More Awesome Than You!

I've recently started to correctly bin my downloaded custom hair (Peggy, xmsims, seomi etc.) and thought about sharing it so that others don't have to do again what I have already done.

There was a thread some time ago discussing the possibility of sharing binned hair, but that thread is abandoned and had no visible result.

So I want to ask if anyone's interested in sharing binned hair!? Or maybe setting up a suitable forum or whatever.

-
Bluescreen

I'd be interested.

Set it up and I'll be there with bells on. :) I have too many projects to take on something like this myself.

Any chance the original creators might host it on their sites?  they ought to be glad to have it....  On the other hand...... they might not like it if someone put another version of their hair up for download on another site - especially if any of it is "pay" hair.  I have some space on my site at the moment - I just hesitate to offer it, if I'm likely to be public enemy number 1 of all the Sims2 hair creators!  If you're serious about the project, I think you have to talk to the hair creators before you start.  Easier to get them onside in principle, before you start messing with their stuff and upsetting them.  The other way to handle it is to talk about it all here and swap files via e-mail so that it's never actually online. 

Anyway I couldn't run a forum - putting files up for download like the directors cut I could manage. 

PS I tried binning some hair and gave up - too slow and I didn't understand what I was doing, but I'd be glad to use other people's.

cwykes, have you tried using the hair binning tool for simpe?  It's dead easy and once you get the hang of things is also really, really quick.  Of course, I did mess a few up when I first started, but it's no hassle at all now.

Of course I could wait until the holy creators start rebinning their hair, which maybe never happens... or I could just do it myself and share it with others who also don't wanna wait 'til the cows come home.

You know, many of us are already rebinning the stuff (OMG - even without permission from the creators!), wasting time by repeating what others have done already for themselves, so why not share it?

I would be glad if any creator steps by saying "don't waste your time, I have rebinned my hair!". Until then I do it my way...

I second the use of the binning tool. The thing w/ sharing binning is that pple have different ways they'd prefer to bin, and while I wanted things binned before, now I give an inward cheer if something's NOT binned b/c then I can do it myself w/ the binning tool. Binned things give me extra work b/c it's almost never binned the way I want.

And really, the binning tool's so very easy, and does everything the RIGHT way (although that does kinda work against me, at times).

I also re-bin all hairs I download, to make sure they are binned the way I like.
I'm weird about hair downloads, and even if it seems like the original creator has done it exactly the way I want, I still do the job over just to make sure.
My current hair peeve is creators who don't do grey recolours of their hair.  I demand grey haired elders.  If they at least did a white recolour as custom hair it would take me a second to fix the problem, but if they don't I have to go about bodyshop, and that makes me really annoyed.

My peeve with the binning tool is that you have to pick out all the hairs for a set at once, which causes problems with the creators that make blond and dirty blond and platinum or light brown and dark brown.  You have to go in and monkey with the file names by hand. 

I'd like an option to not tamper with the file names; just fix them up inside!

Don't forget, if you're binning hair, to also set hats as hats...
Flags = 0A.

And remove the toddler, child, teen hairs if the creator has neglected to use unique meshes. Nobody wants 20 quazillion identical hairstyles.

Don't know if Theo's tool can do this, it is nonfunctional in the current development version of SimPE.

Peggy hair 8, 10, 13, 15, 16, 18, 19, 26 binned and hatted:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=WA462X4X

7.35 MB. Not single-packaged.

Not to mention removing all unused textures!  Those toddler textures really pile up in your download folder, even if they are disabled.

lol it sounds like I want Gwill's hairs :P - I've been too lazy to go any further than just putting them in the right bin.

I also haven't removed any unused textures yet. I'm happy enough that the hair appears in the right color bin now.

@Jordi:
thanks for you files.

I have set up a small forum (see: http://zamara.funpic.de (http://zamara.funpic.de). There I will post links to my binned hair (mostly uploaded by rapidshare and/or megaupload). My board is "invitation only", i.e. anyone who wants to particpate has to PM me here or post in the appropriate public forum to get the registration code.  *being just a little paranoid* :P

If you've modified the file to be binned correctly, will it just overwrite the previous version or does it get a new filename?  Just wondering if I'd end up with double the hair. :)

With one exception, it should just overwrite previous versions. I did change the filename of one (the 15?) mesh, since it was named differently than all its hairtones and did not sort right.

Thanks heaps!  :D

Some of my rebinned hair got new names when I used Theo's Color Binning Tool first. But I always kept the filenumber to identify the matching mesh (like changing peggy008_8765.package to peggy008_red.package, which belongs to the peggy008_mesh.package). So you better check your downloads before adding my hair.

I installed your binned hair and it made one of the styles I was using disappear. Is there a way to find and reactivate the one that's gone missing?

Did it disappear from the catalog, or it was a sim that became bald?

When it disappears from the catalog, it can be a conflict with duplicate packages that have different file names.

When you bin hairs together with the colour binning tool it changes the GUIDs, so they all belong to the same family (the game understands that the hairs different colours of the same hair), so ig you were using the styles already and re-binned them together sims will go bald.

I don't remember changing the GUID of any hairstyle, but I did flag them as hats where applicable. If your Sim was using one of the hat hairs before he'll become bald, as the game is not smart enough to realize hat hair with GUID foo is the same as hair with GUID foo.

Now that SimPE is final I plan to re-do them with theo's tool (if it works again) and merge them some, I edited by hand before.

Actually, the game kindly gave her one of the base game hairdos (the longish, center part, smooth one), but when I went to the catalog to get her usual style, it was gone. It was a soft, wispy, mid-length style that showed up under the correct color, no hat. I figured something had to have overwritten. I was hoping there was a way to find the conflict and fix it, but I have no idea how.

If you bin all 4 (or 5 with grey, 6 if you include custom) shades at once in Theo's tool it matches the guid automatically.  That's so that they can share one grey texture.

That's right, even when binning the packages manually one must also set the "family" property across the 4-6 packages.

A consistent "family" guid is what keeps the mesh selected when you change the color in the catalog.

The binning tool just picks the family guid from the first package to be loaded, and applies it to the remaining packages. The guid's of the other packages are then left unused.

Edit:
Btw, version 0.2.28.3 of the binning tool was a bit rotten, so you better get the new version ;D

I know how to properly bin hair =p
At the time there was no proper tool that worked with SimPE though.

Also, Peggy (like most hair creators) has multiple recolours for hair, and Theo's tool only allows you to pick one package per colour.

And that's just the way I like it!  I can't stand having 3 different shades of brown in the one style!

That's another reason why I re-bin hair.  I only want one of each colour, and I want the family to match up.  Sometimes, when I find a mesh I really like, and if there are two distinclly different shades of blond, or brown, I might allow a second set of colours, but only if it is a complete set.  Very few creators ever bother with more than one shade of black, but if the mesh is worth it, I'll make it myself.
This is also the reason why I don't share my binned hairs.  Other people might not like the same shade of blond as I do best.

That's the worst comment i ever seen.
Theo's tool is the only one that make everything right. Even Datgen have problems with gray hair.
I must say that you are brag about how much you know about properly bin hairs and nothing that you are saying is helpping.
So, please, if you know something usefull (that i doubt), try at least help the tool developers and stop with this type of attitude.

I'm sorry, are you delusional? Nobody asked you anything. Shut the heck up if you don't have anything to contribute.

Ask on the SimPE QA forums, or Theo himself, if the hair binning tool worked with the pre-0.60 QA releases.

Be a little more polite if you can, please. Sorry if i missunderstood something. Anyway, i think you need to understand what exactly you said here: "Shut the heck up if you don't have anything to contribute".
This quote don't apply just to me. I will shut up for sure, don't worry. I was just thinking that non gratitude people have to learn how to thank and don't start brag about how much they know. So, that's exactly why i replied here, jordi.

thanks for your attention.

Apology accepted. And sorry for snapping at you, I'm not in a good mood and apparently quite short-tempered today.

I think everyone sorta skipped past this point when they started talking about tools and how to do it and all....

I think this is a great idea, and though I have no idea if creators would swap out their current versions for properly binned versions, it seems like it would be in their best interest to do so.  There's no reason for hairs not to be properly binned anymore with all the tools available.  Maybe someone should contact the more popular hair creators?

Hah, fat chance. There's no way you can take Public Enemy #1 away from me.

That was the original intent, once the modding folks knew how to change the right bits.

But somehow the binning concept hasn't been caught up by most of the creators I've seen, perhaps due to ignorance of the technical details? ???

I think the only way to get to all creators would be through MaxisEA's behalf, in the form of a functioning BodyShop program, but until now, four EP's have been released without a significant update to BodyShop. Maybe someone should prod MaxisEA in that direction?

Theo's tool made my life better.
I'm manic about sorting, and it took me two weeks to colour bin all my downloaded hairs manually using simpe the old way, before the plugin.
After the plugin I re-binned everything, and did a much better job of things, and it took me less than two days.

I don't understand why any creator would be caught dead with an unbinned hair.  My theory is that a lot of them are bodyshop people and are scared of SimPE.

Um, please don't.  The last "improvement" to BodyShop made its output not backward compatible.

Ok... then maybe we should also tell them what we think of this "improvement":

(http://theos.chewbakkas.net/maty/pet-waste.gif)

;D

I made a literate post on the BBS about how the EA folks could improve the game (and Bodyshop and genetically binned hair was mentioned), and then I linked it to a Maxoid who told me she'd pass it on.  I don't know how much more I can do than that.

I really don't care as much about binning hair as I do about skin.  Hair colour is easily mutable in the game.  As long as I take care to give CAS sims one of the default hairs during creation, their genes will remain perfectly consistent, no matter what I do with custom hairs.  Once in play, I can give them whatever hair style or colour I want.  It's even useful to have some custom hairs unbinned, since I can be fairly certain that a sim with that turn-on will be attracted to a playable sim.

What the game needs more are tools to manage skintones, since those are not mutable, and changing them can really bork your gene pool.

If you copy the family GUID from your first packages, and then paste it into the same field for your next group of packages, they will all be in the same family.  (this is with Theo's tool) This way, you can have as many kinds of blonde as you want, or white pink and blue all as custom hairs in one family, etc.  This is especially helpful when binning XMSims hairs.  She has so many colors, even packaging into single packs, I sometimes end up with six or seven family packages.  But for some reason I have to keep all the colors, just in case!

XMsims hairs are mostly binned, but I have a tendency to disagree with their assignment of colour.  Like the fawn colour is always binned as brown, while I say it's blond (and it's usually my favourite blond), and she has some weird reads (like hot pink) which I deem to be a custom hair.
I usually bin a white custom hair to the family and use that texture for elder hair, then if I feel like having more punk colours I'll let them have their own family class and make sure they use a coloured texture for elder as well (if you have pink hair all your life you're not going to let it go grey just because you turn 65).

Anyone who got Peggy's hair from me: I've rebinned them more properly now with Theo's tool. Will upload later today.

About the "brown blondes" or "red browns", that also irks me. I hope someone will create a hair rebinner with a preview one day (theo's is a great step in the right direction, but as it shows flat textures the exact colour can still be hard to tell in cases).

Personally I love the multiplicity of shades under a single designated colour. I really don't care if everything lines up in paramilitary rows and columns, I just want all the brown shades to show up under brown, all the many blondes under blonde, etc. so that I don't have page after page of "natural" custom hair. I'd like to leave that slot for green and pink, or multicoloured. Is there a way to just do that?

I should also mention, nor do I care at all when the style changes at age transition, since I make a point of doing that myself, clicking on the clothing chooser as soon as the candles are blown out on the cake. My sims change styles frequently, and often it is only meant as a temporary thing reflective of the sim's current age and aspirations. For example, I currently have one of my blonde teenagers with a long, straight black style, heavy eyeliner, bloodred lipcolour, and punk-goth clothing, reflecting her constant aspirations to sneak out, play, and miss work. She'll most likely go back to blonde when she becomes a young adult, unless she wants to party instead of study.

Yes, you can bin just one hair at a time using Theo's tool, or one hair in each color category.  But it is also not hard to copy and paste the family GUID.  Unless you have all your hairs just thrown into one big folder, like I used to do.  Then just do them one at a time.  It takes a little longer, but is SOOOO worth the effort.  ;)