Hearing aids and earrings
Hi all! I’ve been playing the sims for years (sims 2,3 and 4) and one thing that I love about the sims 4 is that the creators really try to increase inclusivity, and for personal reasons I LOVE the f...
Forum Discussion
It's not a bug, it's a design consideration. The way CAS works in Sims 4 is difficult to explain. Imagine a big rectangle. When you put clothes on a sim, the texture for the clothes are in the bottom left of that rectangle. When you put earrings on a sim, they're tucked away in the top right. When you put glasses on a sim, they're also tucked away in the top right. Their shoes are in the bottom left. And so on and so on. Every item your Sim is wearing has its own texture, yes, but they're layered on top of each other.
So it's like placing a transparent animation cel on top of other transparent cells. The clothes go over the skintone cell. The tattoos go between the clothing and skintone cell. But for other things like earrings, they can't go on top of each other- because the game looks in that spot on the texture for the earrings, and that's the only place it gets them from. So if you have two different earrings, you're placing down two different textuers in one spot and they overlap and get all funky! If you've ever used weirdly made or broken CC you've seen textures go in the wrong place or overlap- that's why.
Earrings and hearing aids are both accessories using the same "texture space" on that big rectangle the game references. so you can't have both at once, because then they compete for which texture to show, and both get messed up.
It is possible for them to add new texture spaces- fingernails were addded on in one of the empty spots on the rectangle. But there's very little space left so they have to really prioritize it. It's also possible for textures to be on entirely separate "rectangles". Like the baby carriers from growing together- Sims wear those, but they have their own unique texture spot that nothing else interferes with. (I'm honestly not sure why the game doesn't do this to begin with for everything, but it's more efficient at the end of the day)
In Sims 3, this was different- every item had its own spot for textures. So you could, with mods, wear 50 bracelets and they'd all look fine if they didn't clip into each other. But in Sims 4 there'd be huge texture errors.
Maybe someday they'll adjust it so everything has its own texture space.
