A patch for The Sims 2 that fixes and improves various aspects of water reflections, inspired by the reflections seen in Castaway Stories.

Made for use with The Sims 2: Ultimate Collection, using either Sims2RPC or Ultimate ASI Loader.

Hardware compatibility checks for enabling ocean reflections in lot view seem to be slightly broken when playing on modern setups, as ocean reflections are always forced off. This patch changes these checks to always succeed, so ocean reflections are forced on instead.

Sims2RPC already has an option for this, but since some people play without it, it was important to also include this functionality here. My method for enabling lot reflections differs from RPC's, so it's not a direct copy.

Note for Sims2RPC users: This patch will make RPC's option to enable/disable lot ocean reflections have no effect (as in, lot ocean reflections will still be enabled even with the setting disabled in the RPC launcher).

By default, Sims 2 only permits objects internally flagged as both "VisibleInWaterReflection" and "Props" to reflect in the lot ocean. This is rather limited, as only large neighbourhood decorations will be reflected, excluding important scenery such as houses, roads, and trees. These restrictions have been lifted for both lot view and neighbourhood view, allowing everything to be reflected, as well as things like Sims and clouds.

Vanilla	Mod

There is a very noticeable gap between the ocean's surface and the landscape in the vanilla game. A minor offset has been added to the height of the reflection plane to try and reduce this.

This feature is not perfect, as the size of the gap is closely tied to the height of the game's camera — the greater the distance from the camera's position to the ocean, the larger the gap. Raising the plane too high causes the reflections to start getting cut off, so a balance was struck between maintaining the full reflections and reducing the visibility of the gap.

Another small issue is that the increased height of the reflection plane cuts off the reflections of Sims when swimming in the ocean. If this bothers people, I will look to add a configuration file in a future update that allows for the offset to be adjusted or completely disabled.

Vanilla	Mod

The lighting manager responsible for updating skybox reflections based on the current season or weather is bugged. It checks for the strings "day" or "night" to change the reflection for the correct time of day, except in seasons other than summer, it is instead passed the string of the season name (e.g. "winter"), which causes the skybox visible in the ocean reflection to never update — this has been fixed.

Rather than checking strings passed to the function, it will now check internal variables for the time of day, current season, and current precipitation type to more accurately choose the correct reflection.

Vanilla	Mod

Pool water only reflects objects, not the terrain, so objects appear to be floating in the air when viewed in pool reflections. Pools have been patched to allow the terrain to be reflected too.

Vanilla	Mod

Also included are modified water shaders from Castaway Stories, featuring fancy water movement and the removal of the unnatural cyan tint of the vanilla water. A version compatible with dreadpirate's shader fixes has been provided, for anyone using that mod.

These shaders are completely optional and are not required for the plugin to work. This means you can use the plugin with the vanilla water shaders, or alternative water shaders such as Voeille's, if you prefer the look of those.

For Sims2RPC

1. Download the plugin found under the Releases section of this repository.

2. Move the downloaded plugin to the \TSBin\mods directory, found under wherever you have the Sims 2 installed to. For example, on my machine, the plugin would be moved to:

   E:\Games\The Sims 2\Fun with Pets\SP9\TSBin\mods

For Ultimate ASI Loader

1. Download Ultimate ASI Loader from here.

2. Extract dsound.dll from the zip file and place it in the game's \TSBin directory. On my machine, it would go here:

   E:\Games\The Sims 2\Fun with Pets\SP9\TSBin

3. Download my plugin and move it to the same \TSBin directory Ultimate ASI Loader was extracted to.

1. Download the zip file found under the Releases section of this repository.

2. Extract one of the .package files within the zip file to your Sims 2 \Downloads directory. Choose the 'dreadpirate' version if you are using dreadpirate's shader fixes and ensure my shaders load last, otherwise use the 'Maxis' version.

LazyDuchess, for the hooking code used in this mod.

dreadpirate, for their shader fixes mod.