[Task 2] Modify Existing Object's Appearance

[Tirea]

Decided to change the TV channels on the craftable wall mounted TV. I extracted the sprites from one of the TV channels and opened them in Photoshop. Since the wall mounted TV is a multitile object, the channel screen was chopped in half, so first I put the left and the right sprite back together, to get a better overview on how those channels are handled in TSO. As it turns out, for the wall mounted TV, you can take basically any photo you want and downscale it to 85 x 58 (best TV resolution ever!).

Here are the results:

History channel (Picture of The Sims Medieval)

Sci-Fi channel (Picture of some stars and planets)

The Sims Bustin' Out LP (Picture from The Sims Bustin' Out... Obviously!)

Since I didn't want to mess with anything, I created a new tree table for the wall mounted TV (originally used the same tree table as the expensive TV, the one shown in the action queue icon) and because I like things to be nice, clean and easy to use, I changed the pie menu to create a "Switch to..." Interaction that lists all the available channels.


(In english it would say: Switch to... History, Sci-Fi, The Sims Bustin' Out.)

Download
https://mega.nz/#!6oNiQYYC!2XndDznurMcerhbLAvcV8XME6B3vqFP6dEdNsvbBbdM

Problems

• Creating a custom sound event to use as background music is not possible yet (we talked about this)
• The IDE seems to have a problem with HiDPI displays (not talking about OS X and Retina Displays) and/or "zoomed" displays in Windows 10. You can still use the IDE but things like editing trees are impossible because a lot of the controls disappear and/or are hacked of.

Things I liked

• Generally speaking... I'm in love with the IDE! It's the tool I wish I had when I was actively creating TS1 mods
• Exporting and importing the sprites for my little project was very easy
• The "Appearance" tab made it super easy to quickly look at my imported sprites and check whether I everything worked or not
• The fact that you updated the IDE to support basic sound event editing just because I asked if it's possible in general is very awesome and I appreciate it immensely!!

 

[tsomatt]

Summary:
I decided to modify the appearance of the banner lamp, originally from one of the TS1 expansions. I left the light itself alone and modified the banners to have a blue background with the FSO logo on top. Some of the object trees had to be changed to get the banners to appear, as they were looking for the existence of a TS1 downtown object to figure out which banner sprite needs to be displayed.


Link to object file: http://www.tsomania.net/special/bannerlamp.zip

Problems:
- I wasn't initially able to understand the relation between the drawgroup # and the chunk ID in the list box on the appearance tab. For example the banner is in a drawgroup # (100), the chunk ID is 200 and the sprite ID is 200. It just made it a bit confusing when adding a drawgroup and a different ID in brackets appeared.
- This is probably something not implemented yet, but the banner lamp has a bunch of drawgroups that just show as Unknown SPR#200 etc.
- One existing sprite has (^0) prefacing the name, not sure why.

Things I Liked:
- I liked being able to export and import the entire set of images for each rotation of the sprite with one click. This made it much easier to make small adjustments without having to find the single image files to import.
- The whole layout of the appearance tab makes sense and is easy to use.
- The sprite previews and auto-generation for all zooms is nice.
- I loved that the object inside the game client changed immediately when you updated the sprites.
- While not difficult with image editing software, generating the alpha and depth could probably be automated in the future.