Version to replace Discover University Servos now available here

UPDATED: Several nifty features added -

Visual enhancements, including:

- New specular maps that have a more metallic, less plastic shine, with different kinds of shine across the mesh.

- Added normal maps to highlight grooves in the body.

- Added emission maps so the orb now glows.

Under the hood enhancements:

- Added LOD meshes for smoother performance in high-density environments

- Added ability to accept more accessories, with a new chop mesh so the antenna can be independently hidden.

- Replaced witch and warlock bodies with hat accessories.

- Replaced fang bodies with swappable heads

- Replaced basic bodies with swappable heads

- Added universal body base

- Removed bow and eyelashes from female servos, made them into accessories instead, with several recolors for the bow.

- Updated tuxedo and dress so they now overlay, rather than replace, the bare metal body underneath, enabling compatibility with body recolours.

A comparison, new on the right:


You now get:

- 1 body, without head

- 2 basic heads, male and female

- 2 fanged heads, male and female, with vampire and werewolf styles

- 2 accessory outfits: Dress and Tuxedo

- 4 brand new accessories: Witch hat, Warlock hat, Antenna bow and Eyelashes.

- Bonus buy-mode Servo deco.


The new versions have the same ID as the originals, so your servo sims will automatiically update as soon as you install these. Since the bodies have been superseded by heads,however, any sims that were wearing these will only be a floating head (or hat if they were a witch or warlock), you'll have to give them the body under Skin Details to make them look right, as well as a head if they are a witch or warlock. Also, any female servos will be left without their bows or eyelashes; if you want these back, they're found under accessories in CAS now.

To make things easy, all items now have custom icons so you can find them quickly. Enjoy!

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You may have seen this floating around on the forums here a few months ago; I started this project way back when in May (and teased it in one of the screenshots here), but computer issues kept me from finishing it off. Now, at last, my Christmas gift to you:

New, from Shiny Things Inc., meet Servo!





I have loved the Servos, our sims' delightful mechanical servants, since Livin' Large way back when. It only felt appropriate to convert them to the latest iteration of the game - but I wanted to make sure it was functional as well as pretty, which meant that sims with the Servo outfit could never not have it on - this meant not only when naked, but also while in career or special event outfits. This meant, of course, that I couldn't just go the easy route and make the Servo body a simple item of clothing that could be taken on or off at will - but I did manage it using some workarounds and some neat features TS4 introduced to the CAS system, with some help from the wonderful CmarNYC.

The key was the bear costume that came with Outdoor Retreat - it's an outfit that completely covers your sim, ignores their slider values and anything they might be wearing. I spent some time picking it apart, figuring out how it worked and managed to replicate the effect for my Servos.

Having accomplished that much, I thought to myself...what about if Servo has an elegant party to wait on?



And then...what if Servo gets bitten by a vampire? Or a werewolf?



And then...what if Servo stumbles upon an archaic tome?



And that is the story of how my OCD forced me to convert every single kind of Servo we had in The Sims 2. Plus some extras, like added recolours of female Servo's garishly pink dress!

You get a total of 9 items - 6 skin details, 2 necklaces, and a bonus buy object!

How To Use

• Find one of three basic Servo bodies (normal, fanged, witch) under Skin details
• Go to Necklaces and apply the formal outfit if desired
• Done!

The meshes and textures are all from The Sims 2's expansion packs, and are completely vanilla and unchanged in any way, except for the hands - TS2 is a ten year old game, and the hands are very low poly compared to TS4. This means that, no matter how much I were to fiddle with bone assignments, the animations were never going to line up properly. So I gave the Servos the high-detail The Sims 4 hands to make sure that the animations line up perfectly, and then painstakingly traced the original TS2 hand texture using a vector image program and adjusted it to fit over the The Sims 4 hands' UV map. The result is something that looks like the original hands, but has the beautifully smooth movement the TS4 hands do.

The dress also comes in 7 extra colours, just in case eye-searing pink isn't to your taste - red, black, purple, brown, green, white and blue - the latter six colours are all matched to the witch hat, so you can use them together without fear!

The bonus Buy Mode object is a conversion of the deactivated Servo from The Sims 2: Open For Business. It can be found under Electronics / Misc. and costs §6210. It only comes with a male head, like in the original game, and this one doesn't have new hands. It's just a straight conversion, is purely decorative, and is cloned from a small plant, so it will fit on pretty much any shelf.

You are invited to create recolours and new outfits for these guys! You are free to use the textures and meshes as a base (I am particularly hoping someone gives the female Servo some nice new dresses, and maybe a new hat or two!), but please don't distribute these meshes with your recolours, link back here instead.

Known Issues

Some of the joints on the tuxedo shoulders and around the middle of the dress look a little strange when running certain animations. This is an issue present in the original Servos in The Sims 2 as well, and something I tried to mitigate as much as possible with very tedious and gradually changing bone assignments, but I could only fix the issues with the skirt of the dress. This is something that is due to the small number of vertices in these areas, and not something that can be remedied.

Additionally, certain necklaces will display their texture on the witch / warlock hats - this is due to a conflict in how I mapped the high-resolution TS2 hat texture. It's not a problem for the dress or tuxedo in this upload, but if you see the hat texture being weird, it's not a glitch! Just take off the necklace and it will be fine

Polygon Counts:

Each outfit has only one LOD, since they are from relatively low-polygon The Sims 2 meshes. The buy item has all three levels of detail, since it is very high-poly for a build/buy object.

Male:

Servo Basic - 4422 Polys
Servo Tux - 4325 Polys
Servo Fangs - 4450 Polys
Servo Warlock - 4592 Polys

Female:

Servo Basic - 4507 Polys
Servo Dress - 4247 Polys
Servo Fangs - 4535 Polys
Servo Witch - 4602 Polys

Buy:

Servo (Deactivated)
LOD0 - 3312 Polys
LOD1 - 1760 Polys
LOD2 - 805 Polys

Additional Credits:

Huge thanks to CmarNYC for helping me solve the many glitches that kept coming up!

Thanks as always to MTS for hosting and EA for publishing the game.

Textures made with Inkscape and The GIMP, meshes modified with Milkshape 3D and imported using CmarNYC's CASTools, package compiled with Sims4Studio. Meshes and textures modified from The Sims 2: Open For Business, The Sims 2: Pets, The Sims 2: Apartment Life and The Sims 4.

Very special thanks to scotch for keeping me from pulling my hair out, and a shout out to my perfectionism for making this take so long. Oh, and thank you for reading all of this. Here, have a robot cookie.