Researching an interest in a new approach to world creation.

Yesterday, while revisiting the Life By You livestream videos on my channel, I noticed a detail that really caught my attention. Both it and inZOI had cloud shadows. It’s a simple detail, but it’s exactly the kind of thing that helps worlds feel deeper, at least in my opinion. A great example is comparing Sunset Valley with the world from The Sims Medieval. Both have their strengths, but the Medieval world, compared to the base game, felt more… “seasoned,” if you can put it that way. And one detail: it had cloud shadows.

So I talked to my friend Math yesterday to see if we could port this effect, and first of all, to confirm if it even was an actual effect. He suggested a different approach, something more feasible and practical that I could test on my end. It worked (as you can see here). But it also highlighted something I had already noticed before.

In The Sims 3, trees cast shadows, but they don’t receive them. In other words, if you build a wall around a tree, it will still be lit as if that wall doesn’t exist. Bushes, on the other hand, receive shadows but don’t cast them. Any object will cast a shadow onto bushes, but bushes themselves don’t produce shadows. So today, while thinking about all this, I decided to try another approach:

What if I created trees that actually behave like regular objects? They would both receive and cast shadows onto other objects, but also onto themselves. So, unsurprisingly, the approach worked, and it made me wonder if you’d be interested, after I finish Hogwarts, in seeing me explore a more experimental approach to world creation.

In other words: The Sims 3 would be our platform, but we’d completely transform it to create worlds where all visual languages converge. Light and shadow behaving as they should, cloud shadows across the environment, trees both receiving and casting shadows, and if we’re lucky, the same approach could be used to create stair covers that allow them to properly receive shading and lighting at night as well.

Would you be interested in this idea?