Many thanks to everyone at Maxis for supporting the development of The Sims Transmogrifier,
as well as all the great people on the internet who have used it and sent in their feedback and support.
I am continuously flabbergasted at the quality and attention to detail
that Transmogrifier users are putting into the objects they create!
I'm sorry I haven't been able to reply personally to all the email and bug reports I've received,
but I have read and saved them all, and have tried to silently address as many of them as I could
in this new release of The Sims Transmogrifier 1.1.
If you never received a reply then I hope this new version answers your questions.
But if you have any unanswered questions or encounter new problems,
please let me know by sending email to
"SimTools@LushCreations.com".
I will collect all the questions and answers into a FAQ (frequently asked question),
and publish it on the web.
Pleaser check the Transmogrifier home page (now at
"http://www.LushCreations.com/Transmogrifier.htm")
for updates and more information about The Sims Transmogrifier.
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The name has been changed from "SimTransmogrifier" to "The Sims Transmogrifier".
Transmogrify. Verb. Etymology: origin unknown. Date: 1656.
Transitive senses:
To change or alter greatly and often with grotesque or humorous effect.
To change into a different shape or form, especially one that is fantastic or bizarre.
Intransitive senses:
To become transmogrified.
Synonyms:
transform, convert, metamorphose, mutate, transfigure,
transform, translate, transmute, transpose, transubstantiate.
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Now Transmogrifier supports Livin' Large objects!
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Now Transmogrifier supports importing 24 bit full color bitmaps,
as well as 8 bitmaps with different palettes!
Automatically creates an optimal palette to handle all frames of each sprite.
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Added a "Just Changing Colors" checkbox to the "Export Whizzer" dialog,
that is checked by default.
That simplifies the processes of changing colors,
and maximizes the quality,
by just exporting the color bitmaps,
and preserving the z buffers and alpha channels in the object file.
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Rewrote the code that automatically generates small zooms,
to use the error diffusion dithering code that I added to support 24 bit images,
so the automatically generated small zooms look much better now.
The alpha channels of the smaller zooms have softer edges now, too.
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There are two new checkboxes on the exporter called
"Smooth Small Zooms Colors" and "Smooth Small Zoom Edges",
checked by default to select the new shrinking code.
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Added a "Delete Object File..." button, that a lot of people have been asking for.
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Implemented a visual draw group item editor in the "View Object" dialog,
that lets you reposition the sprites on the tile,
and align them with each other.
There is now a grid in the object view,
showing you where the sprites will be positioned on the tile.
There is now a scrolling list of draw group items,
that lets you edit the offset and flip flag of any item in a draw group.
Note that you must select the individual tiles of a multi tile object
in order to edit its draw groups.
To select an individual tile, use the menu that appears at the top of
the "View Object" dialog when you view a multi tile object).
Also note that each rotation and zoom of each graphical state
has its own set of draw group items, so you must change and check
each different zoom and rotation and graphic state, to make sure they're all correct.
At least it's easier than it used to be,
now that you can make changes and see the effects immediately,
without quitting Transmogrifier and running The Sims.
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Implemented an "Edit Definition" dialog that you get by pressing the
"Edit Definition..." button on the "Edit Object" dialog.
It lets you edit many different aspects of the object.
If the object is read-only, you can still look at them,
but not change them.
The scrolling list of "Editable Properties" lets you select an property to edit.
When you select a property, its description is shown to the right,
and an editor of the appropriate type appears below the description.
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Transmogrifier no longer exports icon and catalog bitmaps,
since they are automatically generated.
You don't need to edit them yourself.
It deletes all the icons from the object file,
including the catalog icon and two sizes of speech icon,
and The Sims automatically regenerates them from the sprites.
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Transmogrifier now imports and exports all the object definition fields in the xml file,
so now you can modify many different object properties,
by editing the xml file.
Be very careful, because you can totally crash the game by changing the wrong thing.
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Added "Set All" button next to language menu, to set strings in all languages to the current text.
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Implemented range check on the price, limiting it to 32767 so it won't wrap around to negative.
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Removed "Shrink Wrap" checkbox on the "Export Whizzer" dialog, since that's not supported any more.
Now it always exports the maximum size of bitmap, and you should not change the size of the bitmaps.
Always position your sprite images in the middle of the bitmap, near the bottom, but away from the edges.
You don't control the position of the object by moving it around in the bitmap.
Its lower left corner (no matter where is in the bitmap) is positioned at
a certain offset from the middle of the tile, called (pixelx, pixely).
These offsets are visible in the new "Draw Group" list at the button of the View Object dialog.
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Fixed a bug that caused extra space around bounding box of objects, and invisible icons.
If you ever encounter an object whose catalog icon is blank,
that is because there is an invisible sprite in the draw group whose position is way out of range,
causing the bounding box to be grossly inflated, causing the catalog icon to appear blank.
Look through the drawgroups section of the xml file for references to blank sprites at unusual offsets,
and delete them, then re-import the xml file. That should correct the bounding box problem.
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The Transmogrifier.exe application can be run from any directory.
It looks in the registry to find where The Sims is installed.
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It now saves your magic cookie in the registry, so you only have to enter it once.
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Lots of other little user interface improvements.
Many small changes to streamline and simplify the user interface.
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Resized and cleaned up dialogs so they work with different font sizes,
and no words are clipped.
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Upgraded the progress display text window to a rich text editor,
so there is no limit on scrolling text length,
scrolling output is faster, and it supports colored text.
Display error messages in red, warnings in yellow, good news in green.
Displays colormaps as colored hex digits.
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Added a "Report Bugs and Request Features" button in the about box.
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Now garbage collects unused palettes, sprites and drawgroups so the
object files don't get filled up with unused junk resources (important when
importing different images repeatedly, since otherwise the custom palettes
would accumulate).
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GDI memory usage bug fixed, that caused it to crash on some machines
with lots of other applications running.
If you still get "Out of Memory" errors, try closing other windows and programs.
I tracked down and fixed a horrible bug that was eating up gdi memory when
you imported an object with lots of frames (or had some other gdi graphics
resource hungry program running). Each time it imported a bitmap, the
cOffscreen class was creating a device context and a bitmap, and keeping
them around! Too much of that, and Windows becomes brain damaged, scribbles
all over the screen, and crashes the computer horribly. (GDI resources are
limited to a 64k segment, no matter how much ram you have!) So I made it
flush the gdi resources out of memory as soon as it was finished with them
(it only needed them for an instant right after the bitmap was loaded), and
now it does not crash mysteriously when you import all the beds with all the
zooms and z buffers and alpha channels!
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Object ID bug fixed. Was only generating 8 bits of random object id.
Now uses 16 bits of randomness and 16 bits of magic cookie.
The object id's are now handled properly, with 16 bits of magic cookie and
16 random bits (instead of 8, because of a bug in the last release limiting
you to 256 objects per cookie, now fixed to 65536 objects per cookie as
originally intended).
The magic cookies are actually inserted into the middle of the 32 bit object
id, because of a bug. In the current SimTransmogrifier Release 1.0, the high
8 bits are 0 (that's the bug), the next 16 bits are the magic cookie, and
the low 8 bits are random. I fixed the bug (which only caused problems if
you made more than 256 objects with the same magic cookie) so the high 8
bits are now random now as well, instead of zero. Now each magic cookie will
be good for 65536 unique objects ids. Old magic cookies and objects made
with the released version of SimTransmogrifier will continue to work without
any problem, since I didn't change where the magic cookie is in the object
id (to keep it backwards compatible), I just made it use the other bits it
previously wasn't using to make unique objects id (because of a bug).
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Tested SimTransmogrifier running on a Mac under Connectix Virtual PC,
and it seems to work fine,
although The Sims itself crashes if you try to run it under the emulator.