thank you for this awesome work it pays to know how to successfully program something, all by yourself

@ammar2 Am getting a problem with the v0.1.1 release-


Edit: It is a false positive with the antivirus programmes on my computer, so probably others will be okay running this! The file is safe.

Aah, I uploaded another version of the 0.1.1 release, would you mind giving that one a try? It unzips to more than just the reiatool.exe but might not get false-positive'd by antivirus: https://github.com/ammaraskar/SimsR...tool-v0.1.1.zip

Didn't get flagged for me, not that I know how to use it. it successfully converted the file into a .reai format but it doesn't work as a flyover (given the file was a random video, I didn't expect it too to be honest). the screen stays black a little longer so it is possibly recognised.

Just to clarify, this is not the flyover that plays after you select the hood. It's what plays in the main menu during neighborhood selection. The random video you converted should play there.

@ammar2



That's just a really crappy test file I made, please excuse the poor video filming! But IT WORKS! We can now make our own reia files to have the animated images on the neighourhood selection screen.

For anyone else wanting to try this, I would suggest making a tiny movie. I used the in-game video camera to test this, using the smallest size setting and with the sound disabled. I just made a video a few seconds long, and the reia file came out about 0.5 MB. If I used the largest video size settings, then it gave a filesize of about 7.5MB for a few seconds, which is larger than the Maxis reia files (Pleasantview is 5.6MB). So if your reia doesn't animate, or gives a wireframe- it's probably too large!
Also- a tip- you can have the game open and swap out reia files to test- just open a neighbourhood, and on the neighbourhood view screen use the icons at the top to open the hood selection screen. Close and reopen that screen to test new files as you swap them in.

Ammar2, no matter what I did to the first version of the program I tried, my AV quarantined it. I'm using Windows 10 with Avast and Windows Defender. If I added exceptions or disabled Avast then Defender screamed. I didn't try running as administrator though, that was just on an admin account with normal privileges. Thank you very much for uploading the second version, I'm going to try it some more!

I may not know scripting but I think that was just an error found earlier, I do know that if your make one out of place mistake with coding it can set the whole thing apart, I don't want to download this because I don't really know how to use it once it's downloaded, I however apprecieate the work you did,

In the little coding and scripting I've actually done in my life I've made some mistakes myself, my tip is to always make your code readable to others and not crammed together in one paragraph otherwise if you do make a mistake or someone edits your code without you're whereabouts you'll usually know how to fix the broken or altered code. one wrong character can set something like this off, I therefore learned how to be precise in manual HTML design in highschool but I never took a programming language course

Don't panic, it was just a false positive by my antivirus program. Something about the exe that my computer saw as a threat, it didn't cause the same problem for others. If you want to try it, I can give you step by step instructions, but Ammar2 has it in the upload queue so I'm sure there will be directions with that, if you want to wait.

Just came across this as I was browsing the Sims 2 Reddit and I couldn't resist to try it out for myself since I have wanted this for such a long time!
Got an animated preview for my Alpinsee "megahood" (main n'hood, downtown, and three suburbs) working successfully. Super simple, super satisfying, thank you so much for your hard work, ammar2! :D


I also came here to respond to this. Sims 2, or at least my copy thereof, can in fact handle extremely large REIA files, after some testing. My biggest one was 73.7 MB in size, 31 seconds in length and still worked, the first few seconds even playing at the full framerate, before eventually dropping down to ~8-10, but still playing and looping fine. No lack of animation and no wireframe.
I eventually decided to reduce the framerate of the source video to 8 fps which brought the REIA down to 22.9 MB, which the game can play back with no induced lag whatsoever.

@LimeyYoshi That was me who posted on reddit! Thanks for the info about the file size, I'm playing on my old PC so I'm guessing the problems I was seeing are just because my computer couldn't deal with it. Good to know, I hope people will play with this and find what workd for their games.