A Call for a modder: Portraits

Pinstar1161

I learned that Portraits are not in The Sims 4 during my time at Creator's Camp. However: I also learned that the barriers to putting them in are not nearly as large as, say, toddlers or pools. And that they would come in as a possible mod. As the Creator of the Legacy Challenge, I'm putting out a formal request for a modder to mod back in portraits. If you are able to do this, I will incorporate your mod into the Legacy Challenge rules and feature you/your site/your other mods in countless places and make sure that credit to the modder is well established.

I realize people won't be able to work on full game mods until after release, but if you have created a portrait mod, know that I would be eternally grateful and direct all Legacy Challenge Players to your mod, once I test it and confirm its functionality and stability.

Shimrod101

Do you know if there is photography of any kind in the game? Taking pictures with the cell phone like in Sims3? Because the portrait and still life painting in Sims3 uses the same camera as the photography, and I presume a camera like this is required to create portrait painting in Sims4. If such a camera doesn't exist, then the difficulty level of modding such a thing is very difficult to impossible. This is my opinion FWIW.

jtravers88

With all due respect to you Pinstar, I would like to see the game play modders abstain from any concerted effort to put things back in the game that frees up the developers to crank out the next EP for cash.

Portraits and a family tree are two of the items I would like to see EA provide to it's loyal following in a free update.

sunnydays44

I've gotta agree with @jtravers88 - now that we know EA are aware that they forgot to add portraits in the base game, I'm keen to see them patch it in. I don't mind using mods, but I don't want the Legacy Challenge to rely on them.

jtravers88

They didn't 'forget' anything. They had a pipeline. They had a discovery process, requirement gathering, design phase, and development (and testing? )

They left out the family tree to avoid having to store the data and increase load times.

They redesigned Painting and forgot portraits? No, again, it's all about avoiding problems down the road after a few EPs with data storage.

Srikandi715

The paintings that sims are able to paint in-game are obviously represented by bitmaps stored in the game code. It is certainly possible to replace those bitmaps with other bitmaps, so if worst came to worse, you use screenshots to create a set of painting replacements for your game (either before or after the paintings are painted). There were actually two similar mods for TS3: a save-game editor which let you swap out a painting on the easel, and image replacer mods that let you replace the inventory of stored paintings.

The whole "sim poses and painter paints what they see in-game" thing would be... a hard or impossible mod to make, I would think But never say never till we see the code, I guess

As for this:

jtravers88 wrote: »

With all due respect to you Pinstar, I would like to see the game play modders abstain from any concerted effort to put things back in the game that frees up the developers to crank out the next EP for cash.

EA devs have put plenty of things in the game that had already been done by modders. There's zero evidence that they have ever taken into consideration modders' activities, except possibly as an indication of what features would be popular.

granthes

jtravers88 wrote: »

With all due respect to you Pinstar, I would like to see the game play modders abstain from any concerted effort to put things back in the game that frees up the developers to crank out the next EP for cash.

Portraits and a family tree are two of the items I would like to see EA provide to it's loyal following in a free update.

I'm not quite sure how to take this comment...

While EA does state that the support modding and that they like the mods that they have seen (meaning content mods, not gameplay mods), there is no way that the existence or lack of any specific game play mod is going to influence what their money people decide about EP / DLC items.

EA has morphed into a company that is all about the repeat business of their game players. Even if modders to create a perfect example of some feature that is missing, EA will not change their plans.

Not only that, but I personally get far more pleasure from modding the game and making tools for others to mod with than I ever get from actually playing the game. So your fantasy about modders abstaining from modding cuts into my pleasure of the game.

Since my actions as a tools developer and modder are going to be totally ignored by EA anyway, why should I limit my fun just because of some group of features seems to be missing?

miromann

Portrait functions are already in the CAS. If those functions are accessible in the game engine mod functionality it should be doable.

Shimrod101

@miromann
Okay, good idea; Thumbnail Camera(s) or CaS Thumbnail Camera(s) these are called. It's worth looking into.

RICCI288282

I have to agree with granthes.

I see nothing wrong with modding the game the way we see fit. For some of us, be it the tool creators, the modders, or the CC makers, we all enjoy the game on different levels. We all toy with the game to make it our own and share this with everyone else to make it THEIR own game.

Sims is all about your own personal fantasy or ability. EA is not going to give everyone what they want and that's where we all take over. So to say we shouldn't Mod is taking away our fun. Well put granthes.