sims-package2glb

Open The Sims 2, 3 and 4 .package mods and get real glTF out of them.

Mesh, UVs, normals, normal map and texture, embedded in a single .glb. No Blender, no Python, no Sims 4 Studio. One window, drag and drop.

English · Français

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Playing Paralives? ParaForge brings Blender models into the game, ready to place.

What it does

A .package file is a container. Inside it sit the model, its levels of detail, its materials and every recolour the creator shipped, all in formats Electronic Arts never documented. Existing tools either need a full modding suite installed or hand you a pile of raw resources and wish you luck.

This one reads those formats directly and writes a standard glTF binary that Blender, Godot, Unreal, Unity, Three.js or any glTF viewer opens without a plugin.

Drop anything	One file, a selection, or a whole folder.
See it immediately	Built in Three.js viewer, orbit, wireframe, grid.
Pick the colour	Mods ship several recolours. Every one is offered as a thumbnail, and the preview updates on click.
Export in bulk	One folder per object. Optionally the raw resources too: textures as readable .dds and .png, original 3D resources.
Three games	The Sims 4, The Sims 3 and The Sims 2, detected automatically.
English or French	Toggle in the corner, remembered between sessions.

Screenshots

An object in the viewer, with the colour strip anchored at the bottom. Click a swatch to repaint the preview.

A package that ships one colour, shown without the colour strip.

Install

Grab the latest build from the releases page:

• sims-package2glb_x.y.z_x64-setup.exe for the installer,
• sims-package2glb.exe for a single portable file.

Windows only for now. The whole application is a 4.5 MB executable with no runtime to install.

Use

Drop them on the executable and they are converted where they already sit: one folder per object beside the package, raw resources included, no window. The same works from a terminal, which reports what it did:

sims-package2glb.exe "C:\Mods\my object.package"
sims-package2glb.exe "C:\Mods"

Or open the window for the viewer and the colour picker:

1. Drag .package files, or a folder of them, onto the window.
2. Click an entry in the list to look at it.
3. Pick a colour from the strip at the bottom.
4. Choose an output folder and press Export.

Each object lands in its own folder as <name>.glb. Tick Also extract raw resources to get, alongside it:

<name>/
  <name>.glb
  1_Textures/    every texture as a readable .dds and a .png preview
  2_Assets_3D/   original MODL / MLOD resources
  3_Data/        object definitions, strings, tuning

Build from source

Requires Rust and Node.

npm install
npm run tauri dev      # development window
npm run tauri build    # executable plus NSIS installer

How it is put together

The Rust side owns every format decision. The interface only asks for a scan, a preview or an export, and arranges the answers.

file	role
src-tauri/src/dbpf.rs	DBPF container, zlib and RefPack decompression
src-tauri/src/texture.rs	DST1/DST5 to DXT, the Sims 2 cImageData, block decoding, normal maps
src-tauri/src/rcol.rs	RCOL container, MODL/MLOD, geometry and materials
src-tauri/src/gmdc.rs	The Sims 2 geometry container
src-tauri/src/glb.rs	glTF 2.0 binary writer
src-tauri/src/extract.rs	level of detail choice, recolours, Sims 2 material binding, assembly
src/viewer.js	Three.js scene
src/main.js	application shell
src/i18n.js	English and French wording

Notes on the formats

These are the findings that make the difference between a correct model and a convincing pile of garbage. None of them are guessable, and all were measured against real packages rather than assumed.

Sims 4 textures are not DXT5, whatever the header suggests. The four character code reads DST5. Electronic Arts keeps the same DXT blocks but splits their fields into planes covering the whole mipmap chain at once, endpoints before indices:

[ alpha a0/a1 : 2 B ][ colour c0/c1 : 4 B ][ alpha indices : 6 B ][ colour indices : 4 B ]

Decoded as ordinary DXT5, this yields nothing but coloured noise. DST1 keeps only the two colour planes. Sims 3 stores plain DXT and passes straight through.

RCOL chunk references are relative. A reference 0x1000000N names the chunk N places after the one carrying it, not chunk N. Measured across a corpus of packages: 110 out of 110 references resolve to the expected chunk tag when read as relative, 77 out of 110 when read as absolute.

Vertex and index buffers are shared. Several meshes routinely live in one buffer pair, and each mesh entry carries the offsets and counts of its own slice, at byte 24 (vertices, in bytes), 32 (indices, in elements), 40 (vertex count) and 44 (triangle count). Ignore them and you get the right model wrapped in a starburst of stray triangles. Index buffers are delta encoded across the entire buffer, so the chain has to be unrolled in full before the slice is cut.

Positions are homogeneous. p = (x, y, z) / w, with all four components stored as 16 bit integers. The Sims 4 always writes w = 32767, which is why dividing by a constant appears to work until a Sims 3 file arrives: that game varies the divisor per vertex (32767, 16383, 10922) to spend precision where the model needs it.

A MODL chunk of version 0x03xx (Sims 4) or 0x01xx (Sims 3) lists no meshes. It is a level of detail descriptor pointing at an MLOD chunk inside the same resource. Only version 0x02xx carries a mesh list.

Normal maps store two channels. X sits in alpha, Y in the colour part, where R, G and B carry the same signal and G is the most precise. Z is reconstructed. The green channel follows the DirectX convention and has to be inverted for glTF: on the high relief textures, the stored X and Y hold the same sign relation to the diffuse gradient, which is the signature of green pointing down. Tangents are exported as TANGENT with the handedness derived from the UVs, so the map is read in the frame it was authored in.

The default material often points outside the package. A recolour mod keeps the base game material as its default and ships its own textures as extra materials. Following the default alone gives an object with no texture at all. For Sims 3 the reference cannot be resolved from the package at all, which is why the colour picker exists.

The Sims 2 is a different shape entirely. Its container is version 1 of DBPF, with a fixed index and no compression marker in the entries: a separate DIR resource lists the compressed keys, and each compressed resource opens with its own length before the RefPack stream. Its geometry is not RCOL at all but a GMDC, a flat array of typed elements tied together by data groups and carved into named subsets by index groups. Textures live in cImageData containers: an object header naming the image and its size, then the mipmaps smallest to largest, each preceded by its size. The largest mip is wrapped back into a DDS to decode. The materials (cMaterialDefinition) name the texture each mesh wears, and the mesh subset names line up with those names, so the right texture lands on the right part. When a subset has no material in the package, the colour picker still offers the rest.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome, especially packages that come out wrong. Attach the .package if you can share it, or say where it came from.

Licence

MIT. Created by infinition.

An independent, unofficial tool. The Sims is a trademark of Electronic Arts Inc. This project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Electronic Arts Inc., and ships no game asset. Anything you extract stays subject to the terms of whoever created it.