More Awesome Than You!

Finally discovering how to bin hair colors properly has lead me to ponder upon a few related possibilities...

I remember that quite some time ago, some talented fellow on MTS2 was making his albino skins read as lighter than the Maxis pale skins by changing its skintone number.

Now, would it be possible to take a custom skin and by changing it to, oh, 00000003-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 have it come out with the same chances of being passed on as the in-game skin of the same number without causing some kind of conflict?

(And on this tack, what exactly are the skintone values for each in-game skintone? Anyone know?)

Now, I was just looking on one of my custom eyes to see if there was any changable number that could affect dominance, but I've yet to find it. Any help on this one?

EDIT: Most of the juicy goodness of this topic (plus a few nuts for added flavor) has been condensed into one fun-sized text document. (http://www.springhole.net/bogsims/tutorials/geneproperties.txt)

I KNOW I did something to my custom eyes to make them not-always-dominant... let's see if I can figure out what by looking at them again.

Okay, it looks like that when you open up an eye in SimPE and look at the Texture Overlay XML it has a line called genetic, which is a single number. For custom stuff it seems like it is 0, which is always dominant over everything else - I think the regular dominance numbers run 1-4, 1 being most dominant and 4 being least. I'm pretty sure that if this is changed on custom eyes it makes them properly genetic. I'm pretty sure this works; I have one sim that has custom purple eyes that I set the genetic to be 4 on that has children with a sim with what looks like default dark blue eyes. Both children have dark blue eyes, but I looked at their genetics just now and they both have the purple as recessive.

I don't know if skintones can be made genetic in the same way, I heard there was some difficulty with it but haven't tried it myself yet.

Renatus is correct, I've changed all my eyes in that way as well, to make them behave genetically correctly.

I also changed the genetic value of my correctely binned custom hair and that seems to work as well.  I made black and brown 1 (dominant) and red and blond 2 ( recessive).  Then I made some tests in CAS generating babies from various parents and it looked like it worked.  Black or brown always dominated over red and blond but if you mixed red and blond it seemed random.  Same for Black and Brown.

I would love to find out how to do it for skins as well.

BTW Renatus, can you point me towards some material that explains how to interpret the DNA of a sims?  I need to undestand that better.

Yesterday was I looking at a sims date and saw a field called skin color in AGE DATA.  It was numbered 1 to 4 and that seemed to correspond to pale thru dark (something like 0000-000-000-0001, I am not at home, so I can't check).  I was wondering what would happened if I change that value.  Would it change the skin?  I was trying to figure out way to change the default skin my sims is using without resorting ot Sims Surgery.

What value, then, would you recommend giving a blue eye color?  I just tried changing an aquamarine color to 4, but found that it was so hyper-recessive that the game favored even gray over it!

Genetic-izing skintones is easy.  You just change the genetic field in the Skintone XML.

Maxis skins, from lightest to darkest, are .10, .30, .60, and .90.  Every non-bizarre (i.e. alien) skin I download gets slotted into this continuum; thus a child of a .10 sim and a .60 sim may end up with something I've categorized as .35, or .12, or .40.

It is perfectly fine to have more than one skin with the same genetic value; for example, I have some skins that are essentially the Maxis defaults with tatoos, and those get categorized as .10, .30, etc.

Skins with genetic value of 0 (i.e. alien or most custom skins) are strictly dominant, although I think there have been some questions about how the dominance of the Maxis alien skin really works.

The "The Mysteries of Sim DNA Unraveled" thread at MST2 is full of this stuff, although it's really really long.  There's plenty of information about eye genetics there too, I think, but as I haven't started messing with eyes myself I can't give you any advice about them.

Edit: thread is http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=19921&page=1&pp=25

Edit 2: Oh, and if you're looking for more stuff to genetic-ize, the same method that works for hair works for eyebrows, beards, etc.  I wouldn't use the 6/custom category for these, though, as I've had questionable results with it.  (The "standard" facial hair that genensims has is categorized this way.)

The new version of SimPE is much more clear on what DNA is what, but I originally used this (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=1423.0) thread by Baratron to figure out what was what in earlier versions. I don't know what Age Data is but I don't think it has anything to do with skin tones. I do know that if one changes the expressed skintone string when one has Nightlife the sim will then express the new skintone back in the game (yay!). The number to change is the 1-4 number in the string - leave the zeros alone! If you want them to express a custom skintone, though, you need to know the exact number for it, and the easiest way to find that out is to look at the DNA with a sim that already has it.  The number order isn't the same as eyes or hair, though, 1 is lightest and 4 is darkest, so be aware of that!

I thought that the game assigned the eye genetics so that dk blue and brown were 1, green was 2, grey was 3 and lt blue was 4, but now I'm not at all sure. Maybe 3 or even 2 would be better for the aqua colour.

I was wondering just the other day if we could alter the Dominant/Recessive Values

/saves page

That's how I heard it described.  0 is custom and will always dominate, 1 is dominant, 2 is recessive, and 3 and 4 are hyper-recessive. 

So I choose 1 for brown/black and 2 for blond/red.  That correspond to mendelian genetics

I'll give 2 a shot.  I tried putting it on 3, and even that was too recessive.  Gah...

The Maxis alien skintone is dominant only when one parent is homozygous to the alien skintone gene. When a parent is heterezygous, with one alien skintone gene and one "regular" Maxis skintone gene, the alien gene turns equal with the regular ones, and has a 50% chance of expressing when inherited.

I changed it to a 2, and that made it Awwl Bettah!

Thanks muchly for your help, guys.  :)  At long last, custom eyes will be a viable option.

THis is a really interesting topic.

Thanks for that info Renatus.  I had read it before and my eyes sorta glazed over, since I had no intention of playing Strangetown, but this is really really useful info. And now that you told me that changing the expressed skintone value also changes the skin in the game, that solves all my problems.  I can go on a blitz and change my skins tones without having to play with Sim Surgery.

Now that Enayla has made some pretty defaults, I am going to introduce more skin colors in my game. Might even try to swap some from default to custom.  The possiblities are endless.


Edit Gad typos galore!

You're welcome! I was really happy to find out that with NL the skintone changes apply without messing with Sim Surgery. It's made my life (and my indecision about custom skintones) soooo much easier.

I just tried what Aqualectrix suggested for making custom skintones properly genetic... I'm looking forward to seeing if I did it right. If I can just get this damned chapter finished I can experiment 'til bedtime...!

Oh aqualectrix, does this point system mean what I think ? That a dark skin (4) sim mated to a light skin (1)will have a cafe-au-lait skin tone, somewhere in the middle (2 or 3)? 

It seems silly not to know, but I actually have never mixed skin colors in my game.  Light skins mate with light skins and  dark skin with dark.

From looking at SimPE data, it seems at least with NL, that light mixed with dark (I've done it a few times both in NL and real life) becomes somewhere in-between, and that's what they pass on to their children. In fact it appears that the only skintone they pass on is the skintone they express.

angelyne, I believe that a dark (4) and light (1) skin can have children that range anywhere over the spectrum, with the game choosing any skintone between and including their parents'. Pretty sure that's how it's meant to work for any two skintones, assuming neither is dominant - so a (1) and (2) could only have (1) or (2)-skinned children, two (3)s could only have (3)-skinned children, and so on.

I believe SeventhSon is correct; the offspring of an S1 Sim and an S4 Sim can have the S1, S2, S3, or S4 skin.  (Or, in my game, about a billion inbetween.)

aqualectrix, Thank you! I changed all of Enaylas custom skintones so they are "Genetic-izied" *is very pleased*


Thank you to everyone for the wonderful information in this thread *laughs*


Couple questions regarding custom hair that I could not find answers to,

1, I've got all my downloaded custom hair properly binned and I wouldn't mind fixing the genetic part but do I change the genetic line under "Hair Tone XML" or "Property Set"? 

2, Is this genetic change really needed? ie; will kids get their proper hair color if the parents have custom binned hair that is not available for both genders by fixing the custom hair genetics

3, Under "Property Set" I noticed a line called "name" with a color after it, which wasn't the color of the actual hair, should that name line be changed? (not sure if that line matters at all)

Hope all that made sense, usually I never make sims with custom hair, I just change their maxis hairstyle to a custom one after they get moved into a Lot and it would be nice to not have to have to do that.

This is an interesting thread :)

I would like to give this a go sometime...I'm sick of custom anything always appearing dominant.

I also agree that seventhson is right, as a have quite a few light/dark couples in my game that have popped out children have various skintones.  Definitely more realistic than the  child just getting either light or dark.

Sleepycat, I'm especially pleased with the possiblity of changing some of my previously default skins.  For example Enayla has created a nice nordic type of skin, which would do quite well for my redheads and blonds, but currently they are defaul tone 1.

Also with this technique we can "Genetic-izied" all of our custom skins and so have a greater variety than the paltry 4 tones Maxis has provided us with.  We can have the whole spectrum of color from very light to very dark.  That's pretty darn cool!.  (and how convenient that Enayla has so productively produced all of those :)

Man I love this site :) I really think it's where all the smart people went when they fled MTS2
 

Sleepycat

1. If your hair is properly binned, it actually doesn't use the Hairtone XML file anymore.
2. If your hair is properly binned, it is properly genetic-ized, in the sense that the game treats any hair binned as Blonde as if it were a Maxis blonde hair, and inheritance proceeds accordingly.  That is, the girl-child of a non-binned custom-haired mother will always inherit her mother's hair style; if the hair is binned, however, she'll get the default hair for her hair color... which is also annoying, but that's what the toddler mirror is for.
I don't actually know what the genetic field does for the hair.  It doesn't set the bin/color, so perhaps it has something to do with dominance?  Nevertheless, once a hair is binned the dominance is just like whatever you've binned it as, as far as I know.
3. You can change the "color" property to say whatever you like; as you suspect, it doesn't matter a bit.

So: yes, if your hairs are binned, you don't need to use the work-around "Maxis hair in CAS, then change to custom" you've been using.

I know most people here are really down on VS but Morague explained how to do this ages ago & even provided all of the files for the hair & skintones.

http://www.variousimmers.net/vsimforum/showthread.php?t=2169

Oh good thread!

aqualectrix, sorry if this is an overly idiotic question but, about the skintone genetics and the .10 , .30 , etc. Does that mean rather than changing the genetic from 0 to 1, 2, 3 or 4 it is alright to actually use the decimals? Or does that mean just relate your numbers above to 1 - 4?

Tried your link, JaneSIms and am getting an invalid thread notice. :/

Weird - it just worked for me. Whatever. He just provided the files you need so you can change what is doninant, so you could make blond & red dominant & brownn & black recessive. or light blue eyes instead of dark blue.

The 1/2/3/4 values are for the "skintone" field - essentially, one of the names the game uses to refer to a particular skin.  I've never messed with the skintone value, so I have no idea what it would do.
The decimal values are for the "genetic" field.  Skintone 1 has genetic .1, 2 has .3, 3 has .6 and 4 has .9.  I'm pretty sure skintone doesn't place the skin in any continuum of light-to-dark; the genetic field does.

It's nice that the skintones have this continuum; I wish the eyes, hair, etc. had something like it.

Yes double checking, in the Skin Tone XML, the line genetic (dtSingle) that is set to 0 for custom skins. This is where, instead of 1, 2, 3 or 4 you would enter .10, .30, .60 or .90?

I thought I'd read it used to be this way but Maxis changed it so that an S1 and S4 always have an S2 or S3 child? At least it seems to work that way in my game.

I don't find it all that clearer, since I can't find all the lines that were there previously.  For example where is the line for expressed gene?

I'd also like to point out that I'd like to make my skintones so that, while they aren't dominant, don't "blend" with other colors - IE, a pale-skinned parent and a parent with dark blue skin (possibly carrying light skin) shouldn't be able to have a child that was... oh, olive-complextioned.  It should be one or the other.  (More realistically, it should be a purplish color, but that's not exactly doable, I don't think.)

Precisely.  You're not limited to .10 etc., though: anything from 0 to 1 is fine, though I don't think it will take anything with more than 2 figures after the decimal.


This is why I leave all my "weird" skins -- colors, fur, robots, etc. as 0.  It's the only way I can think of to stop them "blending" into the normal colors.  Unfortunately this means they are completely dominant; in your example, the child would have dark blue skin.

aqualectrix, Thank you for answering my questions  8)  I'm glad I don't need to do more to all the custom hair I have downloaded and binned *laughs*


I think it's funny that here I was saying just the other day that I hoped Maxis would give us more default skintones (so we could replace them) and then discover today that we can genetic-ly fix our custom skintones to fit into the maxis S1-4 range, giving the babys more skin color choice which is exactly what I wanted!  :D


Oh I must see if I still have/or can find those non-default custom eyes I really liked so I can use them (with the genetic fix). I too disliked/hated all custom anything being dominant and untill recently - I avoid all custom hair/eyes/skintones even the tattooed ones I made - Ohhhh! maybe I'll do some new tattooed ones now! using Enayla's as a base, of course!

I avoided custom hair untill recently when I started finding some that were color binned (then learned how to do it myself) because I hated all custom hair being in the custom bin, I avoided the "custom = dominant" problem by having all my sims start with Maxis hair (since I didn't know for sure that binning it was enough)

Well, at least I'll be able to fix my pale (Nordic-ish) skin up proper.

What value would you recommend sticking to it so that the game sees it as being a tad lighter than the original light skin, Aqualectrix?

Thanks very much, aqualectrix.

Ooo must go breed sims now!  ;D

If it can see values between 0 and 1 and it goes to two decimal places, 0.09 should work if S1 is 0.10, yes?

Yep.  For just a tad lighter I would go with .09 or maybe .08.

What is Maxis' light skin tone set at, anyway?

Er... isn't that in the thread like three times?  ;D

Uhh... probably.  My brain isn't functioning too well at the moment.   :P

I feel like I'm coming down with a bug.  Urgh.

So, it's got to be written as point-oh-nine, correct?

Aw, that sucks. I'm sorry for making fun, then, it IS ridiculously hard to think when one is getting sick. :( Yes, lightest tone is 0.10 (point one) and lighter would be 0.09 (point oh nine) or less.

I'm sorry; I apologize for being such a pain, but I'm finding this rather confusing.  I keep seeing .09 here, 0.09 there... and well, it's confusing.


And this makes it sound as though .09 should be the darkest color...

Darn that tiny decimal point!
.09 or 0.09 is a bit lighter than .1 or .10 or 0.10, which is S1
.90 or 0.90 is S4.  The darkest would presumably be 1.00, although I use .99.

Thank you for posting about this.  I downloaded a lovely set of purple eyes that I've wanted to install for so long, but not if they were going to overtake the neighborhood.  I was wondering though, is it possible to change the Maxis dark blue eyes from dominant to recessive?  It's so weird for a baby to have dark blue eyes as the dominant gene and brown as the recessive.

This thread is super useful. I feel like it should be in the war room.

I made an interesting observation.

If you open a skin with SimsPE and go to the Skin Tone XML, right above the genetic field is the Family string.  That string that is found there corresponds to the 2 (dtString):  (Expressed skin tone) found in the Sims DNA.

I will test to be sure it but if you change that string in the Sims DNA, the skin will be changed in the game as well.


Edit : Well I'm happy to report it worked a treat.  I changed the values as described above and voila, skin was changed.  No fussing with sim surgery.  I assume the same will apply for eye color.  So now I know how to completely modify a sim, including facial structure so that no only his appearance is changed, but he will pass on the new traits to his offspring.    <flexes muscles> I have the powah!!

Actually Maxis had it right, if simplified.  On order of dominance it goes Black>Brown>Blond>Red.  If a person or sim inherits two different hair colour alleles from their parents, they'll only express the one that's further left on my list.  To have red hair you have to get the red allele from both of your parents, which is why it's rare.

To use me as an example: My mum has brown hair like both her parents, so all of them have at least one brown allele.  However, my aunt has red hair so both my grandparents must have a hidden red allele as well.  So my mother must be either brown/brown or brown/red.  Both myself and my sister are blonde, so she can't have passed on a brown allele and must be brown/red.  Meaning I inherited a hidden red hair allele from mum and an equally hidden blonde allele from my dad (his hair's almost black, or was before it went grey), am visibly blonde and can sneakily pass the allele for red hair on to confuse further generations.


Is the dominance factor actually modified by the game in the second generation, or do you just mean that with a normal-skinned partner a heterozygously alien-skinned sim will produce alien offspring around half the time?  Because that would imply to me that the alien skin is always dominant, the normal skinned kids are just getting the alien-skinned parent's non-expressed normal gene.


I'm an enormous genetics dork.  I actually like that Maxis got it kind of right, although I'm annoyed that they wussed out of having particulate inheritance for skin colour.  I personally would have found it hilarious to have two dark-skinned sims of mixed ancestry produce a blindingly white baby.

No, it really isn't dominant in that case. A parent with one alien gene and one normal gene, and another parent with two normal genes will produce a green baby with 25% likelyhood. Another 25% of their kids will have a green gene without experssing it. They have a 50% chance of passing on the gene, but it only expresses half the time.

Wow, weird.  Thanks for clearing that up, I haven't really played with aliens yet.  Although now I'm tempted to cheat and make myself a few.

Yes, it's very strange. I think it's probably to ensure that an abduction pregnancy will produce a green baby, but not to make the alien skin too dominant in the future generations. I've had sims born with a "recessive" alien skintone, so I know it's possible. And if I repeat a birth (without saving, several times) to a set of parents like described in my previous post, I do get an approximate rate of 25% of green babies.

Also the weird thing about the alien skintone is that even those sims who have it as a recessive gene, not showing, can still pass it on to their own children. Normally sims with a regular Maxis skintone will only pass on the skintone they express.

Well, I set my pale skin to an .05, and it works peachy.  :)  Thanks muchly for the help.  :)

I agree, I would hate for this information to get lost in the shuffle. Peasantry might be a better spot for it though since the strangetown dna thread is there.

I just compiled a text document that tells you how to bin hair and change eye/skin color dominance properties.  I mostly did this for my own reference, but also because I'm rather under the opinion that this stuff needs compiled into comprehensive guides once and for all.

Thanks, everyone.  :)

Here's the text document...
http://www.springhole.net/bogsims/tutorials/geneproperties.txt

Is it missing anything?

Wow...you're a mind-reader, and a very powerful one! I was reading through this thread and thinking "damn, wish I could find all the info I spotted in here in one place instead of having to skim through all the posts again". Just when I had finished reading and gone back to the The Podium, I noticed a new post. Back in, and there's your post! Wow again! Just a question: you're at the States? Where exactly? Just to see HOW far away you can read minds!

Edit: oh, a clarifier please? I didn't quite get the last part, regarding the "family" entry. Does it have to be the same in all recolors of a specific mesh to be sort of "linked" to that particular mesh? Or did I get it completely wrong?

Edit #2: Woah there...wasn't this thread in The Podium up until...dunno...10 minutes ago?!

Western US.  And I'm not a mind-reader; I just like my information concise and comprehensive.   ;D

Yeah, pretty much.  If all the family numbers match, it'll keep the same hairstyle on your Sim if you click from... oh, blond to red.  If not, it'll default to a Maxis hairstyle.  Not a big deal, but rather pesky.

I may just have to rethink using custom eyebrows and facial hair  ;D  be nice to have only the blonde eyebrows show up to go with blonde hair, got sick of having to sort thru a bunch of black/brown/red eyebrows looking for blonde ones (or black etc...) so I took them all out!


Syera, thats great, Thank you! handier then opening the whole saved copy of this thread and then having to search thru it *laughs*


DrBeast, If you do the "family" part (you don't have to) then it links all the colors of that hairstyle together so if you switch colors it stays on that hairstyle, faster then having to reselect that hairstyle for each color if your trying to decide which color in that style looks best on a sim.

I haven't done it to any of the hair I binned but if I ever get around to removing the unwanted ages (from the hairstyles that are not for all ages) then I may consider doing it. At this time I have no desire to work on all the damn custom hair I have, again ::)  I got it all binned and I'm happy enough with that right now *laughs*

Western US. Faaaaaar far away from Greece then. I'm impressed!  ;D

Thanks for the info. I've only been fiddling with the XML files to revert the custom hairstyles to their respective color. Now I have to pull them all back into SimPE to reorganize. Yah. Yippie. Hooray. Well, even this looks better than playing The Movies again. Damn, that game SUCKED! I think I'm ready for TS2 again, 3 months away from it is enough...

Edit: And thanx to Sleepycat as well for her (?) response (that cat looks great btw. As long as I don't have to treat any cats I like 'em, heh. Nice vet I am, eh?). I've only got a dozen or so custom hairstyles (I'm rather picky), so it shouldn't take me forever and a century to reorganize.

erm, I wouldn't have considered myself very tallented back then... which reminds me, I never did upload that again (there was a problem with the exchange and it got deleted) I'll have to see if I can find it on my harddrive again. (I'm PatchesSim2, the name I wanted was already taken on here so I chose to use Argon)

The genetics in the game are designed weird, with that skin you could have a set of light skin parents give birth to an albino (50% albino, 50% light; not something that's realistic).

Hey, inert gasses are cool by me.   ;D

Nice to see you around.  :)

yup I'm a she  ;D  heh, I love my cats but I hate when I have to give them meds or anything so I can understand a vet not wanting to treat them *laughs*


I currently have 481 files, in 100 folders, in my custom hair folder (inculding the meshs)  ::)  I'm pretty picky too so I know theres quite a few I will get rid of once I get a good look at them in-game or in-CAS  :P but alot are just recolors of maxis hair (although I do need to delete the recolors of the maxis hair that I will never use)

Very useful Syera.  Maybe you should put it in it's own post in Peasantry.  This way we can quickly point to it when people ask :)

Edit :  On a different subject.  I successfully managed to change the skin tone of my sims by changing the Sims DNA.  It's worked wonderfully.

However for some reason, it does not work with the eye color.  I am absolutely sure that I have done the right correction, but when you launch the game, the previous eye color stills show.  Anyone has an idea why?

Excellent summary, Syera!

For the eyecolor you have to change the dna and the line "eyecolor" you find in the "agedata" of the character's file.
If I'm not clear or you need some, I can take pictures in SimPE, just let me know.
Pioupiou

I'm a little confused here.  Previous eye color?  If you mean what I'm thinking you mean, changing the genetic value of the color itself isn't going to do anything to already-existing Sims.  It just means that future generations will have a sporting chance at getting other eye colors.

Unlike skintone, eye colour on the sim itself can't be changed through DNA changes, just what it passes down. Pity.

Damn it IS a pity.  What I ended up doing it identifying the original file used for the eye and changing the texture.  That worked well enough, but it's less than ideal.

How about sims surgery.  I know you can change the eyes in that manner.  So if it's possible to change the eyes of a an existing sim, it's only a matter of identifying the changes made in the character file.  Unfortunately I am not awesome enough to figure this out.

I know my english is not perfect but I'm trying to tell how you can effectively change the eyecolor of an existing sim : you have to change the number in the line "eyecolor" you find in the agedata of the sim's character file. A trip to the mirror in game and the brown-eyed sim becomes a blue-eyed one without problem. For the change to be genetic you have to change the eyecolor in the simdna to reflect the new eyeolor of your sim.
I hope it is clearer this time  :)

Hi Pioupiou!

Sorry I missed your earlier post.  I think I got the gist of what you are saying.  I'll try it tonight and will let you know.

BTW are you french?  Your name makes me think that.

... Oooh, I think I know what you mean. For some reason I thought you mean a line in the character DNA. Heh, silly me. Yes, there's the line in the character file labeled eyecolor. Thank you for clarifying, this will be really useful.

I did mean the DNA.  I thought it would work the same as for the expressed skin color.  That should teach me to expect consistency from Maxis :)

Anyway, I glad to know where to change the value for eyes in a sims file.  Content creators are always coming out with nicer stuff, and I'd hate to be stuck with "last season" eye or skin. 

I wish I could do that in real life too :)

Yes I am  :D
If you need some screenshots of SimPE for changing eyecolor let me know.
In my game changing the expressed skintone in the DNA doesn't seem to be enough for the change to effectively change. I find that changing the skintone in the different property sets in the character data usually does the trick. But sometimes I had to update the sim in game, even when I had change the skintone in the property sets : what I find to work is changing them into zombie (life state adjustor from the inSim) then back to normal skin. Do I miss something ? I'm curious as I saw you mention only changing expressed skintone being enough....
Pioupiou

Ça tombe bien, je parle français :)  Mais vraiment ton anglais est excellent.

Do you have Nightlife ?  Apparentely this is new from Night Life.  I've changed quite a few skin and it seems to have worked well so far.  It's immediate.  I load the change and as soon as the lot is loaded, the sim changes to whatever skin I set. 

Thanks.
I do have Nightlife (and Uni, but no christmas pack as you cannot find in France (only the special edition that is sims 2 + christmas)  :'(). I only start changing my sims dna recently, and eyes are really easy but I had problems witth the skintone.

Which lines are you changing in the DNA for the skintone ?

(btw, I don't have the xmas pack, it's was just a moneygrab if you ask me.  Well, more than the usual anyway)

Okay, confused, here. Sorry if I sound incredibly retarded. I have tried changing the recessive/dominant strings for eye colors from some other Sim's eye color coding. As well as the Age Data line for eye color. My Sim's eyes STILL won't change colors. :( What am I doing wrong? I've saved everything.

you have to do a change appearance.  Then the eyes will change

Oh! Okay. I shall try that next and see what happens.

It worked! Thank you, ever, ever so much for all of your help! :) You don't even know how much I appreciate this!

Thank pioupiou, he's the one that told me how to change eyes :)

Thank you, PiouPiou! I very much appreciate it! :)

Like Brynne I'm a girl !!!!! :D

Oops desolé!

Well, I got a pale skin made and hacked.  It's uploaded to BSI, in case, y'know, anyone's actually interested. (http://www.springhole.net/bogsims/syera/genetics/skintones.htm)

I even tinted the lips a little pinker - just enough to give them a little color without making them look silly against the in-game skintones.

Thanks Syera, downloaded yr skin & will have a play with genetics when I get time. I was pointed to this thread by Sleepycat & have already d/l the text tutorial.

Great thread - good info, thank you all.

Syera, this is a truly valuable article, thanks a lot for the info. What is really cool (and I can't stress it enough) is that now the offspring of my custom-skinned sims can have an intermediate skin in relation to their parents 8)

Aw, shucks.  Weren't nuffin', just putting everybody else's hard work into a concise and easy-to-understand tutorial like any good Simizen woulda done.   ;D

Okay, hopefully I won't make myself look like a doofus here :P but being hacking-impaired I'm a little confused by exactly how your hacked pale skin works, Syera. I understand the part about "the game sees it as lighter than the light skin" (btw does that mean it will show up with the Maxis skin tones in CAS or is it still marked as custom?) but the second part of your description on the site confuses me a bit, or rather I want to make sure I'm interpretting it right. When you say "no more light skinned offspring from light and dark skinned parents" do you mean that this lighter skin won't be the dominent, and thus the children will have a skintone somewhere between the parents' skintones (i.e. one of the medium tones)?

It'll still show up under Custom skins.  And yes, they'll be able to have mid-toned children!  :)

Awesome! Thanks Syera :)

Would it be possible to create a complete new number, particularly for hair?  I would very much like to introduce 'mouse' to my games, so those kids who have parents with dark brown & blonde hair can come out like most kids of such parents do, with mousey hair (very dark blonde, if you prefer).  Ideally, the colours would be 1-Black, 2-Brown, 3-Mouse, 4-Blonde, 5-Red & 6-Grey, but as that's probably not possible, what would happen if I chose some colours and marked them as '6' in genetics?  (5 being Grey).  Would the game crash, be unable to recognise them, or what?  There are quite a few other colours I'd like to bring in too, such as burgundy, platinum blonde, light brown ... I'd love to see some of these coming out genetically instead of having to choose them all as custom hair.

Well, you don't want to use 6.  That's for "custom hair that only shows up in Change Appearance, not CAS", as far as I can tell.

Anything not marked 1/2/3/4/5 is going to show up as custom, and anything marked 5 but with age flags not set to elder won't show up at all.

Which is to say: I'm pretty sure hair isn't as flexible as skin, although I dearly wish it was.  I generally categorize normal-colored hair (platinum, light brown, mouse, etc.) in whichever bin it is nearest to -- platinum goes in Blonde, light brown in with the Brown, etc.

So if I recatagorize the genetic features on eyes and hair and skin and all that, will it affect sims in game that already have said custom content? Or will it only affect newly created simmies and babies said pre-existing simmies have?

Just wondering if there was a way to change multiple files at the same time. I have SOOOO many eye colors to change!

So I just want to make sure I am reading SimPe right, I think the OFB verison changed things up a bit. It alter genetics on skintone:

Open file > Skintone XML > Skintone XML > Change the genetic line of "0" to the new value you want

Is that right? I didn't see any option to select "Texture Overlay XML" on the skintone files and I want to be sure before I start fubar'ing everything.  :P

Jelenedra, reply 4 by aqualectrix has the answers to your skintone questions

Mmkay, my main concern was the fact the new SimPe doesn't have the texture overlay XML thingy. I clicked on something else that had "texture" in it (can't remember it now, not home) and it had a list of properties like the eyes did and had the genetic line. I was just afraid to change the wrong thing. =P

skintone files have "Skintone XML" not "Texture Overlay XML"

Ah there it is then. I was going by the faq Syera had posted in the first post. It said Texture Overlay in the skintone section. Hence all my confusion.  :P I'm new to the whole SimPe (heck new to any type of coding out of msdos) so I was a'scared.

I hadn't even caught that typo/mistype in Syera file, sorry, ya that would have confused me too. When I did mine I had followed aqualectrix posts.

Theres still alot I haven't learned to do in SimPE  :P 

Aha, I didn't see that either. I read the entire post before opening up the text file. Obviously I didn't read closely enough. Oh well. All good now, I have a project for when I get home.  ;D

I'm pleased I did my custom skintones, already have atleast 1 baby born with one of the altered customs.

custom anything being dominet annoyed me so much that I wouldn't even use them (even custom hair) unless they were default replacements!

Touche! I love my Enayla defaults. All of my simmies have been using her skins. Pretty much anything NOT Enayla is a celebrity skin, which I will set to lighter than .10 because I don't want children with Angelina tats.

LMAO, now that would be funny.

Whoo! I got all my hair and skintones binned. Love it. =)

So what's the genetic values for the eyes?

Not the DNA line with a bazillion values, just the XML one where it says genetic = 0.

So far all I know is that Brown is genetic = 1.

What about the 4 other colors?

It's actually dominant/recessive values, not eye color per se. 1 = dominant, 2 = recessive, 3 = super recessive, 4 = you'd more likely win a lottery than inheriting this eye color! So if you want to make a grey color dominant just go ahead and do it. I've classified most brown and some blue that I really like as dominant, most blue and green and some few browns as recessive (2), and only a few, rare colors as 3 or 4.

I have finally binned the hair files that OFB didn't include, y'know, that onw with the messed up animations.  Anyway, I am so glad to figure this out.  I have my eyes geneticized.  And then I am downloading Enayla's skins right now, which I will geneticize.

I fixed the Texture Overlay XML mistake.

Wyrmking, as far as I know, brown and green are set as 1 while blue, dark blue, and gray are set as 2.

ya ya ya old but people still refer to this thread

so I'm adding the text file Syera made (link got broken when BogSims moved, I believe)

I'm also adding files that let you change the Dominant/Recessive Values on hair and eyes (edit to say - just unzip and place in your Downloads folder)

these are my already edited versions that make the 4 maxis/ea hair colors and the 5 maxis/ea eye colors all dominant. which means if your sims has the genes for a hair or eye color then their kids have a chance of getting that color.  Normally if you pair up a black haired sim with a blond, their kids will all have black hair. That won't happen anymore with this file, the kids will have a chance at getting blond hair. same deal for eye colors. You can easily test these files in CAS (make two sims and use the pacifier to make some kids)


I have no idea who made these files, they were given to me and my friend dosen't remember who made them or even where she got them. They work good and you can edit them to suit yourselves.

The only issue is the eye file makes your custom default replacement eye colors deleteable - don't delete them like that, thats BAD!

Ok, so I know this is an old thread, but my question seems to fit in perfectly.

I was geneticising skintones, but instead of SimPE converting my .35 to 0.35, it converted it to 35. Is that something new, while it still works?
Because every info I can find states that the decimal point is really important, yet SimPE gets rid of it.  :-\

Are you sure you wrote that right? Brown and Dark Blue are 1 while Light Blue, Gray and Green are 2.

Yes, that is very important.  I believe the skin will still work, but the game will put it on the darkest possible end of the scale, which I'm sure you do not want.  Try the SimPE forums, as they can advise you best.


True, but not particularly relevant anymore, considering that the post you are quoting is almost three years old.

I don't know how I missed that. Fuck.

Since this has already been gravedug, I have a question. Does anyone know if there's an exact value the hairtone line has to have to make it custom? For instance, I'm trying to remove the binning from some Peggy hairs, and make them Custom. Just making the hairtone line all zeros doesn't work; the hair shows up in a random bin. I've looked at hairs that come custom from the creators, and there doesn't seem to be a common code.

To summarize: Does the hairtone line need to be a specific line of code to make it custom, or can it be gobbleygook?

Just clone in Bodyshop then re-import. They will show up in the custom bin then. Just delete the binned ones once you've finished.

Use Wardrobe Wrangler on the file, and select 'Custom.'

@Jelendra: That method always just puts them in a random bin for me.

  I have read that if you remove the single digit that determines the color in the hairtone line it will treat the hair as custom. 

     00000001-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 (Black)  to   0000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 (custom)

  Since I have not had the chance to try this method myself I pass it along as gossip.

That method also puts the hair in a random bin. I tried putting in the custom line from another hair, and it didn't work, either, so I guess I have to do it Emma's way. Baaa for everyone's suggestions.

custom is 6, right after grey. i changed all those streaked hairs from the store to the custom tab.

Huzzah! It worked. Custom Hairs still don't show in CAS, but since that only messes up genetics anyway, I'm very happy. Baaa!

If the hair isn't showing up in CAS, you might check the flags on the file. If it has a value, change it to 00 to get it to show in CAS. There are a few custom hair creators that think that hiding duplicate greys means that they can claim that there is "Only one in the grey bin!"

  That makes things easier.  Now I just have to figure out how to make the whole set into one package file.

Currently, the binning tool puts a random guid in the hairtone field(¹) of custom hairs. This used to work a few EP's ago, but now I've noticed that it causes all sorts of odd behaviors, such as wrong color in the custom hair thumbnail, and a few selection oddities.

Setting the hairtone to 0000006-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 doesn't cause all this trouble, but it will remove them from BodyShop and CAS bins, making it visible only when you change the sim's appearance in the mirror.


(¹) - In this context, it is equal to the family guid.

That's peculiar, Theo, I haven't noticed any thumbnail oddities and I still use the tool all the time.  Does refreshing the thumbnail help when it happens?

---


Open the folder where all the recolors are located.  Start SimPE and select File/New.  CTRL+click to select all the recolors you want in the single file in Explorer, and drag them into SimPE's Resource List window.  This will copy all the contents of those files into the new one, which you can then name and save as you prefer.

Then move the originals to a safe temporary location outside the EA Games folder, test in game to verify that the new file works as expected, and if it does, dispose of the originals in the manner of your choosing.

No, but it's really just a small quirk, considering all the other bugs that we have to deal with. You can see here what's happening: http://theos.chewbakkas.net/media/watch.php?v=ObO9khkaCsTO

It may be just another case of tight pants, and I wouldn't be surprised if my sims suddenly started singing in falsetto.