Thanks a big bunch, Inge...

I've to announce, animated floor tiles are possible...! See the attached... Not completely a surprise if the rationale floor tiles are some recolour packages is at least pragmatic, but I failed to make it back to the very beginning of March.

*Updated:*
Necessary changes or additions or replacements
1. txmt type = StandardMaterial
2. stdMatLightingEnabled = 0
3. minimum amounts of txmt animation properties. (Say, if the animation type = tile, only those properties related to "tile" animation are needed.)
Thee're the 3 essential ones.

Changes in performances:
1. Tile-scale limitation is now done by the tile-animation property "stdMatTextureCoordAnimNumTiles"
2. like the ceiling/doubly-sided tiles, hard to make them dark like normal tiles...

For those beginners, may read these threads for handy infos;
1. Frillen's Tutorial: Transparent Floor tiles
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=71559
2. JWoods' Modding InfoCenter - Creating an Animation Cell Re-Color
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=82395
3. Animation via texture-rotation
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=71672
Don't forget, you can ask questions.


For other infos, may check out this post



If a mirror floor tile can exist, that may also mean object recolours can have a mirror property. Floor tile does act like an object recolour.

Wallpaper is just too recalcitrant to be modded, and seemingly all those listed properties are nothing more than some re-enforced or dysfunctional lines. I've followed the Cel-shader info sheet to try to modify the wallpaper, and nothing visually significant happened. Or, maybe I did it wrongly.

That Cel-shader sheet is from the TS2's .../materials/materials.package, the 11th file of its kind.
Attached is my extractions of all those scripts in rtf format.

I've tried switching its txmt types to all I know, but still nothing happened.


Added:

The present mirrory tiles won't work without a normal mirror in the lot nearby. This's very similar to that the animation of pool tiles and pool wallpapers (enabled to select by means of modding their scripts in the Catalog folder) requires a pool nearby in the same lot to work.
Probably, there're some other triggers missing in these instances.




This post will be updated for more infos on animated tiles.

I noticed there was also a wallmask type of material in Objects_02 and wondered if it could be used to turn wallpaper recolours into something that would cut out bits of wall.

Normally, a wallpaper file has at lest 2-3 references to the default textures and "temp-storage" place.
I've yet to extract those textures and compare them with window original clones.

My present imagination of what a wall segment is like 6 surfaces = 3 pairs of corresponding parallel planes, probably no graphical drawing inside a wall segment. The wallmask is to graphically silence both flat sides of the wall segment.. (much like... "something to draw" = "a wall segment" - "the wallmask") But, a wallpaper covers 2 connected sides. The top and the bottom of wallsegments look pretty much like tile's sides. The bottom of a wall segment is empty/invisible/C-thru in the middle part.

That material type is amazing... If the shpe or gmdc or alike of floor tile can be located and simulated, tiles can be modded like a custom object.

Added:
The swirling is due to that the uer rotate the camera. If the user uses translate for the camera, then, it's gonna be a series of straight replicated shots

Public voluntory testings on revised doubly-sided Rgiles' transparent tiles:

In a base game setting with HCP, the revised files are working fine so far. The frost-tile is fixed to be HCP-compatible, but I feel further cofirmation is needed.
But, more testings of these files under different game versions along with HCP are necessary.

the attached files are the testing subjects:

Things to prove:
1. Please help confirm the frost tile's compatibility to HCP (HomeCrafter Plus)
2. see if the new tiles run well and have doubly-sided feature in a particular game version (Ts2 + OFB, TS2+ NL + FFS, etc...)

What to do:
1. remove/relocate/back-up the original Rgiles' tranparent tiles including the frost tile.
2. unpack the contents out of the download into the playing custom folder, especially the "downloads" folder or is subdirectories of your choice(s).
3. Run HCP and the game copy of yours separately.

What to report:
1. HCP compatibility (if any of the tiles crash HCP. this test is more targetted at the frost tile. But, the others are still testing subjects.)
2. feature availability (if you see the tiles being doubly-sided)
3. game compatibility (if the tiles crash your game)
Just report to this thread , and it's just fine... Thanks in advance...

Note: this' not a release, but just for testing purposes.


***Edited***
Testing ended,
Click here for the release.

This is still too advanced for me. Anyone interested in making a batch converter that makes all the floor files I've downloaded so they have white bottoms?

Stimy,

The bottom will be texured the same as the top. Basically, this method is to force the game to use the provided texture in the file to draw on the bottom side as well. So, tiles with 2 different textures for the top and the bottom is not known to be possible yet.

2sided_niol_rgiles_floor test report (15 06 2006)
settings/Installed
---------------------
Game: Original, University, Night life
Graphic & game setting : max
Dwlds folder :2sided floor x5, Custom test wall CEP GunMod lights
GunMod camera
boolProp testingCheatsEnabled true

-The tiles works nice in upper and under view. (pic01)
-General looks texture warmer than V.1
-When enclosed by walls, the transparancy and the luminosity are preserved and well rendered (pic02) unless for the frosted tile which darken dramaticaly (03), even with window or door (04).
-Noticied a slow down down in Cam mode.

-No crash with HCP. Been able to clone frosted tile and resize it in 5x5 (05), to import texture and modifie color (06) but with no transparancy preserved.

Add Numenor wallWindow
-No problem

Attempt with both version
-Seems to overwrite but not easy to tell because of the same name and both thumbnails are visible. And V.1 is very good also ;-) SimPE cloning
-Wasn't able to recolor or clone the frosted tile, SimPE gives alot of error messages or so...

Miscellaneous
- Had fun experiencing some geometricalo-psychedelik point of view (07,08).
Thank you,
PixelHate.

AMD Athlon 64 3500+ 2.21 Ghz
1 Gb ram
RADEON X800 pro
Xp pro

P.s pics seems to be mixed:
07 08 05 06
04 01 02 03

pixelhate,
Thanks again


The following is a quote from pixelhate's message

"
Niol animated test-tile3 report 17/06/2006

Game setting etc. same as previous.

Ok. I've a got a grey tile for a time (about 08 sec? no chronometer.) then a black and white pattern shows up and swirl while zooming for- and back- ward very quickly then repeat from beginning.
The animation is visible on different storey level and from under- & upper- view.
The animation is syncronized on different uncontiguous tiled parts of the lot.
Can be video captured.
Compatible with 2sided floor.
No problem with HCP. Able to clone but animation not retained.
"


Bump-mapping can work for floor tiles and wallpapers

This's an extract from this post (The reason why it was posted there is because the first set of pool-tiles and pool-wallpapers are for the Simstone project, so the original posts were inaccessible to the public. As the project has been released, I re-posted these infos out here. The contents are all the same. So, for most users, no need to visit that linked post. It's just only for references.)
It's about how pool-tiles and pool-wallpapers (caustic tiles and caustic wallpapers) can be made on HCP products.



The vision:
The swim-pool are graphically made up of the following things:
1. pool walls (for bounding limits on sims accessment)
2. pool tiles (for underwater animation, known as caustic effects)
3. poolwallpapers (for underwater animation, known as caustic effects)
4. poolsheet object (for water splashes, especilly sims using for the diving board)
5. pool surface tile (for water surface animation, for the wavy effect)

The pool animaions are done through 2, 3, 4, 5 but not 1.
The swimming animations are done through pool accessories like ladders and diving-boards.

What the pool tiles and wallpapers do is to simulate the wavy pattern under the water while the pool surface tiles is to simulate the water surface... and the blue layer sheets are pool-depth tiles from the base game are to simulate different levels of colour change in terms of the game depth.
So far, with my limited skills and knowledge, I can only get the pool tiles and wallpapers to work on HCP products by using settings from the original pool tiles and wallpapers... while using different guid IDs from HCP products. In other words, these files are kinda hybrids of the original and HCP custom clones.

Only a few settings may need changes (so, it's very simple):

0. XXYY = pool-tile settings/pool-wallpaper settings
1. txmt type = floorpool/WallpaperPool
2. properties: floorCausticsPass=1/tsCausticsPass=1

Non-essential properties: (for pool-wallpapers)

stdMatSpecCoef=0.025,0.025,0.025
stdMatSpecPower=2


Here's a more step-by-step description:
-->
it's very easy to turn normal HCP tiles and wallpapers into their pool versions... with simpe, just open them in simpe. There'll be a txmt file, a txtr file, a xml file in each of them.

1. At the txmt file, just go to the cMaterialDefinition menu, change the
a. (for the wallpaper) wallpaperbump -> WallpaperPool
b. (for the tile) floor -> FloorPool

2. still at the txmt file, go to the properties menu, click "add" and move to the bottom to click on the newly added line, then add the followings accordingly.
a. (for the wallpaper) tsCausticsPass : 1
b. (for the tile) floorCausticsPass : 1

3. Then, click "sort list" to resort the property lines. ( this is to ensure all the lines to be read properly.) and then, click commit and save the files. The sequences are important.

Done, just import the new graphic, reuse the texture you're already prepared with HCP, or whatever you like.
<--


Limitation: (The golden rule of the game so far)
1. One has to have at least a block of swim-pool in the game screen somewhere in order to activate the animation though. If that swim-pool block is out of the screen's scope or there's no swim-pool block, these pool-tiles or pool-wallpapers won't be animated...
The pool block can be hidden under some foundation or else in order to mak ungrounded pools on higher levells..
2. ***Update 31st August, 2006*** ()This's still for testing...()
Some invisible recolours with "CausticsGeneratorMaterial" as the txmt type can activate the caustic animation. A bit more info about this mod here See the attched example "Numenor(MTS2)_SphereMatte_Moi_sphere_023-CausticsGeneratorMaterial". Just place it somewhere on the pool-tiles (caustic tiles) inside the pool. For the invisible sphere with the generator to show up, you'll need
Maxis "Lost & Found" #4: The Matte Sphere *OPEN CONTEST* by Numenor
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=36604
Also, the file "Numenor(MTS2)_SphereMatte_Moi_stand_GS-nil" is an invisible recolour for the stand.
Or if you feel like to find a better way to solve this limitation, go ahead, I'm completely happy with that.

They've been tested to work in all EPs, HCP and SP up to now.

If wanna try an example to see how, download the attachments.


***Update 21st Aug, 2006***
The pool-set for the pool-tiles and pool-wallpapers is here
They all borrow txtr from their correponding normal host tiles & wallpapaers you can download here
So, you'll need the wallpaper & tile pack there in order for them to show up properly.

The attached is an example for the fake-pool approach.
The linked "Stonesims_Cs001_SimstoneCentre.rar " is an instance for re-wallpapering the swim-pool.

For other infos, may check out this post
To read about swim-pool modding, may read here

Wow ! Very impressive. After many failures in my attempt to progress in understanting the wall & floor field AND the loss of 40Gb of datas (mainly sims related) I've decide to give up.
But seeing this makes me want to try again ! Thanks for that, niol .

pixelhate,

What have you been investigating lately....? :D

Maybe, we can share infos to see if anything will come out...

I'm gonna learn more on object-creation coz I start to be curious about that... after fooling around the fields of txmt, txtr, lifo for quite a while. I'm sure more can be done in these few types... but it's just a matter of how fast they can be understood and used more...

Lol, let's turn "failures" into "fruits", then more can result.

What happened for "the loss of 40Gb of datas "? The game corruption? no back-up? HD death (a worse kind)? Partition failure? OS failure? (just curious...)

The first link in post#34 leads to a no permission page...

That's why I posted the contents out of that linked post... on post 34.
Don't worry... the contents are basically the same... nothing more or less... so, just ignore the linked post coz it was for the source reference only.



Just a little news from me:

The swim-pool sheet object is just for the water sparks for the diving.
The pool surface is actually a floor tile.

Although, these are not exactly duplicates of the swim-pool surface tiles, but at least they do function.



But, I need to see how stable they work under different game versions...
Welcome to report... Thanks...

Settings for Pool-surface-tiles:
---[the basic properties]---
1. txmt type = PoolWaterSurfaceMaterial
2. txmt properties:
2a. stdMatCullMode = none
2b. stdMatFillMode = solid
2c. stdMatLightingEnabled = false (true \ false)
---[the textural properties]---
2d. wmReflectionTexture = reflectionoutdoorwater-envcube (or other envcube textures)
2e. wmRefractionTexture = reflectionoutdoorwater-envcube (or other envcube textures) ***(there was a typo for the "refraction", I apologise for that.)***
---[the wavy properties settings]---
2f. wmRefractionEnabled = true (true \ false)
2g. wmTransparency = # (# = 0.000 - 1 , from my limited experiences so far) [eg1 = 0.5]
2h. wmXRepeat = # (# = 0.000 - 100) [eg1 = 12]
2i. wmXSpeed = # (# = 0.000 - 100) [eg1 = 4]
2j. wmXWaveHeight = # (# = 0.000 - 100) [eg1 = 0.1]
2k. wmYRepeat = # (# = 0.000 - 100) [eg1 = 11]
2l. wmYSpeed = # (# = 0.000 - 100) [eg1 = 3]
2m. wmYWaveHeight = # (# = 0.000 - 100) [eg1 = 0.15]

Yeah, there're several settings to add or change at once... for the present model which is regarded as the basic model. Certainly, the one in the complex swim-pool tool is much more complicated.
Yet, using different parameters can result in expected various wavy patterns. So, feel free to make up your own easily...

(Reminder : I may edit this post later again for info update...)


About the attachments:
1. The tile attachment is just for study, these files are by no means regarded as finished products.
2. The movie attachment is for demonstration only.
3. the rtf attachemnt is "Pool Water" (although I'd had posted it along with others in other posts, it's handy to have a copy here as well.)

For other infos, may check out this post
To download the released version, visit here
To read about swim-pool modding, may read here


*** Note: Pandorasims is banned to use these infos or tiles for whatever cause.

Thanks Niol! This will complete my "fake" pool with glass sides So far I was just using the static glass floor tiles.

Niol (and the others who have helped research this), thank you so much for this info. I've been dabbling at it and I came up with these instructions for myself as to how to quickly change a 1x1 non-bottomful regular floor straight out of Homecrafter into a properly-working bottomful. Your instructions are lovely, but a little bit hard to follow, and I wanted to just post up some little instructions that are exactly what you need to change, start to finish.


1. Open your finished floor tile in SimPE.
2. Click on the Material Definition (TXMT) resource in the top left pane, then again in the right pane.
3. In Plugin View, click on the cMaterialDefinition tab, and under Type, change "Floor" to StandardMaterial.
4. Still in Plugin View, click on the Properties tab.
5. Now you need to add two values. Click add twice. This will add two lines to your list of items in the left box. Click on the first : displaying there.
6. Over to the right, in the first box, type "stdMatCullMode" and in the box below type "none".
7. Now click on the second item that you added, the remaining : symbol. Again in the first box, type "stdMatLightingEnabled" and then in the box below type "0" - that's a zero, not the letter o.
Now below that, click sort List. This will put all the items within in the right order.
8. Click on the line starting with stdMatDiffCoef. Change the value for it to "1,1,1,1".
9. Click Commit, then OK. Then File - Save.

These instructions are just for single-tile floors - 2x2 and 5x5 floors are probably more complicated, but I wanted to just basic, quick instructions.

Question though - my floors are bright and light and look just like the texture I have used, but only in bright sunlight - bottomful floors on any sort of interior are quite a bit darker than they should be. Is this due to me screwing up the above or missing a step? They look great if I leave the roof off but otherwise are MUCH darker, even when fully lit by interior lighting.

Hello HP,

That's a nice instruction, thank ya. Hope you don't mind my linking it to the front post.

As for your question about the tile sizes, at part 9 of post 9, the first point was to tell users to use the tile animation tiling to make tiles of 2x2, 5x5, or UxV.
you can just set the other textural animation parameters to disable the animation while using that line to make various tile sizes.

To know how to use those parameters (just in case for users who just happen not to know), may read Jwoods' cell animation, which is already linked at the first post.

HP, the ceiling floor tiles belong to the room above, so they will be lit from whatever light is above the ceiling - with lightingenabled set to 1. With it set to 0 as you have it, they will not respond to any lighting, but will remain as bright as you made them. You can use the emissive value to adjust that.

"lightMapAvailable = true" can help darken the stdmat-based doubly-sided tiles in the night mode.
Yet, lighting interection from other light sources are disabled by "stdMatLightingEnabled=0".

hopefully, there's a way to y-pass the all-black effect when stdMatLightingEnabled is deactivated. Then, this "last" major problem is solved.

The cells shader (cs) parameters [those started with "cs....blahblahblah"] seem to be able to affect the lighing on the stdmat-based doubly-sided tiles for in-room rendering, this may be what Inge had reported about the lighting effect being dependent on the upper floor setting. Surely it's also because of the cullmode rendering with "none" and the upper side is the default interactive surface.

So, the in-room setting seem to be solved with all the given suggestions, yet it's the out-room setting that is still having the big problem.

HP,

for the UV tiling of the texture, here's a clearer description of mine.

just add in or alter these txmt parameters:
stdMatTextureCoordTileAnimSpeed = 0
stdMatTextureCoordAnimMode = tile
stdMatTextureCoordAnimNumTiles = u,v
where u, v stand for the area ratio to the floor tile, so just do the numbers you want as if they're for the tiles.

The 1st parameter is to control the speed of the texture animation, and a value of "0" means no tile is rotated.



The 2nd is to tell the texture is for a tile-cell animation and its activation

The 3rd is to decide how a floor grid tile is devided by the value s of U & V
Say, if one wants tiles of:
1. 1x1, then input 1,1
2. 2x3, then input 2x3
3. 56x79, then input 56x79
Surely, the above are just instances coz values larger than 60x60 won't be useful generally coz the biggest lot is 5x6 which is from a 60x60 lot template copy before any building.
Yet, an exception to the uselessness of values >60 is when one is making an animated floor tile coz every part of the tile will eventually show up when the textural animation runs.
Surely, floor tiles modded with unusual materials can be the other known exceptions.
But for the potential general usages, the above is enough. The exceptions are likely barely used. So, they may be discussed when necessary.

As for the other cell animation txmt parameters, one can keep them for convinience coz they will only add about 1kb to the file size. Or, delete them for neatness.

I may add in some examples later.

Sorry for bumping this thread, but I found it oddly interesting that after installing the seasons expansion pack those pool tiles now show a reflection...just like the actual pools do. Could this be a lead into developing actual mirror floor tiles? Again sorry if this was already know, I am newer to modding...and just thought I would point this out.

I don't know where Maxis added the mirror reflection to for the SS pool coz Maxis altered the hardware support for video cards... now, I can't even see caustic animation or mirror-reflection, and the pool surface become verballised!

But, it's really great you respond here, so I can know what it's like in other video configurations... Thanks a bunch...

Now, I guess I see why Maxis edited the codes around caustic definitions... Thanks...

I thought Maxis added the mirror-reflection on yet another stage near the pool surface, but now seemingly it's on the caustic animation, so basically Maxis combined them together. The pool tiles and wallpapers I made here have the caustic definitions, so they can initiate the caustic animations as well as the mirror-reflection in Seasons according to your response.

Surely, that'll give hints on how to alter certain features to turn the HCP floor tiles into mirrory tiles... probably with new definitions. Don't wanna replace the original ones, so they co-exist for further usages.
But like teko's mirror mod, it's gonna alter more things to make it.

I'm gonna alter the codes for my video card to show... :D

Also another note...the reflections only seems to work when you have a pool placed on the lot? I wonder why this is? I hope you can get the pools working in your game and also I just wanna say Thanks for creating all these wonderful additions to the game =].

Basically, seemingly, the caustic generator material is necessary to activate the caustic animations and I do have a recolour with this material to activate the cautic HCP products... The swim-pool by default has this material in one of its components. But for a fake-pool, such component can not be made yet coz it's still unknown what that is. But according to the source codes, seemingly it's a stage done by the codes along. :rolleye: So, the workaround is the recolour-mod or the swim-pool-blocks so far.

You can find Numenor(MTS2)_SphereMatte_Moi_sphere_023-CausticsGeneratorMaterial.rar
@ post 34 of this thread or @ the cautic HCP product thread.

It needs the host-object for it to appear in the game :D
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=36604

That's why it's called recolour-mod coz the modding effect relies on the recolour material definition instead of the object itself... :D

Hi, sorry for bumping an old thread but this is something that's also happening to me with my game (I'm up to Seasons). Did you ever code your way around what Maxis did? I'd really love the caustics in my game. Strangely enough, I also have the 'text image' issue with some fireworks that I downloaded.