I saw a post like that too.  She uninstalled the FFS pack, restored her backup to get her lot back, and then reinstalled the pack.  She was going to work with a test lot next to see what happens.  I haven't heard anything since.

I, unfortunately, have already ordered the FFS pack, although it hasn't shipped yet.  I wonder if I can cancel the order.

I tried it out once.  Worked fine for me.  I don't remember any thumbnails though.  I haven't fired it up in months.  It many ways it seemed less advanced than the Sims2 Pack Clean Installer, which itself hasn't been updated in a long time.

1.07 GB in about 3500 files of custom content split over 8 folders.  I did a huge cleanout with my OFB installation and had to retire some neighborhoods as a result.

I've decided to use elements, scientists, minerals, and rocks.

Well, if logic did have an effect, and max logic halved those numbers, that wouldn't be so bad.  I wonder what Maxis really intended.   
Oh well.  Doesn't matter.  I'm installing your hack.  I've gotten a few bronze register badges the hard way, but it looks like it will take forever to get to silver.

I agree. 

I downloaded PT from PatchesSims2 simpage and used that sim to make a template replacement for #18 - Caus.  I didn't leave it in the game, but the randomize button in CAS would use it.  I've never extracted the alien face from the game.

I assumed it was that template position that was not used by the game, not what it was set to.  I put elf faces on some of the other templates and now I get townies with elf ears.  I actually put the alien PT face in the eelf template because I assumed it would not get used by the game, but still be available to me in CAS/BodyShop.

When I did it, I made 27 males in BodyShop.  I did all my work in a custom neighborhood that I had no intention of ever playing in.  I'd load one up one male in CAS, make the toddler, add to family.  Then load up the same sim from the SimBin, make into a female child, add to family.  I named them both in such a way that I new they were a matched pair (M01 - male for 1st template, and F01 - female for 1st template, etc).  After I had done 3 sims from the SimBin that way, I added a random sim as a parent, set the required relationships, and saved the household.  Then I moved them onto an empty 2x2 lot.  When I had all 27 templates done (in 9 or so households) I saved all the lots as files simply to back them up.

I was thinking you could send those lot files to Blue.  She could then create a new neighborhood, and install them there.  When she is done with the templates, she can just delete the neighborhood.  Adding too many character files can eventually cause problems, but I thought that limit was per neighborhood, not per game.  If you installed the lots in a custom neighborhood you are never going to play, I would think you weren't going to have any problems in your other neighborhoods.  Especially if you later deleted it.

After Blue installs the lots, she would then exit the game and start working in SimPE.  She'll need the names of each sim, what gender they are, and what template they are supposed to replace.  You should probably send her a list in notepad (simpletext).  She'll have to look in SimPE's Sim Browser to find out the name of the character package file for each sim, then open that up to extract the facial structure data.  Once that's extracted for every age group (male and female) she'll then open the package files from AllenABQ and replace the default data with the yours.

I have no idea if Blue could work with the lot Sims2Pack file directly to get the facial data.  She could probably use the Sims 2 Clean Pack Installer to put the package files into a folder.  But I don't know how she would tell which sims were supposed to matched.  It's probaly doable though.

Yes.  If you choose to make each age in BodyShop, you only need to do the toddlers and children in one gender.

I'm jealous.  I've never seen that face used in my game. I made a buch of templates with elf ears for that reason.  I actually made that statement because that's what I read in the original thread that producted Motoki's tutorial.  AllenABQ has a link to it on one of his posts on MTS2. 

You don't need to do YAs, they use adult faces.  The minimum you need to make is adults.  Blue can take the adults and in CAS, make toddler males, and teen females (or female children) to get everything you need.  When you make an adult in CAS, the game puts the adult face and the elder face for that sim in the package file.  When you make a toddler, the game puts the faces for the toddler, child, teen, adult, and elder in the file.  In general, CAS puts the facial data for all future age groups of that sim in the package file of the characters you create in CAS. I don't think BodyShop does this, but I could be wrong. 

So if you are comfortable with CAS aging your sims, you can save yourself a lot of work by creating 27 adults in BodyShop, importing them into CAS and creating a male toddler version and a female teen version.  From those two sims you'll have all the facial data for one template family.

The downside of doing it this way is that you won't be able to tweak the faces at each age.  If you are planning to tweak all the faces in all the ages, then you'll have to do them all in BodyShop. Otherwise just give Blue the adults and let CAS provide the faces for the different ages.  Or you could create the toddlers and teens, put them all on lots, and ship them to Blue.

Note:  the game does not have different toddler and child faces for each gender.  It uses a 'unified' face for those ages.  The only difference between M/F toddlers and children is the hair, clothes, and perhaps voices.  From the male toddler sim, I extracted the toddler, child, teen male, adult male, and elder male faces.  From the matched female child sim, I extracted the teen female, adult female, and elder female faces.  I used female children instead of teens because they are easier to create in CAS since you don't have to pick an aspiration or turn on/offs. 

So you only need to make 27 x 8 sims at most.  The 2nd to the last facial template - the elf one - is not used by the game when making townies and NPCs.  Replacing that one is up to you, it won't be used by the game.  I only made 27 sims.  I let CAS switch the gender (which I tweaked a bit) and let CAS do all the aging as I described above. 

Worked out well.  It's on the Simposieum.  I like the new faces.

I've done a set of replacements.  It's pretty easy, but rather tedious.  Organization helps a lot.  I also found that if I only replaced adults, I got weird effects when sims aged.  So I replaced all age groups and let CAS do the aging.  I also made each template a M/F pair, but I don't know if that's required.  If you let CAS switch the gender I found that female sim's jaws and chin were is some cases almost non-existent (I started with 26 males).  If I 'fixed' it and switched the gender, the male ended up with a huge jaw and chin.  I ended up tweaking all the female faces before saving to extract the data and not worring that they didn't exactly 'match' the males.  So far no ill effects. 

Blue - read Motoki's thread.  AllenABQ has the default templates you'll need on MTS2 (there's a link on the thread).  It will save you a lot of work.  I also have all the GDC names in notepad files if you want them.

Yes.  And the abs on your fat aliens would look exactly the same too if they weren't stretched by the fat body mesh.  I was using some of KSK's skins for tesing - not good on a fat body.   

There is a fit and fat alien skin tone for teens, adults, and elders of both genders.  I found them in Sims07.package and from looking at the textures in the SimPE plugin, they look correct.  The fit male is more defined than the normal male, etc.  They have their own instance and instance (high) hexadecimal groups.  They just aren't used as far as I can tell. 

I have no idea how to correct such a thing.  I'm not a programmer and if there isn't a step by step guide I'm somewhat lost in SimPE.    You could use Sim Surgery or edit the DNA of your alien sims to have another skin tone.  That's the only way I can suggest how to fix existing alien sims.

Last night I was attempting to create a package file to make default alien skin replacement.  I built it from scratch from a tutorial on MTS2, and used Maxis S1 skintones for testing.  The package file worked, but I noticed that the adult male skin did not appear to change when I used the testing cheat to make him fit.  I tested the teen male too and saw the same thing.  After a replacing the fit, normal, and fat textures in my default alien skin replacement file with different skin tone colors, I discovered that the game was using the normal body texture for all fitness states.  The game uses the correct mesh, but not the correct texture.

To check and see whether this was a mistake on my part, or a Maxian bug, I downloaded a few other default alien replacement skins from MTS2 and looked at them in SimPE.  One didn't even have textures for any of the fit or fat bodies.  It only had replacements for the normal body textures for both genders, teen through elder. (Seems this is a known bug.) The others did include textures for fit and fat bodies, but in my testing the game still only used the normal body texture for all fitness states.

It turns out that I've already stumbled across a work around.  If you create a replacement pollination technican with a custom skin tone, the game will use the correct texture on each fitness state.  I used fwiffo's Multi-PT Kit to create a replacement PT hack back in December.  For that hack I had created a custom alien skin based off the Maxis S1 skin tone recolored green.  The skin is fairly close to the Maxis alien skin, just a slightly deeper green and not quite as bright.  After some testing (by replacing some of the textures in my custom skin package file) it looks like the game is using the correct fit and fat textures.   

You can download my PT replacement hack here.  The hack file comes with 2 sims:  Maxis' Pollination Technician (from PatchesSim2's simpage) and my avatar sim both of whom use my custom alien skin tone and custom black eyes.  They share pollination duties 50/50.  There are 2 other versions of the hack file available on that thread too.  One makes PT the sole pollinator, and the other makes my avatar sim the sole pollinator.

This hack is not a replacement of the default alien skin.  It won't affect aliens already born in the game.  It will use the custom sims I created as the new alien fathers and use their skin, eye color, and face for the alien genetics.

This hack won't take affect until your neighborhood has had one alien birth.  The first alien birth always seems to use Maxis' original PT, alien skin, and alien eyes.  After that, future abductions should be handled by the hack.  The Maxis alien eyes seem to be linked to the alien skin, I don't think you'll ever see them passed down independently of the skin.  But with this hack, and the custom black eyes, they will.  The S4 skin tone actually looks pretty good with solid black eyes (IMO). 

I wish I had know this before I spend a few hours last night in SimPE creating an default alien skin replacement package file.  Oh well, at least I picked up a SimPE skill point.   

I was going to edit my reply, because I wrote that after doing one problematic image.  So I did them all (33 images) in DXT5 and the file size doubled from 15MB to 30MB.  So there's a trade off.  I probably should have only gone to DXT5 if necessary, but I didn't notice the file size increase until all was said and done.  Sometimes using DTX5 produced very dramatic improvements and other times it produced only subtle changes that might not have been worth the extra file size.

I used FastStone Image Viewer to batch convert the bmps to pngs.  It's free, too.

Well, thanks for answering.  Build Dxt is pretty low on the menu, and Import is at the top.  I don't think that's it.  I could re-import the image and it wouldn't make a difference.  Ah well. 

I saw the mipmap thing once before when I was trying to make a default alien skin.  So I was wondering if that was standard or something.

edit:  I found a solution to the importing.  After I click on Build DXT and select the image, I've found that switching the format to DXT5Format seems to solve the problem.  The pics look a bit better too once they are imported.

Thanks for your tutorial, angelyne.  I used it to create default skins for someone at MTS2.  I had 2 questions maybe you or someone else can answer:

1.  The default skin files I got from MTS2 and used had inconsistent mipmap levels for the skin textures.  All the mipmap levels in the S1 skin were set at 1, and in the other 3 tones the male bodies were set at 4 while every other 1024x1024 texture was set at 11.  Should I have corrected this?  Does it not matter?  Or is it set that way for a reason?

2.  I adjusted the skin tones on some of the textures to match the faces, and when I imported those png files into the default skin package file with the Build DTX command I had some cases where the image was altered.  Some colors were replaced with others and there were blocks of incorrect color over the image.  Is this a bug in Nvidia's DDS utilites?  I found that if I imported the altered images into the game with BodyShop and then exported them back out as a project and then used those bmp files (converted into pngs) the images would look ok. 

However I'm seeing the same issue again with the S1 Maxis defaults for some of the male body textures.  (I'm trying to create a default skin template package file using the Maxis default skintones).  I was wondering if anybody else had seen this and if there is a work around.  I could export the problematic pics and correct them, but I don't know why some colors don't 'stick' and are replaced with others.  I could probably be careful and recolor the offending blocks with colors already in the exported image, but that seems like a lot of work.

As soon as I scanned with thumbnails, I didn't have to include that check box on future scans in the same session, which I did to check that I hadn't forgotten anything.  It also went much faster even if I did leave the box checked.  The first time took quite a while.  I don't know if the thumbnails are saved by SimPE or need to be recreated each time SimPE is run.  I haven't rerun SimPE again to find out.

Thanks for the tutorial.  I'm trying to change the catagories of some of the clothes I've downloaded.  I have SimPE 0.54.  I had to select both the clothing option and the thumbnail option in the scanner or I didn't have any thumbnails of the clothes.  Not even in the box on the bottom right when they were seleced.  Once I rescanned with the thumbnail option checked everything worked fine.

I tweaked the female faces a bit.  I started off making all the males in Bodyshop, then converted them to females in CAS.  The game tends to make their jaws and chin very small, so mostly I corrected that so their face wasn't cut off at the lips.  If you make a balanced female face in CAS and convert it to a male, I saw the same thing in reverse:  big jaws and large chins.  If I do another set I might tweak the childer and toddler faces.  They tend to look very weird, especially the children.  But that would mean making even more sims and since I never make toddlers children in CAS I'm not sure what good it would do.

I thought that might be it.  I hadn't tried it yet since I stopped playing Malcom and then new sim I'm playing hasn't gotten that want yet.

I was playing Malcom and he had a want to make a sale to a particular sim.  So I had him make a Basic Sales pitch.  Later the sim bought the object, and Malcom even rung them up, but didn't get the want fulfilled.  I don't know if that's a glitch or something I just didn't do right.  I'll have to look in the Prima Guide to see how to fulfill that want.  I'll keep an eye out on his wants too.

I've made my own CAS templates replacements using Simposieum self sims.  They can be downloaded from this thread:  http://www.simposieum.com/smf/index.php?topic=657.msg14817#msg14817  I don't have pics of all 27 faces used, but there is a photobucket album with some of the new townies that were created.  All the self sims were used with permission, with the possible exception of Pescado's.  He merely replied on the thead I made asking for donations and I took the liberty of assuming he was donating his self sim.  (So, JM - if you're not ok with it, let me know and I'll remove it.)

I used one self sim for each template family, creating a male/female pair from each self sim, and created replacements for all age groups.  I found that for each template family, I could get the facial data for all age groups and genders by creating a male toddler and a female teen in CAS and using those package files to extract the data.  I did not find it necessary to make a sim for each age group.  (It's actually easier to create a female child because they don't need you to assign aspiration and turn ons/offs.)  I used AllenABQ's default templates from MTS2 and combined them into 27 package files so there would be one package file for each template family containing all age groups and both genders.  Then I followed Motoki's tutorial to extract and replace all the geometric container data. 

Along the way I also created separate txt files with the list of all the GDC names for each template family.  I could make those available for upload if anyone is interested.  It would save you some time if you doing a full set.  I actually did a test set, the Simposieum set, then finally a set for my own use.  I actually ended up with a whole nested folder system to stream line the extraction and replacement process, but still it's a bit tedious.  Needless to say I won't be doing that again anytime soon.  (Although someday I'd like to make a set of alien looking templates and used them in different XP account.)

edited for clarity.

I do the same thing.  I've been putting the phones on the floor and having the other sim make a call from it in order to get it to their inventory.  I've also tried to recycle cell phones from sims that are about to die to sims that have just aged to a teen (save a trip to a community lot, I guess).  At least now I can put it in their inventory right away and I won't have to remember where on the floor I put the cell phone.  Those things are tiny!