More Awesome Than You!

Can townies/NPCs be generated by the game with genetic skins in between the default ones, if they're available?

Thanks to another generous, long-suffering MATY-lander, I have an extensive system of geneticised custom skins, some of which have genetic values in between the game defaults.  What I want to know is if new townies/NPCs generated by the game have access to the full spectrum of genetic skins, or whether they're restricted to just the discrete default values.  Lacking SimPE I can't definitively confirm one way or the other in my own game.  Visual inspection is too coarse, given the number of variables I have operating at this time.

I could simplify my custom skin system by ripping most of it out, and force-generating new townies in a test 'hood, but then I'm still reduced to manually teleporting and inspecting the townies one by one, to check whether they all look the same or not.

I figure that MATY is pretty much the only group to possess this kind of arcane knowledge if it's already been determined. :)

Addendum:

Over on MTS2, Enayla has been making some very exotic coloured skins with beautiful markings.  I wish to use them for a special otherworldly enclave within my normal 'hood.  I wanted the skins to be heritable in the usual way, rather than having them simply dominate all the time, so that I would have the possibility of interesting matings between my normal playables, and this select population.

My first priority was to avoid having townies cheapen those skins.  Thanks to all of you, I've (mostly) determined that this can be taken care of by geneticising the skins at the extreme ends of the spectrum, or in the interstices between the default values.

My second preference would be to have these skins come up as a genetic option only if one of the parents already possesses it.  What I'm thinking of is that these markings would give the bearer the privilege of joining the elite, but that unmarked siblings could not.

Ideally, I'd like the skins to be blended into the normal spectrum so that children would inherit a skin colour that's of similar depth to their parents whether they're marked or not.  However, if the skins are classified this way, is there any way of conditionally restricting their inheritance?

Townies only have access to the genetically proper things, whether they be skins, hair or eyes.  If the hair is properly binned, that is.  Default skin and eye replacements will be on the townies, but they won't choose custom.

And according to Pescado, DAC is hopelessly broken, more than was originally thought, so to be safe you should make custom townies the long way anyway.

Does that mean that we should consider the "Deleting, Creating, and Generating Townies" tutorial by Nec (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,4090.0.html) no longer operative?

The deleting part is still ok; it's the part that's supposed to generate all the new townies at once that's broken.  It's better now to make your own townies in CAS, and then use testing cheats or Inge's transporter bush or some similar mod to turn them into townies and downtownies. You can also use the testing cheats to generate townies one at a time, which is still ok.  Or you could just let the game generate them individually as needed -- it means a slight lag whenever the game generates the new townie for a walk-by or for a comm lot, but that's only a one-time thing for each townie.

DAC does a VERY incomplete job, leaving dangling SDSCs and even SWAFs everywhere. After you use it, you have to go to SimPE and finish the job by deleting all SDSCs and SWAFs.

No, the deleting part is broken too.  See above post. :P

Is this a problem even with brand new neighborhoods that have just been created?

(Maybe I'd already know the answer to that if I was familiar with what SDSCs and SWAFs are...but I'm quickly out of my depth here. Which is why I am mourning the loss of the tutorial's usefulness.)

Is a DAC necessary for each neighborhood, or can you use the townies that come with it safely? Frankly, I don't mind the townies that the game makes.

You can use the neighborhood as prestocked if you want, and don't mind that the townies will be the same familiar faces every time...which isn't really a problem if it's your first and only neighborhood and there aren't any familiar faces. Besides, familiar faces give everyone a common frame of reference. When I talk about Komei, everyone knows I mean *THE* Komei, not one of the many random Komeis. And when I talk about Emma's boyfriend, everyone knows who I mean.

(Un)Fortunately, I primarily play Strangetown, and have never seen Komei first-hand. I've heard numerous stories, though.

that also appears to be broken in OFB.

When starting a new cleaned out hood for beta testing InTeen (months ago) the game did not want to create adult/elder townies (it made teens/children townies and NPCs ok)  I ended up having to open a business just to force it to create some for customers. Even then it didn't create very many that were adults/elders, I had to use twojeffs visitor controller to ban teenagers from the lot so the game was forced to create adults.

Hmm, I haven't encountered that; I have all the eps and sps, and my custom hood that I did a DAC on generates all townies just fine on its own.  I've seen many adult townies without having to force the issue somehow.

I created a new custom neighborhood and got the full famous townie battalion (Komei / Goopsy).
My guess is without the N001 Pleasantville present, the new hood assumes the place, gaining the preassigned group.

Interestingly enough, the townies generated on this creation start much later in instances (D1-12C,133) and leave room for playables to assign earlier values.
This does not happen when done with DAC, SimPE house cleaning and in-game regeneration - townies claim the next identification in line.  :(

When using the DeleteAllCharacters method, townies have only generated stagnantly when visiting community lots.
It looks as though Maxis never intended the cheat to be a common-use for players beginning additional neighbourhoods.

Any new neighborhood (not subhood) gets the 'famous townie battalion'

They start later because they are premade specfically for Plesantview, so when you start another hood they just copy them from the PV template and there are your townies.  If you start a blank Downtown/Uni you will get the same not-so-fugly downtownies/dormies each time as well but they will have unique names.  That is what I think happens at least.

To reply to the OP:

Generated sims, like townies or anyone produced by the CAS randomizer, have access to all properly-binned hair as Blue Soup mentioned.  To my knowledge -- and I have not done extensive testing, but report only the mass of my observations -- they do not have access to any skintones but the default four, although of course they will pick up custom replacements.

/me moons Pescado

I've experienced new hoods (N004 onward) created with the three pre-made present being a completely new set of townies.
That's the reason I thought only the PV template is loaded specifically for the N001 neighbourhood: I've never had that same identical set (name/personality/appearance) in any other numbered hoods. But yes, they do retain the same archetype face templates but with imposter names. :P

As for townies with custom content; only binned hair in the four default categories have appeared on newly generated for me.
Should you want full custom content townies (skintones et al), manual creation through CAS is the method to use at present.

Maxis townies must have signed the 'no custom-content selection' agreement.

Actually, I've noticed colorbinned custom hair showing up on townies in neighborhoods after downloading that hairstyle. For example, there's a waitress in Veronaville who has Seomi hair.

I had a sim with Enalya's bronze skin have a baby with a sim with default replacement paler skin and the kid is pale too. But another sim with Enalya's darkest skintone had a baby that looks just like her.

It seems pretty random to me, even with the default skintones. I've had game default "black" sims with "white" grandchildren, no infidelity involved.

As far as I can tell, even with genetically coded skintones, the townies still stay on the power four. But randomizing sims in CAS get to choose from the wonderful spectrum I created.

HOWEVER. I have not ever done DAC, so I do not know if the game would choose my "in-between" skintones if it had to do it from scratch.

You stated that so much better than I did. :P  My mind was going in circles of logic.

I have quite a few custom skins binned in exactly the same way'  Although the majority of my non-playables have Maxis skin, I have three townies with binned custom skins and also a pizza delivery person (although in the case of the latter, I think I altered him myself as he's a redhead so I wanted him to have my redhead skin complete with freckles).  I also get babies born with those skins even though their parents don't have them, that happens quite often.  The binned custom hair comes up more often, I have quite a few non-playables with those.

I've also had new townies show up with custom skin tones, but that's because I went through all of the custom skins in my game and fixed their genetics so they fit properly in the Maxis skin spectrum. I learned how from here -- I believe there's a thread in Peasantry about it.

Yup, here it is: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,2966.0.html

Umm.. Pescado. Will you explain or point to a post that explains what a dangling SWAF/SDSC is? *looks down* 'Cause last I checked my SWAF was definitely NOT dangling, thank you very much.

Good thing. If it dangles too much you'll have to have it removed...and that's painful, believe you me.

(I shouldn't have just been reading that thread about the poor Chinese fellow...)

Dangling SWAF/SDSCs are caused by improper deletion. Basically, when you delete a sim00015 in-game, you just delete the sim, the sim description and their Wants and Fears and all that jazz is still hanging around in your game files.

This can cause a BFBVFS when you get a new sim (either by birth or through CAS) as instead of getting a brand new sim file, they get the old number, sim00015. New sim, but the old sim's SWAFs are corrupting the new sims files. So, you got two different SWAFS and SDSCs hanging around for one sim.

Like I said earlier in another topic, it's how you get toddlers with LTW other than "Grow Up." Because an adult sim was the last one with simfilename00015, they get the adult's Wants and Fears instead of toddler ones. Which is a VBT.

Do I get a gold star? Or did I confuse everyone?

Well, originally I had thought about using DAC on a test 'hood just to check whether townies can receive intermediate custom tones between the Maxis defaults.  Now that I have the answer to this (No), I won't have to think about how to use DAC. 

However, if I had, would the dangling SWAFs come haunting my other hoods, or would they be burninated when I deleted the 'hood that spawned them?

Hmm, theoretically, they should be all gone, as SWAFs and neighborhood dependant. However, I would wait for someone More Awesome Than I to confirm things. I haven't tested DAC like that.

SWAFs are neighbourhood dependent. N001 cannot influence N002 in any way.

This isn't by any means confirmed in-game, but there's a way to fool BodyShop into categorizing custom skins as if they were Maxis':

Open your custom skin file, select the SkintoneXML resource and change the creator property to 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000.
If the version and product properties are present, delete them.

Edit: If the flags value is 0x00000008, change it to 0x00000000

Save the package, and open BodyShop. That custom skin should no longer have the custom content marker (*), and if you click the randomize button, it can be selected.

hmmmm...I will have to try that out!  8)

Would that work on clothes too? So you could have townies randomly generate without the uglo Maxis Clothes?

you should have just posted that separate since most of us don't re-read the earlier posts

It works perfectly in my game ! Thank you so much Theo
The only problem is that you are no longer able to select the "decustomized" skin in CAS as they do not appear in the custom skin and you can only select the four maxis colors apart of the custom ones. No big deal for me as I am always changing my sims' dna in simpe.
It also works for the eyes, even better, as you can select them in CAS (they appear after the maxis one, without the asterisk)
I'm really happy to see more diversity in my townies/npcs skins and eyes.
I'm using the very nice eye replacements made by TWS (wildstar24 on TSR, got them a long time ago when they had this glitch that made all the sets free all the time  ;D ;D) and I was sad that the additional colors (hazel and lighter shades) were not used by townies and npcs. it's no longer the case thanks to you  :-*
Pioupiou
edit to add link to the eyes if anyone is interested :
Hazel Default Replacements (http://www.thesimsresource.com/artists/wildstar24/downloads/sims2/?ID=197768,197769,197770,197771,197773)
Standard Default Replacements (http://www.thesimsresource.com/artists/wildstar24/downloads/sims2/?ID=182083,182084,182085,182086,182087)
Complete Custom Eyes Set (hazel, standard and lighter shades) (http://www.thesimsresource.com/artists/wildstar24/downloads/sims2/?ID=180766,180767,180768,180769,180770,180771,180772,180773,180774,180775,180776,180777)

Yeah, the game CAS skin selector is pretty much hard-coded to show the four S1-S4 skintones, and the modified skins can't be categorized as custom... *sigh*

Then again, you can select these skins in BodyShop, so there's always the possibility of creating the templates with the "custom" skins, and using the templates to create your CAS sims.

Cool trick Theo. I am definitely going to use this once I get my game playable again--seeing the new skintones and eyecolours on townies and NPCs would be great.

I have modified the default skintones so there is a lot more nuance between S1 and S3 (To compare: Maxis S3 is my S4, S4 is custom; and Maxis S1 is my S2, S1 is a really pale skin), by making the "custom" skintones not only genetic (which I was doing anyway) but also fooling the game about the creator I can finally get a somewhat more realistic genetic makeup!

Just a guess, turn on debug mode, and see if your skins show up.

Another good thing : it makes the "simdna" cheat more user friendly : if the game think it isn't a custom skin, it shows not only the family number, but the name (like maxis' "light" or "medium-dark" or "uuface-eye-drkbrown") : so I changed the line "name" in the skintone xml (or xml overlay for the eyes) to reflect what it is and the simdna cheat now says things like "freckles" or "uuface-eye-brown-hazel". I no longer have to refer to my list of family number to know which skin my sims have !!
I will try CAS in debug mode and report back.
edit : even with CAS in debug mode I can't select the skin. But as I said, it's not really a problem for me.
Pioupiou

If anyone else wants Gunmod's eye set fixed according to theo's method, let me know.

Theo's method works for eyes at least: my new townies use ALL eyes, not just the four base colours :)

Oooh I do. I love genetically coded stuff.

Pssst... Enayla's eye set should be next.

Gunmod's eyes fixed by the theo method: http://members.chello.nl/b.kroonspecker/games/GM-Eyes.zip
All files are renamed after their in-game name.

Remove 'GunMods-Defaults.package' if you have other defaults you want to keep.

Original thread: http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=95972

Note: I don't use the horror eyes myself, or the fantasy ones (except Blue Ice), so those are not included.

where can i download this "genetic" skins?

They're not downloadable, it's a way of editing the files in SimPe so that they behave genetically.

So no way I can let someone more awesome than me do it for me just to be on the safe site? ;-)

I solved this by having two copies of each skin. One is geneticized and decustomized so that townies can use it, the other is part of the genetic spectrum but still shows up in custom content. It's not perfect, since skins take up a lot of space, but it works.

I'm sure a bit more skillful SimPE work could get it so that the two skins reference the same textures, and thus don't take up any extra space.

When I install those, the sims get black eyes If the roll over there eyes. (Wohoo sinematic or looking to far to a side in the menue) is this normal?

Yes, that's a known side-effect of some of helaene's eyes (if memory serves, Gunmod used a set of helaene eyes to make as default).

Yup.

Beat you to the punch, eh Jordi?  ;)

Yeah, annoying :p

Some other custom eyes have the same behaviour by the way. I don't mind it myself.

She doesn't have a whole bunch to choose from, but Seomi's site has got a good set of defaults that I use.

These are my favorite eyes
http://modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=93385

Is the process for the eyes exactly the same as for skins?

There are instructions earlier in the thread. On my eyes, I usually just do 1 for dominant and 2 for recessive. As testing in the tutorial thread resulted in the eyes coded 3 and 4 to be TOO recessive.

Compare your eyes to the ones I edited. The difference is where you went wrong ;)

Or just upload what you did and I'll take a look.

The only difference is the genetic line…

I see that all Gunmod's eyes have it set to zero. That is default for custom eyes, or ultra-dominant.

Nope, can't be it. I just set some of Gunmod's eyes to genetic values, and they still appear without the star of shame.
Other than that your file's texture overlay XML has a different order than mine, I have no idea anymore.

Does anyone know the genetic values for Maxis default eyes?

That seems more like the colour numbers…

I know the values:
0 = custom (super dominant)
1 = dominant
2 = recessive
3 = super recessive
4 = hyper recessive

I don't know where I can find what Maxis colour has which value though.

In the tutorial here, it seemed that it was strictly 1 or 2, as testing revealed that eyes set to 4 had hazel being dominant over them.

I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that brown and dark blue are set to 1, and grey, green and light blue are set to 2.

Ah found it -- it was in a list of dna values. Hope this helps:

===========

Eyes
32dee745-b6ce-419f-9e86-ae93802d2682 = Brown eyes - Dominant
2d6839c5-0b7c-48a1-9c55-4bd9cc873b0f = Dark Blue eyes - Dominant
51c4a750-c9f4-4cfe-801c-898efc360cb7 = Green eyes - Recessive
e43f3360-3a08-4755-8b83-a0d37a6c424b = Light Blue eyes - Recessive
0758508c-7111-40f9-b33b-706464626ac9 = Gray eyes - Recessive
12d4f3e1-fdbe-4fe7-ace3-46dd9ff52b51 = Alien eyes

Thx. Helps a bit in properly geneticizing Gunmod's eyes :)

Jordi-

Here is a link to the Peasantry thread that I got all my info. Talks a bit about the "creating a skintone spectrum gimmick. http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=2966.0

If you don't need it, it's here for others to read. At the end of Syera's first post is a link to a tutorial that sums up all their findings. It's what I look at when I am editting things in SimPe.

May I suggest that Theo makes a thread in Peasantry that explains his uber cool way of un-customizing eye colors and skintones for NPC use?

Helps if I actually put the link in the thread....

I installed relia's package, and that eyecolor appeared in BodyShop without the CC star.

Could it be that relia has a different expansion pack installed, and somehow it doesn't allow this trick?

By the by, I geneticized, using Theo's method, Enayla's Eyes for the Eyeless and her other eyeset and Helaene's Sparkling Eyes. If anyone is interested, I'll upload them here.

I would be very very interested!  Did you do any of the eyes that come with the pixie skins?  I am planning a pixie neighborhood, and I am geneticising (sp?) all the pixie skins and eyes, and making pixie skin defaults.  I don't have a lot of time to work on this, but when I'm done, I'll let ya'll know, and upload if ya'll want.   :)

Well, they're not in their own pretty little folder. :D  Still in the skintones folders, stupid CleanInstaller isn't telling me what files are what anymore. And I didn't download her Pixie Forest/Demonic/etc ones, just her natural pixie skins.

I'll get the other ones up tonight.

Very cool!  Thanks so much!

May I ask what values you used for the eyes? I was giving genetic values to the Heleane 5/29 eyes just last night and kept waffling on a few of them. (And do we really have to stick to just 1 and 2?)

I used 1 and 2 on most of them. Only ones I made 3 or 4 are weird ones, like red. Ones that you don't necessarily want passed down through an entire family.

Syera's testing in the thread I linked to above said that 3 or 4 are too recessive, and in game Maxis grey is favored over them. So.... it's kinda like setting an eye color that none of the offspring will get, except recessively. Anyways, here ya go:

Tripod hates hotlinking, so right-click and 'save target as' or copy and paste the url in your browser.

http://suzaku.tripod.com/enayla_eye_color.rar (http://suzaku.tripod.com/enayla_eye_color.rar)
http://suzaku.tripod.com/helaene_eye_colors.rar (http://suzaku.tripod.com/helaene_eye_colors.rar)

I have the exe of the older version of Clean Installer if anyone wants it. Although, can't you usually find the archived version(s) on the site? Anyway, Why in the heck would they remove that kind of feature?  The main thing I use Clean Installer for is to organize my files.

They do archive them, I just don't know which version to grab. The two before the newest ones were 'bad'. *Shrugs* If you give me the version number, I can grab it from the site, katenigma. Appreciate it.  ;)

Thanks so much for the eyes!  ;)

Ain't no thang. It was really easy to do since I was going through and adding the genetics to them anyways. Click, Delete, Click, Delete, Ctrl V, 1 (or 2), Commit, Save.

I'm here! Did someone call?

*looks around, puzzled*

Dang. Another THANG false alarm.

*shuffles off again*

MadamMim did the Enayla skins, and you can find links to them on her site (http://merlinsnemesis.tripod.com/index.html).

They look fine on the custom townie mutants in my game, but I haven't started breeding anyone in that hood yet, so I don't know how they will work with offspring.

Link won't work, I'll assume it's tripod being a punk again. =p

I guess. It works for me.

Thanks for the link!  Dewshine shared a very similar scheme with me, except that neither of us really liked the idea of any random coupling producing a really vivid coloured child.  Since there are quite a lot of the exotic skins blended into that scheme, it's pretty likely that many couples will have genes that bracket one or more of them.  It's pretty cool for an Apocalypse 'hood, but I don't like to play that theme in all my 'hoods.

Eventually, we settled on geneticising all the weird skins in a range of their own (1.++) so that their proliferation could be controlled from one 'hood to another.

Okay, I just messed around with them a little in CAS - I had a woman with the lightest possible skin and a man with the darkest, and then rolled them a selection of kids. It certainly looks like the full range of skins is available to offspring. There are some pretty weird permutations, but if you don't want the peculiar coloured skins like green and blue, then I guess you just don't add them to  your game.

Actually, I really like the odd hues, and I think there's potential for building some interesting stories around them.  I look forward to reading yours if/when you start breeding them!  ;D

I just didn't want to deal with random (normal-hued) couples producing off-coloured children.  Tossing the peculiar shades in a genetic range of their own off the Maxis scale prevents that, while permitting their use and proper genetic propagation in 'hoods where I want them.

Unfortunately, this could result in the peculiar effect that when I breed light (normal-hued) sims with peculiar ones, their children might be almost anywhere in the Maxis range.  I'm not clever enough to figure out any other geneticising scheme where the peculiar skins could be made "recessive", if they were blended in with the normal shades.

What about setting a .00x range?  Hypothetically, it should make them hyper-recessive, not giantly so.

Generally, when I geneticized my "strange" skintones, I gave them a value of less than 0, like .05 or .01. That makes them recessive to skintones that are .1, so unless you have skintones inbetween .05 and .1 then the game will always favor the .1 skintone.

Sounds like you are confusing the skin values and eye/hair values.

Skintones work slightly different and are not dominant, but rather a spectrum.

Since:
.90 - S4
.60 - S3
.30 - S2
.10 - S1

But this does not mean that S4 is 9 times as dominant S1, rather that a child with S1 and S4 parents will end up with ~.50, and thus will be either S3 or S2, with S3 being more likely a bit.

If your custom skintone is .05 and you breed with an S3 (.60) the child will be ~.33, or most likely an S2. But due to the slight random factor he may also be another skintone (although very unlikely!).

Custom .05 and S1 will have about equal chance of being S1 or the custom skintone.

Oh, well. Nuts. =p

I've started geneticizing my Enayla pixie skins.  I started with four default replacements, then added the spectrum of "odd" colors at either end, focusing on depth of color, rather than hue, but still trying to keep the colors in families.  I hope this eliminates two "normal" sims having strangely colored babies.  I threw the Glory skin, which is about the same as S3, but with leaves all over, in the middle for a sort of pseudo-recessive Pixie gene.  My goal was to have "normal" families occasionally exibit Pixie tendencies.
(http://i125.photobucket.com/albums/p52/SallyDawl/enaylaskinscalefinished.jpg)

Interesting...  At the pale end (<0.10), your spectrum goes darker as the numbers get smaller, such that I notice your 0.01 (Is that Moss, maybe?) could almost be blended into the dark shades at the opposite end.

Dewshine's system is similar.  She started with the very deep shades (>0.90) and sorted the peculiar shades from dark to light ending up with the pale but strange shades overflowing (>1.00).  Really, what we need is for the genetic skin system to be made circular!  :D  That way, half the circle can be otherworldly, and the other half perfectly normal.

YES that would be perfect!  I stuck Moss on that end to keep the greens separate from the purples; I didn't want two purpley sims to have green babies.

Ok, I think I'm doing something wrong...not sure though. I got Enayla's Eye set (Not the Eyeless one) and have been trying to de-customize them. I Deleted the product and version flags, and changed flags from 8 to 0, then changed creator to 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000? Any suggestions as to why the CC Star still shows up in BodyShop?

Necromance much?  :P

I don't know WTF you're doing with those flags, but I assume you have your reasons.  Read the FAQ for tutes on geneticising eyes.  In addition, this post by Mens Mortuus (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,7230.msg231720.html#msg231720) is useful for making the eyes available to townies, once you have geneticised correctly.

If you still have trouble, visit Madam Mim's (http://www.genensims.com/guest/MadameMim/eyes.htm) to see how she did her eyes.  More questions?  Start your own thread for new shiny info.