#i call them tsrw and blurry tsrw bc the icon of one is blurry

[riverianepondsims]

Hey, hey, guess what I stumbled upon, or what I've managed to figure out: Boroughsburg has payphones!, and they've been there since the beginning, duh! Any clue on how to make them work? I've tried to get them functional with your mod's script, but it seems like they need more than that, but I'm clueless, honestly haha!

Hey there Josh, Apologies for it being a while since you originally sent this...I've been caught up in a flurry of work for the last long while. This turned out to be a novel 📝, so I'll hide it under here:

So the payphones in Boroughsburg are likely deco items, so they are there for visual appeal but do not have a function! The ones that I posted were the same, they were originally deco items. What I did to make them work was even more simple than a mod, but honestly so tedious! Wall phones already exist in TS3 (can you believe my surprise that they don't have those in TS4??), so I cloned a wall phone to start. Then I imported the mesh for the payphone I wanted to overwrite the old one, as well as the textures. The next thing to do for items like this is to add geostates. These seem to be at least somewhat unique to TS3 and sims game creation-spaces in general, so it was hard to learn how to do this or what in the world a geostate is. They're present in a lot of TS3 objects, starting from the base game. For example, the bookcase getting more or less full based on how many books are in it, food plates getting slowly more empty until they are completely clean when the sim is done eating, pizza slices disappearing, drink glasses becoming empty when the sim is done (some of these are geostates, some are effects), the phone handset disappearing from the phone when the sim "picks it up" etc...there are so many more but these are just some examples. How these work, at least from a CC creating standpoint, is modification of the mesh in TSR Workshop. When you set the geostates, you are telling the game to remove certain polygons/parts of the mesh when needed. So the entire mesh is there, but parts of it disappear and reappear when told to. So the handset on the payphone when not in use stays, but when a sim interacts, that piece of the mesh disappears. The handset sims actually use is another default object called from somewhere else, like the mop sims use to clean puddles that they carry around in their pocket everywhere XD Setting geostates is a painful clicking activity. You need to de-select each individual triangle that you want to disappear for a geostate. Some objects have more than one (like bookshelves). With certain meshes, it is enough to drive one up a wall. Simple enough but definitely one of the most annoying CC creation tasks! This is also something important to keep in mind that with objects that have geostates, they will be invisible in-game if you don't make sure to set up their geostates. Even if you don't plan to make them dynamic (eg, a bookcase that never gets empty or full, just stays the same no matter how many or little books are added), they need to have all faces selected for their geostates or else they will be invisible in-game. This is luckily easy, there's a shortcut to select all at once (the exact shortcut fails me, but I'm pretty sure TSRW tells you when you're in the editor). This was a long winded half-rant about geostates but I hope this (and maybe this tutorial here) helps give you an idea of how these work @joshttewloves!

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