Categorizing all my downloaded hair... Any advice on how to keep my sanity?

[Gwill]

I apparently have 1211 downloaded hair packages.
About 10 of them were correctly binned.

Datgen's hairtoner crashes when I scan for files, so I've been using Simpe, so far I've correctly binned about 100 files.  It's taken hours.
Is there any better way to do it than manually?  And is there any way to keep sane if I really have to spend half a week recategorizing manually?

[cheriem]

Sorry, and my sympathies, but, not that I've heard of.

[cristalfiona]

Do you actually mean the hairtoner, or the skin manager? Thats what ive been using in the newer version, and it crashes for me too. Not helpful, but it might help to know you're not alone in that frustration.

[Gwill]

Do you actually mean the hairtoner, or the skin manager? Thats what ive been using in the newer version, and it crashes for me too. Not helpful, but it might help to know you're not alone in that frustration.

All versions of DatGen that I've tried have crashed on me before I've been able to do anything useful with it.

I'm saeriously bored with this.  Is there any way to write macros for Simpe?

[gali]

There is only one way you can do it, and it's a "Long way to Tiperary".... I did it, and worked several hours on it.

Edited, by the suggestion of swy - sorry to mislead you, but I didn't see the option "move to". The changes are underlined.

1) Use the Clean Installer.

2) Pass all your files in the "downloads" folder, and "Saved Sims" folder (if you have one):

2a) Open a folder on your desktop, named "saved", or any name.

3) When you see a desciption "hair" -  choose the option "move", and move the file to the new folder.

4) If you see "mesh" - do the same.

5)  Do the same for all the files that  don't have description - they are or saved sims, or meshes. You have to compromise here, because you don't know which is which.

6)  After you finish, enter your downloads folder, and see if you have a folder Saved Sims. If you have - drag it to the desktop.

Put the files in the folder "saved"  into Saved Sims folder,  copy the Saved Sims folder, and paste it in the my documents/EA games/TS2

Thanks swy....

 

[Gwill]

148 down.
A hell of a lot to go.

[cheriem]

Again, my sympathies.

[J. M. Pescado]

Here's my idea: Select all of the strange hair you seem to have accumulated, and push the DELETE button.

I mean, seriously, You can't have that many sims. Even if every single one has their own unique hair, you STILL DON'T NEED THAT MANY. You do want your game to actually load today, right? Start DELETING!

[Yay]

Here's my idea: Select all of the strange hair you seem to have accumulated, and push the DELETE button.

I mean, seriously, You can't have that many sims. Even if every single one has their own unique hair, you STILL DON'T NEED THAT MANY. You do want your game to actually load today, right? Start DELETING!

It took me a lot of time to realize that. I'm down to around 100 from an original 500. 

[Kala]

Do you actually mean the hairtoner, or the skin manager? Thats what ive been using in the newer version, and it crashes for me too. Not helpful, but it might help to know you're not alone in that frustration.

All versions of DatGen that I've tried have crashed on me before I've been able to do anything useful with it.

I'm saeriously bored with this.  Is there any way to write macros for Simpe?

I feel your pain with DatGen, since I'm having the same problem.  I'm going to use part of Gali's instructions to make things easier for me.

[cwykes]

I'm probably missing something here, but this bit got me.....

3) When you see a desciption "hair" -  WRITE DOWN on a list the file number (I think, when you hover the description name, you can see the file number; if not - it is written on the right).

Why don't you just rightclick on that item and move it to a new folder?  You can do that in cleaninstaller.  In fact if you sort by category, I think you can highlight a chunk and right click to move them all into a new folder.
Please forgive if I just don't understand..
I have zillions of downloads myself and am planning on a major clean up of clothes, hair etc when I get my first EP - OFB

[gali]

"Why don't you just rightclick on that item and move it to a new folder?  You can do that in cleaninstaller.  In fact if you sort by category, I think you can highlight a chunk and right click to move them all into a new folder." [swy]

Oh my! - Hit me with a stick!!! I didn't see at all the option "move to"!

Consider myself nominated....

I am going straight to edit the reply.

Thanks, swy...

[cheriem]

Gwill is trying to catagorize all the hairs so they show up in the proper color bins in game.

[BlueSoup]

I really want to do that, and I even pointed someone towards the tutorial that's somewhere here on MATY, but I have no idea how to do it myself.  I have a few (read: way more than I should) custom hairstyles, and I'd really like it to show in the right bins.  Someday, when I have nothing better to do, I'll tackle it, but it's a daunting task.

Wouldn't it be fairly easy to categorize the hair correctly when the creator is making it?  Or are my expectations too high?

[cheriem]

I know you have to do this using SimPe, but I don't have any idea how hard it would be.  Maybe it's something they can do now that they couldn't before?  Because all of a sudden everywhere I look all the new hairs are said to be in the correct color bins when you add them to your game.  I didn't see this before, just within the past couple of months.  I would love to do that too, I even probably have the time right now, as my school district is not needing subs at the moment.  I'm just too afraid of messing something up in SimPe and blowing up my game, which I just got working again after a stupid glitch with mouse drivers.  Also I'm so technically challenged it's not even funny.  My husband won't let me even delete anything unless it has to do with my sims, because I'm sure to mess it up!

[Oddysey]

Don't be afraid of SimPE. It keeps back ups, and as long as you keep your own back ups there's nothing you can screw up so badly a fresh install won't fix. Messing with hair files will, at most, cause weirdness with said files. Sim parts (hair, clothes, skins, etc.) in general will usually just not show up if it gets screwed up. Editing in SimPE is rather more taxing on your patience than your technical skills, generally speaking.

This particular excersize, messing with the "hairtone" string, is actually quite easy. Dewshine's post, here should cover it; just scroll down to the first post with pictures in it, should show you what you need to do.

It would be much, much easier on everyone if the creator just did this when they made the file, because it's fairly simple but also rather tedious to do for a lot and all at once. Much easier for just one person to do it, rather than 1000.

[Gwill]

Here's my idea: Select all of the strange hair you seem to have accumulated, and push the DELETE button.

I mean, seriously, You can't have that many sims. Even if every single one has their own unique hair, you STILL DON'T NEED THAT MANY. You do want your game to actually load today, right? Start DELETING!

I intend to do that as well.  But the only sensible way to delete hairs is doing in in game, as it's hard to tell from the previews what hair you're really dealing with.
And since I've already started this project, I thought I'd do the delete project later.

On a nice note; townies are being generated with the hairs from the bins, so binning all my hairs will cause a lot more of them to be used in game.

[Pegasys]

Wow. 1211. Hard for me to comprehend.

I have about 4 downloaded custom hairs. But I'm stingy, stingy, stingy with what I download.

[LynnMar]

I mean, seriously, You can't have that many sims. Even if every single one has their own unique hair, you STILL DON'T NEED THAT MANY. You do want your game to actually load today, right? Start DELETING!

OMG, I just checked mine and I got 431MB of hair colors and 658 files.   I really need to start deleting,  I have totally lost it.      

[Gwill]

Someone shoot me please! 

All the work I did today was wasted.  I've put all my red hairs in the blond bin.

00000003-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 is NOT red.

[yetyak]

I did that too, Gwill, but at least it is a fairly easy fix.  I finished my hair project last week, catagorized about 1030 files, deleted probably 700.  It got to the point where I could change the hairtone number and delete the toddler and child textures and add the file name to the mouseover description in just over a minute. 

One of the best things I had was a small program called Phrase Express SE.  I put the hairtone numbers in it and just pasted.  Didn't have to do all the reds or all the blondes at one time.  I didn't change the family number, that way the genetic end of it seemed to work better in my game.

It helps to have a file folder ( I called mine test hair, it was a recycled folder) and put in no more than 10 at a time.  Much less daunting that way.

Keep going, you will be very happy with your results, I know I am!

[Gwill]

I've started deleted all the crappy hair I'd never use, and if I saw a townie with it I'd kill it off.
I've downloaded a lot of shitty hair.

I'm down to about 950, and I foresee a lot of more deleting.  The problem is that deleting hair from within the game also takes forever.  But I guess it needs to be done.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Just a pity that you don't get the delete option with the mirror, only in CAS!  Sometimes,t hough, when you mouseover, you see the creator's name.  If you find a lot of hair by the same creator which looks dreadful in game, then when you exit, just get rid of the lot!

[Gwill]

Sometimes,t hough, when you mouseover, you see the creator's name.  If you find a lot of hair by the same creator which looks dreadful in game, then when you exit, just get rid of the lot!

I've been doing some of that.
I used to be frustrated that there wan't much custom hair for men around, so I downloaded everything I could find.  So now I have a bunch of badly meshed, badly textured, huge anime hair.  I don't mind anime hair, as long as it's well made.

[angelyne]

Are you following a tutorial to do this?  I've been meaning to classify my hair, but I have yet to find instructions that are so clear that they inspired me to start doing it. I should be ashamed for being so lazy!.  Alright if someone points me towards decently clear instructions, I vowe to turn them into a proper tutorial complete with screenshots.

Anyway, this won't help you much but for the future it might.  I started keeping a jpg of everything I download and keeping it with the file.  I make sure the jpg name matches the file.  This way, if you hate the hair, you can always go back and delete it easily.

Maybe you ought to just bite the bullet and delete every hair and start from sratch.  Reload only the hair you like.  Don't forget that some of that hair is high poly on top of being bad looking.  If some of your townies start sporting them everywhere your game will slow down.

And I've started to see hair appearing in the correct bins as well.  I welcome that change.  At least one of the creator mentioned he used Datgen.  I think that either they are all using Datgen, or the information on how to do this is being circulated more widely.  It's amazing how much progress has been made since the early days of TS2 when you compare the quality of stuff that was made then and now.


I wonder about one thing though.  If you have a sim with custom hair and you delete that hair.  I know he will go around bald or something like that.  I also know that you can make them change appearance to fix that.  But what happens to genetics.  Will missing custom hair be passed down to the babies?