More Awesome Than You!

So, I'm getting ready to update the Wardrobe Wrangler (http://www.djssims.com/index.php?category=1&subcat=5) for probably the last time (I know, I know, it's been forever, leave me alone! :P ) I'm basically only planning on making a few minor changes, the biggest being to make it so townifying skintones no longer hides them in CAS.

However, I'm open to some suggestions and ideas for features or other things that may be borked that need fixed. So, anyone have any good ideas for changes/features? Does anyone even use this anymore? Should I bother? :P Discussion wanted...

EDIT:

Go here: http://code.google.com/p/wardrobewrangler/ to get the latest debug builds.
If you have a feature idea, submit it HERE (http://code.google.com/p/wardrobewrangler/issues/list?can=1&q=&sort=status&colspec=ID%20Type%20Status%20Priority%20Milestone%20Owner%20Summary). Check to make sure your idea isn't already listed before submitting a new one. This is also how you submit bugs that you find. :P

You might consider getting with CatOfEvilGenius and see if you can incorporate her extra-texture-remover thingy into it...

I would LOVE it if you could set the eye-dominance slider to be like the skintone-slider, to allow for intermediate values.  I don't see much point in geneticizing eyes at a value of 3 or 4, but it would be nice to be able to set light browns, dark greens, medium blues, hazels, at a dominance of 1.5, for instance.  I did that with my custom eyes in SimPE, but there are far fewer steps to do that with the Wardrobe Wrangler, and there's currently no way to set intermediate values outside of SimPE.

Is that actually allowed? Huh. I didn't know that was allowed, so that explains why I didn't allow that. I was trying to make it so the Wrangler could basically NOT break anything by generally preventing people from screwing around too much. Though there always was the advanced tab.... Anyhow, provided that's allowed, I can easily add that.

How about a setting allowing you to set a hair color to Custom as well as the standard Red\Brown\Black\Blond\Grey? There are quite a few hair colors that should rightfully be under Custom but are under black instead, like a hot pink or neon green. Does the wardrobe wrangle remove hair from certain ages as well? Like how some hair styles do not have a child, and need that age state removed so that you do not have 20 freaking maxis meshes as placeholders. If it doesn't, could it do that? I admit that I use Simpe primarily for hair at the moment because of that custom issue.

I'll second that request.  Especially if you can figure out what needs to be done to make a hair in the custom bin work properly in a family with its mates in the other bins.  Theo's plugin used to be able to do that, but for some reason it no longer works.

Would it be possible to make a function that un-hides already townified skintones?

This was actually in the first version but removed because it didn't work. I have yet to find a way to fix this problem properly. The way I was trying to go about doing it was creating a new, random bin ID number, but this did not function properly, at least in my tests. If anyone has ideas about how to properly go about doing this, I can implement it.

The second thing you mentioned IS available but does not remove the textures. Consult the manual for how that works.

I could make it so that if you townify an existing skintone it'll fix it, yes.

Thanks for the ideas so far, keep them coming!

Big second to all the suggestions that give the Wrangle the ability to bring custom hair closer and closer to "Pescado Approved" file size.  Removal of extra textures and auto redirection to the remaining texture. I discovered a few custom content creators that apparently think that having a grey texture for every bin and using flags to hide all but one of them in CAS is the same as having only one grey texture.

I use the WW all the time and was so sorry to see the forum go.
Tips:
The 'update accessories to BV' feature does not fully work: it is not possible to set the accessories to specific BV destinations, or to set them as collectible.  
A new feature I would love to see is the ability to set sort index numbers. It controls the order in which clothing etc. appears in CAS for example. It would be great to group clothes belonging to special bodyshapes together, otherwise they are so difficult to manage. Maybe you could even implement sort of bins for it, but just the ability to change them (and maybe sort list by them) would be great.

Using a program that creates Collections might be a faster/easier solution for that.

@Jfade:
On the jewelry. It would nice to be able to edit jewelry that's been updated. I have an earring that I mislabeled left when it should be right. =p

Using a program that creates Collections might be a faster/easier solution for that.

[/quote]
Yeah, in CAS it may be so, but there are no collections when you are buying clothes, and consequently when you use hacked clothes-changes objects either. Sort index is also useful to group together make-up and other accessories within the same sub-category.

I think the reason I didn't do the relinking thing is that, IIRC, linking is done in some goofy resource (I think it was the SHPE or MATD or something like that) that I don't have the ability to edit yet. I remember looking at the spec for one of those (whichever one it is, I can't remember) and being horrified. :P So relinking isn't probably going to happen. If I can make an efficient algorithm for determining which texture is connected to whichever property set you're removing, I can remove the extra textures as well.

Ah. Well, I guess I can remove the special sections then since they can't be added to. I like the idea of coming up with bin sort numbers, will have to toy with that later. I can't remember offhand if I have a BINX editor yet but I've written one before so I can rewrite it cause the BINX resource is easy to edit.


I can undo that, it was set as a safety feature originally, though I can't recall why now. :P

Also, recently, when I was enabling accessories for outerwear, I noticed that copying categories to all also copied the gender option checked, in a file which had parts for various ages and genders. I'm not sure that's intentional. Anyway, maybe the other way round would be more useful: retaining gender option and copying clothing category to all.

I would love it if hair is also binnable to the correct eyebrow color. I always do that seperately in simpe.

Just a simple one--could you make it possible to move a single garment to another folder instead of having to move everything you've found in the sort.

Otherwise I love WW.

I've seen some eyesets that have five or six levels of dominance, ranging from 1 to 2.  I've geneticized my eyes that way, and so far, nothing's broken.  Some SimKiddies I had with hazel eyes geneticized at 1.5 married people with custom eyes set to a dominance of 1, and all their SimKiddies ended up with the dominant eyes.  In my experience, intermediate values won't break anything, and if it's do-able, THANK YOU!

Is this process identical to the one used to bin hair?

Should be able to add a context menu to do that, yes.

I do use WW.  Would love to have a batch mode.  Let me select multiple files, for example 20 outfits, and do the same thing to all of them, for example, set their category to outerwear.  This is what I primarily use WW for, and it takes me a while to do them individually.  If WW already has batch mode and I just haven't figured out how to use it, I'll feel pretty silly. ;)

Duplicate texture removal would be handy.  As AmberDiceless mentioned, I am working on this.  I can remove dupes from individual files, but I cannot yet find duplicates that may be used by several files, put them in just one file, and make the other files link to it.  That's planned for the future.  If you would rather tackle this project and incorporate it into WW, I have no problem with that.  If my source would be of use to you, I'll share it.  It's not up yet because I don't consider it polished enough yet to share, but if you want it, you can have it.

Since it seems our last chance, I'll likely have quite a few more suggestions.
- Setting skintone genetic value still does not work for me: moving the slider causes error (System.FormatException: Input string was not in a correct format), and overwriting the genetic value does not move the slider, nor does it get saved. 
- Support for image sizes 812x1623, 128x256, 512x128, 256x128. And maybe instead of the pop-up window at an unsupported image size, just a window or image that does not have to be clicked to go on?
- Ability to enlarge the file list window, or even to scroll left and right to see file names even in recursive mode. 
- Ability to remove unneeded (non-duplicate) texture files would be lovely. Like the two in each Liana accessory with white spots against black background.

Or the multiple alpha textures in Peggy hairs?  >:(

I'd like the ability to remove "townify" from clothes also.

I accidentally townified a pair of pants by fanseelamb that are cut very low to be worn with long shirts. They look utterly ridiculous with regular shirts which of course will be chosen by the game for the tops. I ended up deleting the file and re-downloading it.

Oh my. O_o

The ability to change the tooltip field would be cool too. For those accessories that you cannot see in the thumbnail preview.

The ability to insert the file name as tooltip in one click would still be a wonderful addition.

Gods, yes!  This is badly needed.  Forgot to request this in my previous post, but vetyak jogged my brain.

I third that.... please  :D

Binning facial hair and eyebrows in a manner similar to binning Hair would be awesome. They are genetics after all.

On that subject, is it possible to townie-fy eyebrows and facial hair or would just binning them work? Anyone know? I admit that I haven't taken the time to try to bin them and am wondering if I should take the time to bother. I use Mirablu's Facial hair for townies hack and am curious if that would include any custom ones I bothered to bin, that would give me more incentive to do the rest ...I'm not sure how that hack does it though.

Facial hair and eyebrows can be both binned and townified, yes--there's a thread around here someplace on the subject.  An issue with that is that damn near every single guy generates with facial hair if you do it.  (I fixed this in my own game by making a bunch of invisible townified facial hair so many dudes look like they don't have any.)  For the record, you can also townify glasses and other accessories, which then turn up less annoyingly often for some reason.  Doing all of the above makes an enormous difference in the variety of Sims you get in CAS.

Ahhh, thank you for answering my question. While it is distressing that so many spawn with facial hair, I think that I could deal with that and just open up a nice beauty parlor downtown for that purpose. Shave and an Hair cut, two bits.

Un-awesome speaking up here, but the Maxis custom hairs are binned as 00000006-0000-0000-0000-000000000000. I've binned a few hairs manually using this, myself, and it works fine. Also prevents them from showing up in CAS (available from mirror only), which may be a good or bad thing, depending on your point of view (I think it's a good thing, I don't want custom hair to be genetic).

Another suggestion: a file-opening system that remembers which folder you opened last, or ability to select several folders at once - especially for the mass-townify function? I have many clothes split up in separate folders and it's a pain to open each and every one.

Well that is interesting to know. seems like a good idea for certain dyed versions of hairs I have(where the textures look like they have streaks). Can't say that I'd want to do that with ALL of my custom hair however.

Theo's plugin for Simpe bin hairs as custom, what does it bin them to?

You have a PM. :)

Yeah, I want to fix the genetic slider issue eventually. When you move the slider and the text box is updated, what does it say? That or can you copy and paste the exact error in a PM or something?
Who on Earth uses 812x1623? Talk about non-standard. I can change the popup to just be status window text or something.
If you maximize the Wrangler window the file list will increase in size. I can see about adding the horizontal scroll as well.
That's something I'm working on, possibly anyhow... We'll see...

Can be done, I believe. Will have to look into this.

You should be able to do this already, unless I'm misunderstanding.

That was one of the things I wanted to do, but never got around to doing. I'm going to have to make some keyboard shortcuts for some of this stuff. :P

This was originally disabled for security, but I can re-enable it.

Interesting. At the least, this can be added as a new option.

Re: the file opening/remembering system, that can possibly be done. However, you don't have to open all the folders separately. Check the recursive box. :P

I have no idea, that's probably what I'm going to have to look into to find out. Or I'll PM him. Or he can post here. Whichever happens first. :P





Side point: Any of you programming-type peoples out there (I know you lurk around here! :P), would you be interested in helping out with this? If so, shoot me a PM. I'm thinking of opening this up and making it more open to multiple contributors.

I use WW regularly.

I would agree with the removing extra textures from hair mentioned above.

Would it be possible to also create a sorting mechanism to search all recolors of a particular mesh and move them to the same folder/subfolder or even delete them? 

How about a create-a-collection ability for CAS items (ie. so we make custom collection file to include clothes, hair, makeup, accessories etc.)?

I would like this, too. Besides giving you the ability to group all similar clothing items together, you could also group all similar hairstyles together. Then a user could switch between different types of, e.g., ponytails without a lot of scrolling through the catalog. Or recolors of a hair mesh made by different creators at different dates could be listed close to each other, instead of at opposite ends of the catalog.

Error message sent in PM.
812x1623 necklaces are by a creator called Elynia at www.elynia.it. Now you know :) Changing the popup to simple text or whatever would be most helpful.
So would a horizontal scroll. Longer folder names plus longer file names do not fit in even the maximised WW file list window in recursive mode.
Also, maybe you would reconsider giving up on the function to upgrade to BV destinations? The method described by Captain Swooptie in your old thread (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,9516.0.html) certainly works with SimPE. Standard BV upgrade works already in WW, and the only difference would be the Instance number in the 3DIR Collection field. I even tried upgrading stuff to BV with WW and then changing this number, but WW must change something else as well, as it does not work that way.

OK, so I've created a Google Code project for this...

http://code.google.com/p/wardrobewrangler/

Don't laugh at the code. :P

I'm in the process of adding feature requests to the issues tracker now. Please add any other suggestions you have (as well as ones I've missed) and I'll review them.

/me laughs at Jfade's code.

I expected as much. :P

When I update it this time around I plan on making it much more organized and not so stupid.

I don't create but I still want to sort out what I download.  Unfortunately, probably because I don't create, I can't make any sense of most of the flattened skins and hair.  Would it be possible to include the thumbnail that I see in the CAS?  Using WW takes me a long time because I spend a lot of it staring at the screen like a backward monkey and I'm never entirely sure what I've accomplished until I open the game again.  I've made a few very bed mistakes.

On a possibly related note:  I've seen several hacks that hide certain Maxi skins but they never match what I want to hide (I hate the gorilla suits) and usually hide at least one set I want to keep (I like the baby bear suits).  I can't find any tutorials on how to hide them myself.  Could this be an adjunct to WW?

Are you going to do a version of WW for Sims3?

Not at this point. How the thumbnail hash is generated is a yet-unsolved problem, so I can't pull thumbnails for the game. This wouldn't help for clothing that you've not installed yet anyhow.

At this point I'm going to have to say no to this request, that's far beyond the current scope of what is currently available.

Perhaps. Is CC going to work the same in the sims 3? Who knows! :P

Actually, I didn't really look at it, I just laughed at it because you told me not to. Therefore, I figured that rather than investing the time to specifically find out why I should laugh at it, I would just take your word for it that something existed to be laughed at, and laugh at it.

Oh... duh. I did wonder what the recursive box was for.  :P Well, thank you. I shall complain no more. :)

One more thing: it would be nice if the 'open in SimPE' button did not open a new copy of SimPE every time. It could just open the file in SimPE if the programme is already running. 

So, discovered something else. What is it about using the wardrobe wrangler to change the hair bin that makes it so that Delphi's download organizer doesn't register that it's changed bins. I use it to sort all of my hair into Brown, Blond, Black so that I can go through each folder and make sure that what they are is actually Brown, Blond, Black. When you change the bin with Simpe, this is reflected the next time you scan the files with DDO, with the wardrobe wrangler it does not.

I second this.  I mostly use WW to townify everything I download, and it's kind of a nuisance going through every single file.

Jfade, I found the tutorial for giving hair the correct eyebrow color. You only have to change one setting in the Hair Tone XML:
http://modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=165931
Hope this helps :)

Once a hair is binned, the correct eyebrow colour will come automatically. No?

Two feature suggestions:

1. A "Hide Me" button for custom content, that would change the appropriate flags with one click. Useful for items you want in game, but don't want cluttering up the catalog, or dependent defaults, which replace, e.g., Maxis skintones, but leave a copy of themselves in the catalog.

2. A "Bin Filter" for the various accessory and hair bin numbers the WW applies to custom content. That way, one could see quickly if items have been misbinned, e.g., earrings using the left ankle bin number, or hats using the shoulders bin number, etc. Should make it faster to narrow down problem files.

No, sadly it does not pick the right eyebrow color automatically. I found out after someone emailed me, asking about it.

Not sure (I could not find any information on the subject when I looked) but I think Theo's color binning tool does automatically set eyebrow color.  At least I've never noticed mismatches after using it.

I see! For some reason I wasn't able to use that one without it deleting the recolors or creating empty packages.

Eyebrows are not part of hair. Correctly binned hair will set eyebrow color correctly when first chosen in CAS, but you can give sims incorrect eyebrow colors deliberately, like real-life weirdo dyejob freaks, so this has never been automatic post-CAS.

I would also like the ability to change the sort index, so that similar clothes/hairs will be grouped together.  Adding a batch mode, so multiple files can be selected and then batch change the sort number. Adding the filename as a tooltip would be handy too.