“One small step for simmers, one giant leap for Murf!“
I’ve always wanted something like this in my game, and my 2018 New Years Resolution is to learn to make new things, so here we are: double moons for y’all to use in whatever world you want! 😀
Jupiter and Callisto
There’s phases included for those of y’all with Supernatural Lunar Phases turned on.
Included is a 2000 and 4000 size file – the pics show only the
4000, which is effing huge in the sky – you have zoom all the way out
to see it all.
So, yeah, you get choices in case you want it to appear that your worlds closer (4000) or farther away (2000) from the crap in the sky.
Saturn and Iapetus
Included again is a 2000 and 4000 size file – the pics show only the 4000 flavor, which is effing huge in the sky – you have zoom all the way out to see it all.
Here’s the only picture I took of 2000:
There’s phases included too for those of y’all with Supernatural Lunar Phases.
For Saturn I converted a Skyrim moon replacement mod – I edited out the Earth from all the phases, and I changed the colors because I’m gaudy like that. Then I added Iapetus because reasons. 😛
You only need the Basegame for this mod to work – though you won’t be able to use any of the lunar phases without the Supernatural EP, just the Full Moon. Which is the best phase anyway, so who cares!
This will conflict with any mod that alters all these files:
YOU CAN ONLY USE ONE FILE AT A TIME.
Download (package files): SimFileShare
And as a little something extra, I decided to make this post double (lol) as….
☽✶•.¸(✶•.¸★¸.•✶´)¸.•✶´☾ ☆«´¨`•°°•´¨`»☆ ☽.¸.•✶(¸.•✶´★`✶•.¸)`✶•.☾
Welcome to Murf’s School of Crap and Crap-Making!
School Motto: Prepare to be tortured! For Science!
Lesson #12: Jumping Over EA’s Moons to Make Your Own!
☽✶•.¸(✶•.¸★¸.•✶´)¸.•✶´☾ ☆«´¨`•°°•´¨`»☆ ☽.¸.•✶(¸.•✶´★`✶•.¸)`✶•.☾
I dunno about y’all, but I have never seen this done before; people making multiple moon replacement mods rather than just one. So I figured I’d walk those interested through the process – though really it’s barely any different from making the zillion other moon replacement mods already out there.
All you need is S3PE and a .dds texture image program (GIMP/Paint.net/etc).
You can download EA’s moon textures in the MTS thread here.
Ready? Here we go!
So what you do is open up the EA textures in an image program – on this new godawful Windows 10 Dell laptop I haven’t secured a pirated copy of Photoshop yet, so I’m settling on GIMP for the interim (which in my limited experience has been a piece of crap with DDS files. So I have to use Paint.net in order to make the dds properly, but yeah, I’m using GIMP right now).
So open EA’s textures – start with the full moon one (especially for y’all without the SN EP).
Though this tutorial only covers making Twin/Double moons, it works for adding however many moons you freaking want.
And it doesn’t even need it to be round/moon-shaped!
Pi in the Sky. Cuz I’m a little snot, that’s why! 😛
(If you’re somehow desperate for Pi in the Sky, you can DL the beta version here – there are no phases included, and it’s pink. Cuz of course. :P)
Size In DDS Layers
The key is to have your image fit inside the limits of EA’s default full moon.
If your image is too big and goes over the moon’s edges, you’ll end up with the BS cropping I initially suffered through:
Again: It doesn’t matter what image you use, as long as it fits within EA’s moon.
My Steps
This is nothing new for y’all
familiar with making regular moon replacements. I just wanted to show
how I do it in GIMP, cuz alpha channels in GIMP confused THE EFF out of me
with all their Floating Anchor BULLSH!TE and I could barely find any help online navigating this nonsense.
I did each of the
moons separately, then pasted them together when I was done. So I’m only
gonna walk through making one of the moons, not both – same steps y’all.
Start with opening one of EA’s moon phase images, then open your first moon you want to use. Make sure they’re the same size this time. It’ll look like this:
Now Hide the custom moon layer, and go into the Channels tab. Where it says Alpha Channel, right-click it and select Channel to Selection.
The little marching ants dotted lines will move around the image, so you’re good.
Go back to the Layers tab, and this time Hide EA’s moon and Show your custom moon, so you see the marching ants on yours.
Now right-click your custom moon’s Layer and select Add Layer Mask. It’ll give you a bunch of options – choose Selection.
Wash Rinse Repeat for your second moon, arrange the two of them however you want on the canvas, then Merge the Layers together into one.
And remember – when you’re done you have to rescale everything so they fit together within the frame of EA’s full moon.
The texture resolution quality is gonna BAIL on you, so you’ll need to use stuff like Sharpen and Contrast, in order to bring back some of the original quality.
It’s a bit tedious cuz you have to do this for every effing phase (7 phases – the New Moon one stays clear cuz duh).
When you’ve got your phase finished, and you’re ready to save it as a DDS file, there’s an issue. In Photoshop and Paint.net, what you see is what you get when you save a file. DDS files need their dimensions to be multiples of 256 or whatever – 256×256, 512×512, 1024×768, 2048×2048, etc. Try any other multiples, and things like TSRW will crash on you – quickly.
So here comes GIMP when you try to save a dds image with a transparent background: rather than just saving the image as it is, GIMP will for whatever reason wrap around the actual image, not the whole canvas. So when you save it, if your image is only 325×418 on a 512×512 canvas, then
325×418’s the dimensions GIMP’s gonna save your dds as – WHICH IS BAD!!!
I have ZERO clue how to fix this issue, so what I’ve done is save the images as a PNG, since GIMP saves them with the transparency and dimensions just fine. Then I open the png in Paint.net, and export it out as a DTX5 dds.
THERE! Boom! The precious time lost scratching my frikkin head over GIMP’s strange way of dealing with Alphas!
Size In-Game
Now as you can see, your finished moons are gonna be however many multiple times smaller than EA’s moon, even if you use 512×512 dimensions rather than EA’s standard 256×256.
You fix this in the SkyCommon.ini file that alters the Moon Radius parameters.
(S3_1F886EAD_00000000_5E20253AF53E517F_Tunable Parameters Related to Sky%%+_INI.ini)
Find EA’s in something like C:Program Files (x86)Electronic ArtsThe Sims 3GameDataSharedNonPackagedIni.
Import it right into S3PE, right-click it, and click Notepad, so you can edit it.
The only thing you need to touch is where it says Moon Radius = 200. Increase the number and the moon looks bigger in-game. Decrease the number and the moon size gets smaller.
If you’re squeezing all these moons into your dds, and you’ve got like 2 moons that are 10x smaller than EA’s moon, then you should increase 200 to 2000 – that’s my mindset.
Whatever number you choose, when you’re happy click Save and exit out of Notepad, and it’ll ask you “Resource has been updated. Commit changes?“ so click Yes. Then Save your package again.
So that’s the whole size & texture thing. ^_^
The Glow Thing
You‘re gonna have to modify EA’s Moon Glow texture so that it’s perfectly transparent.
(EA’s default one is included in the MTS post here. I included the clear one I modified in the DLs.)
Otherwise you’ll end up with this hot mess:
I tried to do The Most and actually make a real edit of the glow – but it was actually The Least. U_U
Just freaking get rid of it, whatever.
So yeah, when you’re done, just open up S3PE and Import in all of the .dds textures, plus the .ini. S3PE will then auto-generate a _KEY file for you, just leave it. Save your work as a package file, and that’s it!
Now go forth and do the moon walk! (^0^)/
The Faery's Gifts 