#pooklet learnz

[pooklet]

old game, new glitches

It never ceases to amaze me how, after twelve years, The Sims 2 (and associated programs) still finds new and excitingly terrifying ways to frustrate the living fuck out of me. If you have any problems with lots suddenly slowing down (fps drops that exiting and reloading/restarting won’t fix), invisible babies and eternally pregnant sims, or just SimPE refusing to ever load the Neighborhood Browser, this post might hopefully be helpful to you!

EDIT: @lilsisterg​ pointed something out to me that I should have noted! Before you try the first two fixes listed below, definitely get BoilingOil’s No Sim Loaded hack. It can catch a LOT of this stuff and save you some major headache. In my case it did not fix these problems, which is why I had to resort to the following measures.

1) Problem: A lot that ran fine before suddenly slows to a crawl, with incredibly choppy, laggy movement in live mode, almost as if the frame rate of the game has suddenly dropped down to between 5 and 10 fps.

Solution: Get MATY’s Batbox. Make sure testing cheats is turned OFF. I cannot emphasize this enough. If you’re even the slightest bit unsure about whether it’s off, Ctrl+Shift+C to bring up the cheat window, type in the following and hit enter:

boolprop testingcheatsenabled false

When testing cheats is safely turned off, select the Batbox (Misc/Misc in the catalogue). Select “Force Errors...” an then “On Off-World.” Is your lot running normally now? If it is, great. If it’s not, make sure none of your sims are doing anything important, select the Batbox again, go back to “Force Errors...” and this time click “On All.” All your sims will snap-reset, but whatever was causing the lag should be taken care of.

It’s not an ideal solution cuz the issue can reoccur (on my current legacy lot, this has happened three times in as many generations), but it’s a much better alternative to moving the entire family out of the lot and then back in, which is the usual advice that I’ve found for this problem.

2) Problem: You just saved right before a birth so that you could “roll the pacifier,” either using Create-A-Sim, or the “Rerandomize Sim Generator” option on the above mentioned Batbox. You get the new baby popup and the baby shows up in the family sidebar ... but your pregnant sim doesn’t actually give birth. They just stand there, clearly pregnant, but not giving birth. If you check their pregnancy status with the Insimenator or similar, they are no longer pregnant according to the game. There’s no way to interact with the new baby.

Solution: OK, so this is a longer and much less general problem, but all the info I could find while googling “sim won’t give birth” “invisible baby” “endless pregnancy” and suchlike ended up being unhelpful. I was mostly told that by moving my sim to a new lot, she’d immediately give birth, but that did not work for me.

To prevent this from happening, try not to save too close to the new baby popup. I’m pretty sure this occurred in my game because I saved too near to the birth itself, when the game had already begun to generate some data about the baby. So, try to save while your sim is flailing around in the first throes of the in-labor animation, not when they’re nearing the end of it.

BUT, if this has already happened to you, you’re going to need the Batbox for its force error function again, and some sort of pregnancy controller hack, like the Insimenator. If you have Mansion and Garden, you will need this version of the Insimenator. If that link ever goes down, I’ve uploaded a mirror on SimsFileShare right here.

First, to fix the invisible baby, once again make sure that testing cheats is off and none of your sims are doing anything super important. On the Batbox go to “Force Errors...” again, and then straight to “On All.” Everyone will snap-reset and the baby should appear by the mailbox. Phew. Since the name-change dialogue box never popped up, your baby will be named Baby Boy or Baby Girl. You can wait until they’re a toddler and then change it using the Batbox, as described here. Or, you can change it immediately using the Sim Blender if you’re comfortable having both Insim and the Blender in your game at the same time.

Now, to fix your eternally pregnant sim, spawn the Insimenator’s Reproductive Adjuster by clicking on the ground somewhere and clicking “Spawn...” “Reproductive Adjuster.” A microwave will pop up. When you click on it, your sim will show as having non-pregnant options (i.e. they will see “Have Baby With...” instead of “Pregnancy Details,” “Pregnancy Stage” and so forth). Select “Have Baby With...” and pick the same sim that got them pregnant with the no-longer-invisible baby (if the sim in question is not on that lot, select “A Neighbor (Dialog)” and select the sim’s picture from the menu that pops up). Now immediately click on the Reproductive Adjuster again and select “Abort Pregnancy.” Your sim’s phantom pregnant belly should now disappear.

From here you can proceed as normal. I was feeling a little nervous after all that glitchiness and so I went ahead and backed up my neighborhood and ran Mootilda’s HoodChecker. It found and fixed a bunch of errors, but now things seem to be back to business as usual in my game.

Lastly, the following is an issue with SimPE rather the game itself, but it’s no less annoying and I had to dig through old, archived copies of the SimPE forum on Wayback Machine to find a working solution, so I figured I’d post it here.

3) Problem: SimPE won’t fucking load the Neighborhood Browser and just sits there, frozen, forever, with “Please Wait” in the bottom left corner. If it does load, it takes upward of half an hour for it to do so. If you try to open the neighborhood package file directly instead of using the Neighborhood Browser, you have the same problem.

Solution: Local Mode! Go to where you installed SimPE, find “SimPE.exe”, right-click it and make a shortcut. Rename the new shortcut “SimPE localmode” and move it to your Desktop. Right-click on the shortcut and select Properties. Add “-localmode” to the end of the Target (without quotes). So, if you installed SimPE to the default location, your target would now read:

C:\Program Files (x86)\SimPe\SimPe.exe -localmode

When you run SimPE from this shortcut, you’ll get a popup telling you that the FileTable won’t be loaded automatically. Click OK. SimPE should now be able to load the Neighborhood Browser immediately with no problem. Use the localmode shortcut whenever you want to load the Neighborhood Browser, to use Sim Surgery to extract an in-game sim, for example.

EDIT: Azayawife and I just ran into another SimPE issue that we couldn’t find any helpful info on, so I’m adding it here. If you encounter a “changes cannot be saved” error when trying to import a new texture and you have already confirmed that the problem is NOT that your files are read/write protected, it is most likely that the texture file name is too long. Rename it something shorter before importing it and SimPE should be able to save your changes.

[pooklet]

face distortion faux-fix formula

(This is a fix for a TS2 issue, not TS3, just FYI!)

I added this as an edit to my previous post but I'm giving it its own one to make it easier to find. After lots more testing and messing with modifiers, I think I've settled on a formula for mitigating the game-induced facial distortion in offspring. It's not a perfect fix, but I'm personally very pleased with the results.

"Brow Up Down" = 3 clicks RIGHT

"Eyes Up-Down" = 3 clicks RIGHT

"Orbit Up-Down" = 3 clicks LEFT

"Cheekbone Up-Down" 2 clicks LEFT

"Brow Up Down" can be found in Brow, "Eyes Up-Down" and "Orbit Up-Down" can be found in Eyes and "Cheekbone Up-Down" can be found in Face. The upper eyelid will still be a little bit stretched and I haven't found anything at all that fixes the stretching around the mouth, but it's better than nothing!

Notes: This will not prevent distortion in future generations, it only treats existing distortion. Children born of sims who use this fix will still have the regular amount of game-induced facial distortion and will need to be fixed individually.

I've tested this method quite a bit and moving the brows/eyes/orbit around does not cause any extra genetic weirdness in offspring, so this is safe to do with the in-game surgery (using this hack) or by actually changing a sim's facial genetics in SimPE.

Last but not least remember, never ever ever use the "Face Short-Long" slider (found in the Face modifiers section). It's broken as hell and it causes even scarier distortion in offspring.

Aaaand I think that's officially everything I can do to help with this issue! Stopping the game from doing this in the first place is completely beyond the realm of my abilities, sorry!

[pooklet]

a few bodyshop tricks + a faux-fix for the offspring distortion glitch

BodyShop is a willful little beast but sometimes I can trick it into altering hard-to-edit parts of a sim's face by using seemingly unrelated sliders and "canceling out" their effect with other sliders. Looking at this post now it is not actually that helpful and everyone probably knows this stuff already but I made gifs and everything so now I have to post it, it is the law.

1. Change Eyelid Shape

By using the "Eye Size" slider to make the whole eye smaller by a few clicks, and then canceling out the effect by enlarging the eye with the "Eye Width" and "Eye Squint" sliders, you can stretch the eyelid texture of your sim's skin outward toward their ears.

To compress the eyelid texture, you do the opposite; click the "Eye Size" slider a few clicks larger, and then use the "Eye Width" and "Eye Squint" sliders to shrink the eye to its original size. In the end the eye itself is unaltered but the eyelid texture is dramatically changed.

2. Nose Bulb Fullness

"Nose Up-Down" moved down + "Nose Tip Up-Down" moved up lowers the bridge of the nose and squishes down the nose bulb. "Nose Up-Down" moved up + "Nose Tip Up-Down" moved down raises the bridge of the nose and stretches the nose bulb up, making for a wider, rounder nose overall. Given that both "Nose Width" and "Nostril Width" can cause distortion to the cheeks after a point, this is a good way to make sims with much larger noses without getting the Cheek Crease of Doom.

3. Stretch (or Compress) Skin Around Eyes, The Face Distortion Faux-Fix

By raising "Brow Up Down" and "Eyes Up-Down" and then lowering "Orbit Up-Down" the same amount, you can stretch the skin around the sim's eyes. Which in large amounts looks creepyweird but can be useful in smaller increments.

However! By lowering "Brow Up Down" and "Eyes Up-Down" but raising "Orbit Up-Down," you can compress the texture and this is the semi-fix for the Offspring Face Distortion Glitch.

When your sims have babies with the facial stretching as seen in the gif above, you can compress the stretched texture by raising the orbit, but lowering the brows and eyes.

I have tested this in a limited capacity (your mileage may vary). It does not seem to have a negative impact on genetics, however it does not inoculate future generations against distortion. You will have to do this to every sim with the distortion. It is not a full fix.

EDIT: After some more extensive testing, this is the exact formula that gave me the best overall results for minimizing distortion:

"Brow Up Down" = 3 clicks RIGHT

"Eyes Up-Down" = 3 clicks RIGHT

"Orbit Up-Down" = 3 clicks LEFT

"Cheekbone Up-Down" 2 clicks LEFT

Again, it's not perfect, but it was the best overall solution of all the different slider combinations I tried.

[pooklet]

POOKLET LEARNED A THING

If you edit the property sets on game clothing a lot (to enable stuff for all genders or recategorize outfits because there's no need for duck tubes to be in everyday, maxis), then you are probably familiar with this annoyance:

Even though the custom star is disabled, the delete button is enabled. And if you click it, you can indeed potentially delete that bit of content and break your freaking game.

We're all careful people but if you're as paranoid as I am, you reaaaaaaaally don't like that delete button being enabled at all. It makes you feel itchy and paranoid that the cat is going to walk across your trackpad, manage to delete something important, and destroy the delicate ecosystem that is your game install.

Well NEVER FEAR because there is a way to fix this bullshit and it's pretty darn simple:

Wherever you've installed the game, find your latest EP or SP and from there go to TSData\Res\Catalog\Bins. This is the magical folder where you can put property sets that have been modified without enabling the anxiety-inducing delete button on game content!

So if you download a default that has the mesh, textures and property sets all in one package, you would export the property sets and save them somewhere temporarily, delete them from that default package, and add them to a new package saved to your Bins folder. You cannot put whole defaults there, textures and meshes will not load from there, but modified property sets will!

This might be common knowledge, I just didn't see it covered in any default-making or SimPE tutorials so in case anyone else (like me) did not know about this thing until this very moment, I hope it is a helpful thing.

[pooklet]

posted for posterity, a ts2 tutorial on default replacing a thing with another thing that has more groups

I wrote this for myself and Azaya and I keep losing the frickfracking text file so I am putting it here, because the internet never forgets. If it is useful to you I am glad. It probably will not be, because I am truly deplorable at writing tutorials. (But apparently not rhymes!)

1. In SimPE, use the Finder set to PropertySet Search to find Property Sets for the default you want to replace. If they show up in multiple EPs, export the latest ones.

2. You gotta get the corresponding 3D ID, too, and the easiest way to do that is select one property set then organize by Instance and export both based on the matching Instance number. Do this with each Property Set/3D ID.

3. File > New > Add all the friggin Property Sets and 3D IDs. Save with the name of your intended default.

4. Empty the 3D ID files by opening them one at a time, right-clicking and deleting the stuff under 3D Reference File Editor. Click commit (beside the window, under the up/down buttons). Save when you've emptied them all.

5. Open up the replacement mesh, make note of how many groups are in the GMDC and extract the CRES and SHPE files. Temporarily add the CRES and SHPE files to the replacement file with your Property Sets and 3D IDs.

6. Open up the 3D IDs one at a time again, click the "Package" button in the editor and drag the CRES, then the SHPE into the space you emptied earlier. Commit, repeat. Delete the CRES and SHPE files that you temporarily imported into your replacement. Save.

7. Open a Property Set, now do aaaaaall this shit:

numoverrides: shows the amount of groups your mesh has, change it so it has however many the replacement has.

override0shape, override0subset, override0resourcekeyidx: copy each, change the 0s to a 1s in your copies. If there are more groups, copy again and change the 1s to 2s, etc.

override1subset: change the value to reflect the name of the other group.

override1resourcekeyidx: change from 0x00000002 to 0x00000003 and so on (this indicates where in the 3D ID that instance can be found, so the main group comes first at 0x00000002, then the first alpha at 0x00000003, then the second at 0x00000004 if there is one, etc)

If the Property Sets come from the base game, add the following lines to all: version (dtUInteger): 0x00000002 product (dtUInteger): 0x00000001 Save, close. Onward to BodyShop.

8. Open bodyshop, EXPORT AND REIMPORT ALL THE RECOLORS of the replacement mesh you're gonna use. If you do this then your fucking defaults won't BREAK if you (or the people who download your replacement) happen to delete the custom version of the defaulted recolors, because they will now have different TXMT numbers and whatnot. Close bodyshop. Yank those new files out of Projects and dump them in whatever folder you're keeping your shit in, make sure they're named something you can recognize.

9. Open one recolor, export the TXTRs and TXMTs. GIVE IT ITS OWN FOLDER AND NAME IT SOMETHING RECOGNIZABLE (even if it's just that the first recolor goes in a folder called "1"). Do this for each and make sure each recolor's TXTRs and TXMTs are separated in subfolders cuz otherwise you won't be able to tell them apart.

10. Open your replacement file, organize by Instance. Now add the TXMTs of one recolor. Select the Property Set of the original recolor you want to replace, and find its 3D ID (if organized by Instance, it'll be right above or below its corresponding Property Set).

11. Like you did with CRES and SHPE, click the "Package" button and drag each TXMT, **in the same order you set up in your resourcekeyidx**, into the same space you dragged CRES and SHPE. You can make sure you're adding them in the right order by checking the Group or Instance (High) value (click AllRes, organize by Instance High, make sure the Instance High of the Material definition you're dragging is the next alpha and so on).

12. Do this for each 3D ID, matching up each replacement recolor with the original in whatever order you want (it helps to have a text file set aside that lists what the original colors are, and what the corresponding replacements are). Commit. Save after you've done them all.

13. Add all the TXTR and TXMT files you previously exported and the entire mesh file of the replacement mesh you're using. Save. YOU'RE DONE.

[pooklet]

Hello Pooklet, do you have any tips for recolouring dark skintones so they could have cold undertones? I want to recolour a maxis match set but I never managed to make something decent.

Sure! I can try to help. :) I use Photoshop CS3 so any tips I can offer will be based on that program, but hopefully some of it is applicable regardless!

To start,

here’s my Kids In Technicolor PSD.

 I try to save them whenever I remember to do so, because I can never recall from one project to the next which techniques worked best, lol. So I’m going to use that PSD as an outline for this post.

Also I know you were only asking about recoloring dark skintones to be colder in tone, but since I had been meaning to write up some tips on making dark skintones in general, there’s gonna be a lot of that. Sorry for any unnecessary info! If you want to skip that stuff, jump down to “go-to adjustment layers for changing the color tone of images.”

Starting point. Having a mid-to-dark base skin to start with helps, but that’s not always possible when blending skins. If you end up with a pale base, you can still successfully make a nice dark tone, you’ll just have to use techniques like this a lot to counter detail loss and pixelation.

Gradual darkening. I find it a lot easier to try to inch the skin along with multiple different adjustment layers instead of trying to do everything in, say, one levels layer. In the PSD, the main four shades i made are divided into groups. If you take a look at group 1, I used a brightness/contrast layer, a color-fill layer set to multiply and and a levels layer to make the image darker.

Alternating layers that affect brightness and color. Adjust the color as you go. The base tone I ended up with in my PSD was pretty greyish in tone. In group 1, after the initial brightness/contrast layer, I used the channel mixer to add more red to the image before proceeding on to the color fill/multiply layer and the levels layer.

Go-to adjustment layers for darkening images: levels, brightness/contrast, a color fill layer set to multiply (a pale, desaturated shade works best). I don’t know the technical jargon for how these work differently so I’m just going to muddle through.

Levels: I use levels primarily for fine-tuning work because a little goes a long way and sometimes the effect can be a little too strong if you’re not careful.

Brightness/Contrast: I really like using brightness/contrast because dragging the brightness bar toward the darker end can often do most of your work for you; it’s a good way to darken an image without washing out the details of the skin.

Color Fill/Multiply: Pick a pale, low saturation tan/beige/grey shade for a Color Fill layer set to Multiply. Because this can wash out detail, I tend to use a low-opacity brush to erase the layer mask around the eyes, nostrils and mouth and then use gaussian blur to smooth out the mask. Check the very first Brightness/Contrast layer in the PSD for an example of what I mean; it’s really important, in general, to try to preserve the details of the face as well as give a good amount of definition to the features. I’ve noticed that people sometimes skip this with darker tones and it makes for very washed out, flood-fill looking tones.

Go-to adjustment layers for changing the color tone of images: hue/saturation, channel mixer, color balance.

Hue/Saturation: This is kind of a no-brainer, but it can be used for pretty awesome, precise adjustments if you go into the individual color channels. Not only can you desaturate, say, just the red tones on the face, but you can also define the area that the layer interprets as “red.” In the Hue/Saturation dialogue box, Click the drop-down “Edit” menu. Select one of the color channels you want to edit. At the very bottom, where you see the spectrum of color, you can click on the dark grey rectangle and drag it around to define exactly which colors you will be adjusting. You can also edit the “size” of the area to be adjusted by dragging either the thin buttons on either end of the dark grey area or the triangular buttons a little further away. A good way to get a feel for how this works is to go into a channel, turn saturation all the way up too +100 and fiddle around with the sliders to see exactly how it effects your image. I don’t often use the color-droppers, but they’re good for even more precise editing. You can color-drop and add or remove specific parts of the image from the area that your Hue/Saturation layer adjusts.

Channel Mixer: This one is a bit more heavy-handed, and I use it as a “counter-layer” more often than not. For example, if I have a skin that is very red-toned but I want to be more yellow-toned, I could use the Channel Mixer to add yellow to the overall image and then use a Hue/Saturation layer to selectively reduce the yellow in the image to exactly the tone that I want. Its effect is sort of that of a color wash, and can be overpowering if you’re not careful, but if it is very useful in combination with other fine-tuning layers.

Color Balance: Another no-brainer, but essential for making small color edits and extremely useful given that it breaks everything down not just by color but by Shadows/Midtones/Highlights. So if you like a skintone overall but think just the shadows have too much red, that’s fairly easy to edit! Also, oddly enough, I have found that turning Preserve Luminosity off works better for preserving the luminosity of skins and minimizing pixelation.

Other notes and stuff: law of opposites, layer masks forever, actions.

Law of Opposites: In addition to desaturation, it can also help to counteract or minimize certain colors by using their opposite, i.e. if a skin’s highlights are too pink, adding some green with a Color Balance layer can help. Blue counteracts yellow, cyan counteracts red, etc.

Layer Masks Forever: I talked a lot about layer masks in previous tutorials and earlier in this one, but they are absolutely essential. Either by selectively erasing and blurring parts of your adjustment layers to reduce their effects to areas where you want more highlights (or shadows), or by taking a lighter skintone and blending it in at a low opacity around the eyes and mouth to make sure they stand out realistically (examples in the PSD), layer masks are a lifesaver for editing darker skins without losing all detail.

Actions: A lot of people have made lovely skin actions, but in general I would recommend against just using an action without at least planning to do further individual editing. Since there is no way to be sure every skin base will have the same features nor distribution of highlights and shadows, results from actions can vary widely, and often lead to pixelation and washed out features. Although you might find yourself using specific techniques frequently and want to make an action to speed up that part of the process, I can’t imagine using an action for the entire skin-coloration process and still come away with a satisfactory result. I am too much of a micromanager when it comes to skins. /o\

A lot (if not all) of this was probably extremely unhelpful, I’m sorry! But when I finish my next set of dark, cooler-toned skintones, I will be sure to save and upload the PSDs.

[pooklet]

Thank you! I'm probably going to download everything on that list <3 Another thing, if you don't mind, what do you do for makeup? Do you have any idea how to convert things that are just for girls for men too?

i’m not actually sure re: makeup. i downloaded a WHOLE bunch of makeup and some of it happened to work on AM, so that’s what i use, lol! i would check my game but i haven’t reinstalled ts3 yet. but i know that one of those leefish links contains some converted makeup!

as for tutorials, there’s one by omegastarr on converting skirts. i don’t know any for tops or full body outfits that retain the AM chest. where texture overlays without meshes are concerned (such as tights or, i presume, makeup!), littlecat told me in a pm that you can easily convert those sorts of things in s3pe. you select the CASP part, then select GRID, and then under age/gender set “male” to true. that’s it!

edit: also!

lolabourbon replied to your post: Thank you! I’m probably going to download everything on that list

You can use master controller to make all accessories available for both genders though meshed stuff doesn’t tend to work a lot of the time. I think MC also has an option to do this for makeup too.

thank you for the tip! :D

[pooklet]

ts2 empty neighborhoods when installing to program files

so when GOS went down it took my empty neighborhoods tutorial with it, which isn't such a big loss because it was in need of a major rewrite anyway, which i will get around to shortly.

for the time being i wanted to share a link that was provided on my old tutorial (accessed via wayback machine) that might explain why if you install to the default program files location on windows 7, you still get a lot of random character files dumped into your neighborhood!