So these are my stars. I can't remember if I've even shared a picture of them before. When I made them, I wanted some that were smaller, more like TS2 stars were, and more realistic. These are a bit more plentiful than what you would see with your own naked eye, but they're a lot less plentiful than the default Sims 3 sky.
Depending on the angle though, sometimes they look more stretched out and skewed (see 2nd picture). The sky map mystifies me. It's not a solid texture like the TS2 sky map was. In TS3 it gets all segmented and thrown around randomly, like a kaleidoscope.
Anyway, even if they are a bit skewed in places, I still prefer mine to the default stars, which look like big fat snowflakes instead of stars, lol!
Tip: when taking pictures, you can zoom in or out, or change the camera angle or rotation, and that will fix some of the skewing. I guess it happens a bit with the default sky too sometimes.
I did put real constellations in this map (you can see part of Orion and Taurus in the first pic), and before I knew how the sky got botched up, I even had the constellations aligned to represent their appropriate places in the Northern Hemisphere sky. Yes, I am that dorky, lol! But because of the way the game segments and jumbles up the map, that kind of gets jumbled up.
In any case, I can't really be bothered to mess around with it any more at the moment, so I'll throw it up here for y'all to use if you want it. I'll come back and update this again if I ever figure out how to fix the stretching.
Couple more in-game pics -- taken near midnight, by the way, when the sky is darkest and the stars are brightest. Near dusk and dawn, as you probably know, the stars fade a little as the sky changes.
Notes: this mod does not affect sky colors or cloudiness or anything like that. Just the stars.
I also have a "darker nights" mod in place -- if I recall, the night time sky is a bit bluer by default. But the stars will look the same. Also, this file has not been tested with the Seasons EP yet. I'm planning to install it soon, but haven't gotten around to it. It's possible Seasons did weird things to the sky. Let me know if it did!
Looks cool! If I get a chance to test it, I'll let you know if it plays well with Seasons.
ReplyDeleteI'm torn on adding the darker nights mod though. It looks really awesome in these pics but I think I had it in before and for game play, it always seemed a little *too* dark. Do you ever find that?
Yes, I do find that mod makes the nights REALLY dark! I was actually just thinking about taking it out for a minute to remember what the default lighting looked like.
ReplyDeleteI think one of the reasons I put the mod in was not just for the darker nights, but because the default nights looked really blue without it - not just the sky itself, but the lighting on the ground too, and that was something I really didn't care for.
I like how dark the sky is when you're in town, like the last picture with Summer there. But out in the country, like the second-to-last picture, it's so dark you can hardly make out the horizon line. And yikes, if you go out to the water line, it's pitch black! Kind of spooky, actually, lol!