Modding Diary- Balloon Arches

Hi Guys! I hope you all had a fantastic weekend!

This week I mostly worked on two things, the first one being getting sims to watch the balloon popping. When you click on “Pop Balloon with…”

all sims within a 40 (meter? or whatever sims4 uses) radius will come running towards the balloon

when the balloon is popped they will react by throwing confetti or clapping etc. the interaction is not perfect yet as you can see the sims on the bottom left of the image below are busy talking to each other rather than watching 🙃 and the guy on the right side of the image just want to go to bed. Im gonna see if there is a way to force them to pay attention,

the other thing I did is I made these balloon arches, they are decorative and they are one of the many decorations I plan on making for the gender reveal party.

these two swatches are my personal favorite. As you can see the balloons are not super round, unfortunately circles are illegal in the sims4 and I try to keep my objects as low poly as possible. I’m afraid if I lower it any further they are going to look like minecraft balloons, even these have a whooping 6k polygons, which is a little more than what I normally use on my objects, but considering its a three-tile object, I think this is acceptable.

For those of you who wonder what are polygons and why are circles illegal in the sims4.

using the image below you can see the first object has the least amount of faces/triangles, and therefor the least amount of polygons, the smoother an object is the more polygon it has. when creating video games it is typically recommended to keep poly count as low as possible, because the more polygon something has the more computer power it needs to render that object. If you have a good pc it probably wouldn’t concern you, but many people dont so I always keep mine as low as possible.

I know not every sims4 creator care about polycounts, I’ve seen cc boots with over 22k poly counts and cc cake with 60k poly counts, I would love to make make my objects perfectly smooth too, but I just don’t have the heart to knowing that it might negatively impact someone’s game. Hopefully game engines will be advanced enough one day that poly counts wont matter anymore!

Thank you very much for your support as always!

Next week I am thinking about adding a one-person balloon popping animation, so that sims wont always have to pop it with someone else.

If you bought the Home Chef Stuff Pack make sure to update the childbirth mod to avoid getting LEs!