Hi there!
TS3 Multiplayer
So I have kinda bad news - Discord will be shutting down their Game SDK in a few months, which is what the mod is built around as it provides a safe and easy to use networking framework.
It is a bit demotivating, as it's definitely going to be a bit of work to fully replace the system with one that doesn't depend on the Discord SDK. But oh well, at the moment that's a problem for future me to deal with.
OpenTS2
Some of you probably know that I have a very WIP open source reimplementation of TS2 I've been working on for a while now: https://github.com/LazyDuchess/OpenTS2
This is the project I've been focusing on for a while now.
It's nowhere near finished - won't be for a very long time - but a lot of coding and research has already gone into reading/writing packages and resources in a way that resembles that of the original game.
The benefits to having an open source TS2 should be quite obvious, you could fix anything you don't like about the game if you put some work into it, but my main goal at the moment, with compression and package loading and editing already finally implemented, is to make better tools. SimPE just doesn't work great for me, and OpenTS2 doesn't have much trouble at all loading the entirety of the game's packages in under 5 seconds!
One thing I've been experimenting with are TS4-like body morphs, here's a rough proof of concept:
The fat morph mesh is completely separate from the clothes or any of the Sim's parts, and is not actually a copy of a TS2 model, it's completely different and only loosely resembles the shape of a TS2 Sim, but with some maths it can be automatically adapted to any existing TS2 clothing mesh without any extra work from the user.
This also means there are (hopefully) no negative copyright or legal repercussions, as the morph models don't actually match the TS2 models at all!
Now this is a proof of concept though - the code is there and it's been tested on exported TS2 meshes, but we're far from seeing Sims being loaded and rendered in OpenTS2.
TS3 Attraction
I'm really interested in getting TS3 Attraction further along, as I've taken a bit of an interest into researching custom traits and it seems like a good way to store attraction data by generating a trait for each turn on, turn off and sexuality option.
I played around with hidden custom traits a little and it seems like there are no crashes or obvious issues from uninstalling them and loading a save with Sims that had those traits, which is promising, and could also mean that some custom visible CAS/Reward traits could be added to Attraction to make it a bit of a more involved mod. Maybe.
The way attraction works at the moment is insanely hacky, there are a lot of bad workarounds to try and make attraction work in CAS and transfer it in and out of it, and unfortunately there are a lot of downsides as copying Sims or saving them in the library won't keep the attraction traits. This is why you don't see mods that add custom data like this to CAS, I imagine.
Making custom hidden traits could potentially work around all of these issues, as traits are copied and moved around with Sims.
The proper option would be to make it a core mod with an actual system for custom Sim data, but I imagine that would justifiably be a bit of a bummer for most of you and I'd like to keep it as compatible as possible, but it could be a great feature to have for a community core mod project (I believe there is a WIP one on MTS)
That makes me wonder, what core mod do you guys use, or do you not use any? I'd love to know.