Howdy Hi. I found a link to this message board and thought "Hey, this place is my cup of tea...SIMS!!!!111!!!1" Seriously, though...Please excuse me while I ask a few questions about The Sims 2. If these questions have been answered before, that's fine, b/c I R Teh N00b. Anyway...I thought y'all might be able to help me with my gaming experience (since I've been downloading the SimsStuff skins like crazy ) 1. Sims Body Shop: ok, I've figured out to change eye color and such, but...whenever I try to color hair, I end up with only one section of the hair being colored, and the rest is just blacked out. And that's just w/ the Adult skin---toddler, child, you name it, the rest is totally messed up---the part is on the fricken side, for example. :\ So...if anyone's figured out how to work this crazy thing, I would appreciate it. 2. I'd like to move some families into my custom neighborhood. I do not know how I'm supposed to do this. Like, I want my bro's family that's in Veronaville or w/e to be in my custom neighborhood. And I'm too lazy to make my own darn person. So again, help w/ this would be most appreciated ^_^ Thanks if you're able to help me, thanks anyway if you're not. Boy, this place is great.
Packaging Have you tried packaging an existing family's members, importing them, and then moving them in? They'll be just like the family in the other neighborhood without relationships. Fresh tabla rosas to begin molding. However, IMO making custom families is where this game really springs to life.
I've been playing the game for a long while, so I have about...oh...*thinks* 6 families in my custom neighborhood. However, I'd like to move these two certain families from Strangetown into my custom neighborhood (just to make things interesting ) And I've packaged the two families in question, I'm not quite sure how to import them into my ville. :|
Err, the true process of abducting entire families can be rather complicated, depending on how cleanly you want to do it. When you package a family, it loses all of its friends, a minor problem, but you also get "dangling family branches", if the family has members that do not live in the same lot. These people will basically look perpetually alive, yet you'll never be able to relink them, since if you package those people seperately, and transfer them all, they won't recognize each other. It's somewhat complicated. Plus it produces tons of dead wood. If you do this, you can have several megs of orphaned character files that point to no existing character that can be seen or interacted with.
1. The friends thing isn't gonna be too much of a problem. I mean...none of these Sims in question had enough friends to cry over. :| 2. I did package one family that did have about 2-3 generations on it, but again, that's not gonna be too much of a problem. I was able to figure out how to package, unpackage, and import the families into my custom neighborhood. Now I just need to figure out if these families will actually work. :|
Okay...colouring hair is, technically easy. You already figured out how to colour one part - and the rest is the same. The only drawback right now is that you can only colour one hair style, so if you'd want one new colour for all hair styles, you'd have to export ALL hair styles and colour them the same way. Basically, what you do is: choose hair style you want to recolour. Export it, and then look at the files. Depending on what hair style you exported, it will give you one hell of a lot of files. In my latest project to recolour the longish male hair, I had 62 .bmp files + 1 .package file. Open ALL the .bmp files in the graphics program of your choice - I'm using Paint Shop Pro 8, but I guess it works the same way in Adobe and GIMP. What you do not need to edit are the files ending in _alpha.bmp. These just decide what the hairstyle looks like. So you can close those again. You'll still be left with a lot of other .bmps, though. What you also do not need to edit, technically, are the .bmps which have white/grey hair on them - these are what your Sim will have as an Elder. All the others which have, for example, brown hair on them? Recolour them. In PSP, I do it by using its recolour function. Then, save them all, and refresh the Sim in bodyshop. Your new hair colour should show up. Remember that you need to recolour ALL .bmps which have brown hair on them.
Ah ok. Thanks for the tip. I was confused and overwhelmed by the number of bmp files that would be in the hair folder, so I just assumed to color them all. So...gracias. ^_^
