Silver, I don't see any reasons why it wouldn't be possible, but you have to know what you are getting into in advance. By doing your own set, you will have to do all 16. Since they are custom, they will never work with any other set except yours. That's not the part you need to commit to though, in every single Property Set in each of the 16 packages, you will need to change the Skintone line, the Hairtone line, the Family line, and (since they are custom, maybe not) the Creator line. Each package has about 50 Property Sets, so 4*50*16= 3200 lines you will need to change. If you miss one, it's going to blow up on you in a weird way, usually in a way that won't help you figure out what is wrong. (Part of the reason this took me 2 years XD ) On top of that you'd need to create the textures for all of these, which could easily take you even longer. If you want to go down this path though, start by making all of your skins. It will be way easier to link existing skins than to create a template set and then try to figure out where all the texture files go via their matdefs. This does back us into a corner if it turns out we can't get custom ones to link, you'll have made 16 very pretty skins, but you'd either have to stuff them into my template or just use them as custom ones (I'd genetisize them at that point) Weigh your options carefully. I'm quite willing to help, as long as you are committed.

Ok, you've managed to lose me already. Not a good start, lol. To clarify: why would I need to do a set of 16? I thought the number 16 came from there being 4 default skins and 4 haircolors thus resulting in 16 needed combinations. I assumed that a custom eugenics set would consist of 4 skin variants since each skin would be linked to a hair color and there are four hair colors. Sorry if I'm being thick.

Also, *if* it were to turn out that it was possible to do with custom skins, would it be possible to create a template similar to yours for the defaults so that one could easily make a "set" of custom that look different depending on the haircolor of the Sim?

Whoops, you are right, 4 not 16. You've lost me about the custom templates though. The great thing about the templates is that creators can mix and match. Would you need to be able to do that, or would you prefer to have multiple eugenic sets?

Sorry, I don't speak "mod" yet, haha.

Ok, I'll ask the simpler question instead of trying to sound smart. What I'm wondering is whether I would have to do the code changes from scratch for each custom quartet I want to do. Let's say, because it's easier for me to talk in anthro skins for some reason, I want to do a custom Tabby skin and a custom Fox skin (each in one shade for each haircolor). Could I do the changes to the Tabby skin, save the package and then copy the file and swap out the textures for the Fox skin ones or would I need to do the coding changes a second time for the Fox skin? That's what I meant by template: having like a texture-less file (I assume that's what your template is) that I could quickly drag custom textures into in order to make more hair-color linked customs. Just for my own benefit (though if there are others who want to do custom eugenics skins it's always nice to share I guess, hah).

I'm not sure I understand your questions, to be honest...



Oh, while I'm bothering you, I must ask: Is there any way at all around the elders getting the brown skin? I assume not or you would've done it yourself, but I just had to check. For human skins it's not such a big deal so long as I remember not to let the differences between the brown and the others be too big, but for my anthros I had planned to have 4 shades of red for the red hair, 4 blonde for the blonde etc so I would end up with red, blonde and black/grey Sims suddenly becoming brown. Though I just realized it ought to be possible to get around that by simply recoloring the elder texture to a grey fur that matches the hair so nobody would be able to tell that it's technically brown.

In a very short answer; no, no, and yes do that.

The benefit of a template is that every skin made from the template will overwrite each other, or rather be mix and matchable within the set. If you want multiple custom sets of 4, having a template would not help you because you'd still need to change the skintone and family lines for each, and I don't think afterwards you could get them to not overwrite each other anyways. So, yes I finally understand what you are asking about and no you can't do it that way.

A, you are not bothering me. I just had to wake up a tad more to understand your question because I don't speak anthro skins very well at all. B, no. I've tried and it just won't work. The idea really is that elders should have grey hair anyways, so you wouldn't notice the color change. This should be fine for your furballs, it's not so fine for people doing ethnicities, Asian sims grow old enough and they become Caucasian?! wtf. This is what I am doing with my game, so believe me, I tried.

Hmm... that's a shame! Let's see, that'd be... 4*4*50=800 lines of code for each eugenic custom skin. Oh boy, that's quite a bit, especially considering there's several I would want. I wonder how long it would take... Still, *if* I could manage to find the time and patience to do it, I think it would be awesome to have (why does the idea of a brown-furred Sim and a tiger Sim producing a brown tiger-Sim make me so happy? lol!) so I will have to consider it anyway. Where's the shortcut genie when you need him? Hehe.

Well, I think I should start with simply using your templates to make a default set which would require a couple of recolors of Genensims skins to make sure I have 16 appropriate solids plus making the elder skins grey. Then once I've got that done I can think about if doing the custom ones will be worth it.

Yeah, I imagine that's problematic. I'm not sure if I'll go the ethnicity route exactly but I'm sure I'll still end up with Sims mysteriously getting paler or darker as they age, haha.

Silver, I'm not entirely sure we are on the same page again. Assuming you are using 2 sets of custom eugenic skintones, there isn't anything to tell the game that their kids would be from a third set of custom skins. The best you could do is genetisize them, but then you still aren't guaranteed to get the correct skin. Now if you go back to having a 16 matrix, and decide that the hair color will decide fur color and that skintone with decide pattern, you could still do this. I don't think you could do it with custom skins though, you'd have to give up having 'normal' sims for it. You could of course have your S1 be 'human' and your S2-S4 be animals though. The bright side to that is you don't have to do any coding, just use my template.

Wait, so custom eugenics skins wouldn't work at all? I thought you said they would? Now I'm confused... The way I thought it would work would be:
- let's say I have a eugenics skintone set for tigerstripes, comprised of stripes on a white, red/orange, brown and black/grey base respectively depending on haircolor. Let's call it Skintone C
- I make a Sim with, let's say, red hair and tiger fur, thus creating an orange tiger. So C+Red
- Said Sim has kids with a Sim that has, let's say, black fur and black hair, from my default set, so S4+black
- Following combos for Skins avaliable: red hair and tiger skin (C+red), black hair and black fur (S4+black), red hair + black fur = red fur, if I set the solid skins up that way also (S4+Red) , black hair + tiger fur = black with tiger stripes (C+Black).
That is, of course, if I geneticise this custom skin directly above S4. Not quite sure if I'm going to geneticize them or just have the customs all be dominant, since I don't want to many pattern mixups.
You're telling me this isn't how it would work?

If it clarifies things, I keep my anthros in a separate hood. So for that hood it's furs only, no normal skins. I'd like to use customs for my patterns since they can either be kept dominant so that the offspring always uses that pattern or at least kept outside the grid of the normal defauls, thus making it less likely for a Sim kid to end up with a coat/pattern that neither of the parents have.


Edit: As a sidenote, incase you know this better than I do: if a Sim has a parent with a fully dominant skintone (say a custom or Alien one) and one with a regular skintone, does said Sim still have the "gene" for the regular, non-dominant skintone? That is, could that Sim still pass on either the dominant or the regular/non-dominant skin to their kids? Slightly off topic, sorry.

Ok, when in doubt, experiment. I created 4 testing skins, red and black stripes and patches. They are regular custom skins that I've edited the hairtone and skintone lines. The hairtone lines are reflective of the hair color, and both patches and stripes have their own unique skintone line that they share with the all the skins in that hair color. Here's the result.

I believe that you can make sets of 4 skins (one of each color), and you can breed them back and forth as you like. You are only held back by what skins you put in the game, and you aren't going to get 'legacy' skins, like a red and a yellow haired sims breeding will not produce a strawberry blonde.

I'll write up a how to about custom eugenic skins soon, but you can start by getting 4 hair colors of each skin pattern. I think our communication problem stems from the fact that we are speaking two different languages, I speak code and modding, and you are speaking anthros and furries.

You are a Simming goddess! I'm so glad this is doable.

Yes, definitely a communication problem. I'm trying to learn to speak modding but it's not going so well, hah. Anyway, I need to start by doing an inventory of what colors I already have and which ones I'll need to recolor myself. Not sure when I'll get around to it because I've got this assignment that's due soon, but since I'm so excited about it I might just manage to make time for it. Though I should probably start with the defaults...

Thanks again!

Phae, Phae, Phae! I just thought of something, that I wonder if might not help you.

The next thing on my list is to make a new set of default skins, but at the moment, I'm recoloring hair.

I was thinking about how all the skins have to share the same elder skin on the count of GREY hair. At the same time, I was ticked off, because I'm going to have to have 4 duplicates of the same hair, in the GREY bin. I don't want that, so I used CatOfEvilGenius' hair binner. http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=434016 (Plus, her program also familifies the hairs.)


...Without using external programs, whenever you recolor a hair, it gets it's own gray. You can bin the hair, with SimPE but it still contains it's own gray in the file.

But with Cat's program you can,

A. Link all of the hair colors to a separate grey file.

B. Link all of the hair colors to, like say brown hair to draw the greys.

C. Leave them the same, each having their own greys, (which clutters up the hair bin).


I thought it might be worth looking into a way to treat the skins like hair recolor files, so each skin could have it's own grey?

And if anybody understood how the game references grey hair, that would maybe be Cat.

I don't know if this helps.

I do know that I don't understand!

Oh boy, I'm sorry for the necromancy, but I was wondering if you had written up a how to about custom eugenic skins somewhere else? I didn't see it around here...
I've had somewhat the same idea as SilverLining, only with human skins.
From what I understood of your conversation, I could make several non-default 4-piece sets tied to one hair each, rather than a comprehensive set of defaults with the elder tied to brown. Monotonous and labor intensive, yes, but I have so many skins I'd like to have bodyhaired and tied to that color (so that i don't have a red head with a black bodyhair skintone for ex) that the limitation of the elder-browns won't let me be satisfied with the setup of your default set. [That's not a criticism at all, this is such a wonderful idea. I'm still defaulting my favorites this way.]

Also, how does family-ing skins work compared to family-ing hair?

Phaenoh will probably have better answers, but I can at least share my experience of custom eugenic skins.

The way I tied them together was by choosing the Black hair skin and copying down the family (dString) line from the Skin Tone XML, then editing the other three colors to have the same family. You'll need to change the Skin Tone XML, and then all of the skintone lines under Property Set.

Setting the hairtone is easy, like binning hair. In each Property Set, just fill in the hairtone line with the respective color ID.

So, what I changed was as follows:

*Skin Tone XML: Family line. I copied the Black hair to the other three skins, so all four skins share the same family.
*Property Set: 57 of them. Make certain the skintone line matches the Skin Tone XML. Change the hairtone to the respective color.

Three lines in total. It worked for me, at least, including babies being born without causing crashes. I played with them for several months like that, no obvious issues except for one thing. The swatches. I wasn't certain how to handle the duplicates (this was the first modding work I did), so I ended up with four swatches for each skintone. It didn't cause any problems, just clutter. Once the skins are properly familified, the four swatches will act as one and light up together when you choose one. It just took up space.

Thank you SleepyTabby!

If you don't mind clarifying, when you say "I copied the Black hair to the other three skins, so all four skins share the same family" you mean S1-4 that share one hair right? Because this is not the big set, I want to make sure I'm looking at it right, because with hair, the family ties the shape together so that when you flip between colors it doesn't suddenly become longer. With the skin does the family tie the four red-haired skins together, or all the S1s tied to the four different colors? Does that make sense?
If I tie the four different skins to one hair, how does that affect skintone dominance and heredity? I understand how the default set affects all that, but on smaller sets, what does it change?

Okay, let's see if I'm following you. (It's not you, I'm sluggish right now, so please bear with me.)

Family-tying the skintones is only necessary for different hairtones. When you tie the skintone to a hairtone, it becomes just one part of a skin. That is why I am pretty certain you need a skintone for each hairtone. Thus, to quote Phaenoh's last comment: "I believe that you can make sets of 4 skins (one of each color)...start by getting 4 hair colors of each skin pattern." Thus, one skin pattern needs 4 different files to reflect the four different hair colors.

Let's say I made a skintone called Light. I'm not very creative, I know. But I want Light to be a correlated skin, that way the genetic body hair painted on the men corresponds with the hairtone. I need to start by making four versions of Light, one for each hairtone. I call them Light-Black, Light-Brown, Light-Blond, and Light-Red. When I have those four versions, I have to choose one of their Skin Tone XML family numbers to represent the whole set, that way their hairs will always correspond with their skin. So I chose Light-Black's family number and have decided to copy it to Light-Brown, Light-Blond, and Light-Red, that way their Skin Tone XML's and Property Sets share the same skintone ID.

If I didn't do this, then textures would be messed up in game, because Light-Black's skintone textures will only show up for Black haired Sims once I've tied it to a hairtone. I could switch the Sim using Light-Black to another hair color in CAS, but then their skintone would change to the default S2, like the game always does when a Sim was using a custom skin that you removed. I imagine this would ultimately affect their genetics, possibly causing crashes at birth, but in the least, babies wouldn't inherit the correct skin if they had a different hair color than black.

But now that I have four versions of Light in my game, I can switch between the hair colors in CAS, and the skin will change to the appropriate one and genetics remain intact.

Sorry this was all hypothetical and I don't have any pictures to illustrate. I haven't used correlated skins in awhile, not because I didn't like them, but just that I changed my game's aesthetics and was too lazy to tie all the skins together again. So this is all going off of memory.

As for your last questions, I'm not really sure how it affects dominance. In my game, the genetic values of the skins seemed to be more important than the hairtone. But I didn't test it extensively.

That all made sense to me, thanks for laying it out, that helps a lot. So once labeled with the same family number, this "Light" skin is in essence one skin with four files as far as the game is concerned... overall that doesn't sound too bad, I'll give it a shot. The swatches thing will bother me, but that's okay.

Thank you again!

Yes, that's exactly it. I'm glad it made sense to you.

The swatch thing is annoying, but I still am uncertain how to fix it. I learned I still have copies of my old correlated skins, so I may check those out and see if I can at least make three of the swatches "hide" when in CAS. I'll post back here if I ever do figure it out (or if someone else does, maybe they can post their solution, since I don't know if Phaenoh had that problem when she tested it out for TheSilverLining).

Hope it works out for you!

I'll keep an eye on this thread then, in case you do sort that out.

Wish me luck! XD
[Rides off into the distance to decide which skin to test this on...]

I've been running on no sleep for about a week now, and this is a topic I haven't looked at in a while, so forgive me if this help doesn't actually work, but usually to hide something in the catalog, you just have to set the Flags to an odd number - most of the time 09 is used. I think this works with the swatches as well, but as I was mostly dealing with the defaults, I don't think I ever testing that.

As long as you have a set of 4 (1 per hair color) then your game should be fine, but if you don't link them all together or are missing a color, you game will have problems (ranging from strangely textured baby skins to all out crashing) upon birth of an infant with the missing hair color skintone.

Ah thank you Phaenoh!

Would it hurt anything for me to hide three of the swatches, and then toss all four skins into one greater file? (So that I don't stupidly delete one for some reason later.)

*And I hope you can sleep soon, I have issues with that off and on, and it sucks. I'm sorry =/

You should be able to merge them just fine, if that's easier for you. I found it less confusing to have separate files, that's all.

Hope you get some rest, Phaenoh.

Merging them will work just fine. If you merge the files, I'm fairly certain you should even be able to flat out delete the extra 3 swatches, but if the swatch has a Haircolor line in it, change it back to 0x0000s so the one swatch will work for all 4.

I almost wish (but not because that's a terrible thing too) insomnia was the issue. Starting your own business is not an easy way out by any means!

^^Undoubtedly, you're at the worst part of it all right now, getting everything set up and going. Still, hope you can get some better (and more) sleep soon.

I hope you don't mind, but I figured out how to delete the extra swatches today, and I thought I'd update this thread with a little tutorial to help anyone who wants to know how. I couldn't find any Property Set for the swatch, but I figured that it shouldn't be much different from adding in custom swatches. Turns out, it wasn't.

I took plenty of screenshots to make this simple. So, if you're interested, it's all behind the spoiler.

Thank you for the extra tut tips!

*Phew* Glad you were okay with me adding that in there.