I feel it's so silly to go to 5 different places to browse 50 recolors of a hair or a top and there might be no recolor that fits my taste
My CC folder will sure explode.
They already sacrifice the open world, why also kill Create A Style too

Unfortunately, no. From what I understand, Create a Style can never be written back into this iteration, it's basically hardcoded out.

Someone else can probably explain better and in more detail.

I know your pain, my mod folder is 99% recolours and is positively bursting at the seams already!

Nah, it's not really "hardcoded out" as much as it's just a core function. The game doesn't consider the possibility of an item having custom textures so there's no functionality there to "enable". You could add it in, but it would require so many changes to the existing behavior of the game you might as well go make your own sims clone

Someone might decide to create it, but don't expect it any time soon and probably not at all unfortunately.

It is possible but it would be highly difficult. Third party tools like Caster are likely to be the closest to this functionality for a good long while.

Actually, coding support for CASt-ed textures would probably be rather easy for Maxis, since they're just different textures for the same mesh, no different from the alternate textures they already offer for each object, or from the recolour textures from mods. And they probably can dig up the cache code from TS3. Coding the GUI for it, though... well, let's just say, you do have to pay someone to do it.

But it being EA, I would expect it won't happen, when they can open a store and sell you colour-coordinated sets instead.

Moraelin, that's what's known as "recolors". Very different from CASt.

One of Graham's comments seemed to discourage any hope of this ever happening. Sad.

I thought I already explained in another thread how CASt is done. You just make a composite texture and cache it. That's what the compositor cache files were in TS3. Then the rendering engine just uses the composite texture like it were a normal texture.

Really, there is no different rendering and no need to. Not the least because you want it to match how the graphics card works. And it expects just polygons and textures, not compositor masks. So you mix all those textures an colours into one texture for the object, and that's it, then when rendering you just use the same pipeline as in a game without CASt, only you load the composite texture.

As far as the rendering engine is concerned, it's no different from a recolour. And really, there is no difference. It IS a recolour, just it's saved in the cache file instead of a recolour package.

Well thank you for setting me right in my ignorance but I am pretty sure that's not what everyone else is referring to. They want the individually hue-sliding and blendable mask channels, not a total overlay swap, which is much harder to make and can't be shared with other objects like the patterns could be in TS3

Plus, CASt is more than just textures and colours, there's also pattern sounds. When a Sim places a plate on a surface that was CASted with a texture from the Rock & Stone category the sound when the plate hits the surface is that of some distinct hard material, while if you CASt the same surface with a wood texture the sound becomes that of wood.

That is actually rather irrelevant to my point. Running the textures through a recolour before mixing them into the final texture for that object is not changing the fact that in the end you have just a normal texture. (Well, set of textures.) No different from a recolour. Because it IS a recolour.

Rendering with it from that point is more of a resource management problem -- i.e., your program must be able to load textures from the cache too -- than some fundamental rendering problem.

Well, that doesn't sound like an insurmountable problem either, though. And, honestly, I'll even take some generic sounds, if that's what it takes to finally get some colour-matched furniture.

Well the question of this thread is "Is there any hope to bring back Create-a-style" which means what is popularly known as "the color wheel". To which the reply is "no", regardless of what you'd like to offer in the way of recolors.

I don't understand all the technical parts of this discussion, but I do understand the difference between just recolor a pattern as it is and having different channels behaving differently, and it's most certainly the last one I want. I'm not really interested in just a picture I can change colors on only one way fits all. Such a recolor ends up looking ugly pretty soon.

Well, I didn't say it was doable by a mod. I just said that EA could do it fairly easily, if they wanted to.

I totally miss being able to custom colour my items like I could in the Sims 3. That's one feature I wish they had kept in the Sims 4.....

No, they can't. Did you know for example that there has to be a seperate COBJ and OBJD for every color version of each object? Meaning a red sofa is literally a different object from the blue version of the same sofa? It's simply no longer the same data structure. In fact that's even "worse" than TS2 where you could actually provide a lower level recolor for the same object.

Ok, please enlighten me... So what's stopping them from generating those? It seems to me like if an external piece of program can do that, that piece of program can be linked into the game just as well.

Nothing, we or they can add extra color versions of any object any time. And they will. It's not CASt or anything like it.

I'm saying that CASt did nothing more than to do recolours and save them in the cache file too. If you can do it in another program, you can do it in game just as well.

I am sorry Moraelin I am not recognising your take on CASt as anything resembling my understanding of it.

Recognize or not all you want, but the simple fact of the matter is that if you can have a program that does A and a program that does B, you can have a program that does both. E.g., if you can have a program that does spreadsheets and a program that does charts, like in ye olde days, you can have Excel that does both. Whether it's the same way as the old charts programs or on the fly, is flat out irrelevant.

Same here. If you can have a program doing recolours, and The Sims rendering them, then you CAN have the latter do both. Whether it's like you imagine the old CASt to work or not, is irrelevant. It can make them be separate objects, or it can save just the textures, or it can even do it on the fly, when the CASt-ed object is loaded, or whatever. The simple fact of the matter is that if an external program can do compositing, then EA COULD integrate that in TS4 too, if they wanted to.

Moraelin I look forward to your new tool, you sound like you know how to make it. Let us know if you need any testers

ea go back to way it was in sim2 they stupid

I would, really, but since I don't work for EA, eh, it's not like I can compile my stuff into their program :p