Here's my problem, it is currently being discussed on MATY as well...


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Any ideas?

It's as Pes says- an artifact of the way the game handles the Low LOD textures. Basically, your island is very close to sea level, and so the game is having a hard time deciding whether it should appear as sea or land when zoomed out. So, it's making it a bit of both. If you want it to appear circular from a distance, you need to raise the land level (or make the sea level lower). I had this in a world that I made- the coastline had triangular artifacts from world view, but a perfectly smooth coast when zoomed in.

It's also worth noting that when I got a better computer, the coast on that world no longer looks ruined from world view- as my new graphics card handles higher resolutions for the Low LOD textures. The game will give a low-end graphics card lower resolution textures.

Okay, that makes all the sense now... (sigh) finally. I don't think it's my graphics card which is a 512MB GeForce GTS 250, but who knows, also I specifically remember raising the sea level right up almost to the land height, so I think it's that. Thank you very much for the quick reply, so I can get to fixing that now, and see how it goes.

Well, your card only has a 'Maybe' for Pets on the MTS recommendations:
http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title...em_Requirements

So it's quite possible that the game is defaulting it to use lower resolution textures for everything. The only way to know would be to check the Graphics rules to see what it has that switched to.

Okay, yeah I saw the list. So here are the specs for my computer so you can have a better idea:

Operating System
MS Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1
CPU
AMD Phenom II X4 810 2600MHz
Deneb 45nm Technology
RAM
4.00 GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 1333MHz
Motherboard
MICRO-STAR INTERNATIONAL CO.,LTD 790GX-G65
Graphics
512MB GeForce GTS 250 (XFX Pine Group)
Hard Drive
500GB Hitachi RPM 7200 (SATA-II 3.0Gb/s)
What's your thoughts?

Oh, and also I've been testing out the water levels, I lowered it and it did get better, actually in EIG it look perfect from edit town mode which is high up, but if I scrolled back, away from the islands, so that they were in the distance, that's the only time you can see the deformed rendering.
And BTW How do you change the bit depth of a height map in GIMP or PAINT.NET if you are familiar with any of those?

Last edited by Rolfy : 3rd Jan 2012 at 02:43 PM.

I don't need the full specs- what resolution your PC uses for the Sims 3 game textures will depend upon your graphics card and processor, so you'll need to check the graphics rules file if you want to see how the game rates your hardware. You could possibly mod that graphics rules if the game is setting your game to use medium textures, but that will stress your hardware so is not really recommended.

For the heightmap question, you need to make the heightmap greyscale and choose 16 bits per channel (no alpha) as then you just get one channel=16 bits. If you need a free program that can do this then check out this thread:
http://nene.modthesims.info/m/showthread.php?t=382629
Not sure how you could do that in GIMP, I read it doesn't support 16 bit PNG but that was a while ago so maybe they updated.

Oh Okay, well I'm currently running it on 1024 x 786, but I think I got enough info and what not to continue my world creating, and thanks for the link I got the height map to work now. Thanks for all your help, will let you know how it turns out.

Glad you got it to work, well done!



I didn't make myself clear here- it's not which screen resolution you are running your game on, it is what resolution the game chooses to make your textures.

Here's a section from the Graphicsrules.sgr file ([Game Install Location]\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\Game\Bin\ Graphicsrules.sgr):





As you can see, this file is allowing the game to identify your hardware, and depending upon what it is it will identify it as Low, medium, high or Uber (for the CPU and the GPU). This will then determine what size textures your game will use, and what the default in-game options will be. The in-game options you can change, but the texture defaults you cannot (unless you edit the Graphicsrules.sgr)- if the game thinks you have a mediocre graphics chip, it will only let you use mediocre textures, no matter what screen res you use. Likewise if you have a mediocre CPU it will limit how many sims go to community lots, how many sims story progression will move in, etc. So this affects your whole game, not just how it appears in CAW and EIG.

Ohhh... I see, so how can I look at mine to see what it says? I found it, but not 100% sure what program you use to read .sgr files, so to be on the safe side thought I'd ask first.

I just used notepad to open it, they are just text files.

What you need to do is to find out what your hardware is, then look at that file to see what category the game rates your hardware as (high, medium, low etc). What some people do is to backup that file and then change the text to make it so that their hardware is rated as best, so that the textures used are higher. I did this for my old PC, and it worked quite well.

Bear in mind though that this will put extra stress on your computer, especially if you trick the game into rating your processor higher- so you might want to monitor your system temperatures if you do this. Oh, and did I mention backup any files before you mess with them?

Yeah lol, I won't forget to back up. Alrighty, thanks for the info again SS. peace.