Wallpaper Texture

[maybesomethingdunno]

I'm posting this here since it falls under "Interior decorating" and "Walls & Floors" is a subsection of the Build area in the Wiki. I searched but couldn't find anyone else with this problem.

So, making Homecrafter content is fairly easy...unless you want your pixels to be perfect apparently.

Even though they're saved as bitmaps, I exported the texture from the .package to find they are now a .png somehow. I reapplied my texture to the exported .png, saved, used the NVIDIA DDS Utilities to re-import the texture, commit the changes and save the .package.

Yet, I still have noticeable stripes where I should have a gradient.
http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/5719/stripedpaper.png (http://img526.imageshack.us/i/stripedpaper.png/)
The left is my raw texture, the right is a screenshot of it in-game. While there may be some not-so-subtle transitions in the raw texture, they're not as bad as what's in-game.

Would a "Smooth" filter in the NVIDIA DDS Builder correct this? Is this just the nature of what happens to the texture when the camera is zoomed out? Is this a game limitation?

(My graphical settings are all on high.)

[mustluvcatz]

You're using SimPE, not Homecrafter for this? Well then, yeah- when you export a texture from SimPE it will be a .png. Personally, I've never tried to do walls in SimPE so I'm not too sure what could fix the stripes issue. One thing you could try is using Import instead of Build DXT. If you try that, be sure to Update all Sizes before you Commit. Maybe the build process is affecting your texture. Since you're using SimPE, you could also try saving your original texture as a .png then applying it to the texture exported from SimPE.

[HugeLunatic]

Yes all images in simpe are png - well ok there are some exceptions. LOL But walls/floors are png even if made using bmp in Homecrafter. I'm guessing when HC saves as a package it converts to png.

I would say it's an issue in game rendering the walls. There are Maxis walls that I notice this on. There are some gradient walls in game, they may have come with NL that you may be able to compare to. And I think IKEA may also have added some gradient ones. The ones that have the small light halo area? You could most definitely try the smoothing when building dxt, I wouldn't use Import since the quality is usually much worse. I make walls in HC with the default template image, then I open them in simpe to get the texture to edit.

Somewhere around here, ages ago, someone was talking about what the different options in the nvidia utilites do. But obviously I can't find it right now, maybe nvidia has it on there site? Yes I might be delusional again.

[bluetexasbonnie]

The DXT1 format option often seems to have trouble with subtle gradients. Try DXT3 or even DXT5. The higher the last number, the larger the file generally is, so you want to use the 'smallest number' format that gives you acceptable results. (Note: I have no idea what those DXT numbers actually mean. It may be pure coincidence that there is a correlation between size and number in Sims2 creations.)

[maybesomethingdunno]

Thanks everyone. There was some improvement, but not as much I'd like. It wasn't as bad, just not as much like the raw texture as I'd want it to be. I did look at those Nightlife wallpapers and they were a bit grainy. Maybe that's the key? Grainy texture = smooth rendering; smooth texture = striped rendering? If so, it must has been "Opposite Day" at EA when that was programmed. :|

Well, as I'm about to report back in my Creator Feedback post, the intended effect was not effective/noticeable anyway. :(

Still, it was a learning experience and I appreciate the insight.