anyone noticed this in CAS?

[jrd]

Back on topic for the first post:

by default DNA-generated faces are "normalized" to the templates. You can switch this behaviour off with a cheatcode:

faceBlendLimits off

This works in userstartup.cheat

[Bangelnuts]

Back on topic for the first post:

by default DNA-generated faces are "normalized" to the templates. You can switch this behaviour off with a cheatcode:

faceBlendLimits off

This works in userstartup.cheat

thanks for the hint

[AllenABQ]

Well, I have some bad news and some good news.

Concerning the elders. Good news. I used the amArchCaus geometry files (That's the 18th male face in BS or CAS) and took these to replace the the emArchCaus geometry files. This works fine: the old man resulting out of this looks fine. I noticed that the game adds some tweaking to the face, the same way it does when switching from young adult to adult. This works in the game, in CAS and in BS.

Concerning the teens. Bad news. You can't just do what I did with the elders. The face gets completely distorted because the mesh coordinates are verticaly way too heigh. Besides, the resulting face doesn't look like belonging to a teen. Same behaviour in the game, in CAS and in BS. I guess that the teen templates must be completely rebuild.

And now rather good news: The game uses the new templates when calculating a new face geometry: I had a afArchHeart (1st female adult with original template) marry a amArchCaus (18th adult male with new template). I made them have a male child in CAS. That child took most of its genetic appearance out of the male. Lets say the game took 10% out of afArchHeart and 90% out of amArchCaus and transformed this in 10% cuArchHeart and 90% cuArchCaus. (cu stands for Child Unified, I think). Since the xxArchCaus templates are quite ugly, the child was also very ugly. Growing that child older in the game, in CAS and in BS resulted in the game using the new templates of tmArchCaus, amArchCaus and emArchCaus to calculate the new face geometry when reaching the corresponding ages. tmArchCaus was still completely distorted so it was pretty obvious that the game was using the new template.

Another solution has yet to be found for the teens, but I think the new template stuff is really going to work.   

Well I've got some sorta good/sorta bad news too.

First, that's great that elders can essentially use the same geometry files as adults.  Just eyeballing differences on the screen, I've noticed that elder mouths are turned downward at the corner a few clicks, but that's no great loss to the mesh.

Teens... I'm utterly confused.  When I created the new adult templates, naturally I made sims of them that I could extract the face data from.  It turns out that those sims ("Caus", for example) translate facial geometry properly when I clone them in BodyShop and make them a teen.  So you'd think, GREAT! no having to rebuild.  Well, yes that's true at least for the sims I've created.  But then I went into BodyShop and started with a fresh sim based on "Heart".  I saved her. Cloned her.  Then used the clone to set to teen.  ...  She reverted to the unchanged teen "Heart" template.  argh!!!  I even tried it again, this time not only modifying her face ever so slightly with the face sliders, quitting BodyShop, changing the name of the file in the Saved Sims directory, and restarting.  Cloned her and changed her to teen.  STILL binding to the unchanged teen face.

ARGH!!

In short, I'm not sure WHAT I did to my sims that makes them unbound now.  Maybe someone will figure it out, but it looks like that for now I have the only sims where I can derive teen versions with a few simple clicks instead of rebuilding the face entirely.  Here's my "Caus" teens made from cloned "Caus" adults:


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[Motoki]

Well one thing I figured out is if you are going to do all the ages, take the original sim you are basing them templates on before you make him or her a template, change that sim to teen, then save as a new sim, change to elder, then save, the other gender then save and change the ages again for that gender etc.

If you make them a template first and make a sim based on the template then as you pointed out Allen it will revert to the original template when you change their age.

[Erdehel]

Thank you Motoki,

You're a very resourcefull person 
I have now a complete set of the "caus" templates: PU, CU, TM, AM, EM, TF, AF and EF. The set works in CAS and in BS. I didn't try it in the game yet.

If someone wants to try it, here it is. Put the files in your download folder. To undo simply remove the files. Sims created on base of these templates will keep their face until next face calculation. This is the first time I upload something, suggestions are welcome. If there are any complaints this upload will be removed and I will never upload sim stuff again.



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[Motoki]

  You replaced them ALL? Wow that's dedication.

Downloading now, I'll give them a try. I'm curious to see if any Maxis features still pop up with a full template replacement for all age groups.

[Bangelnuts]

Thank you Motoki,

You're a very resourcefull person 
I have now a complete set of the "caus" templates: PU, CU, TM, AM, EM, TF, AF and EF. The set works in CAS and in BS. I didn't try it in the game yet.

If someone wants to try it, here it is. Put the files in your download folder. To undo simply remove the files. Sims created on base of these templates will keep their face until next face calculation. This is the first time I upload something, suggestions are welcome. If there are any complaints this upload will be removed and I will never upload sim stuff again.

wow that was quick thanks

[AllenABQ]

OK, a little more quick experimentation today with the set of adult templates I created.  Thankfully it appears at this point that the templates DO NOT exert effects on previously-made playable sims when they age transition.  I had a one recently-created CAS family where I let the child generator determine the face of a girl.  I aged her to teen then adult with the aging cheat.  No template effects kicked in.  What a relief.  Of course she was a composite of mom and dad, so I believe if you had made a CAS sim that was 100% template in origin then then you might see an aging affect.  But I don't have any sims like that in my game to test.

I've got a rather busy week ahead of me with school assignments.  I probably won't be able to devote much time to this again until after Thursday.  I do intend to make a full set of all ages from the templates I started.  But it is time consuming and won't get done this week.   

[witch]

This sounds both tedious and complicated. Thank you very much for being so persistant. 

[Erdehel]

This sounds both tedious and complicated. Thank you very much for being so persistant. 

As a matter of fact, once you have spotted the right sim to work with, it takes less than 15 minutes to build a complete set.  There are 27 sets... I would like to replace about 20 of them in my game. It's a bit tedious, but not complicated.

The biggest problem is to find a correct sim to work with. I now have 2 complete sets, I made them with ingame born sims. The sims hace to be quite different in their appearance so that the game will generate a wide variety of faces. That's gonna be the difficult part of this. I'm not able to build 20 completely different sims... when I build new sims they all have something common in the way they look... 

[AllenABQ]

Just a progress report.  I'm slowly making a complete set of templates that includes all ages (with my previous adult age sets used as the starting point).  I have six done so far.  About 20 left... 

Motoki, I was thinking this would make a great official tutorial to put up somewhere like on MTS2's message board or some such.  Would you have any interest in making one?  Or would you object to my doing it and you getting marquee credit?

I also figure that since I'm extracting every single face mesh out of the "CASFaces" package, that it would be a real waste to have people do THAT tedious part all over again.  So I'm saving the base extracted template files and thinking it would be great to zip them up and offer them for download somewhere -- ideally as part of said tutorial I mentioned.

[Motoki]

I haven't really participated at MTS2 for some time now, but I've thought of having it put up there as a tutorial. I would have done it myself, but the mods have to do it. I suppose I should contact Numenor or someone like that and ask if he wants to put it up there or at Quaxi's place since I think he's a mod there too.

Also if anyone else wants to repost it just via copy and paste somewhere else feel free to do so. No need to credit me either unless you want to. I did put the tutorial up in Peasantry just so it didn't get buried in the thread here and I also added the part about deleting the CAS thumbnails that you discovered Allen.

[AllenABQ]

Hey Motoki...

I've encountered a really weird problem.  In BodyShop it appears that two face templates are missing from every age group except the adults.  I've identified one by name as "CSLA" (right before the elf face).  The other I haven't found yet but for myself every age group has 25 face templates except for the adults which have 27.   Oddly enough, the missing faces for those ages ARE in the "CASFaces" package, they just don't appear to show up.  Even worse, the two adult sims I made by improving the adult CSLA face revert to other face templates when changed to different age groups.

I was wondering if you can verify the same issue in your setup?  I'm sorta stumped as to how to figure out a workaround.  I've tried extracting the missing faces from "CASFaces" and placing them in as package files in the Downloads folder but they are ignored. I even took out all my custom face templates and reloaded BodyShop on the off-chance one name group was somehow overwriting the other but the problem persisted.

[Motoki]

I'll check it when I get home. It's possible they put a flag to hide those facial templates in the bodyshop for other age groups. I know they use a flag to hide stuff like work and npc outfits from showing up in the bodyshop. They do some other weird things too. Like somehow that elf template is excluded from being used on townies and npcs, but I'm not quite sure how they do that.

If you want to check those facial templates, see what the flag setting is for them in the CASFaces file. If it's anything other than all zeros that's probably what's hiding them.

[AllenABQ]

Ah... I'm not familiar with the flag setting or where to look for it.  Went through various tabs showing information and didn't see one called flag.   

Can you describe where it is in the "CASFaces" file?  If not, no biggie.  This isn't a rush thing.

BTW, the other one that has missing age groups is "CPER".

[Motoki]

I'm not really sure where it is, but I think it should be there. It's there for clothing with the property set stuff and depending on how the flag is set the clothing will either show up or be hidden in the bodyshop.

I'll take a look and dig for it when I get home. I think with the clothing it was in the catalog file but not sure where they hid it for the faces.

[AllenABQ]

I just confirmed that the faces DO NOT show up in CAS either, even when the game is in debug mode to show hidden stuff. 

[SaraMK]

Has anyone else run into a problem with the teen females? I wanted to replace the Cara template, but the Teen Female does not have a LOD15 file for it, just the regular file. The Teen Male has both, and so do all the other ages. What the heck?

[AllenABQ]

Has anyone else run into a problem with the teen females? I wanted to replace the Cara template, but the Teen Female does not have a LOD15 file for it, just the regular file. The Teen Male has both, and so do all the other ages. What the heck?

I hadn't gotten around the extracting the teen templates yet, but I've done all the other ages.  And I noticed that the LOD15 file is also missing for the CPER and CSLA faces for toddlers.  That's the same templates that aren't showing up at all except for adults.  Wonder if there's a connection?

As long as the faces can be used in the game, I don't know if the missing LOD15 files really pose a problem beyond slightly more video memory consumption for sims using those faces.

I'm beginning to wonder if this isn't an oversight in QA on Maxis's part.  Can't think of any significant benefit they'd gain from doing it this way.

Maybe some questions directed at MaxoidTom would clarify a few things...

[Motoki]

Allen, I found where the settings that hide a facial template are stored:

C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2\TSData\Res\Catalog\Skins\Skins.package

Then select "Face Arch XML" from the left hand side. Now in the upper right window are the settings for your face templates, might want to hit the type bar above the window to sort them alphabetically. When you look at each face arch XML lookout for the settings "Flags". If this is set to 0x00000009 the face will be hidden in the bodyshop and CAS. Change it to 0x00000000 and the face will then show.

For example, the alien face templates are hidden, but if I change their flag to all 0s they then show up.

Of course, you don't want to change these settings in this file itself, but rather extract them and then insert them into a new package file and put that in your downloads directory.

*edit: Okay this works for clothes, but I can't seem to get the damned alien templates to show. Also, I looked and there don't seem to be Face Arch XML settings for CSLA for the other age groups. I suppose we could try creating them and see what happens.

*edit #2: Creating a new face arch XML file for the teen CLSA faces is not working for me. When I copied another teach arch xml and changed the name to clsa and the family to the same value that the adult clsa uses, it did not show up. When I copied the adult clsa face arch xml and changed the age to 4 (teen) and the name to tf and tm facearchclsa_clsa it did show up, but the face was at the adult height and had a huge neck stretched to reach it lol

Obviously there's more settings I don't know about or am not seeing, I guess I'm going to have to leave finding how to add those faces to the CAS and the alien ones to a more techie type person. Perhaps you could ask Morague? I hestitate to send anyone over to VS but he (she?) has always been a decent, polite person in my experience and has unlocked a lot of hidden Maxis stuff.

[AllenABQ]

Thanks for looking into this, Motoki.  I might poke around with it a little myself being a techie type.  But my unfamiliarity with the Sims 2 internals would probably not help much unless I devoted some serious study to it which I don't have time for right now.  So perhaps contacting Morague might be beneficial.

It's curious though.  I find it hard to believe no one would have noticed the problem until now, but then the "Skins.package" file has a creation date of 8/17/2004 which is prior to the base game release.

I filed a bug report with Maxis about the missing faces in the other age groups anyway.

P.S. -- I've got 10 fully age-completed replacement templates now.  Hopefully I'll get the rest done over Thanksgiving break.

[Motoki]

I'm honestly not sure if it was a bug or intentional. Seems like a bug, but then again there are some face templates like the aliens they are delibarately hiding so you can only access them through gameplay.

Oh and my skins.package now has a much more recent date on it since the holiday pack modified to add santa claus and a couple of other things. 

[AllenABQ]

well I found another file "globalcatbin.bundle.package" that keeps a text list of all the archtypes referenced in skins.package.  None of the CPER or CSLA age groups except for adults were listed there, so I made a package file to replace that text list with "tfarchcper_cper" appended to it.  That didn't help.  I figured it was a long shot anyway because the alien faces are listed in it, and they don't show up either.

I did notice that the "stretched neck" effect you mentioned came from cloning the adult cper file to make a teen version but not giving the teen version its own unique instance.  In addition to getting the stretched neck, the adult version disappeared from its own group -- sorta like moving it from one age group to another.  But giving the teen version a unique instance didn't get it to show up either, although the adult one returned to the adult group.

Strange...

So is Santa pretty anemic looking?

[Motoki]

Yes, he's pretty damned thin. I think he's just some random sim they slapped the christmas outfit on rather than make a new npc that's a full body mesh. He doesn't go down the chimney either and interacts very minimally with your sims or their house and objects so I don't see how clipping could be an excuse for making him so damned thin.

[Bangelnuts]

Yes, he's pretty damned thin. I think he's just some random sim they slapped the christmas outfit on rather than make a new npc that's a full body mesh. He doesn't go down the chimney either and interacts very minimally with your sims or their house and objects so I don't see how clipping could be an excuse for making him so damned thin.

if heget any thinner he will be see through as in a ghost