More Awesome Than You!

OK, so, I'm trying to finally finish up the Wardrobe Wrangler ("AFTER HOW LONG NOW?" I know I know go away. :P ) and I'm noticing that there is absolutely ... no ... convention for "binning" accessories.

To explain: Most accessories are mesh overlays, cloned from glasses. (Though they can be texture overlays too.) This is why they all tend to show up in the glasses section when you're working in CAS. The problem is this: When you go to differentiate accessories, you give them different bins. This allows you to layer things on the sim, so that they can have, say, glasses, a watch, and a purse that they carry around. However, since no one has bothered to make a STANDARD of some sort, creators just make up random bins for things, sometimes even making multiple accessories of the same category all have different bins. One time I noticed that a creator made a new mesh for a pair of glasses, and then stupidly binned all the recolors as a totally different bin. This is clearly stupid, and results in things like this:

http://temp.djssims.com/SOFASHIONABLE!!!111.JPG (http://temp.djssims.com/SOFASHIONABLE!!!111.JPG)

First off, here's my big annoyance: This creator made glasses. GLASSES. There's already a standard bin for Maxis glasses. USE IT. Secondly, since they also binned all their recolors stupid-like, you could layer the recolors on top of each other. This is also stupid.

So. Given that there's only a finite number of bins that can be used (granted this is a large number) and given that it's stupid to have custom purses, for example, all binned to made up bin numbers so that you can shove 50 purses in a single sim's hand, I think it's high time for someone to make a set list of recommended bin types, and this would be helpful to me given that I'm making a program to do this anyhow.

If you're wondering what the current list of Maxis bins are, they're listed here: http://www.sims2wiki.info/wiki.php?title=2C1FD8A1#bin

I guess what I'm asking is for input on whether this is even a big deal, and then help thinking of new bin categories. I'm thinking that we should start with 50 and then move up from there. Here's some starting accessory category ideas I've thought of so far: Purses, Necklaces (maybe 3 categories of these so you can layer if you want to) Watches, Bracelets, Electronics (I've seen iPods made before) and Rings.

Any other ideas/input?

Trying to coordinate anything in this community is like trying to teach worms to dance the Macarena.

It was difficult enough convincing people to bin hair. You've got a long fight ahead. :P

I'm VERY much in favor of this -- at the very least, I would desperately love something that would let me organize my own downloads in a way that makes sense, even if very few creators actually sign on to the idea.

All the programs coming out now that actually let me manage my crap make me SO happy. I've been waiting for this kind of thing for two years, and I'm sure most of the community feels the same way. I've had the WTF Editor cacheing for, oh, hours now, and I can't wait to spend a ridiculous amount of time organizing files.

Possibly I should step up my accessory-wrangling (need to clone a bunch of things in Body Shop to give them tooltip text that explains what they are if they're not visible from the neck up) so I can contribute some more categories. Off the top of my head -- Hats, Wings, Facial Piercings, Apparel (like generalzoi's cape or trenchcoat), Earrings, Scarves, Hand-Held (guns and other weapons, and I have some others), maybe something for headwear other than hats (I have one particularly fabulous hair flower, possibly the best thing Peggy has ever made, plus some lesser ones from other creators and various other non-hat headgear).

What I think needs to happen is to have a tool that changes the bin # easily and quickly. Rather than creators binning their accessories, this could become something that downloaders do themselves, much like we now use tools to change clothing categories and bin hair.

The tool, which could be similar to Theo's plugin, could have a short list of bins that a person could select from. For example (and these are not real bin numbers, of course): 001 = glasses, 002 = purse on shoulder, 003 = purse in hand, 004 = earring on upper ear, etc. This would help users select an appropriate bin for their stuff, without having to keep track of which bins they have used for other items, or needing to check which bin the item is already in.

I honestly do not see creators following any types of guidelines. Leaving it up to them is not going to work. There will always be thoughless idiots who bin their pink hair in the red bin and their purple hair in the black bin, or put each of twenty glasses recolors into different bins. Fighting creator stupidity is a losing battle in my opinion.

Oh, and one for "nails" as well...

I wish there were some way to make the item show up on the thumbnail when it's a non-head item..

That would explain why I've got earring that you can layer every single colour on at once. My OCD would love something that can let me organise things my way. Easily.

There needs to be lots of bins for facial piercings so you can layer them. And I'd say at least 3 for headgear - hats, hair deco like flowers and horns. Also all the kids school backpacks - it would really be nice if these were outerwear instead of accessories anyway. I like hats better as hair now too.

Tell me about it. :P

Ohh, nifty, thanks for the additional ideas. :)
Oh yeah, I don't expect to win at the creator level, but I can at least try to set a standard to begin with and maybe some will actually use it. :P The tool I'm making will have the ability to change the bin number to a Maxis default bin category, the suggested categories we're going to come up with, and also allow you to change the bin number to something totally different.

Noted the nails, and as for the thumbnails, I'm not sure that can be changed since I would assume that since all accessories are cloned from headwear (glasses or beards basically) that the game would, by default anyhow, get a thumbnail from that area. Perhaps there's a way to change this, but I don't know offhand and would have to experiment. We'll see what happens. :)

Thanks for the extra category ideas, keep them coming! :) As far as changing an accessory to act as something else once it's been made as such, I'm not sure that would be very easy/possible. You may be able to change the main Sub-type though, and have some accessories show up in a different area other than glasses, but I've not actually TRIED that yet to see if it would work. I guess there's some experimenting to be done with this tool once it's done! :P

This sounds like a great idea.  Here's some more categories:

Wedding veils
Wedding bouquets
Shoes/slippers (such as the bunny slippers, tiger slippers, and swim flippers)
Shoulder sitters (parrots, pixies)

Also, some "misc" bins, such as:

Misc hand (already mentioned)
Misc head (like the swim snorkle)

And if it's not too rude to hijack things briefly, I wonder if anyone can tell me how to make an accessory work for nude only?  I can make them PJs only, or formal only, etc., but can't seem to figure out nude only.  Or is that just not possible?

Did anyone actually mention earrings as a category? I can't find it.

I've thought for a while that someone (or preferably a coalition of high-profile Someones) should put together a master list of "best practices" that all creators can refer to.  (Not that all of them *would,* obviously, but if enough people got behind it and promoted it I think it might eventually help reduce the general confusion and fuckwittery.)  This would be one thing that would have to go on such a list, definitely.  Am I to understand your Wardrobe Wrangler will have an option for changing these categories?  *Hopefuls*

Just for the record, some other items I'd put on such a list, if I were to compile it?

- Bin your hair
- Change prices and categories on cloned items to reflect the new item (no more $300 bread baskets in the Living Room and Sculptures sections!)
- Compress everything XD
- Change footstep-sounds in clothing meshes to reflect shoes or lack thereof
- Name and describe shit in the primary language of whatever site you post it on (i.e., if it's on MTS2, it should be in English!,) including filenames
- Put a personal identifier in the filename of any item you release so that people will know who the hell made it
- Strip extraneous lot junk with Clean Installer before upload, and check downloaded files for un-stripped junk just to be safe (which is already part of the common wisdom, proving that yes, this stuff *can* filter through to the masses, given enough time and publicity.  At least the masses who are lucky enough to escape the confines of the Exchange...)

Hecubus,



The bold is mine. ;)

DOH!

Okay, so I'm blind.

_____________

Amber, this is a terrific idea...it would be especially helpful to new creators, since there are any number of questions that are hard to find answers to, like the binning codes, etc. I am NOT the person to do it, since I don't know jack about it.

Earrings need to be more than one category, at least three: Right ear, left ear, pairs.  And possibly different categories for earlobes and other parts of the ear.
There's a lot of fantasy gear/accessories/bodyparts that might be hard to classify.  Rose has a bow (hand) and quivver of arrows (back), and HP has some "sparklies", which are basically just an animated aura.

Thanks, and the thing is, these days there's utilities or SimPE plugins that can do practically everything I mentioned quickly and easily.  It would just be a matter of getting them into peoples' hands from the very beginning, along with the message "This is how this is done."

/me contemplates actually taking this on as a project, and toddles off to avoid further cluttering jfade's thread.

• Remove extraneous age categories.
• Provide ONE gray for elders. (Many don't even give you a gray color. Others give you 4).
• "Family" the hairstyle by using the same GUID on all the colors.

The sad part is just as we finally have the right tools to do everything correctly, Sims 3 will be released and we will have to start all over again.

It  needs to be less by type of item (because that will get insane) and more by... I guess "slot" is the best word.

like, 2 hand slots, a head slot, and so forth.

Now, there should be at least 3 slots on each hand- nails, rings, held items- and definitely multiple head slots- ears, hair, eyes, nose, lips, horns- but you get my drift. Rather than classify, say, wedding bouquets and guns differently, they're both in the "held item - right hand" bin or whatever.

I've actually considered doing this for quite a while, so if you actually do start this, I'd be interested in helping. :P

Actually, I really like this idea a lot...

So... lesse here...

Slots:
Left foot (I seem to recall seeing toenail accessories, but I may be wrong)
Right foot
Left ankle (Ankle bracelets)
Right ankle
Hip (belts and such)
Butt
Chest
Back (Wings, backpacks, etc)
Shoulders (Shoulderpads, wings that sit higher up on the body)
Left Arm
Right Arm
Left Wrist
Right Wrist
Left Hand
Right Hand
Left Fingers
Right Fingers
Neck (Necklaces and such, but maybe we should have 3 neck slots?)
Neck 2
Neck 3
Chin
Mouth/Lips
Nose
Right Eye
Left Eye
Forehead (I've seen a bandaid for a head wound before that they binned separately to sit on the forehead)
Top of Head
Side of Head (Horns)
Back of Head
Left Ear Attachment
Right Ear Attachment
Ear Attachments
Ears

I think that's it... did I miss anything?

Would tails go on the back or hips, or should we also have a butt category?

forehead would also be the dozens upon dozens of Naruto forehead protectors that, ah, someone, no idea who, downloaded and um, I, um, forgot how to delete... >.>

I think maybe ears themselves could be a category.  There are a lot of elf-ears of various kinds around (and you only need one of those at a time), which can sometimes be combined with earrings without it looking strange.
Maybe just seperate it into "Ears" and "Ear attatchments".
Horns might also be good as a category of its own.  Most creatures only have one type of horns, but they might want to wear a bindie, or a band-aid along with them.

I'd say tails on hips, although if you're making Nightcrawler you might want the tail and a belt, lol.

List revised. Added Butt, and reclassified Ears.

The way I figure it, won't "Top of Head" work well enough? Or no? My only reason for thinking that is that if you have horns, wearing anything else from the "top of head" slot usually won't work too well. :P

certain hats, bandannas, et cetera work pretty well with horns, and sometimes even with cat ears. Plus I like to make horned cat-eared people once in a while.

Also, what about the ear-and-tail combination sets? the way the ones I have are set up now, they get overridden by ears and by tails (from the same creator)...

OK then, I guess a "Side of Head" slot for the horns will work. As far as the specialty items, that's why there's the ability to make custom bin IDs. :P

I've stopped using custom accessory meshes since Pets broke them.  Did something get fixed with Seasons?

Why not just call it "Horns"?

SOMETHING has fixed them. I don't know what exactly did it, but I no longer have any flashing accessories. I'm hesitant to say that Seasons fixed it because I think I still had some flashing stuff after Seasons, but I've made so many changes to my game (installed all new patches, installed Celebrations, etc.), that it's impossible to say when exactly the stuff stopped flashing.

I had more problems than anyone with flashing blue accessories, but a complete re-install and cereful use have so far fixed it for me.
The only thing that still flashes are the occational vampire teeth.

Ears need more than one slot - I don't just mean for adding Elf ears, but also so you can wear more than one earring at a time. Same for nose, it needs left nostril, right nostril and um... the center, I forget what it's called. There's chin piercings and lip piercings and you can pierce lips in more than one place also - either upper or lower and left, right, center. I know that's a lot of slots, but when I was doing a vampire/zombie/gothy thing, I really enjoyed the piercings and that they overlay so you can make ms. spikeyhead or whatever.

Oooh, I can fix it somehow so the accessories don't flash blue? I should reinstall and get the Seasons patch (the one with just 3 things in it - I haven't installed that one yet) and what's meant by "careful use"? Anything else I should do? I don't have the last stuffit pack either - has that changed something?

Frenulum or septum? lol I know it's one of those.. can't be bothered at this time of morning with digging up the descriptions of which is which.

Same here.

I still get the occasional necklace / teeth blue flashing issues, but a trip to the mirror fixes them. It's such a waste of time, though.

I just realized you said a complete reinstall - so not just Seasons? ugh... maybe I don't want accessories that much :)

Septum.

Well, mine are fixed and I didn't do a reinstall. But I did have to reinstall Glamour after my game somehow managed to delete it.

My blue flashing stopped when I installed Seasons. I installed Seasons and the Seasons Patch at the same time before running the game, so I don't know which part fixed it.

 :P  Now I think I want Seasons.  Dammit.

I have all EPs, including Seasons, and still get flashing vamp teeth. He had not been played since before Pets, however, so maybe now that he has been played, it will stop, but I have my doubts. I also still get blue necklaces.

My daughter just set up The Sims in the other room for herself. I gave her my downloads folder to copy, so the 2 installations should be the same. But she is having trouble with flashing accessories. So I guess that Seasons didn't fix anything after all.

I have also been having problems with the terrain looking like a mirror from certain distances, unless there is an object on that square. I found that changing the default Refresh setting from 75 to 85 fixed it for me. I don't know if it is doing anything useful for the blue flashing stuff or not. Since the two computers The Sims are on in my house are almost identical, (same video card, etc.) I'm going to see if I can find the difference as to why my flashing stopped by hers is evident.

Snowstorm made a tutorial about custom thumbnails for accessories http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=194145 (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=194145), I don't think it was mentioned  - now I wish all accessory creators knew about it, and well, I still have to update my own stuff >_<

Else I agree that a standard for binning would be nice; in theory, I don't see why I would use more than one pair of glasses or such even given the possibility, but when creating a sim and trying on stuff I often end up losing time going back to remove an unwanted item. Now good luck with making it a general practice... For now I'm rather surprised that there isn't more conflicts with stuff simply using the original bin codes. But if there is a standard, and if I make more accessories, I'll happily use it.

Oh, about horns - people like to combine different kinds that don't work too bad together, like big horns in the middle with smaller ones on the sides (but I think i saw 3 pairs once).

It was by q3tbo on MTS2. It's cool to be able to combine three to four different types of accessories for fantasy sims like tails, ears, horns, piercings, etc, but overlapping glasses is ridiculous, and I know I had a couple of nails meshes that overlapped. That was just weird.

Great idea the slots, it's also maybe the most tested solution so far, in similar issue (think of MUD codes, or MMORPG).

I don't know if it is possible, but granted that the accessories matters for turnon/turnoffs, may one decide if that specific accessory will act as a eyeglasses turnon or not? I think e.g. at hats as accessories, or other similar stuff.
If the bin matters, then it should be possible to set their effect in NL and eventually correct.