More Awesome Than You!

Remember way back in the Sims 1 days when someone had created a utility to look at skins ON a model so you could see what you were deleting/recategorizing? And it helped you find skins without meshes and meshes without skins so you could do some housekeeping?

Remember?  ::::: wistful sigh ::::::

I want this for Sims 2! I have searched high and low and can't find anything even remotely useful....and SimPE has crashed my computer more than once AND prompted me to completely reload the Sims (plus expansion packs). And when I had it actually working, I couldn't get it to do what I wanted anyway.

If you say SimPE is my only option, I will have to get Stephen Colbert to put you on notice. (For the uninitiated, go to www.colbertnation.com.)

Thanks.

Did you try the clean installer? It doesn't let you see the clothes on a model, but you can see the whole texture. If you remember what your clothes look like, then you should be ok. It will not help you find meshes, though. That is the downfall, but there are other tools for that, too. Can't think of them off the top of my head.

You can use BodyShop to delete and re-categorize skins. The deleting is self-explanatory but to recat you have to actually clone each piece and remove or add categories where you want the skins to show up. The other part you can do without SimPe is find textures without meshes - if the skin displays in BodyShop or CAS as a maxis skin and it has the CC daisy then, you have a texture without a mesh.

There's a clothing tool in the works.

Whose works? This would be such a great tool for us plebs...

jfade.

jfade rulez!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  BAAAH!  BAAAH!  BAAAH!  BAAAH! 

Yup, I am indeed working on a tool for this. It's still a ways off though, so, don't sit around twiddling your thumbs waiting for it, heh. :P

Goal at this time is mid March, but that still may not happen, especially if Seasons makes the file format change for whatever bizarre Maxian reason they have. And at this point my inclination is to think they will change the format, or at least will add something to it. But who knows, I may surprise you all and finish it sooner, and I'll likely have at least some sort of test version soon that I, and possibly a few testers, will get to poke around with. :)

If you put a call out here I can't imagine you'd possibly be short of testers.  ;D Though I don't know if you're affiliated to any other site.

Heh, well, I already have a group of testers that I've used in the past, and provided the majority of them are still around/willing, I'll use them again. :) If I need more though, I'll be sure to post a thread here for more testers. Although I usually do make a thread here when I'm closer to release anyhow, it's just that the earliest versions of the programs are never up to my definition of ready for public testing until about the 5th or so version. But anyhow, I will keep that in mind and if I need to, I'll make an "open call" for testers. :)

And, BTW, I'm not really affiliated with any site, just have my own site (http://www.djssims.com/). :)

Oh yeah, I have seen that site, but not for a while. Didn't link you with it, but am off for a browse now. :)

:)

While we're at it, actually, anyone have any ideas about features they would definitely want to see in a "skin/hair/accessory/whatever other CAS content there may be" editor?

General idea of what I have planned so far:

Change categories
Change ages
Color bin hair
Change tooltips on content
Make existing stuff backwards compatible for non-Pets games
Remove unneeded ages from hairs
See preview of image in (hopefully, not yet guaranteed) Maxis style format (IE I'm hoping to pull the thumbnails generated by the game.)
Mark multiple things for deletion at a time and delete them when you're finished
Change shoe sound of skins
Identify what version of BodyShop the content was made with. (Not a precise expansion version, because of a weird thing with the NL and Uni BodyShops flagging content you make with it in the same way. In other words, within the file, there's a version tag. NL and Uni are BOTH 2, OfB is 3, Pets is 4. Of course, this doesn't tell the user exactly what expansion the content requires, but can give a general idea, and it can be helpful in finding content made with the Pets bodyshop that may not be compatible. Though with the patch, that now too is not a conclusive flag. But I'm babbling now. :P )
Orphaned mesh scanner type deal

And ... that's about all I can think of ATM. So. How's that sound? Anything blatantly obvious I'm missing? Any other super nifty features you want?

The ability to family the hairs, so if you switch from color to color, your Sim keeps the same hair.

Another awesome thing I'd want to see, though I have no idea if it would actually be feasible, is the ability to remove the shoes off of an outfit.  Like swimwear with high heels, blech.  Maybe Seasons would actually make that part easier, I dunno.

Never heard of putting hairs in a family. Not sure what that would involve, but will look it up. :)

And by removing shoes, you mean like ... changing a mesh? Or are you talking about the sound the mesh makes?

I guess changing the mesh.

Meh, not feasible, for me at least. I know nothing about the 3D meshing aspect of the game's file formats, plus I have no clue where to start/how to do things with 3d Meshes to change them so that certain parts would be added/removed. Sorry. :( But maybe you can find someone who can manually change the mesh for you?  :)

I think what Bobblehead meant was "mesh changes", as in, switching a texture to use a different mesh, such as mapping "super-deformed" outfits back onto regular Maxis meshes.

When I color bin hair I give all the colors of the same style the same GUID. That keeps them familied. You can change colors or ages and the hair remains the same style. Also, only one gray is necessary in the elder bin because no matter what color their hair was, it will default to the one gray since it has the same GUID.

I'd love it if we could remove shoes from outfits as suggested by BlueSoup. What if it wasn't a mesh, but was a recolor of the foot area to "nude"?

Some of these shoes - usually stilettos - have the mesh remaining, it would just look like a flesh covered stiletto.  :-\

 I have an idea. Please forgive me if it's totally stupid, but if it's at all posssible to do I'd be in heaven.
 I want to know if it would be possible to somehow be able to identify which is the mesh item when looking at the thumbnails.
 My trying to clean up what I consider ugly or unwanted hair colors/textures from within CAS or bodyshop has unfortunately resulted in deleting a couple of  meshes. Trying to use clean installer is mostly useless for such a project as this. So if there were an easy to use program where I could look at a hair style, recognize which hair style it is,  be able to tell which one of the three shades of black is the actual mesh, and then delete the unwanted colors on the spot...that would be awesome.

1) To remove sneakers or other flat shoes, you'd just have to mask off the foot area in the alpha layer.  You'd have to make sure you displayed all the catagories that a garment is available in.  You wouldn't want to remove shoes from "undies" and discover that it's also used as "athletic wear."
 
2) Theo's got the source code up for his SimPE hair binning plugin.  Maybe you could peek at that to get ideas.

3) TaWanda, you've got objects and hair mixed up.  Objects have a "base" color packaged with the mesh, and if you delete that, you'll delete the mesh.  Hair (and other BodyShop stuff) has the mesh completely separate from the colors.  Maybe you're thinking which one has gray and toddler varients?

Not all shoes are maskable. If the shoe looks distinctly shoe-like, masking it off will just give your sim clubfeet.

jfade, you are my HERO! ::::strikes up the band and ticker tape parade:::::

Your list of probable features looks terrific. The other feature that would be of interest to me is the skin/mesh matching. Perhaps you can provide a way to examine a mesh and see a list (picture?) of associated skins? And on the flip side, a utility to find skins unmatched to meshes would be good too.

I would willingly be a tester, obviously.

Thanks!

jfade, you rock!  I too have been desperately needing this tool!  Thank you thank you!  :)

You know what else bugs me about meshes?  It drives me crazy when the mesh shows up in the clothing cataloge! I have so many downloads that I don't want to have to wade through the ugly meshes, too. 

Meshes normally do not appear in the clothing catalog unless the mesh included a "template texture", often one in a flat tone that is obviously a non-outfit. These may normally be safely deleted from in-game.

While I probably could snatch the bitmap of the skin and smack it onto a default Maxis mesh, depending on how they did their UV Map, it may not work, since they can sometimes make things suck very badly and it may not match up very well at all. :P

I know what you mean I think. This is rare, but sometimes mesh creators will bundle in the base color/style of the piece of clothing WITH the mesh, and if this is what you mean, then yeah, it'll be able to ID that, and possibly remove the default option from the mesh package while leaving the mesh intact if they went that route.
Snatching all recolors associated with a mesh (or vice versa) is definitely doable, though may be slowish, unless I have it build cache or something somehow. I'll make a note to do that too. :)

 Okay, I'll admit to confusing objects and hair. It's not the first time I've been confused and certainly won't be the last. The older I get the more time I spend confused.  ;D
 But I still have the hair problem with clicking on a hair style in CAS and finding my sim with a hollow head. Maybe I've taken the mesh and original colors out and these are recolors that weren't removed because they were by a different artist. Would the orphaned mesh part of this tool help sort this out?
I'm confused by this because I don't know if you are talking about identifying meshes that don't have any textures, or if it means identifying textures that have the mesh missing, or both?

The mesh is the shape of the garment including shoes or whatever, it's a whole body thing. Textures / recolours are the same AFAIK, they colour in the shape of the mesh. If you have a colour but no shape then you might have the effect you mention.

I'm hoping that jfade is talking about both shapes that have no colours and colours that have no shapes.

Both. :)

...does a happy dance. Thank you!

An option to add a description would be awesome. It annoys me to have to click on every piece of jewelry to try and find what I'm looking for. I know how to add a description in Simpe, but that also annoys me.

If by description you mean tooltip, then yes, that will be in there. :)

BTW, anyone have any ideas for the name this program should have?

Mesh/texture sorter?

JFade's Awesome Clothing Tool

Personally I was thinking "Jfade is Awesome and so is his tool"...err, wait uhm, no, nevermind.

Jfade's:

Fashion Friend
Fashion Fiesta
Fixit Fashion
Clean Clobber
Fancy Fashion Fixes
Clever Clothes Cleaner
Sorting Drawer
Super Sorter

Wardrobe Wrangler
Outfit Organizer

Oh, pinch me...  it's too early in the evening for me to be dreaming, surely? 

Am I reading this properly?  Is this for more than just Bodyshop/CAS?  If so... 

jfade's Fixit Toolbox (and yes, I do believe the contents of those change from time to time, don't they?)

I swear...  half the fun of this game is watching the brilliant minds that get involved. 

Thanks in advance *puts order in early and often*   ;D

I'd call it The Laundromat.

I'd like to be to indentify which mesh is missing for a clothing item....  I run CAS in debug and it doesn't show enough info to know what mesh is missing. It only says something like "AMBodyOverall" but isn't that the maxis mesh the base mesh is made from?

If it's going to have the abilty to change the tool tip.... can it have the ability to copy and paste the file name to the tooltip.... and being able to give a group of files a sequential tooltip... such as "Creator Tshirt #???"...

Also I use quite a few skintones that use specific meshes..... would be nice to be able to see the sim in a true "nude" state so that if the skintone uses a mesh with "attachments" you could make a decision before you used the skintone in a game and then have to use sim surgery to change the skintone....

can't think of much else but i'm sure i'll come up with more later...

Thanks for all your effort Jfade     ;D

I really liked the wall-floor editor jfade, the same batch renaming would be awesome (but not changing the filenames, just the tooltips maybe as Scratch suggested) That way I could find the clothes I wanted to make available for other categories, such as underwear or swimwear, without wrestling bodyshop. :)
I'm looking forward to this clothing tool altogether, thanks!

Batch tooltip changing is a Can-Do, I'll make a note of it. :)

Unfortunately, that's something I can't really do, 3D wise that is. I'd be able to let you see the various flat pictures of the skin tone, but nothing beyond that, and if I end up making it so it uses Maxis previews, it'll not really show much of anything at all. Though, I could still have it so that it shows both maxis previews and the flat images in the file... *Ponders...*

I really like the idea of "Wardrobe Wrangler" though Jordi, so unless someone else suggests something more awesome, I think I may have to use that.  :P

I like Wardrobe Wrangler too!

Suggestion on the nudes: Export the white undies and black out the alpha.  Pop that into your game when you're "test fitting" your skintones.  Take it out when you're actually playing (unless you really hate the white undies and would rather your Sims ran around nekkid).

That would be awesome, I find it hard to picture the clothes off a flat file.

If we could make collections of clothes.. *dreams. If we could clean and organize in the WARDROBES. *drools I know that isnt the goal of your astounding project, but that would be SO useful, I do hate when the wardrobes of houses get swamped with absolutely wrong clothe items.

I know this is quite an old topic but I just thought I would stop by and mention that I used to use DatGen to family my hairs. I never quite worked out how to do anything else with it but it worked really well for that task!

Just wanted to drop a quick note...

I'm now looking for testers as the beta is nearly ready, and I'm especially wanting testers who play on the Mac. I'm looking for about 10-20 mac testers and about half that number of additional Windows testers, unless many of the other testers I've used in the past are unavailable again. Anyhow, if you're interested, please send an email to jfade AT djssims.com letting me know what expansions you have installed and your OS, and I should send out the links to the forum to those selected when it's ready. :)

jfade you rock!  ;D

Count on me as a Mac tester for sure (email is on the way).

Not sure if you are still taking suggestions, but what would be neat is  a better way to create clothing collections.  The one provided by EA is piss poor (what a suprise).

Clothing collections are not super super useful in game, as it's only avalaible in CAS, but they might have a couple of practical applications.  For example, when trying to clean up/purge your clothing, a thumb nail picture or a texture picture is better than nothing, but it really only gives you a rough idea of what the clothing is.  You really need to be in the game to decide if clothing is worth keeping or sucks lemons.

So one practical aspect to this would be for example, select a bunch of clothing, create a collection with it, and then load up your collection in CAS to determine if it's worthing keeping or not. 

Then we'd need a means to identify orphan meshes :)

And another cool feature would be the ability to re-order your clothes.  I'd love to be able to push the stuff I don't care about in the back of my virtual closet and keep the stuff I like near the beginning.  That would be awesome for makeup as well!

This may be too late for your beta version, but perhaps for a later update: it'd be great to be able to reclassify custom clothing as Maxis.  (Reason: it will then, from what I understand, be used on randomly-generated Sims.)

Beta still isn't quite ready (finishing a few more tweaks) so I could probably add this. How exactly does one do this in SimPE?

Ooh, spiffy.  The info is here:

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,7598.msg211179.html#msg211179