More Awesome Than You!

I haven't seen a fix for this anywhere, so my apologies if it already exists.  This hack fixes the age group and gender fields for the alien eye Texture Overlay XML file, creating a new default for that file.  It does not conflict with alien default eye textures because the texture overlay XML (XTOL) shouldn't be included in any defaults.  If you aren't aware of the issue, here's a demo:

Maxis alien skin tone with custom alien eyes:

(http://img142.imageshack.us/img142/4091/alieneyesbeforetn8.th.png) (http://img142.imageshack.us/my.php?image=alieneyesbeforetn8.png)

The same as above, with my fix included:

(http://img142.imageshack.us/img142/5986/alieneyesafterle5.th.png) (http://img142.imageshack.us/my.php?image=alieneyesafterle5.png)

It should be fine, but if anyone here has a few aliens in play I would appreciate help in verifying that it works.

EDIT:  Oops, forgot to attach it.  Fixed!

EDIT 2: I'm updating this because I learned that the same problem can occur with alien hybrids: by default, Maxis made the eyes dependent upon the skintone, so a child who inherits alien eyes but not the skintone will end up with textureless eyes.  Not cool!  The problem is fixed with the same file.

EDIT 3: I asked Pescado to include this in vampwerefixes (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,1482.0.html).  If you have NL, Pets, or Seasons, go use that instead.

I've tried this with partial success. My teenage females with default replacement alien skin/eyes are using the alien eye texture if I do a 'change appearance' in the mirror with them. I'm fairly sure that the eye texture was missing on age transition as it was the usual washed out colour from the skintone texture. I've got a couple more sims that will age up this week so will check again carefully and get back to you.

Does this mean that teen males will need to be patched separately? If yes, would you mind supplying a fix for them too? Or detail the changes you made so that I can fix my own. I looked into this problem a while back and figured out how to workaround it in SimPE but this is a proper fix, so baaa! Thank ye.  :)

All I did was change the age group and gender codes for the base game eyes to match the codes used in the other 5 Maxis eye colors.  For whatever reason (stupidity?), Maxis did not make alien eyes work for all ages and genders.  With this fix in place, all of your sims should have working alien eyes.  I'm not too surprised that pre-existing teens don't get the proper texture until changing appearance, but I can't imagine why it isn't working on age transition -- that's very odd.  If you want to look at it yourself, the XTOL file this hack replaces is "uuface_eye_alien", which is inside skins.package in Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2\TSData\Res\Catalog\Skins.

I had another teen transition tonight and her eyes worked perfectly. It might be that the other teen transitioned before I put the hack in - I've been averaging 12 sims in that particular household so keeping track has been a little hit and miss.

I'm also amazed that this hasn't been addressed earlier as the bug has been there as long as there have been aliens in the game, though Eaxis might see fit to patch it now you've provided the correct fix.  ;) It'll be nice to have the alien eyes appear on 'normal' skinned sims too.

Yay correctness! This has been bugging me for years now. I haven't had many aliens lately, so I'd forgotten about this friendly little screw-up. But, I digress, baa, baa!