More Awesome Than You!

I have a number of really nice custom hairstyles which I made genetic. However, they don't all include unique styles for all ages, so I have many duplicates of Maxis hair for children. And often I have quadruplicate greys for elders as well.

Is there a way to either remove the unwanted lifestages from the files without breaking the hairstyle, or marking these not to show?

I really hope someone answers this because I would like to know too.

I finally decided on five custom styles for toddlers, which of course don't have the other age stages.  I was thinking when I start binning I'll just leave these in custom as it's not such an issue with the little ones' hair as it is with the older sims.  I also think in the future I won't download custom hair unless it's very, very special or has meshes for all ages.

I have a vague memory that there is something very technical you can do in the package file to get rid of the unwanted ages, but certainly the standard bodyshop way you aleays get the spare ones.

Is this what you need?

http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=89652

Alternatively, use SimPe, open the hair package & find the property Set. Look for the line that says

Flags [dtUInteger] = 0x00000008

Change the 0x00000008 to 0x00000009 & then it won't show up in the catalog. Click Commit & then save the file.

Yeah, but the files are quite big on disk, and probably still get loaded into the game so it would be better to delete them if possible before sharing the new hair.

I just altered a set of hairs I just got, and they all appear in the correct color bins in BodyShop now, but all four colors are still showing under Gray for elder.  That is, I have four copies of gray hair, the same style, but on mouseover, it gives the name the creator gave it, which reveals the different hair color names.  How do I get rid of that so I only have one gray color?  Each hair color is a separate file, and the gray hair is included in each one. 

I got rid of the toddler hair in this set by following the tutorial from MTS2 I posted above.  I also deleted the unneeded/unwanted puffy toddler hair texture from each file, and each one is quite a bit smaller, by almost 150k each!

Rainbow: thanks for the link! It seems to work :)

You're welcome.  Actually, I got it from another thread here, this one:  http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=2119.0

All the ones I've opened have 0x00000000 for Flags.  I don't see any with '8'.  ???

It worked!

Additionally, for each recolour I left one grey style with Flags=0x00000000 and set all others to Flags=0x00000009. Now only *one* grey recolour shows!

Great.  I'll try that.

I suppose if you wanted to change the hair from custom to genetic, you would need all those toddler and grey hair files.

Just to sidetrack a little, does anyone know what happens with those Maxis custom hairs which only appear in the mirror, not in CAS - are they counted as genetic or as custom when you set turnons/off?

If it appears in the bin marked by an asterisk, it's custom.  If it's in any of the other color bins, even if it has an asterisk, it's considered to be that color.

I just delete the associated texture and remove the XML line that corresponds to the ages I don't want.  Seems to work for me.  I also delete all the XML lines for gray hair except for one color, so that I don't have multiple gray styles in the bin.

I really just wondered in the game sees it like that when it's checking turnons - I've found that any sim I've had with one of those custom hairs has difficulty getting 2, never mind 3, LBs if their partner has the Custom Hiar turn on.

so, I suppose what I was really wondering is whether when checking turn-ons, the game actually checks the sim's genetic hair rather than added later custom content.  (Their own custom content isn't available in CAS, so the sim in question would have a genetic hair colour and then one of their recolours added in game.)

Well I would think that the game looks at what the hair is classified as, and if it has the string for black hair, and the other sim has a black hair turn on, I'd think it would match.  Besides, I have been told that chemistry doesn't depend so much on turn ons as it does other things like zodiac and aspiration.  Sometimes if they are close to having three bolts, though, the turn ons can help tip the scale.

So, it seems that you need to set the turn-ons to their genetic hair, not whatever they have at present.  (Unless their custom hair is what they were originally created with in CAS, which would make it genetic, right?)

I think it would be whatever hair they currently have.  At least that's how I've been doing it.  If I change the sims hair, I change their SO's turn on to match.  I'll have to experiment more.  I'm pretty sure that I saw one couple that had three bolts, and I changed the girl's hair to a custom style, and they went to two.  I changed his turn on to custom hair, and they went back to three.  The number of bolts is set by the average of the chemistry between the two sims.  I wish there was a way to see what the actual numbers are.  There are some sims which seem to have three bolts without even changing their turn ons, and others it seems like you barely get three even after changing their aspiration, zodiac sign, and turns ons to match.  I have heard that interests play a part, as well as fitness preference, but I'm not sure exactly how these work.

Well, I certainly think they should have included something for having a good relationship with each other!  I have sims who get on like a house on fire, keep throwing up wants about each other, yet can't even get 1 LB!  Surely, since in RL it's know that opposites often attract, they should have allowed for this?

That is true.  Why do they have to have the same aspiration to have good chemistry?  I could see having similar interests, you have to have something to talk about, but it's boring to always have two sims with the same aspiration.  I need to read the guide again about how chemistry is calculated, but it says the closer personality traits are, the higher their chemistry.  Yet in the first game, they recommend pairing a neat sim with a sloppy sim because you need someone who likes cleaning up!  And you need someone who is more outgoing to make friends, and so on.  I like pairing my two favorite aspirations, Knowledge and Family, but according to their chart, in one direction is a Good match, and in the reverse direction, it is Neutral.  That makes no sense to me.  The attraction system was a good idea, but it definitely needs work.

And since Family sims can be just as slutty as romance, they is it rarely a good match?  Is it because romance are hypocrites and like to pretend they aren't sluts?

Well, the attraction system isn't coupled to the want system at all. In fact, none of the systems really work together, they're just disparate and completely unintegrated parts that act completely seperately from each other.

Only if you're a magnet, and in that case you tend to attract thrown sharp metal objects. I can't imagine how people with absolutely nothing in common could possibly find anything to do with each other besides ignore each other most of the time.

If that's what they're happy with, great, but that's not what I call "attraction", that's more "co-existence due to lack of conflict from lack any desire to interact".

Well, they can fight and fuss at each other over not having anything in common. Considering many couples I've seen, that seems to be what those 'opposites attract' types end up doing...

Well, my parents were like that, and they stayed together till the end!  Made life a bit odd for us kids though - mother dragging us off to church, father giving her a ticking off for doing so!

ZZ:  Here's the answer to how the game considers custom hair when it's classified by color.  I just updated one of my downloaded hair styles so they show up in the correct color bins.  I had one of my sims using the hairstyle to go to the mirror and change appearance.  The asterisk was still highlighted, but I reselected the hairstyle she was wearing under Red hair.  I saved and closed the game, and opened up the neighborhood in SimPE.  In her file, under the Nightlife tab, she has the Trait Red hair marked off.  So that indicates to me that the game does indeed see her as having red hair for the purposes of turn ons/offs, even though the hair is a custom hairstyle, it is in the correct color bin.  Before, she was showing as having custom hair.

It was really those Maxis custom hairs that made me wonder - all my other custom hair when I've changed turn ons to include it have shown a difference, but not the Maxis ones.  (At least, not that I've been able to tell.)

But at least, if in other cases the game takes the current hair whether custom or not, then that's useful as I often forget when I've dished out the custom hair what the sim had originally!

I've just been removing the property sets for the ones that don't have custom style for the other ages when I sort them, and removing any spare textures. Hopefully it hasn't broken anything, but it works just fine in-game. It's so nice to go through my toddler/child styles and not have any duplicates! I can't recolor anything I've done that to, but eh, if I really wanted to I could get a fresh copy and recolor that...

I've found that doing that is only a problem if you want to upload a sim with that hair to the exchange. It absolutely will not take a hair changed in this manner.

Why couldn't you recolour it? I had a hair I did that to  that, because of the exchange problem, I had to export and re-import. It gave it the other textures back but otherwise didn't change anything or cause any problems that I could tell.

If you've correctly binned it, you don't need them. That's the point!

As far as I understand it there are six bins:
Genetics:
-0x00000001 black hair
-0x00000002 brown hair
-0x00000003 blond(e) hair
-0x00000004 red hair
-0x00000005 grey hair (elders only)
-0x00000006 custom (special)

Any hair sorted in bins 1-4 will behave like Maxis default hair: if a CAS Sim has the blonde Jeanette Biedermann hair for example this Sim will pass on the blonde hair gene, not the 'Jeanette Biedermann hair' gene. Thus if a haircolour lacks files for certain ages, a random other haircolour is chosen.

Nongenetic custom hair indeed does require styles for all ages. This hair does not pass on a haircolour gene, but a hairstyle gene.

The 0x00000006 bin appears to function slightly different than other custom (non-genetic) hair, but I'm not really certain yet *how*. Investigation is ongoing. Perhaps this bin only shows while changing appearance, not in CAS, and is thus never genetic?

One huge advantage of properly binning hair is that newly generated townies etc. will be able to use them.

Yes, it would have been a good move if the whole hairstyle thing had been coded so that, if you stuck to the original four colours, they would be genetic, but blue or purple recolours would be custom!  And the custom bin wouldn't get so enormous!

People aren't born with pink, blue, or purple hair, so they would have to be dyed later in life to get that color.  To me, that's what custom haircolor should be, any color that isn't "natural," which in Sims is black, brown, blonde, or red.  But with the new hair meshes, these are all showing up under Custom regardless of whether they are one of those four.  So I am happy to know now how to sort them so they show in the proper bins.  Then I don't have to change turn ons if I change hairstyles to a new mesh and I don't have to go hunting through the Custom bin.  If I take a little time to do it when I download a new one, I think it will be worth it.  It's just all those other ones I've already downloaded that are going to take some time to go through.   :-\

I know!......What would be a real help would be a list of downloaded hair that had already been edited, but i suppose there's actually very little out there.  I know I've downloaded quite a lot of hari recently, and none of it has appeared as a default.

When I've tried recoloring anything, actually, if there was a hair showing in Bodyshop with some of the colors removed, even if it wasn't the one I was trying to recolor, it seemed to mess the whole thing up. Or at least I think that's the culprit - I haven't figured it out otherwise. I would try to export a hairstyle to recolor, and it would actually end up exporting a totally different one, usually the next one in the list with all the sets intact. It was screwing me up before I started fixing the hair myself because there are some custom styles that come with property sets already removed - SanMoo's Femininity and the one that is on the SimBrynne avatar, off the top of my head, are two.

I think it's because there aren't associated styles for all the age groups, so when it gets to where it shows you how it looks for all the ages and you can refresh to tweak, etc., it can't show those and so it barfs. I get around it by taking out all the other hairstyles when I want to recolor one that I haven't taken property sets out of, which has the added bonus of loading Bodyshop faster.

Melodie9 at MTS2 has some toddler hair she's made that she updated so that it shows in the correct color bin.  She is the first one I've seen to do that.  I think the creators are just learning how to do this, so maybe more and more will start doing it now.

Oh, okay, I didn't realize that you were recolouring custom mesh hair. I had recoloured hair that used a Maxis mesh; no wonder I didn't have any problems. I can see why Bodyshop would barf on a custom mesh, it wouldn't know what the hell to put in the missing age groups.

The newer hair from WDS (Well Dressed Sims) is binned properly.  But it's only been that way for the past 3/4 months?  I don't remember it being binned properly before then.  So I guess my point is that it's catching on now that people (creators) know how to do this.  I can find hair styles listed as properly binned now, which makes me very happy.

Me too!  :)

I downloaded some hair styles that I had not gotten the mesh to, although I didn't realize it.  It was showing up in BodyShop as the straight black hairstyle, and when I tried to click on it, I was confused at first before I realized it was kicking me back to the start of the black hair bin.  I realized I didn't have the right mesh, so I went and got it, and it showed up properly then.  Maybe the same thing was happening to Swiftgold when she said it would mess up on her?  I also noticed that after I got the correct mesh, the name shows up on mouseover, and the hair would show up properly when I'd click on them, but the preview pictures are still showing the straight black hair.  Any idea how to get it to update?

crtl+right click on the picture : works in CAS and in the mirror, and for clothes as well.

Oooh, good to know. I had that happen with the last batch of hair - it was turning up straight and I was confused as to why even the adult style was "to be removed". *snort* I think my problem did have to do with missing custom hair property sets, though, but that's only a problem with recolors, and fixed easily enough by using an intact .package, if one exists...

Thank you, it works perfectly!  I never knew that.  I'm going to be fixing all those clothes now that I downloaded that show up with the red top and white capri pants!

BTW, do you know if this works in BodyShop also, or just in the game?

Well, there are a lot of useful tips here!  I've got two Victorian dresses that are showing as the Capri pants so at least I now know what to do!  And I'd searched and searched to find an outfit by Biene that wasn't historical!

I think it doesn't work in bodyshop but it's been a while since I try so I can be wrong.