New S4TK Package (@s4tk/extraction)

@s4tk/extraction

Hey all! Sims 4 Toolkit just got its newest package added, @s4tk/extraction (Docs, GitHub, npm). This package exposes new functions for extracting tuning, strings, and SimData from the game's files.

You can either perform a full extract of tuning and SimData (while restoring comments for strings and tuning IDs), or load string and/or tuning maps into memory. In my testing, it takes around 1m35s to extract all files on macOS, and around 3m on Windows.

Features

The primary function in this package is extractFiles(), and I spent a while making it extremely configurable. To name some of the options you can set:

• Naming convention of your files (S4S, TGI, TGI and name, name only)
• Output file structure (two levels of subfolders, for type and class)
• Choose which language you want your string comments to be in
• Generate manifest files that list key/string pairs and tuning ID/tuning name pairs

There are two additional functions, loadStringMap() and loadTuningMap(). These functions load the equivalent of those manifest files into memory. This is likely only useful to people creating their own tools with S4TK.

How to Use

@s4tk/extraction is still just an npm package at this point, there is no desktop app for it. Its functionality will be included in the Sims 4 Toolkit desktop app, but that won't be ready for a while. However, there is a template repository that you can use to use @s4tk/extraction immediately. You can find it here.

Comparison to Existing Tools

Before saying anything else, I want to express my immense gratitude to the creators of tools that came before Sims 4 Toolkit. Most of the things I've implemented would not have been possible without the work of Andrew, Orangemittens, and Scumbumbo.

In my testing, @s4tk/extraction outperforms both Sims 4 Studio and XML Extractor.

Sims 4 Studio, while being an indispensable tool for all Sims 4 mod creators, is notoriously slow at extracting all tuning from the game (in my experience, around 20-30 minutes). Additionally, it requires an update after every pack in order to extract the new files. Finally, S4S does not sort the output tuning files by class.

XML Extractor extracts tuning much faster than Sims 4 Studio, and its time is comparable to that of @s4tk/extraction (it took 4m compared to S4TK's 3m on my computer). There are two key problems, though. For one, XML Extractor does not extract SimData files, and is only available on Windows. Like S4S, XML Extractor also does not sort the output tuning files by class.