. You may just have fun with it anyways.'

Even so, I respect that you like a more realistic set of graphics. Heck, I think your nature pictures are gorgeous! But from a gameplay standpoint I wouldn't be able to stand having it.
Mad Poster
#41 Old 24th Jan 2018 at 6:39 PM
The graphics in 3 look very realistic to me. I have seen pics in 3 where I had to look twice to see if real or the game. 4 has very artificial graphics/colors like animated movies. 3 has far more muted colors like much of the real world. And items in the real world have sharp edges. As I type this I see nothing around me that is a bright color and everything has a hard edge except a piece of sponge that was in some packing. IMO Sims 3 has quite realistic graphics. There were worries when 4 was announced it would get to almost photo realistic quality and most people did not want that. For me the graphics are clear and beautiful as done. I do not want to change them to distorted and blurry. I just have to take my glasses off to see blurry. I do not want to see that in my game.
Instructor
#42 Old 24th Jan 2018 at 8:06 PM
Quote: Originally posted by GrijzePilion
I could upload it if you want @Floraflora2, but it's really nothing more than an empty shell with some windows painted on. It doesn't include an interior, any purpose, or 12 German terrorists.


Empty skycraper shells are very fine when one wants "filler" lots to increase the density on the map; but I don't want to make you do extra work or fuss just because of me, if you don't have plans to upload it anywhere. Just saying that it looks nice and if it was downloadable (and if I had the EPs for it), I would grab it.
Mad Poster
#43 Old 24th Jan 2018 at 9:17 PM
Honestly I've always thought TS3 looks ugly by default. Not bad, but ugly. The graphics are adequate for a 2009 game. It looked adequate the day it came out and it looks adequate now.
It has a bad art style. Awful shader coloration. The entire game seems to have a slight bluish thinge over it. Almost as bad as GTA IV's toxic-looking yellow color grading, which I think was supposed to look New Yorky and cinematic but didn't. It's like the devs don't know what the hell to do with the color blue, because every Sims game has bad blues. TS4 has those nasty colored shadows during sunset, TS3 has it everywhere. Edges are one of the relatively few things TS4 does better than TS3, though not by much. It's still much too sharp. Things don't look like that in real life, the human eye doesn't have pixels or anti-aliasing. Modern video games use graphics technology that's based on advanced optics, whereas games like TS3 have flat surfaces with a bit of lighting drawn on it somewhere. What TS3 also doesn't have, and modern games do, is intelligent lighting. Volumetric effects, atmospheric light scattering, screen-space occlusion-esque effects, and that sort of crap. These are all standard effects in today's video games (except TS4 of course) and they add a ton of subtle detail to the picture.
So naturally that's what I have too. My shader is set up to use luma-based sharpening ON TOP OF gaussian blur, combined with adaptive screen-space ambient bloom effects (all of these words have a meaning) because it makes for a decently good imitation of a newer video game. And as it turns out, that's how light works in real life.
And, you know, I'd rather have a game that looks like real life than a game @Daisylee would consider gorgeous and realistic.

Quote: Originally posted by Floraflora2
Empty skycraper shells are very fine when one wants "filler" lots to increase the density on the map; but I don't want to make you do extra work or fuss just because of me, if you don't have plans to upload it anywhere. Just saying that it looks nice and if it was downloadable (and if I had the EPs for it), I would grab it.

Too late, it's on my upload list now. Which means I'll get it done right after all the other things I'll totally absolutely finish soon.

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Mad Poster
#44 Old 24th Jan 2018 at 10:11 PM
Quote: Originally posted by GrijzePilion
And, you know, I'd rather have a game that looks like real life than a game @Daisylee would consider gorgeous and realistic.
The 6 agrees with tunafishfish's comment that the game looks gorgeous happen to disagree with you. You can do whatever you want in your game. But for some of us the game is fine. We enjoy the game and do not spend time ripping it to shreds as you do all the time.
Mad Poster
#45 Old 24th Jan 2018 at 10:14 PM
I could be the only one out of a 100 to hold a viewpoint, and it would still not invalidate the possibility that the other 99 all just happen to have no idea what they're talking about. So it's cool that you feel the need to cite numbers, but it makes you seem rather hostile.

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Mad Poster
#46 Old 24th Jan 2018 at 10:25 PM
Quote: Originally posted by GrijzePilion
I could be the only one out of a 100 to hold a viewpoint, and it would still not invalidate the possibility that the other 99 all just happen to have no idea what they're talking about. So it's cool that you feel the need to cite numbers, but it makes you seem rather hostile.

I will not waste my time on a further response. You and your ego can carry on.
Mad Poster
#47 Old 24th Jan 2018 at 11:51 PM
Wonderful.

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Field Researcher
Original Poster
#48 Old 25th Jan 2018 at 3:39 AM Last edited by MeowMixPls : 25th Jan 2018 at 3:52 AM.
Well, that is all fine and dandy if you love the looks of unmodded sims 3. But I have to ask did you ever play ts2? I remember how shocked I was seeing the pudding that the TS3 sims were. Luckily, we have very skilled modders who quickly made amazing defaults to make sims look good. Also, custom sliders and master controller's slider multiplier! Also, how about about those plastic looking clothes, since when fur is supposed to be shiny, EA?! Thankfully, people made fixes to that issue too. And, those are just two examples. The list goes on and on. Now my biggest wish is that somebody can crack the game engine and fix the shadows and other graphical annoyances like with the ts2 shadow mod I linked in my first post.

"We enjoy the game and do not spend time ripping it to shreds as you do all the time."
Is that supposed to be a bad thing? Sims would not be nearly as popular - not even close, if people couldn't rip the game apart and make their own modifications. I'm wondering how many actually even play the game instead of creating. I haven't actually played the game for ages, just been opening it up to see if my CC works and how it looks. I would have walked away long time ago if there was no custom content or I couldn't tweak the game files. I love S3PE so much!

To further drive the point home, think how many people refuse the play sims 4 because there is no CASt (and for a few other things) but that just shows how important it is to sims players to be able to micromanage every single detail.

After playing cities skylines and then coming back to sims 3 has been rough. TS3 has not aged well visually. Although it was pretty ugly when it came out and I remember many TS2 players saying no way they will touch that mess. Fortunately heaps of mods, CASt, and open world makes me stay with TS3. And yeah, the cartoony look of sims 4, no thanksies.
Mad Poster
#49 Old 25th Jan 2018 at 9:43 AM
Quote: Originally posted by MeowMixPls
Now my biggest wish is that somebody can crack the game engine and fix the shadows and other graphical annoyances like with the ts2 shadow mod I linked in my first post.

I still can't say for certain if it's possible or not. It's a relatively standard format, it seems, but I don't know if you can just casually tear it apart and then put it back together, and if so, how.

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Field Researcher
Original Poster
#50 Old 25th Jan 2018 at 10:59 AM
@Esper-of-Tropica "Never judge a game by it's graphics. You may just have fun with it anyways." Yeah modding the crap out of it can be fun! Just kidding, well partly. I actually used to play a lot. Especially TS1 and TS2. I think minecraft is excellent at showing that graphics come second to gameplay for many people. However, I am a micro manager and love to mod everything in my game. For example, there are so many amazing sims here but I could never play with them because I didn't create them. So I just admire the pictures of them.

@daisylee yeah I remember some of the people being worried of the graphics being too real. I wasn't one of them. But those people definitely got what they wanted. Clay hair, really? Or how about the ball pit?

For the record, just because 6 people here happened to agree that they like the original graphics better is far from what most people think. Sims 3 is known for being fugly and pudding like. Cue all the threads here about how to make sims that aren't hideous. We stay because of the gameplay eg CASt, open world etc. For example those default eyes have been downloaded nearly 500k times. 500 thousand times! This skin has gotten over 1M downloads I couldn't tell you how many times well known lightning mods or SweetFX presets have been downloaded but they seem to be equally popular.

@GrijzePilion I think the chances are pretty low at this point. But then again somebody has made The Sims 1 into 3D. Although ts1 is just pure awesomeness, can't think many people feeling such strong affection towards ts3.
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