Hair sorting - beyond binning. (Anal, I know. Ribbing expected. Arrrr!)

[LurkingCat]

I've been sorting/binning/weeding through my hairs (using the Wardrobe Wrangler.) Whew! What a job! Thank you JFade! 

Is there any way to make all my shiney sorted recolors be together in the CAS catolog per style? If I have 3 shades of brown hair of the same style/mesh - how do I get them to appear next to each other in CAS?

For example: I have a zillion black recolors of Raon's #20 (with various streaks and patterns) all neatly binned to black, but Buffy's are on one page in the catolog, Apache's a few pages away, Shadysim's on another, etc... how do I get them lined up next to each other? I've tried renaming their file names (so they are together in my 'hair' folder) but, that seems to have no effect. Is this possible to do?

Thanks for your help! 

[Lord Darcy]

Adjust the sortindex number in BINX.

[LurkingCat]

Thanky! I'll give it a go.
 


...uh - I opened a hair in SimPE and found the BINX numbers with no problem. My Q is: do I need to modify each of the sort index #'s? The hair I opened had 7 (I think.) And, does it matter what I change them to?

And, is there a way to edit in the Wrangler?

[J. M. Pescado]

You only need to edit one of them. Editing any of the others will break it.

[jfade]

And, is there a way to edit in the Wrangler?

No, unfortunately there is no way to edit BINX files in the Wrangler. I won't promise to add it either because I know I don't have time.

[LurkingCat]

Ya know, you people really are awesome!
Thank you.


OK - I tried it. It didn't work. I am not awesome.
I only tried one hair (Helga #91) that I have "recolors all over the place" of and, well, they're still all over the place...

I altered the first (#1) of the BINX numbers only - and I changed each to be the same throughout the 'family' of the hairstyle. No worky.
I did notice (when I was checking things in game) that the Frag. sort index number changed; higher numbers were at the front of the catolog with CC - lower CC numbers in the middle, and when the Eaxis hairs started the numbers got larger again (kindof a B.C./A.D. thing.)

I don't know where to find those numbers - will altering them help?

Thanks again. 

[Lord Darcy]

You only need to edit one of them. Editing any of the others will break it.

Really? The sortindex numbers on all 6~7 BINXes included in a single hair recolor are identical, at least in custom hairs. If I want to group them together for all age groups, not for just one age group, shouldn't I give a new sortindex number to all BINXes included in a given recolor? I've done it on several hairs without breaking them.

I did notice (when I was checking things in game) that the Frag. sort index number changed; higher numbers were at the front of the catolog with CC - lower CC numbers in the middle, and when the Eaxis hairs started the numbers got larger again (kindof a B.C./A.D. thing.)

Changing sortindex number (hex) will change Frag sort index number (dec) which you can see in CAS debug mode, yes. For example, if sortindex number on one of blond recolor is 0x000010EC, you give 0x000010ED to another blond, 0x000010EE to yet another blond... you get the idea. The recolor with the largest sortindex number will show up first in CAS or Bodyshop, but only within a same bin. EAxian skins are sorted into EP bins, which the game uses to sort skins in accordance with the EP order.

[LurkingCat]

OK. This is starting to make sense.

When it didn't work, I went back to SimPE to change the BINX numbers back as they were before (I didn't do the 'back-up' method, as these were hairs I really didn't care for all that much) Anyway - when I went to change them back I saw that even though I'd only changed the first number, all 7 numbers had changed. Maybe it's a short-cut to only change one?

If the sort index number and Frag. index number are the same (hex/dec,) then why didn't the hairs line up together in CAS? Does each hair need it's own number? Or, can all the blonde recolors of a style/family share the same Frag. index number ? I made them all the same.

Maybe I did something wrong - I'll double check and try it again. I noticed another anomoly in that a few of the tool tips I had changed didn't appear changed in the game. Maybe I'm losing my mind...

[tunaisafish]

I don't know if this is related...
http://www.simbology.com/smf/index.php/topic,2017.msg40725.html#msg40725

Basically, there's a file in the Thumbnails that was stopping the catalog from being reordered.
Could try backing those up, then deleting them to force the game to recreate the files.