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Pettifogging Legalist!
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#1 Old 16th Feb 2010 at 2:46 PM Last edited by plasticbox : 18th Feb 2010 at 10:05 AM.
Default What would prompt an object to change its footprint between closing and reopening the game?
I have a rather puzzling issue with a custom object (a chair), and I can't tell whether this is erratic game behaviour or something wrong with the object.

It's a chair, cloned from the EA "Quaint" chair (the 115§ one). Custom mesh, but the dimensions aren't much different than the ones of the original (if anything, my object is a little smaller overall). I also changed textures and presets, changed the name and price, and removed duplicate textures from the package – but I didn't touch the FTPT or VPXY.

I put the package in, start the game, and my chair has a one-tile footprint like any other chair. Playtested, sims can use it fine, everything looks good.

Then I save and exit, and the next time I open the game, my chair has a two-tile footprint and behaves like a two-tile object (e.g. if I pick it up and it's next to or behind something else, I need moveobjects on to put it back down). However, when copying that "two-tile" chair with the eyedropper, or buying a new one from the catalogue, those new chairs have one-tile footprints again – only the pre-existing chairs don't.

In short:

- the initial footprint is correct
- after exiting and restarting the game, the footprint of in-world chairs is broken


What would prompt an object to change its footprint, or the game to load a different footprint(?), between exiting and restarting? Is the footprint of an object that's already in the world constructed somehow differently from the one of a catalogue-bought object?


I'm nuking all caches and also the objects cache of the world I'm testing in between sessions, and there is only one version of the chair in /Mods/Packages. It happens whether or not I update the package between sessions (i.e. I can place chair, save and exit, immediately restart, and it'll be broken).

This is cloned and edited with the latest stable versions of s3oc/s3pe, and objtool v1.01. I looked at the bounding box in vpxyeditor, and it seems reasonable (all X and Y values are about +-0.3); the values in the ftpt resources are also nearly identical to the ones in the EA chair (up to the first or second decimal digit).

All clones of EA chairs that I made have two ftpt resources; this is correct, yes? (One is apparently a standard resource, "chairDinning_ftp" off the top of my head (with typo); the other one has the name of the cloned object ("ChairDiningCountry" without "ftp" suffix).

I know HL's tutorial http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=382724 but I haven't tested changing or reimporting the ftpts yet because the values themselves don't look wrong at all .. it's mainly the breaking-upon-restart thing that's puzzling me right now.
Screenshots

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In the kingdom of the blind, do as the Romans do.
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Pettifogging Legalist!
retired moderator
Original Poster
#2 Old 18th Feb 2010 at 9:26 AM Last edited by plasticbox : 18th Feb 2010 at 10:01 AM.
HugeLunatic and me narrowed this down to something about the cloning process breaking the OBJD of the Quaint chair in such a way that it results in this footprint issue.

All of this leads to broken footprints:

* just cloning the EA Quaint chair without editing at all (tested on two different machines by two different users with different games)
* cloning the Quaint chair as override, replacing meshes + images, importing and re-linking the OBJD, deleting all other resources but _IMG, _KEY, _RIG, MLOD, MODL, OBJD, OBJK, RSLT, STBL, TXTC, VPXY, then renumbering
* constructing a frankenchair: cloning the PatioPlastics chair as override, replacing meshes + images, importing the OBJD from the Quaint one and re-linking it, deleting all other resources but _IMG, _KEY, _RIG, MLOD, MODL, OBJD, OBJK, RSLT, STBL, TXTC, VPXY, then renumbering

The latter two reference the original FTPTs, so it can't be a problem with the FTPTs themselves.

A clone of the PatioPlastics chair that does not contain any parts from the Quaint one works fine (HL's "Jules" dining chair), so it must be something from the Quaint one that's broken, and since the unedited Quaint clone (which does not contain my meshes) is also busted that only leaves the OBJD as far as I can see.

e: I confirmed this by making another clone of the Patio chair and replacing the meshes and images with mine but not the OBJD – that one works.


I somehow need to get the material presets out of the broken OBJD and into a working one. Any ideas on how to go about that?

Attached is my unedited clone of the EA Quaint chair for reference. I used s3oc_0912-13-1531.
Attached files:
File Type: zip  pbox_ChairDiningQuaint.package.zip (544.1 KB, 3 downloads) - View custom content

Stuff for TS2 · TS3 · TS4 | Please do not PM me with technical questions – we have Create forums for that.

In the kingdom of the blind, do as the Romans do.
One horse disagreer of the Apocalypse
#3 Old 19th Feb 2010 at 9:03 PM
Can sims still use the chairs as normal?

"You can do refraction by raymarching through the depth buffer" (c. Reddeyfish 2017)
Pettifogging Legalist!
retired moderator
Original Poster
#4 Old 19th Feb 2010 at 9:10 PM Last edited by plasticbox : 19th Feb 2010 at 9:38 PM.
From what I've seen during my playtesting, they can .. at least, my tester sim never complained or jumped or anything. That said, I did put in new versions of the package between pretty much every session, and also nuked caches (including the objects cache of the world I was testing with), so maybe there simply were no "pre existing" chairs as far as the game was concerned.


e: with "playtesting" i mean playtesting of the original problem chair, the one in the screenshots – I didn't do any "live" tests of the ones I made in the course of trying to narrow down the footprint issue in particular.


e2: HL also just confirmed that sims can use it fine, and what's more, the chair reverts to one-tile when a sim is using it.

Stuff for TS2 · TS3 · TS4 | Please do not PM me with technical questions – we have Create forums for that.

In the kingdom of the blind, do as the Romans do.
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