*Please download from post #14*

Hello Simmers!
I've decided to take on the task of recolouring the beds in the game so that there are more available combinations of bedding and frame.
The first bed I took a stab at was the kids Anti Goblin Bed (I think that's its name.) Now all of the different goblin beddings are available on all of the goblin frames!
Got a girly princess who also loves dinosaurs? Now you can have that combination on a bed!


If anyone would be willing to try these in their game before I release them that would be great. Currently they are all individual .package files but I intend to merge them into one before I offer them officially for download.
They should all show up as extra options under the original bed. This is NOT a new object, just lots of recolours.
The colour tags should also be correct if you search in the catalogue by colour, please let me know if they aren't.
As always, the colour swatch tool will not work on these recolours once placed in world. You will have to sell and repurchase to change the colour.
Finally, in an attempt to reduce the file size slightly, I have linked the name and description to the original. It shows in English fine but it would be good to know from Simmers who don't play in English if the text still shows up correctly for them also.

Thanks!
*Please download from post #14*

oooh ... I don't play Sims 4 much at the moment, but just wanted to say that these are really nice!

Just signing in to see if I can get any more input on this?

Ah, I'll try these now, just downloaded -- but, just a suggestion: maybe it would be an idea to include a "blank" version of the bed frames as well, just the colour, without the stencils? They'd still be the same style, but much more versatile IMO ..

Also, since you say "This is NOT a new object, just lots of recolours" -- I guess you're aware of this but these actually *are* new objects .. clones like everything else. If you want to reduce the file size, maybe kick out all the redundant bump and normal maps and link to the original ones instead? You can also get rid of the rig, ftpt, lite, rslt that way -- unless you changed those (but I wouldn't know why you'd do that -- they normally wouldn't change just because the texture is different).


ETA: Tested. Two suggestions for improvement:

1. Since the game doesn't offer a simple way to differentiate between CC and Maxis stuff in-game, and these recolours are so similar to the Maxis items, I'd actually suggest you put the stbls back in -- at least for the description; that's the most hassle-free way I know about to let people know which is which (you could simply add a line "made by Menaceman" or something at the end of the description -- keeping the link to the original (Maxian) name is a good idea I think since that works for all languages.).

2. The swatches:



Since there are so many of them, in my eyes it would be a big improvement if they were sorted -- either by bedspread colour or by frame colour. Also, the purple ones seem to have the frame colour first and (most of?) the other ones the bedspread colour, which is a bit confusing when tryng to find a particular one.


(Just so you don't get this wrong: all of the above is a user opinion, not a moderator opinion =) -- I don't moderate uploads.)

Thank you for the feedback plasticbox!
The thing about the purple bed having the frame colour first as opposed to second is due to how the original is. EA did it the opposite way around on that one for some reason. I know this doesn't mean I can't change that though.
Does sorting object swatches work like CAS swatches? The order they appear in currently is just the random order the game decided to put them in.
Perhaps I could use custom swatch icons to distinguish the recolours?

ETA: Just realised that since I removed the STBL resources I can no longer open my files with Studio as it throws an error when I try and then closes instead. I guess if I want to make any modifications I'll either have to find the relevant info with s4pe or start again.

Putting in a new stbl resource is not very difficult in s4pe -- open your package, click “New”, type "stbl" in the Type field, 0x80000000 in the Group field, and for the instance use the hash from something like “menaceman_antigoblinbed” with the first two digits set to 00 (for US English – the different languages are distinguished by those first two digits). Then open the Grid view of that resource, and in “Dictionary” add one entry with your description in the “Value“ field and a 32-bit hash from something like “menaceman_antigoblinbed_description” as key. You then need to change the description key in your COBJs to that key as well, but I guess you already know how that works (since you managed to reference the Maxis one there).

Or of course, if you have a backup of your packages with the custom stbls still in, you can just copy and paste those into your current version.

About the swatch sorting, off the top of my head I’m not sure if it’s the same as in walls (see here) or just by instance – one way to find out is compare the order of your swatches in game against the actual instances of your objects. It definitely is not random. Note that the way swatches show in the UI is top right to bottom left (vertical columns) when you select a catalogue instance like in the screenshot I posted, but left to right (I think horizontally but not 100% sure) when you select an object in-world.

Well I tried using the wall method of altering the instances and all that resulted in was the game showing red Xs for object previews in the catalogue and a failure to produce the actual object. The hand tool never had anything in it.

I haven't got around to trying any other method of ordering yet. (I'm also using my free time away from the Sims to build a miniature TARDIS for a commission)

Okay so I haven't managed to get altering the instance numbers for ordering the swatches to work in any useful way. If I change the instance number in any way at all, even by just a single character, the objects stop functioning in game. I did get it to reorder the swatches but it was pretty useless seeing as the objects then couldn't actually be placed and just had big red Xs for preview images.

I have made the step of updating the swatch icons to custom ones though to make identifying the custom recolours easier. I've attached the blue version (the only one I've done yet) to this post for people to see what they make of them.

I can’t look at your package right now since I’m not on the TS4 computer – which instance numbers did you change there? You know that COBJ and OBJD need to remain identical? (I mean, COBJ1234 and OBJD1234 are the same object, the game knows which is which by instance – so you can't just change one of them, if you change them you need to change both)

I think the way I did this for the recolours of my Notebook upload http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=545512 was the other way around; I left the instances of the COBJ/OBJDs as they were and then changed the order of colour variants by replacing the _IMG and changing the colour swatch. They don’t have colour tags though, which is why this was rather simple in this case (i.e. the swatch is the only thing that’s unique to each COBJ), and I also only wanted to group the first four and last four .. for you that approach might be rather inefficient if you already have loads of colour tags in everything.

Ah, I didn't realise I also had to change the instance of the OBJD as well. That was probably the issue then. I'll go and take a look now and see if it makes any difference. Ta.

ETA: Yeah, issue fixed! Thanks.

Ah, did it work that way (by changing the COBJ/OBJD instance)? Or what did you do now to get it to work?

Yeah, I was only changing the instance of the COBJ and not the OBJD as well. Now that I've changed both they are appearing in the game fine.

OK so I checked your packages now -- it actually is UnkCommon06, just like in the walls! I'm sorry I might have thrown you off by linking to the middle of that thread earlier on (where we're already discussing default thumbnails, not basic sorting), but for just getting the swatches in a reasonable order all you need to do is edit that one field.

I just quickly tested this with your "cream", "blue", and "green" packages (the others are untouched):



Can you see what I mean? First in the list (starting at the top right, listed vertically) are the cream ones, then blue, then green, by frame colour. What I did was give all of the cream ones an UnkCommon06 of 0x0020, blue 0x0040, green 0x0060 (they were all 0xFFFF originally, that's why they were sorted just by instance) -- one could sort them further (e.g. so that the yellow bedspread is always first, purple second etc) by editing them more (e.g. 0x0020 for cream + yellow, 0x0021 for cream + purple etc), but I think this alone is already quite an improvement when it comes to usability. Or of course you could sort by bedspread colour instead (shouldn't be hard if your swatches are correct) by using 0x0020, 21, 22 etc for the yellow ones, and so on.

(The one "leftover" cream+light blue swatch over on the left hand side is the Maxis one. Those probably all have 0xFFFF, so if you'd want them to sort with yours you'd need to include overrides for those COBJs with your upload)

The only thing you can not influence with this is the default thumbnail, that is probably the one with the lowest instance (or lowest second-half-of-instance or whatever .. I guess with this upload it is not that important, since it's using an existing catalog entry anyway).

Okay, so thank you VERY much for all the useful feedback, plasticbox! Much appreciated.

Attached now is what will hopefully be the final version that I will release.

All of the recolours are organised by bed frame colour and feature a custom swatch icon to differentiate them from the originals. I have also edited the frame textures so that the gender suggestive stencils only appear on the recolours with matching bedding. For example, the beds with dinosaur footprint bedding will still have the dino stencil on the headboard if it was there to begin with. The bedframes with the ball design (orange and green frames) haven't been altered at all.
The beds should also be correctly colour tagged if searching the catalogue by colour.

The only type of feedback I haven't had back is whether or not the descriptions still function in none-English games which I realise you cannot provide.

Just checking in to see if I can get some attention from non-English players.

Hi, I've tested it for you.
My game is in German.

Thank you very much! Looks as though the text works fine in games that aren't played in English as well then! Yay!

@Plasticbox if you are still popping into this thread, are you able to explain to me how to link to existing textures so that I can reduce the file size by removing the duplicate bump map and specular textures? Or point me in the direction of a tutorial?

What tool were you using again? In s4pe what I’d do is find one of the original beds – not sure if you already have those; the most straightforward way would be to search the STBL or http://sims-4-files.wikia.com/wiki/Strings_ENG_US for the in-game name (which yields <Text Key="5D8CEB11">Anti-Goblin Bed by Kindermade</Text> ), then search FullBuild0.package for that key ("0x5D8CEB11", filter for COBJ). The OBJD with the same instance as that will reference the model (same for all colour variants, so you only need to check one of them), and in that you will see the original bump and spec maps referenced in each MATD. You can copy these resource keys and paste them into the equivalent fields in your objects.

A more long-winded discussion of this stuff is e.g. here: http://www.modthesims.info/showthre...638#post4596638

Also, I don’t know whether S4S can perhaps make identical clones of in-game stuff -- if it can, you could use such a clone as reference too (instead of searching for the original in the game files).

Thanks for the info but after trying that on just one of the recolours I'm going to leave the package as it is. It did work and correctly linked to the existing textures in game but they didn't render correctly. They were very pixellated for some reason.

The two beds on either side are my recolours with the updated texture reference and the middle bed is the EA original showing how the texture should appear.