I'll second that request.  Especially if you can figure out what needs to be done to make a hair in the custom bin work properly in a family with its mates in the other bins.  Theo's plugin used to be able to do that, but for some reason it no longer works.

You might consider getting with CatOfEvilGenius and see if you can incorporate her extra-texture-remover thingy into it...

I believe it is possible to change a Sim's skintone by hacking the Sim file with SimPE, but you have to do it in both the expressed and inherited DNA, and unfortunately I don't know how it's done to explain it for you.  :/

The missing body in the shower suggests the Sim is using a non-shower-proof skintone.  Does she have a nonstandard body mesh (such as one of Marvine's bodybuilder types?)  Also, do the problem children share her skintone?

Maybe a compromise could be reached?  Some sort of (dis)honorable mention, perhaps?

It IS possible, you just have to take the time to learn the program, as with anything else.  Importing and exporting is done, strangely enough, by clicking the Import and Export buttons you will find if you use SimPE to open a face template file with SimPE and click on 'Geometric Data Container (GMDC)' on the left.

However, may I suggest that the best way to ask for help at a site where you've never posted before may not be to state your intention to plunder the info you need and run?  It doesn't give me a whole lot of motivation to help you.  :p

Yep, as Cat says, this is totally a good idea.  Just be very careful to verify that the files you think are duplicates, really are duplicates; sometimes they look very very similar but have subtle differences in shading that can leave seams on your Sim.  Cat's duplicate texture remover is probably the way to go, but make sure you test the cleaned up skin before you permanently delete the original.

I don't consider the binning tool obsolete.  I still use it all the time.  Granted, jfade's Wardrobe Wrangler can also be used to bin hair, but the binning tool is frankly quicker and has a more straightforward interface that I much prefer (sorry jfade!)  Those extra features occasionally prove very useful.

(I'm aware of the issue with families and hair placed in the Custom bin, but since I seldom mess with putting anything in that bin anyway, it's not that big a deal to me.)

Actually, I hadn't, and I confess I'm not entirely sure what you just said.  XD  Can you link me to any discussions or explanations on the topic?

Combining Property Sets and TXMT's is easy, but it's a bitch trying to figure out which 3DIR goes with what.

I'm afraid I can't say with any certainty which case is more common, but in the case of B, just for clarification, there may sometimes be a legitimate reason why the creator did it that way.

When more than one hair mesh group references the same texture, BodyShop will clone multiples of that texture.  If the mesh happens to have, say, five parts, you wind up with umpteen duplicates: one for each group in each age category.  Now, in the case of a simple recolor, the extras may be unneeded (thus the stuff we've been discussing in this thread.)  However, in the case of one hairstyle I modified myself, I needed some of those extra textures in order to apply slightly different alpha effects and details on different parts of the mesh.

Also, with certain hairstyles (but not all of them), it seems as though some mesh groups pick up their display properties from the Material Definition (TXMT) of the Sim's skin, while others will use the TXMT of the hair itself.  When that happens, it may be necessary to color one texture a bit differently so it blends with those using a different TXMT.  Otherwise you'll get an unsightly two-tone effect.

These odd cases are the reason I said to take a close look at all the textures and make certain they really are identical before you delete them.  A visual way to confirm that would be highly advisable.

Cool beans, thanks for the tip!

Oi.  I'll have to take a look through mine and see what I've got that might be suitable for sharing.  I tend to also bundle hairstyles up in single packages of all four colors under a similar but different name, so I'm not sure how suitable they would be, but we'll see.

Okay, that's something different.  Those are the mipmap levels for a single image, and they're necessary for the texture to scale properly when you zoom in and out in the game.

Over in the Resource Tree at the left where you see Texture Images (X), the X indicates how many Texture Images you're actually looking at.  It appears there's just the one there, so you can't recover any more space by that method.  The size of the file may be related to the size of the main image Peggy used rather than the number of images.

HOWEVER, if you want to go really in-depth to trim it a bit further (and are willing to risk sacrificing some texture quality--you definitely want to try this with a backup copy,) there's a couple of other steps you can take.  Also, the Nvidia DDS utilities and a good image editing program like Photoshop or Gimp that can handle layers are pretty much necessary for this stuff, so if you don't already have them installed I would recommend not bothering.  If you do, though:

1.  Click Export and save the image (the biggest one) to a folder of your choosing.
2.  Open the image in Photoshop (or equivalent) and resize it to the next level down.  The image proportions must remain the same and it must be sized in increments of 64 pixels (64, 128, 256, 1024, etc.)  Resave the image in the new size.
3.  Right-click the image in SimPE and choose Build DXT.  Choose the file you just resized, choose DXT 5 in the drop down menu, set Sharpen to None, and change Levels to 9.  Then click Build, and when the image has been imported, push Commit.  This will eliminate some file size, but it may also make for fuzzier textures in game.

Another more complicated trick is as follows, if you want to try it.  It will help most if you have a texture image that contains a lot of areas that are not actually used on the mesh (which often happens if the creator re-uses textures originally made for a different hairstyle.)  You can do this and the last one at the same time if you want, just follow these additional steps before reimporting the file:

1.  Right-click the image in SimPE and choose Export Alpha Channel.  Save it to the same place as the image itself and open it in your graphics program.

2.  Copy the alpha image and paste it as a separate layer over the main image.  Select the black area in the alpha (if you can, adjust the sensitivity of the selector so it leaves a wee bit of space around the white parts unselected) then delete the alpha layer, leaving that space selected on the main image.

3.  Fill in the selected area in pure white or black and save the image, then reimport as per the instructions above.

The reason this reduces the file size is because only the parts of the image that are white in the alpha will be displayed in the game, and because large patches of a single color require less space than complex patterns of many colors.  So you may as well blank out the areas that are not used anyway and reclaim a few bytes in the process.

Unfortunately no.  Adult, young adult and elder hair and clothes are all more or less interchangeable because those three ages are the same size and height.  Teen, child and toddler hair and clothing all use different meshes at different heights, and can't be switched around without editing the meshes themselves. 

Bleh!  Tipi is not meant to produce fight!  Cannibalism strictly optional.  :p  And no, it's built on the tent from BV and presumably requires that EP.  For some inexplicable reason, the tent is in the chair/bed category, so the tipi is too.

Material Definitions work much like Property Sets as far as editing goes.  All you really have to find in there for the purposes of this discussion is the stdMatBaseTextureName field.  The most annoying thing is that in custom hairs, all the texture references are random alphanumeric strings, which makes it a pain to remember which one you're supposed to delete unless you write it down.

That's peculiar, Theo, I haven't noticed any thumbnail oddities and I still use the tool all the time.  Does refreshing the thumbnail help when it happens?

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Open the folder where all the recolors are located.  Start SimPE and select File/New.  CTRL+click to select all the recolors you want in the single file in Explorer, and drag them into SimPE's Resource List window.  This will copy all the contents of those files into the new one, which you can then name and save as you prefer.

Then move the originals to a safe temporary location outside the EA Games folder, test in game to verify that the new file works as expected, and if it does, dispose of the originals in the manner of your choosing.

Umm, yes, I believe there is, but I'm not certain I know all of the necessary steps involved to really do it correctly.  Theo's binning tool is much easier.

I'll take a stab at it, though.   Let's see.  If you're going to be mucking around manually anyway, you might just as well start by going through the steps in item #2.  Otherwise you're messing with a bunch of Property Set values for less of a return on file size.  In addition, you would find the Material Definitions for the gray textures in all but one recolor (I'd use black) and point all the stdMatBaseTextureName references toward the gray recolors in that file.  Then delete all the gray textures in the other files, and double-check to make sure that the Family string in the Property Sets and Hairtone XML's of all the recolors is the same (change it if necessary.)  I *think* that should do it.

Also note that you can treat some textures for things that are identical from one hair color to another, like hats and veils, exactly the same way as gray recolors: get rid of them in all but one package and just plug in the texture references in the others.  (The potential downside to this, of course, is that if you make them all up as separate packages and later forget and delete the one with those textures, you bork all the rest.  This is one of the reasons I prefer to consolidate mine in single packages.  Which can, btw, also be done manually in Windows Explorer: open the folder where your recolors are stored, start SimPE, choose File/New, and then select all the recolors you want in that package in the Explorer window and drag them into SimPE's Resource List window.  All the resources from those packages will be added to the new file, which you can then save with the name of your choice.)

Pes probably cuts his files down with a plasma torch.  :p  I have no idea, this is just the stuff I do myself.

Maxwell's interesting thread on reducing the size of the game installation got me thinking it might be worth posting what I've learned about hair files (which tend to be horrible bloated things full of unecessary duplicate files) and how their size can be dramatically reduced.  Beyond just saving hard drive space, you can cut down the number of textures the game has to load into RAM, which should improve performance as well.

This is not a tutorial.  It assumes either basic familiarity and competence with SimPE and .package files, or the ability to poke around and figure things out yourself without much hand-holding.  If you need them, you can find tutorials and articles that explain the terminology used here over at MTS2.  This also assumes that you have the spare time and patience to sit and putz around with these things for a while.  None of this is all that difficult, but it can be tedious.

Regardless of your level of experience, as always, back up everything before doing anything!

1.  Color bin the hair using Theo's color binning tool in SimPE.  (This usually applies even if the recolors are already color binned by the creator, unless they packaged all their colors in one file instead of separately.)

Load each file in its appropriate color tab and uncheck the gray textures in all but the black recolor (ignore the gray tab, unless there's actually a separate gray package and the other recolors do not include gray textures.)  Uncheck any YA textures as well, then select the Adult texture, go to the Properties/Ages tab, and check both Adult and YA.  In the Package/Options/Output menu, make sure Remove Unchecked Recolors and Compress Textures are checked, and Generate Single Package if that's your preference, and save the hair.

If you have a hair style that comes in a lot of colors, and you want all of them binned as the same family, you can bin them in groups of four (or less) but have all of them use the same gray textures.  Just follow the above directions for the first four you do, leaving the gray textures in the black file, BUT before you save the file(s), go to Package/Options and copy the GUID to a temporary safe place.  Then bin the rest of the recolors using the same process, but uncheck the gray textures for all the files and copy the original GUID to the appropriate field in Package/Options before you save.

This will remove several redundant textures and leave a single Elder recolor in CAS.  (If the hair you're working with is an age or gender conversion of a Maxis hair, see #3.)

2.  This one is more time-consuming, but in some cases it can pare a file down enormously.  Open the hair in SimPE, find any exact duplicate textures (look carefully to be sure they're really identical!) and jot down the filenames of any that are.  Then go look through the Material Definitions and change the corresponding stdMatBaseTextureName references so that they all point to a single texture (just pick one of the names you wrote down, and anywhere you see the filename of one of the duplicates on your list, replace it with that one.  Copy/paste ftw.)  When you are sure no Material Definition is referring to a particular texture anymore, go and delete it.  Continue doing this until no duplicate textures remain.

3.  If you have hair files that are just conversions of Maxis hairs to different ages or genders, you may be able to reduce them even further by changing the Material Definition references to point to the original Maxis textures (filename will be found in the 'File List' tab of the Material Definition) and then removing all the textures in the package.

Note that Theo's Color Binning Tool also has an option to do this, though it's a bit iffy since it's difficult to be sure which references you have and haven't changed (and you also have to be careful in the cases of some later hairs that use, for example, the hairband texture from one color on the hair texture of another): select the texture in the main window, go to the Materials tab, right-click each line and choose Use base texture.

4.  Move the original hair files temporarily to a safe place while you load the game, and check thoroughly in Bodyshop to be sure that your edited version works correctly.  (I say Bodyshop and not CAS, because you can easily check out the YA textures there.)  If it does, remove the originals and any .bak files SimPE has left behind.  Then Compressorize everything.

If you take the time to do all this, you can reduce the sizes of some files by a factor of ten or more.  If you have more than a handful of custom hairs, I recommend going to the folder where you keep hair recolors and sorting them by file size, then going through and paring down the largest ones first.

This should be obvious to anyone who isn't a total nitwit, but in case any nitwits happen to be reading: whatever it may or may not do to a normal installation, removing the old executables will DEFINITELY break Numenor's AnyGameStarter.

Here's a must-have: The Big Collection of Flesh Plugs!



http://modthesims2.com/download.php?t=294157

(I guess technically it's a mask, but it's a mask of an accessory.  Close enough.)  :p

Yes, it runs from its own .exe and has its own objects.package.  Because EAxis suxxors.

Where you been, man?

You add more polygons around the edges of the first one at a different angle, thus giving the appearance of a beveled surface.