Since Datgen has fallen by the wayside and never really was the modding tool of choice anyhow, we could really use a SimPE version of their 'hair toner' that makes it easy to set up custom hair to use the correct Maxis genetic hair color bins and families and such?

Right now although it is possible to set up hairs this in SimPE way thanks to the research and testing of Pinhead and others, it's a manual and tedious process and 99.9% of custom hair creators are not bothering to take the extra effort to do it.

It would also be nice if it allowed for deleting unnecessary ages in a hair file a since the bodyshop feels the need to clone every age and thus waste space with duplicate textures of the same toddler, child etc hair clogging up our custom page and also our downloads directory.

Finally, it would be nice if there was an easy way we could search for and grab the reference to Maxis hair textures to apply to our custom hairs. I see people convert Maxis hairs from female to male or vice versa and only the shape of the mesh is changed, but the package includes the textures. This is a terrible waste of space and slows down loading time.

I know there were be plenty of creators that still won't get off their butts and do the custom hairs properly even with such a tool, but I think it will help at least encourage more custom hair creators to make efficient packages without wasteful duplicate textures and have the hairs set up in the proper color categories.

Oh man, I would love this. I have spent so long recategorising hair and I still haven't done the ages, etc.

Please make this!

Something like this skin manager from Datgen seen here would be very helpful:

http://www.datgen.info/tutorials/sm_hairtone.aspx

I think it would hopefully encourage more creators to categorize their hair. Right now, custom hairs are a mess and filled with duplicate wasted files like duplicate copies of Maxis toddler, child, elder etc hair textures. This wastes space and slows down loading time for the game.

That would be SO wonderful!!!!! I really hope this can be done! :)

Thank you for a wonderful program!

I asked for this months ago.......

DatGen has it's virtues, the hair plugin is much easier to use than doing it 'long hand' in SimPE. When I cat my hair files, I use Datgen for the color cat, then open the file s in SimPE anyway to 'hide' the unwanted ages. Getting rid of those unwanted, never used ages, would be better like Motoki says.

As it is, hair files are such a PIB (pain in butt) I have learned to just pass them by most of the time. :(

If SimPE had a 'short hand' plugin to do these steps, then we don't need to have two utilities that cover much of the same ground taking up space we could be using for DLs :P, it'd be a ton faster, easier, and, as Motoki points out, sooner or later DatGen's not going to work with the EPs.

*on knees, begging sincerely*

Hello,

I've noticed something interesting by deleting and allowing the generator to make townies, dormies, etc. It has taken all weekend but have confirmed this and YES! The game will use custom content once it has been catagorized so the program may "intelligently" use it. Example: There is a hair mesher who is apparently using DatGen to catagorize his hair. The mesher is Seomi. And I was amazed to see a Dormie wearing a new hair. I ignored this but later on here comes another new dormie with a different color Seomi hair.

I hope that the creators of SimPE takes this to the next level which would be to catorgorize ALL custom content eyes, hair, skintones, brows, facial hair, etc. in the hope that the Sims 2 base program will begin using all custom content because (and I'm assuming) that the program doesn't use custom content cause it cannot make simple color association decisions. Once the program knows the color associated with a hair, brow, etc. the program grabs the package file and it gets thrown into the ramdom sim generator.

I think we are very close to solving the non-custom content issue.
The answer is out there.

Thanks,

Pcgeekri