Altering DNA: Skintone Range

[neriana]

Well, dormies aren't townies, technically. Maybe the game counts them as NPCs. I don't know if there's a difference between spawning and generating normally, but I think that maybe the game can grab those custom skins for any Sim that's spawned normally, but not for those that are force-spawned. I'd have to know what makes the game decide to generate townies to test it. Will just showing up at a community lot do it?

[jsalemi]

Actually, dormies ARE townies, at least as far as the game is concerned. I made most of the Maxis-made Uni students into dormies by using Inge's teleporter bush to 'make me a townie'. The only difference is that YAs can't normally go to non-Uni lots, though Pescado's Customer Controller does let you have them come to an owned business.

If you don't have the maximum number of townies (I forget what it is -- maybe 32 of mixed ages?), the game will spawn new ones as needed. So yea, going to a comm lot could spawn new ones, and it will occasionally spawn a new one for a walk-by. If there aren't many playables in the hood, it'll spawn townies faster. Otherwise, it will take a while before it sees the need to generate a new one.

Of course, this only applies if you DON'T have notownieregen in your game.

[neriana]

I thought dormies weren't exactly townies because they have code preventing them from dying and because they can be a real pain to marry into a family. But it's good to know that they pretty much are, because that means my extremely tenuous theory may not be completely out there. Maybe the game can use skins with only the flags and not the creator numbers changed if the Sims in question generate normally and not from the mailbox.

[jsalemi]

Well, no, dormies can die -- just put Pescado's nouniprotect in your downloads.  They start dying off in droves after a while, which is a good way to 'thin the herd' and get some new, hopefully better-looking dormies into the game. It's something in the dorm code that keeps them from dying, I believe, not anything in their character files.

And the only issue with marrying them into a family is that you have to move them into the non-uni lot first, so they can age to adult, since YAs can't get married (without hacks, anyway). Sometimes the aging process gets borked, and they don't get the proper number of want slots and locks that they should if they really graduated, but that's easily fixed with TJs' College Adjuster or the Lot Debugger.

[squish]

Maybe the game can use skins with only the flags and not the creator numbers changed if the Sims in question generate normally and not from the mailbox.

All I did was change the flags and it seemed to work that way for me. I'll need to take my sim out and about so I can run into townies and see how they are.

Only two of my dormies were using default skins, the rest (6 or 7 of them) were using the non-default custom skins and it was so nice to see a a bunch of random sims that are DIFFERENT. I'm wanting to go on a skin downloading binge to get even more diversity now ...This is kind of addicting.