More Awesome Than You!

Can anyone point me in the direction of a good tutorial/explanation of using SimPE to alter genetics.  I remember seeing some stuff about this somewhere before.  Specifically, I'd like to be able to change the expressed skin tone for some of my NPCs.  Any help appreciated.

thx

PS -- I know 'Sim Surgery' allows for some replacement, but my understanding is that only affected appearance not genetics.  It also is very limited in allowing you to change to custom skins (basically only unless there's already a sim using the custom skin).

I'm sure someone more awesome will come along with a better explanation/method than this but all I do if I want to alter skintone is open my Sim's DNA (under other) and replace the code number for the skin they have with the number for the skin I want them to have.  You can do this for both the dominant and recessive skin tones. 

To find out the skin number of the custom skin you want I think you do need a sim with that skin in the game.  I guess one way to do this without putting unwanted sims in your game would be to create a custom neighbourhood and put in a CAS family with the skin/s you want.  Then open simpe and find out the skintone numbers under Sim DNA - write them down (or copy/paste them into notepad) then use the numbers for the sim you want to alter.  You could then delete the whole neighbourhood if you wanted.

Baratron's strangetown DNA tutorial in Peasentry explains about the DNA quite well and BogSims Institute http://www.springhole.net/bogsims/ (http://www.springhole.net/bogsims/) has a tutorial that explains how to make your custom skinstones properly inherited (ie blended with lighter/darker tones) if you want.

You can use the "Skintone only" option of Sim Surgery with custom skins, but only if you add them to SimPe's File Table.

I've seen the plugin's code, and I can tell that it changes the SimDNA record for the patient sim (or at least tries to).

But Rascal's point is correct: you can also change the expressed skintone just by altering the SimDNA record.

Very easy to do with SimEnhancer, though.

I notice that when I go into Sims2DB, it lists one short code for the skin, whereas in SimPE I get a long chain of stuff (something like "4dcb6e-000202-00005-3df6g9"), where the first block of digits matches what Sims2DB shows. Are the following chunks of data significant? (Because they vary from sim to sim, even between those that I thought had the same skin.)


That makes sense...but how about this case?

I've got a couple dozen custom skintones in my Downloads folder. I know that *one* of them is being used by the members of a family I am playing...but I'm not sure which one. Is there a better way of figuring out which skin it is, without the trial-and-error of creating a new sim with each of the possible skins until I find the right code pop up in the SimPE description?

That long chain of numbers is the family guid of the skin, and it's immutable: if two sims have the same skin, they should have the exact same value for the skintone guid.
I can't even speculate why two sims would have two different values for the skintone guid, if they express the same skin  ???

You can find the skin's family guid by opening the skin package file, and then inspecting the SkintoneXML (XSTN) resource.
The guid is the value of the "family" property.

Example SkintoneXML:

Maybe I just don't know what I'm looking at. I'll have to poke around more.

Which will be much more enlightening thanks to your guidance about the XSTN resource. Thanks! Now I know where those goofy strings come from...

I agree,the best $15 bucks that I ever spent.