I've made a Bottomless Baby Bottle, which is working in general. But I thought it would be cool if it was recolourable, since none of the older ones I found are. And now it keeps crashing when I try to open that section of the catalogue. It started as a complete crash of the game, and has progressed (I found a hyphen/underscore error) to a soft crash where it just pretends to be loading the catalogue forever, without generating a crash message.

Presumably it's something I haven't understood correctly in the tutorials, but I've rebuilt it numerous times, and tried to compare with a working object. There was originally no MMAT, so that has been imported. I'm using the tutorials by HugeLunatic and IgnorantBliss.

Help please? What am I missing?

I made a bunch of clones from Simotized's recolorable bottomless bottle (which likely was based on Inge's) a good long while ago, here (login required). You could take a look at those. Simotized's original recolorable bottle works fine for cloning.

Here's Simotized's bottle (and recolors) in case you want to take a look at the files and don't have a login:
https://simfileshare.net/download/4701036/

If Bo's version continues to cause trouble, you could clone Simotized's version and tune it to match Bo's.

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The only things I do find are the groundshadow is set to "VertexAlpha" instead of "StandardMaterial" in the cMaterialDefinition tab (TXMT) - no idea if this would affect anything, or if the setting works fine normally, I'm just used to it being set to "StandardMaterial".

The "green_bamboo" TXMT also has a slightly wrong name in the File List. Should be "-bamboo" and not "-green-bamboo" (should match the TXTR it references).

I don't think any of those would cause crashes, though.

Could be a mesh reference issue - I can't quite figure out where the mesh is referenced in the file, but if there's a conflict between the referenced mesh from Bo's original and your added resources, that could be causing the issues.

If you've run "Fix Integrity" several times on the same file, I've found it can occasionally cause the file to become a bit unstable. I usually do it at the start, and if I'm adding MMATs (as the last step). If you need to add or significantly edit a TXTR or TXMT (adding resource, editing resource name...), the "Fix TGI" button acts as a "soft" Fix Integrity that only affects that resource and not all the rest, giving it a new instance number and such if necessary.

Thanks for that, there are several ideas to follow up there.

I tried the Simotized bottle first (thank you!), but the -glass resources kept refusing to do what I wanted - I don't know enough about MMATs, probably. So I went back to a clone of the in-game bottle. Without trying to be recolourable, that works just fine. It's adding the recolour option that is breaking stuff now.

I'll poke it some more!

I may well have run Fix Integrity a few times, but I have also started again from the before-all-that working version too. I can do it again, I suppose, to make sure.

The clone I started with is the EA bottle; I took BHAVs and tuning from the ijBO version, but there is no mesh in their files at all, so I couldn't use that as a base for new textures.

I fixed the TXMT - that was only changed while I tried different things yesterday. 'VertexAlpha' is how the clone came. Changing to SimStandardMaterial made no difference.

Still crashing.

I tried Playtex bottles, but the best I could do with them was changing the 'milk' texture, still encased in glass. Every time I tried to make the glass subset have a proper texture, it failed.

I'll have another look at Simotized's bottle and see if I can work around the glass issue. I'm making a primitive bottle, so glass is counter-indicated.

Thanks for your input -happy to hear more ideas if there are any.

The crashing issue with the first attached file is due to part of the files being compressed and part not. If you remove compression (in simpe) it no longer crashes. And fix that one line on the file list on the txmt from -green-bamboo to bamboo, it shows proper two subset colors.

Okay. I have no idea how to un-compress something in SimPE, and a quick search didn't find me anything. I mean, there's the Directory of Compressed Files, but I imagine just deleting that would not be what you mean.

Assuming I un-compress it, and that works, does that mean the package needs to stay uncompressed forever?


EDIT - I think I just figured it out...now I feel silly. I compressed the file myself, so I can just do the recolouring edits on the previous version of the package, right? It doesn't have the CLST resource. And then compressorize it afterwards.

To uncompress in simpe, select all the resources, then on the resources window choose no in the dropdown box for Compressed. You can recompress once you are done editing. The game is just very finicky with packages having some resources compressed and some not.

Thanks for that mini-tute! There's so much SimPE can do that I don't know how to utilize.

So, now I feel even sillier. Tried reworking the pre-compression file, but it's late here and I'm tired, so I probably got it wrong - it crashed. But then I decided - last-ditch effort for today - to re-compress yesterday's file - the same iteration posted above - and it works. No crash. Beau Broke got a drink at last.

I haven't checked with a recolour yet, and I have to go to bed - but I am hoping that was the answer. (And I know it is possible to un-compress things in SimPE, so if it turns out broken tomorrow, I can try that method.) Thank you so much!

My new bottle continues to be not broken today. I've made a few recolours to prove it. Thank you both for your assistance.

I've just published the baby bottle you both helped me create - thank you again!

https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/4918660