More Awesome Than You!

I've been altering DNA's of my CAS families and I'm fine with the eyes and hair but I don't get the skintone part. For example, I have this boy, who's dad has Maxis S2 and who's mom has custom skin that is set to be in between of Maxis S1 and Maxis S2. His dad also has a sister who has Maxis S3, so I made dad have Maxis S3 as recessive. Now I'm altering DNA of this boy and I set his (and his moms skin) to be dominant and his dads skin to be recessive, but I was wondering if I could put S3 somewhere in his DNA too? Is that what Skintone Range field is for? Please, explain. ::)

Short answer - no. The skin tone range will be the mother and father's skintones. The dominant/recessive in skin is named misleadingly. They should both be the same number as they are what the Sim is set to display. If you alter both the game will simply display the one you set in dominant.

I think that this is because of the way skin transfer changed over time. It used to be that a Sim could transmit the skin s/he carried from either her mother or father when having children - now only the used skin is transmitted because so many people were complaining when two pale skined Sims suddenly had a dark skinned baby.

Skin transfer hasn't REALLY changed. How it works is somewhat odd, though, with regards to ranged ("geneticized") and unranged skintones.

Ok, I get it now... :-\

Strange? How?

And, slightly offtopic but close.... Madam Mim, you've said before that making geneticized skins NPC available makes them unselectable for CAS sims? How? In order for my CC skins to be CAS and NPC available, must I have two sets? How do I make them available for NPCs? (I have a lot, so the idea of two sets is, well, bloating.

Yeah, if they're NPC available then they don't show up in CAS. You have three options, 1. have two full sets, one for NPCs one so that you can see them in CAS. 2. NPC available skins still show up in body shop so you can create one sim with each skintone and save them so that you can later access that skin in CAS (by opening the saved sim with the skintone you want and then modifying to your taste). 3. you can create sims with NPC available skins in bodyshop as needed.

None of them are exactly what I'd call ideal. I use a mishmash of the methods. For my larger sets I was too lazy to make body shop templates for each skin so I sucked it up and took the double hit on my harddrive space. For my smaller sets I used the bodyshop option.

Oh yeah, the NPC available ones spin up when you hit random sim in CAS so sometimes you'll get lucky and get the one you want fairly quickly. I don't recommend this method, though, for obvious reasons.

There is an exception to this: for aliens.  An alien mother can pass on the alien skin, or the normal one from her other dad.  If the child receives the alien skin from her mother and a normal one from her father, she may express her father's skintone, but she will still carry the alien skin as a recessive trait, which can be passed again.  Every time the alien skin is passed on, the child has a 50% chance of expressing it.  I've had the alien skin recur in later generations this way.

Not true.  Making geneticised, townie available skins that are also available in CAS is easy.  Look here:  http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,7230.msg231720.html#msg231720
Just change the "flags" line to end in a zero instead of 8.  All of the skins in my game are now hacked to do this and the custom eyes I put on MTS2 use the same technique.

Thanks, BastDawn. I did the eyes that I've downloaded, and they work fine. I was just worried about doing the skins too, as I hadn't heard anything other than no-longer-CAS-able.

Here's a strange question...the eyes tutorial I found at MTS2 says you have to change the "version", "product", "creator", and "flags" lines. Why do some of the eyes not have "version" and "product" lines?

The only line that actually matters is the flags line.  Change that and make them genetic, you're done.  (I don't know why the other lines aren't there, but don't change them if they are.)

I tested this the other night in the game. You can make geneticized skins NPC available and still have them show up in CAS. However, they will not be used by townies. Townies will only use skins which have the Creator set to a bunch of zeros and which therefore won't show up in CAS.

Hmm. I'll remember that for the future. (I already changed my CC eyes and they're working fine (ie CAS available...haven't checked the townies yet.) but I have backups in case they fubar later.)


Okay, then that leads to this question. I changed the eyes that had a creator line to a string of zeros. They are CAS available both by hitting the random button and by choosing them in the alteration area. Again, I haven't been able to check the townies/downtownies/NPCs/etc yet.

Does anyone know why the skintones would work differently?

If you just change the flag on skins, they will be available in CAS and to the randomize button/townies.

I changed my skins and tested this just last week.

For some reason, changing the other markers, like the creator line, on the skins will make them unavailable in CAS.  I'm not sure why, when it doesn't do it to the eyes, but I'm just glad that using just the flag line works.

Also, I'm going to boot up SimPE on the original question.  I had a couple, one with a skintone around .1 and the other around .5 have a kid with a relatively dark skintone.  I don't know if I screwed up while geneticizing.  I just assumed it was because the sim with the .5 skintone had a mother around .1 and a father around .9 and still had the darker end still in his genes from his father.  So now I want to look things up.

Thanks for doing the testing. I'll set to work on my overly--large skintone set this weekend. If the thread isn't dead, I'll report back when the testing is done.

Here's how I tested this: I created a new test neighborhood, generated new townies, and summoned all of them (about 30) to a lot. Changing only the flags and not the creator line did not make them use the skins with only the flags changed. NPCs used those skins; the cab lady, paperboy and cook did, at least. But not one townie showed up using one of the skins with only the flags changed. Townies did use skins that had both the flags changed and the creator set to zeros.

So we're back to the question: why does that work differently with eyes?

The eyes whose creator line I've changed do show up as a choice in CAS.

Why do skins and eyes work differently with the same line?

I think it has something to do with the user interface in CAS. Custom or not, the eyes show up side by side. The normal maxis skintones (S1, S2, S3, S4) don't really show up in CAS but have "buttons" specially for them (you know the silhouette, more or less dark depending of the skintone), the custom ones show up under the asterisk. When the creator line is set to zero, the skin is not seen as custom anymore by the game, and does not show under the asterisk anymore. It can not show up with the maxis skintone, as they are a pre set number of silhouettes, only for the 4 maxis skintone.
They show up just fine in bodyshop because they user interface doesnot work like that in bodyshop.
Do I make sense even with english not cooperating ?

*slaps forehead*

Of course! The placement of the choices didn't even occur to me!

You're awesome, pioupiou!

Sadorandom.  I have townies with custom skins using this method.  Make more new townies.

That's one hell of a lot of sadorandomness, considering that I had more custom than default skins.

Question: did you let your townies generate naturally, or spawn them with the mailbox?

I changed the flags on all of my custom skins (over 30 of them) and made a new neighbourhood to test them out.
I used the mailbox to make my townies and every single one of them has one of the default skins and none of my "decustomised" ones.

Unfortunately, this only seems to work for NPCs and not townies.

edited because I misread. Sorry, spookymuffin

Huh?
I said that my newly generated townies have the default skins only, not one of them has the decustomised ones with the modified flags.

Upon further investigation, it would seem that I am full of shit and must apologize.  I don't have custom-skinned townies either, just NPCs.  And I used the mailbox in all cases.  Sorry for being stupid.   :-[

I changed the flags on all my skins and have set up a new hood. I made a few townies one by one with the repo-man gun, but they just had the defaults. I then ran 'generate 30 townies' but I haven't seen any of those yet. I'm starting my sim off in college, and when the dormies were spawned, one of them (so far) is using one of the custom/non-default skins (one of Enayla's dark tones which is waaay darker than my default dark).

Is there a difference between manually generating and just letting the game spawn sims on its own, then?

Well, dormies aren't townies, technically. Maybe the game counts them as NPCs. I don't know if there's a difference between spawning and generating normally, but I think that maybe the game can grab those custom skins for any Sim that's spawned normally, but not for those that are force-spawned. I'd have to know what makes the game decide to generate townies to test it. Will just showing up at a community lot do it?

Actually, dormies ARE townies, at least as far as the game is concerned. I made most of the Maxis-made Uni students into dormies by using Inge's teleporter bush to 'make me a townie'. The only difference is that YAs can't normally go to non-Uni lots, though Pescado's Customer Controller does let you have them come to an owned business.

If you don't have the maximum number of townies (I forget what it is -- maybe 32 of mixed ages?), the game will spawn new ones as needed. So yea, going to a comm lot could spawn new ones, and it will occasionally spawn a new one for a walk-by. If there aren't many playables in the hood, it'll spawn townies faster. Otherwise, it will take a while before it sees the need to generate a new one.

Of course, this only applies if you DON'T have notownieregen in your game. :)

I thought dormies weren't exactly townies because they have code preventing them from dying and because they can be a real pain to marry into a family. But it's good to know that they pretty much are, because that means my extremely tenuous theory may not be completely out there. Maybe the game can use skins with only the flags and not the creator numbers changed if the Sims in question generate normally and not from the mailbox.

Well, no, dormies can die -- just put Pescado's nouniprotect in your downloads.  They start dying off in droves after a while, which is a good way to 'thin the herd' and get some new, hopefully better-looking dormies into the game. It's something in the dorm code that keeps them from dying, I believe, not anything in their character files.

And the only issue with marrying them into a family is that you have to move them into the non-uni lot first, so they can age to adult, since YAs can't get married (without hacks, anyway). Sometimes the aging process gets borked, and they don't get the proper number of want slots and locks that they should if they really graduated, but that's easily fixed with TJs' College Adjuster or the Lot Debugger.

All I did was change the flags and it seemed to work that way for me. I'll need to take my sim out and about so I can run into townies and see how they are.

Only two of my dormies were using default skins, the rest (6 or 7 of them) were using the non-default custom skins and it was so nice to see a a bunch of random sims that are DIFFERENT. I'm wanting to go on a skin downloading binge to get even more diversity now ...This is kind of addicting.  :P