More Awesome Than You!

I'm in the middle of The Great Custom Content Clean-Up of 2007 (it's been something like a month so far, I have WAY too much crap), and I've had this problem sporadically with other objects, but it's a major issue with beds in particular.

In the middle of my ridiculous mess of bedding I have a group of at least half a dozen clones of a Maxis bedding. (The same one, 6 or 8 of them in a row.) I know they must be stray textures that are hitchhiking on a custom bedframe I have in my game. One of the Maxis beds also has a big chunk of clones of its default color in with the actual custom recolors, which obviously must be stowaways with some bedding recolor or another.

What's the best way to get at this stuff outside of the game (since there's no way to delete the piggybacker without deleting the thing it's riding on in-game) and find the stray textures and get rid of them? Do I have to open up every bed and bedding file I can find in SimPE to figure out which ones are single recolors, which are double recolors but both parts are actually new textures, and which were made by someone who doesn't know enough to leave out the texture they aren't planning to recolor? (And if so, is there an easier way to be sure I'm locating all the bed-related files than hoping they're all actually in the bedroom subdir in my downloads folder? Beds aren't the only thing that could use some tidying -- damn, but I wish I could get some of the textures for some custom seating I've downloaded to stop appearing as hideously-mapped recolors of Maxis seating -- but they are definitely the biggest offender.)

As much as I hate to say it, Delphy's Download Organizer (http://modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=227925) would be best.

How does one use it for that purpose? It doesn't show thumbnails (or, at least, I have not figured out how to make it do so), and the files I'm trying to deal with aren't orphans (the most useful feature of the organizer by far and yet it doesn't even do it right! I couldn't get it to confirm my 95% certain belief that a particular group of meshes were in fact orphans). Or does it have the ability to identify beds and bedding and I'm forgetting? *goes to poke at it*

ETA: Ah, I see it has the ability to identify all the meshes categorized under Seating - Beds. That IS useful, if not as thorough as I was hoping for. *gets on opening them with SimPE to check for stupid yellow flowery bedding*

Hmm. Well, for WinXP, I'd suggest rd /sq Downloads, mkdir Downloads. Nice and clean, no more extraneous textures.

That's why I like you, Pes -- I never had the nerve to tell someone to rm -rf * back in the day.

I gave up and backed up my downloads and then just started deleting the duplicate bedding and frame textures. So far I haven't ruined anything I couldn't live without.

*commiserates*
I'm doing the same darned thing. Just spent 2^1/2 hours on cleaning accessories and adult female everyday, formal, swimwear, and activewear. Still have all other clothing categories for all other ages to do. Plus seating (sans beds), lighting, and surfaces. I also have at least a hundred custom beddings. However, I'm probably going to just dump them all and redownload a few. Or not bother. I'm already down half a gig.

Problem is, this isn't it. After that, I want to go back and remove all jewelry from clothing meshes. I hate included jewelry. It usually looks flat and ruins even the best of meshes.

Oh, and rosesims? A grand vampiress dress is not swimwear, mmmkay?

I have to prune in steps, just like I do with RL clutter -- toss the stuff that I really don't want at all first (mainly things that came with sets that I downloaded in full because I wanted most of the objects or couldn't read the language in the filenames to tell which file was which, or things that looked promising but turned out to be crap), then go back through again a little later and decide I can live without thus and such after all, realize that I have three armless-backless sofas and the one with the most nice recolors should stay, ditch half the colors of that top I like, tell myself I don't need three different updos...

And then there's the alteration, yes. :P Hair that didn't have a decent brown shade, outfits that appear in every damn category for no good reason, accessories that need to be tweaked not to show up for ages and genders they don't have meshes for (I hope the technique I know works for that).

Including the texture that one isn't recoloring is a major pet peeve, though. :P I went along happily deleting things until I got to the ironwood bed or whatever it was, and then made a lot on which I included all the frame recolors that I wanted to see what they were piggybacking on, packaged it, and opened the package with Clean Installer.

IT INCLUDED DAMN NEAR EVERY BEDDING IN THE GAME even though all the beds had the default blue Maxis one on them.

Fortunately, since I was already in Clean Installer, I decided to try checking the thumbnails of all the included files and quickly found that, now that I'd isolated it down so that all the problem files were in there even if crapton of other stuff was too, it was easy to find the problem files because the ones that had frames piggybacking on them showed the frame in their thumgnail, while the ones that were just bedding showed the bedding.

Dummy question here:

I noticed that simchic in particular, in Clean Installer, had a LOT of "Clothing" files that were just white, or white with little aqua coloured areas. These weren't marked as meshes. I assumed (we know that's usually a bad thing, right?) that these are aids for recolouring. Some, not all, were called alphas. Most were not. I disabled those files, and now I'm fretting that simchic clothing will not show up in CAS or it will bork the game as it tries to load those files.

Any hints as to whether this was a bad plan? Or am I safe? Or will I just have to bite the bullet and load and see? (It takes a looooong time. My CC hack-and-slashing is taking some time.)

Ugh.

Clothing shouldn't require a third file (besides the mesh and the recolor) to work. Did you ever have a look to see whether you had a bunch of plain white clothes in CAS before you disabled the stuff? (I managed to download a few things that came with those, and I just deleted them in game, which is where I do most of my culling. I'll probably be done before jfade finishes the Wardrobe Wrangler, alas.)

No need to worry. Those should be just templates for recolor artists, and are not requires for recolors to show up, as long as you've got the mesh.

They *will* show up in CAS and Bodyshop, and clutter things up, so you should disable/delete them.

I have that, Lorelei. As a test, I deleted one of the white colors for a dress I wasn't hell-bent on keeping. The dress still appears just fine. In CAS and on sim. So ditch 'em.

Since we're still slightly on topic, and I'm at work with no access to my files or SimPE...Can you just extract the textures for clothing packages from SimPE and then fix/replace? I hate to screw around with BodyShop, and then you end up with two copies of stuff and have to delete...blah.

I had no all-white untextured clothes in cas, but I did have a lot of maxis default stuff showing up. hmmm.

Also, just booted up Delphy's ddo and got a crapload of this:

(http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/9220/screenshot035gq1.jpg)

Erm. Whut?

Yep! I'm planning to switch to this method for fixing loud red hair and other uglies. It's easier to FIND the damn things in Body Shop, but once you locate the file, SimPE editing's tidier. (And SimPE still takes less time to load than Body Shop, even as bloated as it is.)

...now if only I could find the player-made fix for the b0rken Mission seating graphics. Someone claimed the OFB patch fixed it, but since I both patched OFB when it was my most recent EP, and have since added Pets, Seasons, and 3 full-version stuff packs, and it's b0rked still/again in my game, I think not. Or at least not reliably. :P

Didn't you compressorize? I know the organizer wasn't working with compressed files before. He was looking into updating it, but I'm not sure if he did yet.

EDIT: Oh my. Never thought this day would come. I'm done cleaning. Now to remove jewelry from 37 clothing textures, and recategorize 8.

I did compressorize, so I didn't remove anything, just looked at what it did. Moved some items that were mystery number files to appropriate folders, and left all else alone.

So that's what happens? You get a lot of Erm...whut boxes!

I know, I know, slightly necromatic...but I just had a eureka moment.

Extra bed sheet and base recolors can be deleted in-game. All you have to do is use the redesign (swatch) tool. Click on bed, click on offending recolor, hit the trashcan. Simple. Obvious. Took me forever to realize.

Here goes cleaning out approximately 200 sheets....

Oh, I know. That's what I was in the middle of doing when I made the original post.

The trouble is that some of those extra textures were, say, non-recolored Maxis bedsheets (which I don't want) attached to custom or Maxis bedframe recolors (which I DID want), or non-recolored Maxis bedframes stupidly attached to pretty custom sheets that I did want, or (worst of all) custom bed-like objects that had untouched Maxis textures that AREN'T EVEN USED BY THE CUSTOM OBJECT tagging along, all of which cannot be deleted without deleting the entire file that also contains the stuff I do want.

Some of it I was able to fix in SimPE by deleting the unused textures. Some things I just gave up on entirely.