I think after the last few times i've downloaded undies that are in all categories i've finally snapped into wanting to knife in the back the creators who think that when they make something it needs to be in more than one sub category.

There are 6 different categories for teen-young adult-adult and elder:

Everday, Formal, Undies, PJ's, Athletic and Swimsuit

The problem again, is with creators not taking the time to pick a single category and sticking with it, so we as players have to take our time and fix it (if its worth it). To something more specific.

We're going to use two tools, SimPE ver. 0.46 or higher, and Sims2pack Clean Installer ver. 1.5.1.4

A. Make sure your games not running and startup Clean Installer. What we're going to do now is seperate your clothing from the rest of your downloads "temporarily" so that the processes dont take forever and a day to complete while using SimPE's scan folder function.

1. Uncheck the box that says "Preview images"
2. Choose directory downloads.

Clean Installer will than start scanning your downloads folder and subsequent subfolders for all of your custom content in that directory structure. You can tell when its completed when the word "downloads" is no longer grey and the choose directory is able to be clicked again, but dont do that, its finished and now we can move on.

3. Click the grey bar that says "Type" .. This will sort the files into their different types so that we can find all the files we're looking for.
4. Move the slider down until you find the first type of file that is 'Clothing'.
5. Click that first clothing type file so that it is now highlighted.
6. Hold the shift key down and find the 'last' file that is of the type 'clothing'. Then click it.

What you've just done was highlighted all of the clothing type and now its ready to do something with it? .. wait, what? we're still in clean installer, .. again we're just going to move the clothing to its own subdirectory to save ourself a little time with the SimPE processes.

7. Right click one of the highlighted clothing and it will give you some options, Enable Package, Disable Package, Remove Package and Move to, we're concerned with the Move To.
8. Click on the Move ->, than it opens up a subpanel and you than want to click on "New"
9. It will than ask for a new subfolder name and we're going to name it "RECAT", just so that we're following on the same page.

It will now move all those clothing file type that you block selected and put them into that folder named RECAT.

Cool, we've now seperated the clothing from the rest of all the other downloads, lets move onto the SimPE portion.

B. Load up SimPE, SimPE is a very very very useful tool in doing all sorts of things and well, this is the one we're going to focus on, scanning the folder RECAT with all the clothing in it, check out the thumbnails and recatagorize that clothing to appropriate places.

1. The 2nd option at the top is is "Tools" click that than move down to "Scan Folders", it will now open the scan folders plugin, this is going to be what we're primarily going to work with.
2. At the top, you'll see the words in a drop down box labelled "Download Folder" well thats all good in fine, but we moved the clothing into a subdirectory, so what we're going to do is click the drop down box until you see a "..." The "..." means to actually pick which folder we want to use.
3. When a new window appears asking you which folder to choose, find the one in the sims 2/downloads called RECAT the one we created earliar, highlight it, than choose OK.

Now, it will still say ... above in that drop down list, but just remember you chose the directory RECAT so just have faith that it knows that its there, .. it knows.

4. In the lower half of the scan folders plugin are 3 tabs, Scanner Settings, Operatives and Cache. Make sure that the tab Scanner Settings is chosen.
5. Choose these options and uncheck all the rest, Choose "Thumbnail Scanner" and "Clothing Scanner" Everything else again should be unchecked.
6. At that point when your ready, go ahead and click that word "Scan" in the upper right corner, OR the scan button.

This is going to take awhile, what its doing is reading or creating thumbnail preview images for each and every file that you have in the RECAT directory, .. remember that reason we used clean installer? well this is it. Because its having to do all the work in creating thumbnails for us to view it would be 3x maybe 10x longer in time if we had it do your entire downloads.

Seriously, dependant on how many custom content clothing you have, you might as well go watch a movie for a little while. Play with your children who miss you cause your sitting at your computer all day, or that pet that requires some attention and/or husband or wife. For me, so far 30 minutes have elapsed and its not even half done.

OKAY! Once its completed your folder scanner will update and you will see 5 columns of information, Filename, Enabled, Type, Ages and Categories.

7. Sort the list that appears by Categories, that is, go to the column that says catagories and click the word catagories at the top of that column, it will now display the entire list by catagories.

Just to get you familiar with the operations tab, click on the Operations tab in the lower half of your Folder Scanner, than scroll down that box until you see the portion designed for the "Clothing Scanner" You will now see set Ages: and set: Categories: and options for that, thats what you will be using at this point.

8. With the operations panel open and ready to set Categories, find the first file in your folder scanner that has multiple categories, .. usually at least for me it was one that showed "Undies/Swimsuit" click that file and now we can do an 'operation' on it.

Look at the name of the file, does it have the word swimsuit, or bikini thats a real big topoff on what it actually is.., in the lower right hand corner you'll see a nicer view of the thumbnail. Sometimes creators will put the acronym SW or UND or EVR or ATH etc to denote what the clothing is so use your better judgement, the trick is to at least try to get as close as you can to where the clothing should actually fit in.

9. In the operations menu, choose a single, most appropriate category that that article of clothing should fit into. In my case, it had the word "swimsuit" in the filename, so I uncheckmarked the "undies" box.
10. Click the word "set" in the word "set Categories:"

What this does it actually create a .bak fie of that file so you have a backup, AND it makes the changes that you did. Big warning though, it does NOT update your current scan, so what happens after you click Set is that it reappears as if you didnt make any changes, .. ignore that. It made the change but you didnt do a re-scan and well heck it'll take forever to do another re-scan so just move on to the next file.

And at this point, you've got the basic idea, .. head through all of those files that have multiple categories and choose one.

WITH the exception of NUDE clear clothing. I have clothing that is in multiple categories for a purpose, thats the nude clear clothing, so that when I create a sim if I want a particular say undies for him to just be nude instead of wearing undies, it will stay there. You dont need to change that one, just move on to the next. (file usually has the word "nude" in it).

C. Cleanup and checking time.

Now what we want to do after we've made all of our changes is do a rescan of the folder, (this time without thumbnail checking) and verify what we've done is done.

1. Move the lower left hand tab in the folder scanner over to the left to Scanner Settings, and uncheck mark the Thumbnail scanner, so that the only thing it has checked is Clothing Scanner.
2. Click the Scan Button, .. you will notice this doesnt take as long as before, quite fast actually.
3. Verify that Categories tab, click it, it sorts them all again and notice that the files you've edited will only have that single category you have chosen.
4. Your done with SimPE, go ahead and just close that program.
5. Load up Sims2pack Clean Installer again, its time to move the changed clothing back to the downloads main folder.
6. Uncheck the box labelled preview images AND uncheck mark the word box labelled Recursive.
7. Move the dropdown box down to the word "RECAT" instead of Downloads. Now it will start scanning that particular directory and you will notice that its all clothes.
8. Click the first file on the list, hold the shift key down and than click the last file on the list, *marking* them all, highlighting them all.
9. Right click one of them than choose Move To.

At this point you will notice that the actual directory Downloads isnt available, so we're going to have to "browse" for that upper directory to move the files back to it.

10. Choose browse, than search for your downloads directory than double click it open click OK.

It will now move all of your clothing files, back into your root downloads directory where they should be. As a bonus, you also now have .bak files /backups/ of all that you have done still inside the RECAT directory.

Go ahead, start your game up and notice how things are looking alot cleaner in your clothing and categories, sure you'll have one or two in the wrong places, but now you know how to edit those with SimPE and fix it yourself where you want it to be.

.. If you use the boolprop testingcheatsenabled true, and shift-n while choosing clothing, if you move your mouse over a piece of clothing you can actually find the filename of which that is than move on from there.

I keep all of my clothing, genetics, make-up, etc, in my Saved Sims folder. When I ran the clean installer, I noticed quite a few packages without a type. Some have the name, but others are just a lot of numbers and letters. What is your advice for this? Many of us really appreciate you taking the time to help us all out, especially with the new ep coming out very soon. Thank you.

Most often the ones without a type are one of the following:

Mesh's
Complete Sim makeups
Sims Heads (put together)
Hacks

You basically just leave those alone

Thanks.

Hey, thanks! This is a lot easier than editing the category string in the Property Set.

Wow, so detailed! Thanks frumph for another lovely step-by-step, easy to understand tutorial. I've moved it to the tutorials section for now.

Hi, was going to try my hand at creating, but cannot get to SimPE site it appears to be suspended. Is there any other way to attain the Modding Tool?

Quaxi is dealing with the issue's at his site, just be patient and information of it being back up/where its at will be posted i'm sure

thanks, i hope they resolve the issue soon.

Frumph you might want to add is, to make sure all your files in your RECAT folder arn't read-only, otherwise you will come across painful errors like this:



Anyway thanks for describing how recataloging can be done, as I didn't have the slightest clue before then.

EDIT: Also ive noticed a lot of clothing, avaliable for Young Adults and Adults, just asking is it safe to change that also ?

Can you go in and change the availibility of the clothes the same way, like can you make the ones that are available for adults available for young adults? And I also noticed the pregnant option. Can you check that to make some of the clothes available for pregnant sims? Thank you so much for these wonderful tutorials, I'm all new to this and I have been able to follow right along with you with no problems. Thank you!

Well I don't where I when wrong, cause as soon I finished recatagising, I put my clothing packages back into downloads, then started the game up, and it was crashing on me, if I click on CAS or even a house, just loads for about 2 lights, then crash to desktop.

So looked through my downloads folder, removed my recent changes from the date and time, they were all the modified package files from changes I made re-catagloging in SimPE. Everything was ok again, but I lost a lot of clothing.

I just put about 3 or 4 back-in, then reloaded game, and its was crashing again, as usual, so removed them and its ok. So I seems Ive corrupted 124 package files, all changes I made.

Luckily SimPE makes backups, but the odd thing there is the old RECAP folder I used before has 225 .bak's (backups), and there were only 124 package files that is casuing the problem. Im sure if its just 1 or 3 or 5 or 20, or all 124 corrupted causing my game to crash even I just add 1.

Anyway SimPE can seem to read these modified files ok, but the game somehow can't, will just crash if I put them or some into downloads.

:down:

Thats a pretty odd issue actually and not one i'm familiar with, which version of SimPE are you using? .044?

Yeah I was using latest version, but used the SimPE Classic.exe file as there are 2 of them in the folder. (The new-style SimPE has graphic glitches on my machine)

I guess I can just restore all back-ups, and try again I suppose with the normal 0.44 SimPE.

well there's no difference in the actual working-code in classic and new gui, just really the interface .. i used 0.46 and didnt have those problems at all .. not sure what they could be and best would be to post a new thread concerning it so that someone SimPE technically smart could answer in the SimPE area

Are there answers to these questions already and I'm just not finding them? Is that why I'm not being answered? Or am I just not posting right?

I just havent gotten to it yet, .. the program Datgen has a great Adult-YA and YA-Adult clothing changer..

the problem you will find though is if the adult clothing is made for a custom mesh, having it switch to YA will cause problems with the midrift section where it doesnt connect straight and you will get overlaps

if your comfortable with that, go for it.

As for pregnant clothes, you really need to create clothes for the pregnant mesh itself, you shouldnt just label something as pregnancy clothing, the reason being that its 1) another mesh entirely 2) it stretchs the image/clothing around so it doesnt and wont look right

best to just have pregnancy clothing made for pregnancy clothing

Thank you, glad I asked before I went and started clicking. lol Thanks again.

Thanks for the tutorials. They are all helpful. Just thought I should let everyone know a mistake I made while doing this that caused a problem, that I thankfully was able to figure out and solve, in case someone else does the same thing.

I went through the process step by step and was going along and clicking and making sure most of my clothes were set to one category only, when somewhere along the way, without realizing it at the time, I accidently clicked on the "skin" category for one of my types of nude clothings (you know, the ones that make your sims nude all the time.) I of course was keeping those in all the clothing categories, but along the way I accidently checked the "skin" box in that particular file and saved it that way. When all was said and done and I finished all the steps, I went back into my game and discovered that my teen girls had ALL GREEN SEMI-TRANSPARENT BODIES (except for the head), no matter what skin I clicked on, with the exception of one or two custom skins. The adult and elder women had red and back bodies with normal heads. What was even weirder is that when I clicked on an all nude clothing to see the full skin, the body was red and black, but showed the texture of a full bathing suit (a Maxis made one) on it. I was pretty flustered trying to figure this out.
:confused:
I went back through the process again to scan my clothes in SimPE again and went through each one until I discovered that none of the others had the "skin" checked except one particular file. I took a chance, seeing as that was inconsistent with the rest of the files, and unchecked the "skin" box and reset that clothing file, finishing up the process again in the same manner as before. When I went back in to my CAS, it had worked! My sims were all normal skinned again!

So, if any of you go through this process and then discover a strange looking colored skin in CAS that won't change no matter what you click on, remember me and my mistake and rescan your clothes, looking to see if the "skin" category is checked anywhere.

And so, the moral of the story is - don't checkmark the "skin" category box when re-categorizing your clothes.

Hope this helps.

Just to let you know, I got down to find out my problem. It wasn't all the packages files corrupted after all, after putting bit by bit back in, it just came down to 2 corrupt packages.

I only lost 2 pieces of clothing, or 2 corrupt package files, and I don't even miss them, because I wouldn't know what they were anyway.

Your turtorial works wonders Frumph, it my own fault what I did was terribly wrong, I was adjusting my computer clock while SimPE was running, and it caused 2 corrupt package files.

So never adjust your clock while SimPE is running.

Anyway all my clothing now, is now cleanly catalized, and all unwanted clothing has been deleted. Never had a more organised wardrobe than this before.

I also noticed quickier loading times, also it was well worth it. Now I guess its now comes to the objects, recolours, walls, and floors.

Looking forward to your Part 7 Frumph!

Righteous Conrad, glad to hear its all lookin good for ya!

Why not just use Bodyshop and create new clothing of the ones you want to change categories for? When you import it again, you always get the option to select the categories you want the clothing to be displayed in (formal, everyday, undies, swimwear, pjs etc). Then you can delete the old clothes if you wish. This "cloning" is a much easier and faster way I think, 30 seconds or so . I use it alot myself if I want to change the categories of the clothing I've made or other's.

I've described before how to make adult clothes available for young adults or vice versa. Take a look in this thread

http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=79238

Again, I warn anyone against doing the converting the setting of YA and Adult clothing to work for multiple ages like both YA/Adult

You will find that alot of your clothing you set to both ages will have problems lining up with both the tops and the bottoms, they will look overlapped and out of place. Than, it will be harder to find that piece of clothing and reset it seperately. Your more likely just to get frustrated and delete it.

If you DO want to convert both YA and Adult to work for both, take the piece of clothing and clone it, than set its age seperately.

You shouldnt use multiple choices.

Oddly everything I create for Adult in BS is always also avalible for YAs, bit of a pain, also just exporting then re-importing from BS just to change the categories is actually a lot slower, because BS is a very slow appication. Plus on my machine, if I make a clone, I lose detail and quality on the duplicate. (Video Card Problem I guess). Plus some creators don't want their creations exported in BS, and thats exactly what your doing even if to just change the category.

Ill rather just edit the originals with SimPE than make clones.