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So, this is another one of my little attempts at making the game more visually enjoyable.

To emulate believable reflections without setting fire to everyone’s computer, what most games do is use cubemaps. Simply put, they’re images layered underneath everything that move depending on the camera position. Parallax and all that stuff.

What developers usually do for sandbox/open-world games is automatically generate cubemaps so that it actually looks like objects are reflecting the world around them. For whatever reason (probably performance), TS4 doesn’t do that. The developers use premade images with white squares that vaguely resemble windows and stuff, cause most of the time when you’re indoors that’s where light comes from.

Now, that doesn’t always work. And with that I mean it almost never works. When it’s completely dark, for example, the cubemaps get completely blown out, and instead of a nice reflection you get a weird alien glow on your kitchen tiles. You also just get random reflections that don’t really come from anywhere, and that can be a little immersion breaking. I personally hate it.

So I replaced all cubemaps in the game with empty, black textures. That way, they become transparent and don’t ever show up at all. To me, that looks way better, the game looks more natural and things look less plastic-y. It’s my personal preference, and I’m posting this here in hopes that maybe someone else likes this look as well :)

All pictures in the post are taken with both my ITTL and OOTD mods! Highly recommend you to use both of those as well.

(This isn’t going on early access on my Patreon, but you can still support me there if you want to help a sister out in this economy lmao)