Thanks Margaret, the base game files did get rid of the fuzziness, and I think the brightness, too, however, they brought another set of problems. Trouble seems to find me (anyone pick up the subtle, possibly incorrect Harry Potter reference? excuse my cheesiness...) Anyway, I found that the labels for simsample's base game edited ini files don't match with the color ramps. For example, the ini files for clear (S3_1F886EAD_00000000_967BC6C3B3808C00%%+_INI.ini) is labeled inside the text as partly cloudy, and partly cloudy's ini file is labeled in the text as custom. Maybe it doesn't matter, but in CAW the cloudiness bar in time of day goes partly cloudy, clear, overcast, stormy, and then custom, when clear should go first. I found that strange, and then also, when I'm looking at the sea (off the heightmap) at some angles it has a yellow tint (so far noticed only during clear weather), and my clear sky has a pink fogginess to it and there are no traces of pink in my color ramps except during sunrise and down. Any ideas?

Wow, it's been a long time. Last time i edited these for a world was last winter :P

Well towards the end of this long hiatus I worked on a small world called Howland Isle. What's different about it is that rather than being configured to allow you to do anything, it's planned to have you revolve around a specific story line, so in this case - no roads/sidewalks, mostly hidden tombs. I did build in a few empty residential lots and a hidden mini-mall with all of the rabbit holes, in case you would want to make it a full-time world, which I wouldn't recommend.

I'm editing the .ini files for Bridgeport, as I did w/ Sturgeon Bay, which I will finish at some point!

I should have pics of how it turned out by tomorrow along with a beta test version in CFF with the basic (i.e. no hidden tombs, mainly one residential lot, garden lot, beach lot, and ambiance)

Also I don't know if this was posted yet, but for Bridgeport there are some extra override files, and I wanted to point out what they do.

S3_1F886EAD_00000000_3EC0CF0CC4A6540F%%+_INI.ini

Configures:
-Lot LOD Height Threshold (Regulates Affect on walls in worlds with custom color)(If you have weird house colors due to INI editing, this is the file to look at!)
-Determines which Pre-programmed flythrough your world will play(Simsample has a tutorial on this)
-Building Wall/Roof Colors (Color of the edge of the top of the wall)


S3_1F886EAD_00000000_5E4F8E7B226066CA%%+_INI.ini

Configures:
-Sunlight Scale
-Ambient Probe Scale*
-Light Saturation
-Grayscale Intensity* (Assuming this is towards the night)
-Bloom Ramp Intensity/Threshold
-Gamma level

*Unknown as to what this does

S3_1F886EAD_00000000_5E20253AF53E517F%%+_INI.ini

Configures:
-Sun/Moon Radius
-Sun Halo Radius (Does not work - source: INI File)
-Sun/Moon Degree Offset
-Starfield Degree Offset
-Sunlight Transitions and Shadow parameters
-Lunar Cycle Length
-Moon Reflection factor
-Horizon Skew Factor
-Distance to which the sun or the moon can approach the horizon (Horizon light Minimum)
-Sunset Dimming Speed
-Sunrise/Sunset Time
-Amount of time before/after Sunrise/Sunset the sun controls Light Direction
-Weather Change Intervals
-Bloom Threshold and Slope (Must be between -1 and 0)

S3_1F886EAD_00000000_7886A7F59355762F%%+_INI.ini

Configures:
-Path of Camera during the world introduction (Main points listed in file, also Simsample has a tutorial on this.)

S3_1F886EAD_00000000_D89F9D186B7BB372%%+_INI.ini

Configures:
-Sea Params
-Normal Map texture Coordinate Scales*
-Time Scales for Normal map levels 1&2*
-Normal Scales for Levels 1&2*
-Water Angles in Radian for Normal levels 1&2*
-Wave height
-Time and World Scale for Big Waves
-Noise Offset for Wave Ripples
-Global Scaling Rate for waves
-Wave Time Scales
-Sun vertical stretch factor (How far does the sun reflection stretch)
-MIP Level* (No Longer Works)
-Water Depth factor (How deep is the water until the haze shows)
-Refraction Distortion
-Shoreline Depth Settings

*Level 1 and 2 are wave/bump textures for the ocean.

Note: The majority of how these parameters work is covered in the files themselves, mainly the Misc Sea and Sky params.

Glad to be back

@Älex: You can just open your world in S3PE and remove the files you added to get rid of the weather. The filenames are listed in post#3:

You should always make a backup before importing anything- then you can revert if you don't like the results!
What odd graphical effects were you getting?

@Volvenom- Have you had any luck yet?

@GrayOwl- What resources have you imported into your world? From your image and description it sounds as though you haven't imported all of the files needed. For example, if you import only the colour ramps and not the ini files, your sea will be transparent and things will glow unnaturally- rather like your image. Remember that the ini files are removed by CAW upon saving, so you have to reimport them. Perhaps you could attach your ini files and colour ramps so that we can test them?

@Riptide651:

This file is present in all of the EA worlds which have custom lighting, it is not specific to Bridgeport. The wall top colour is just that- it changes the wall edge colour but does not affect the roof. I like mine to be grey, whereas EA have most of theirs some pukey brown colour!

The flythrough number identifies which flythrough is used on world initialize- so you need this file if you use a flythrough!
LOD distance determines exactly when the transition between high detail and low detail will occur, I would just leave this as it is.


These are all again not unique to Bridgeport, I've touched on them in post #2 but haven't written up all info I have.


Levels 1&2 are the bump maps used for the sea texture, if you change these figures you can change the direction of sea flow. There seem to be two wave textures, and changing how they are angled to each other can change the way the sea appears. I modded this file for Jericho to make the river flow toward the sea; see the files attached to post #3 for details. This file is unique to Bridgeport; the other worlds don't have it (although I think maybe Sunlit tides does). For Bridgeport, all figures are at default except the water depth factor.

I have imported into my world the following along with their corresponding color ramps:

S3_1F886EAD_00000000_560C0FD7012DA7F3%%+_INI.ini(partly cloudy)
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_967BC6C3B3808C00%%+_INI.ini (clear)
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_2C02B3532B64EB49%%+_INI.ini(stormy)
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_8DEA7AE7631A026A%%+_INI.ini(overcast)

I have not saved since importing ramps and ini's into my world, and before I run CAW, I typically always tweak, and then reimport the parameters. I have double checked that all the of the ini's have their corresponding color ramps. I don't have to have a custom color ramp or ini, do I? And there is no trouble with the edited base game ini's being mismatched?

Anyways, I've attached my ramps and ini's (clear, overcast, partly cloudy, stormy). Perhaps they will shed some light. Thank you for all the help. :lovestruc

GrayOwl, you seem to have a mismatch- you have the following:

S3_1F886EAD_00000000_967BC6C3B3808C00%%+_INI.ini (Clear)
Which goes with
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_7529C26EE8E2A9E6%%+_IMG.dds (Clear)

S3_1F886EAD_00000000_2C02B3532B64EB49%%+_INI.ini (Stormy)
Which goes with
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_E422CDDE7FE1F25F%%+_IMG.dds (Stormy)

S3_1F886EAD_00000000_8DEA7AE7631A026A%%+_INI.ini (Overcast)
Which goes with
S3_00B2D882_0076A684_F0A86F660985BF20%%+_IMG.dds (Overcast)

But then you have:
S3_1F886EAD_00000000_FE1F6A95A24A604A%%+_INI.ini (Custom)
Which should go with S3_00B2D882_0076A684_28C841C9462BCDE0%%+_IMG.dds, but instead you have S3_00B2D882_0076A684_ECCBBCB773C02131%%+_IMG.dds (Partly Cloudy). That one should go with S3_1F886EAD_00000000_560C0FD7012DA7F3%%+_INI.ini.

From what you said you wanted the partly cloudy weather instead of custom, so if you rename S3_1F886EAD_00000000_FE1F6A95A24A604A%%+_INI.ini to S3_1F886EAD_00000000_560C0FD7012DA7F3%%+_INI.ini, all will be fixed and you shouldn't get any odd glowy effects.

Thank you! I was confused by the text of the ini's. All should be well then. *crosses fingers*

Don't go by the text, those are just remarks and are not read by the game. Just go by the instance number.

So, PoisonFrog and simsample, I'm going to get to work on making this info more accessible via a big wiki tutorial. I'm drafting out the format, but the information is basically your research not mine so it makes sense that I invite you guys to contribute. With your permission, simsample, I'd like to draw heavily on what you've already provided in the first post and credit the tutorial jointly to you. I really want to stress this isn't about Kiwi_tea making a tutorial where he gets credit for your hard work, the thread is great but I feel we'd all benefit from having this information more organised. The draft format can be found below for now, and I'll start creating the pages themselves soon.

http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title...iwi_tea/Sandbox

Kiwi, I'm going to kiss you again! I've had this on my list of things to do for so long, but never quite got around to it.


I really don't care about credit, as long as someone does it! We can all edit it, so if something is incorrect then someone else will notice and put it right.

I did a bit of testing with a view to writing a wiki article, and the way I was going to approach it was by analysing the parameters in the ini files and showing the effect you could get by changing a particular feature. For example, fog curve:
0.05

0.075

0.10

0.15

And so on.

The images I took so far are zipped up into a file here:
http://www.4shared.com/archive/ui7_41mb/Tests.html
(username [email protected] and password modthesims will access that).
In case you want them, they are put in folders entitled with the parameter name, and the images are numbered with the parameter value. So you should be able to figure out what I did! The images in 'texCoordUtexCoordV' are intended to make an animaged GIF from to show the cloud movement. I'm afraid I didn't get that far, lots to still take images of!

So I don't know if any of that would be of any use to you for the article or not.

One thing I would make clear is that for modding an individual world, it's best to use the method in this thread (I think, since that's the way the EA worlds are done), whereas making a default override for the basegame weather (to show in all worlds that do not have custom weather) would be okay with an override of the basegame ini files. Of course, this may all change with the next EP! I like the way you've approached this though, with asking ' What Kind of Climate Do You Want?'. Good idea!

Heh, great stuff! I'm thinking I'll also have a list of each file with annotations and links, like I started doing on CAW Wiki here (http://cawtool.wikia.com/wiki/Lighting.ini). I got a lot of them up, then never filled in the details. As we go we can test and fill in the blanks.

I'm always very aware of the conceptual side of things. I'm probably personally better at the concepts than I am at the technical craft, unfortunately for me. I beat myself up if I don't do some sketches before starting a world, but the cat and I manage to destroy most of them or I'd share them.

I've had some time off this ini/dds tweeking.

This time I just installed the stormy ini file and the correlating ramp file from the table in the second post. It still won't load. I didn't even do any changes to it, not until I to be on the safe side, saved the ramp as no mip-maps and 8888 ar ... blabla save.

It still won't load. I have attached my world file this time. If you're an angel perhaps you can figure it out for me? A on me if you do

It's the file where I fixed the dds to a no mipmap 8888 file, which should be a waste of time. I only imported stormy. Tried all last time, so I've just been a bit more modest now.

http://www.4shared.com/archive/O9Xk...myINI_DDS2.html

So, before I make the tutorial I'm trying to map out some pages on the various files, and integrate those pages into the TS3 file types list. That way, the tutorial can reference bits of the files more easily, and with links.

I'm just trying to get a good format that is legible and also easy for wiki editors to add to. These are still a bit messy from the wiki-editing end, but do they seem like a good format for the end-user? I've started feeding your research into the fields, simsample, but there's plenty more to do. The visuals you provided are great but just don't fit this format, so I'm going to make those separate pages as parts of the tutorial-proper.

http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title...rldEnvtIni_Misc

http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title...D/CAW/SkyCommon

Hey simsample!!! Finally back. Been really busy but I am so glad to be back, and I am here to stay! Lol hehe Well I have found some time to to test things out in my world and the results have been very strange I focused on getting things the way I wanted them to be (water color, sky color, etc.) in one ramp which was the custom file from Bridgeport. I didn't want different weather patterns because the results were so pretty , so I tried to assign the edited ramp to all of the ramp files (big mistake lol). When I tested out the time of passage, at a specific time the world went completely black!! Also, on the other tunings (clear, partly cloudy, etc.) the water color would change if I rotated the camera at certain angles. Very weird. And lastly, the color ramps with the numbers underneath have only 19 bars while the ones without them have 21. So back to the basics, which files should I be using???

EDIT: I added two more pictures that were too big to attach so here they are. One is the ramp I used for the custom file and the other is how the water color looks with the clear setting. I also wanted to clarify that I am trying to get the clear weather effect but with the water color of the custom setting if that makes sense. Once I accomplish that, I want to know how I could use that for ALL of the weather patterns without all of the weird stuff happening lol. THANKS!!!

Goofygirl, you're ini files are probably mislabeled. The same things happened to me, I had to rename my ini files and to make sure they corresponded with their parameters. Or, it could be you're using the wrong ini files, like there's a custom ramp in there that shouldn't be or something. Maybe post #286 will help?

Thanks for the response, GrayOwl!!! I will definitely go back and check to see if I mislabeled my files. However, I actually DO want the effects shown in the picture below with the clear weather. So you're saying that I should completely get rid of the custom file?? My main problem is that the water keeps changing colors when I switch to a different weather setting, even when I move the camera to a different angle sometimes(shown in the stormy weather weather picture) I also want to know if it's possible to copy and replace a color ramp for each and every other color ramp since I don't want different weather patterns. I just want one consistent weather pattern. The ramps with the numbers underneath usually have 21 bars but the others have only 19. Why is that, and could that be the reason why all of these bizarre effects keep occuring when I copy and replace the ramp to the others??? Sorry for so many questions!!!!

Just to organize my questions (Because I know I'm asking alot lol!!) :

1. Can I copy the clear color ramp and replace it with all of the other color ramps to have just one weather type?
2. If so, which files should I use? (Base game edited files, Bridgeport, Twinbrook, etc.)
3. If not, how can I achieve that without the bizarre effects?
4. Why are the number of bars different between the ramps with numbers and the ones without? (Numbers-19 bars;No numbers=21 bars)

1. Of course! I do that to have my settings the same for clear and partly cloudy. In my photo editor I just copy the clear color ramp and paste it over the partly cloudy. You could do this for all, or just some of your ramps. Just do not rename them. Leave each ramp to have its own,original name. And you don't have to get rid of your custom file.
2. I use the base game edited, because the Bridgeport inis had too much bloom and made everything fuzzy. It shouldn't matter, and I'm sure you could use a mix, but you'd have to careful to keep from getting confused.
3. Well, I had no idea that the ramp amounts were different. But if you want to have the same color ramp for everything, just make sure all your ramps have the same number of bars.
4. I have no idea. I would guess the parameters they have. I have 21 bar color ramps (just checked, and I'm using base game edited files). I would be safe and use color ramps that have 21 bars. Which world ramps only had 19?

So, to sum up, make sure all your color ramps have 21 bars. This could be the reason for the adverse effects. When the game doesn't have all the files it wants, it likes to throw a tantrum in the form of extremely saturated colors or messed up water. And double check the inis. And if you want the effects that are in the pictures, you're going to have to make sure to use those colors. I would put the images in Kuler (palette creator website) or something, to find out what the values of the colors are, and then apply them to the ramp accordingly, if that makes sense. For example, to get the color water I wanted I found an image with a nice water color, uploaded it to Kuler, got the value for it, and then used that color in my ramps.
Edit: kuler is down for maintenance. Try out ColorLovers . This might not be as good, because I don't think you can upload from a file.
I really, really hope that made sense.

Hey everyone,
Thank you for your work, it's amazing ! I'm here today because I met some trouble with fog. For my new world I decided to use Moonlight Falls ramp color and ini. But I do really have a problem I cannot see the fog when I zoom (+) (Forgive me I do'nt how to say haha btw I'm french so I did not a large vocabulary :p) but when I zoom (-) I see the fog...

It's a crazy thing I don't understand how I can fix that, maybe you can help me.

ZOOM +


ZOOM -


Thank you !

So, I have read your post, and I want to make a conclusion, to see whether I am understanding:

-If I don't want to change the default colours, I should not change the files in .../NonPackaged/ini, but instead, I should download one of the files of the EA/custom worlds (ie Bridgeport, Twinbrook and so on) that alters the colours of the sea, sky etc.

-Then, I should alter the settings in one of these files, and import the files to my world using S3PE as in your tutorial.

Is there anything that I did not get it right or something that's missing? Further explanation, if desired, would be much appericiated.

I'm not sure if this one is new in 1.42 patch.
Looks like EA added some new weather INI files in DeltaBuild0.package
INI
0xF79056CF01576E43
0xC27110EA1E65A398
0xBB71FB48F2EA5697
0xF5DD9845113A2538 (For Fun)

DDS
0x29585B456B1C0285
0xE0EAADD780BDDD6E
0x9FC8C8277B71A696

All of them are very dark... maybe for the rainy day or blizzard or something?

S3_1F886EAD_00000000_5E4F8E7B226066CA%%+_INI.ini

AmbientProbeScale controls the scale of ambient part (The second and third bar of Color Ramp).
This is the base environment lightness without sunlight.
However, SunlightScale=0 will result in no shadow, no matter what value you set the AmbientProbeScale.

SunlightScale = 1.0 AmbientProbeScale = 1.0


SunlightScale = 0 AmbientProbeScale = 1.0


SunlightScale = 1.0 AmbientProbeScale = 0


SunlightScale = 0 AmbientProbeScale = 0

GrayscaleProbeIntensity:
Looks like this one is lighting from the ground.
Controlled by AmbientProbeScale.

LightProbeSaturation: I really can't tell what this one does..... it seem like it adds violet color to GrayscaleProbeIntensity, but show influence on all world.
Controlled by LightProbeSaturation.

LightProbeSaturation=0, GrayscaleProbeIntensity=0


LightProbeSaturation=0, GrayscaleProbeIntensity=10


LightProbeSaturation=10, GrayscaleProbeIntensity=0


LightProbeSaturation=10, GrayscaleProbeIntensity=10



I set the value to very very high to see the effect....
Very high value can show effect in daylight too.


With normal value<1
LightProbeSaturation=1, GrayscaleProbeIntensity=1

I just found this video showing a shooting star effect from Lunar Lakes. I haven't seen that effect in other worlds, is that just me? I'm wondering if it's part of the .INI-files or if it's just a regular visual effect (maybe the meteor shower effect which can be found in CAW?)

That's the meteor shower effect that you place in CAW.

Awesome! Wow, I've never seen that effect in-game before, and I look at the sky a lot. I wonder if it doesn't show very often, or if it shows just from certain spots... Gotta look at the sky more carefully from now on!

It's pretty rare. I don't know what influences it to show up. Lunar Lakes has lots of them, so you see it more there.