Facial Structure (LNxR) and DatGen
If you've ever had an interest in modding sim faces in TS2, you've probably noticed these Facial Structure files. Every character file has them, but opening them in SimPE gives you a whole lotta nothing.
These seem to be where the sim's genetic facial data is stored. You can delete all GMDC, GMND, SHPE and CRES files from a character file, and the sim's face will appear broken ingame, but if they then have a child, the offspring will still inherit their original facial features. Conversely, if you delete just the LxNR, the sim's face will appear intact at first; but if you change them to a different age they will revert to the default face, and if they have a child the inherited features will also revert to the default face. Giving a sim plastic surgery will generate a second LxNR in their character file for the new facial structure, although only the original one is genetic. SimPE can be used to geneticize plastic surgery by replacing the original genetic LxNR with the newly generated one, but it's pretty useless for doing anything else with LxNRs.
However, there is an older modding program called DatGen that does give more information about these files. This program was originally created for Sim City 4 modding and eventually expanded to support TS2 as well, but development was abandoned around 2005. The MTS wiki has information and download links here: https://modthesims.info/wiki.php?title=DatGen (My antivirus didn't like the installer, but I've had this program on my computer for a while and haven't had any problems with it.)
In DatGen we can view the LxNR as a list of vertices.
I don't know where to even begin in making this useful, but I wanted to share in case anyone else has an idea :) This LxNR format seems to be quite a mystery, in all my searching I found basically no information about it...
