Testers wanted: Color Binning Tool 0.2.30

[Solowren]

Here's the Exception Text.

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[Theo]

Thanks a lot 
I think this happens when you don't type a tooltip for the package, I'll post a fix for the tool briefly.

[Solowren]

Ah, that would make sense. I didn't put tooltips on my earlier recolors. Thanks a lot. 

[Yolu]

I've come across another problem: The plugin seems to 'eat' blond recolours. Every single blond recolour i run through the plugin does not show up in CAS. Is there something I'm doing wrong?

[Theo]

I've come across another problem: The plugin seems to 'eat' blond recolours. Every single blond recolour i run through the plugin does not show up in CAS. Is there something I'm doing wrong?

That is odd What options are you using?

[Yolu]

I just followed your walkthrough exactly and left all the default options. I've reccently started compressing the textures but I noticed this problem from the very beginning.

[Theo]

Can you provide a link for one of those packages? I would like to see what happened to the blond recolor package.

[Yolu]

I've pmed a link to you.

[Sophie-David]

I have a bit more information which might be helpful. In my high horsepower computer at home, I have the Sims and all expansions installed, together with a lot of custom content. With that computer, I found that even in the tutorial I was hard pressed to come up with a consistent output. Sometimes colours wouldn't move from one bin to the other properly during assembly. Sometimes one colour = often the blonde - wouldn't show up in the output file.

However, I am presently on the road and using a rather clunky Pentium III laptop with a primitive video processor. Although practically speaking it can't effectively run the Sims, it is quite useful for doing hair recolouring sinced the results are extremely reliable. Two possible reasons come to mind to explain this. It may be that on my home computer the large amount of custom content is in some way interferring with this plugin, and/or the presence of all the expansions including FFS is in some way overwhelming its operation.

Now that I have reliable plugin operation I am using me time away to rebin some of DJ_Mur3's wonderful hair designs.

[MistyBlue]

I have an interesting tid-bit for you. I color binned all my hair and reinstalled my game a few days ago. I started a new hood and used testing cheats to create townies. I hired a nanny for one of my sims and noticed that the nanny had custom hair. I thought that was odd, but didn't think much of it. When I took my sim to a downtown area, I saw that a great number of my townies are now walking around with custom hair. I have not seen this happen before and the only thing I've changed is color binning so I am assuming that this great tool is what did it. Thank you so much! I urge someone to try creating a new neighborhood and seeing if this can be done without reinstalling.

[BlueSoup]

Nope, the townies and NPC's get random hairstyles, so if you have custom hairstyles that are in the proper colour bins, there is a chance they can get those.

[Theo]

So it seems that the game checks for the hairtone property when choosing the hair for a new townie or NPC.

Just to update on that last problem, I re-checked the entire code and besides the obvious bugs, I was unable to find anything that could solve the missing recolors.
Since I cannot reproduce that effect here, I'll keep waiting for someone to report more information.

[baratron]

Thank you - this is great .

What's the procedure to get Quaxi to add plugins to his list of Official Plugins that get automatically installed along with SimPE? Anyone know? 'Cos this really should be included as standard, assuming Theo's ok with that.

I was quite disturbed by how much larger the files became after editing, until Simsbaby told me about the "Compress textures" option. Now I'm very happy with my new slimmed-down Downloads folder .

[blackjacksims]

Any success stories on binning brows with this tool or by manually changing XTOL value?

[Theo]

Any success stories on binning brows with this tool or by manually changing XTOL value?

Actually texture overlay packages are even more hard to edit manually, because texture overlays like brows apply to both genders, so you have to edit twice as many property set resources than in normal hair packages.

This tool should be able to all this work for you, and as long you have the packages for each brow color, you can load them the same way you do for hairs.

I did used it once for binning brows, and more recently for facial hair (I had binned most of it manually ), and the tool processed them without problems.

[Tina G]

I've come across another problem: The plugin seems to 'eat' blond recolours. Every single blond recolour i run through the plugin does not show up in CAS. Is there something I'm doing wrong?

I've just gotten up the nerve to give this a shot today and have the same problem. Only the black colors are missing instead of blonde.    As unawesome as I am, I should have known to just leave well-enough alone. LOL

[Ambular]

I've come across another problem: The plugin seems to 'eat' blond recolours. Every single blond recolour i run through the plugin does not show up in CAS. Is there something I'm doing wrong?

I've just gotten up the nerve to give this a shot today and have the same problem. Only the black colors are missing instead of blonde.    As unawesome as I am, I should have known to just leave well-enough alone. LOL

I had the same problem with black recolors, and I figured out why: I was loading the black package a second time in the gray tab and checking only the gray textures in there, which worked fine in most packages, but a few of them didn't seem to like it.  The solution I found was to leave the gray textures checked in the black tab and load nothing in the gray tab, and then everything seemed to work fine.

[Tina G]

Thanks Amber! Actually I don't know what the hell I may have done...lol  I do know that it's giving me a helluva headache. I'm stubborn though so I'm gonna keep on trying until I get it right or until my head explodes! 

[blackjacksims]

Theo, I used your plugin for hair and it worked very well but when I try to bin brows they do not compress and become 2Mb files. Please tell me where I'm going wrong.
Thanks.

[blubug]

It's easier than you think: when you download a hair, it normally comes with four color packages. When you view the hair in CAS or BodyShop, all four colors are in the custom content bin. But when you change the mannequin age to elder, you see that there are also four grey hairs in the catalog. This happens because each color package comes with a grey recolor.

This tool enables you to hide three of them (at your choice), leaving only one grey recolor (like the Maxis hairs).

That's why the tool automatically unchecks the elder recolor items [in standard color tabs], so that you can simply check the desired grey recolor, instead of unchecking three!

The example also shows a little quirk: there were no really grey colors available (as seen in the texture preview).
Because the tool does not allow you to replace an item's texture yet , you either choose an elder age recolor (out of the four available) that looks like a grey hair, or you would have to create a grey color package yourself, and load that package into the "Grey" tab, where the elder age item is the only one selected.

Oh dear, well I thought unchecking the grey in the big window (where all the hair colors are) made the hair have NO grey color. And I read the whole script on the download page (many times)! I feel very 'stoopid' after having binned almost 700 hair textures. I checked the unchecked grey every time, I didn't realise you could keep it unchecked and have one grey anyway.
Well I just have more useless elder hair colors, since I don't even age my sims to elder, freaked that they will become all shrivelled up and die without my control. Now I wonder why I even bothered checking them in the first place. God I need a brain transplant. (and could you introduce a batch-fixing option for this? Maybe I could uncheck the greys without the hassle all over?)

Thanks for making this plugin anyway, it works brilliantly!  (I think I have an older version by the way, with no clothing options)

[Theo]

Theo, I used your plugin for hair and it worked very well but when I try to bin brows they do not compress and become 2Mb files. Please tell me where I'm going wrong.
Thanks.

Sometimes the textures won't compress even if you check that option.

This is a known problem of SimPE's compression function (which is used by this tool), and I think it happens when the compressed data is larger than the original.

Perhaps in a future version of SimPE that problem may be solved, but until then there's nothing we can do. You can try do do the compression manually, but in the end the result will be the same

[jrd]

SimPE's compression is indeed buggy. Compressing any kind of image (including hair textures and skintones) may actually corrupt the package. Only text can safely be compressed.

[Theo]

The Fix DNA function scans the Sim DNA resources in your neighborhoods, and if it finds any family guid of the loaded packages, it replaces it with the normal color guid. The normal guid to replace depends of course, on the color tab where the package was loaded.

This was done by request, and I have never used it in my neighborhoods, for the simple reason that I never created CAS sims with custom hair.

So far the only person that used it reported no problems, but if you want to try, don't forget to make a backup first

[J. M. Pescado]

This is a known problem of SimPE's compression function (which is used by this tool), and I think it happens when the compressed data is larger than the original.

I think the compression algorithm is set by whatever the Maxians are using, and it would thus be pointless to "compress" something to produce a result that is not, in fact, smaller.

[Theo]

This is a known problem of SimPE's compression function (which is used by this tool), and I think it happens when the compressed data is larger than the original.

I think the compression algorithm is set by whatever the Maxians are using, and it would thus be pointless to "compress" something to produce a result that is not, in fact, smaller.

What I find odd is that the same resource can be (or appears to be) compressed in a package generated by BodyShop, but cannot be so when processed by SimPE.