Mod The Sims - Tiny Filesize Invisible Driveway for Lot Builders

Technical Notes

Complex lot builders are often juggling their included objects in order to keep the uploaded filesize within the 10 MB limit. I noticed that roddyaleixo's popular invisible driveway weighs in at 686 kB and realized that with the advances in Sim 2 modding that we have made over the last five years, I could create an invisible driveway recolour of much smaller size. Strangely enough I could not use the techniques I learned with my invisible speakers to totally eliminate the TXTR and TXMT from the recolour but had to content myself with a 1x1 transparent pixel and a stripped-to-the-bones TXMT.

I tested if this recolour is automatically packaged with lots. Using AnyGameStarter I discovered that with EPs from Nightlife through to Seasons these recolours will be included by the lot packager, but with Bon Voyage and later EPs they will not. As far as I can tell, this appears to be a game bug, and apart from making this recolour into a standalone object - which would defeat the purpose of making a tiny filesize invisible driveway - I do not know of a way to force a recolour to be automatically packaged. So if you do upload your lots and use Bon Voyage or later EPs with this driveway, please remember to include this recolour in a separate archive with your other unpackaged recolours.