This tutorial is going to teach you how to recategorize Maxis content. I will be covering clothing/hair with this tutorial (and maybe accessories/jewelry later).

First a little heads up. We will NEVER be editing the Maxis program files. ALWAYS create a copy of them for editing. It is possible (but not recommended) to do your editing directly in the program files, but there are two downsides to this. If you mess it up, and you don’t have a backup and need to replace the files (for most people, that means a full game reinstall). The other downside is that when you get a new Expansion Pack, it will overwrite all your changes and you will have to start all over. That happened to me. I was editing the BV object files and when I installed FreeTime I lost all that. It really sucked. Though it was a good thing for you guys, I had to make a new version (the way I’m teaching here) and was able to upload that for you all. If you found this tutorial to be a bit daunting, my catalog edits (objects) (clothing) are available for you instead. Everyone clear on this? No editing game files!!!

Recategorizing Clothes:
Requirements: Paper, pencil, SimPE and basic knowledge of it. If you don’t understand some of the the SimPE, go look them up in How To Use SimPE type tutorials.

1) The first step here is similar to objects. Grab paper and pencil and start the game. While you are in the neighborhood view open the cheatbox and type ‘boolprop testingcheats enabled true’. Then go into CAS. Once inside CAS press Shift N. Then go into the clothing catalog and start writing down the names of all the outfits for every age and gender that are in the wrong places. It is VERY important to group them by EP in your notes. Remember to write down which categories you would rather them appear in. If something appears in Everyday and Formal and you only want it in Formal, make a note of that. We can remove and rearrange to our hearts content. You can even make Adult clothes for YA! (And for elders if you don’t mind them having a more fit body) Toddler and Children’s clothes can also be rearranged by gender. You can give your girls all those cute sweaters their brothers are wearing now. We can also make certain hair only show up for certain categories. Off the top of my head I am thinking about the nightcaps from Family Fun, and the wool hats from Seasons and maybe some extra special fancy hair might only be placed in Formal.

2) Open SimPE and open the BaseGame Skins.package. It is here C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2\TSData\Res\Catalog\Skins. Find and extract all the Property Sets for the Base Game outfits. (Hair has a file for each color don’t forget) Put them in a folder called ‘BaseGame Clothes Recat Project’. Do this for all the other EPs and SPs. Put them in their own folders.


3) Start a new package. ‘Add’ all the Base Game clothes. Save it as YourName_BaseGameClothingCatalogEdit. Follow the install instructions here. Create packages for each of the others.

Open the Base Game file, change the outfit’s ‘category’ to whatever you prefer. Commit after you are finished with each outfit, and save when you are finished editing all of the clothes in a package. Repeat with all other packages.


Everyday: 0x00000007
Swimsuit: 0x00000008
PJs: 0x00000010
Formal: 0x00000020
Undies: 0x00000040
Athletic: 0x00000200
Outerwear: 0x00001000

To put an outfit in multiple categories, add the numbers together. 0x00001007 is Everyday and Outerwear.

The ‘gender’ number can be changed for toddlers and kids as they are the same shape.
Female is 0x00000001
Male is 0x00000002
Both is 0x00000003

The ‘age’ number can be changed or added together as well.
Adults is 0x00000008
Elders is 0x00000010
Young Adults is 0x00000040

Some outfits are hidden. To make them visible you need to change the 'flag' category.
Hidden are odd numbers, generally 0x00000009
Visibile are even numbers, such as 0x00000000 or 0x00000008

To make a Base Game outfit show up for Young Adults you also have to add ‘version(dtUInteger) = 0x00000002’ and ‘product(dtUInteger) = 0x00000001’ to the outfit. Highlight an existing line that is (dtUInteger) and click ‘Add’ then change the name and numbers. Commit and save.

You are done! Go test!

I've included a pdf version complete with pictures of this tutorial for your offline enjoyment! Any updates or changes I've been making to the online version are NOT included in the PDF, however. If you have any trouble with the tutorial, reread the step, then ask questions. If it was helpful let me know!

I'm glad I didn't wait 'til Friday to check for this!

THANK YOU!!! This looks terriffic! I was on the right path, but there were a few steps I was missing - and now I know. My catalog will now be perfect (for me anyway )

One thing you may want to add - when you combine categories/ages and add the hexed numbers together, be sure to use a scientific calculator set to hex because sometimes it comes out different than you'd think. Like, for instance, if you wanted a clothes item to appear in EVERY category (which seems contrary to this whole tutorial, but it may happen) the combination number is 0x0000127F. And, there must be 8 digits after the 0x.

Maybe I'm the only one who didn't know this already, but I just learned it yesterday while I was messing around.

Thank you, Phaenoh, for this great tute - I'm off to go re-arrange my game!

Catherine

EDIT: I have a question... what's the difference between the CASIE files and the non-CASIE ones? Like CASIEamhiphophood and amhiphophood? And what do I do when an outfit (like amhiphophood) is in several different EPs? Do I change them all, or just the latest one? HELP! Thanks!

Wow Phae...great job on the tutorial. I will definitely be putting this to use this evening.

Thank you so much for this tutorial. It's just what I need!

Thanks so much for this tutorial... I'm a chronic organizer, so this tutorial has been fantastic! I just have a quick question about categorizing hair...

To enable a hairstyle for all categories, should the category be 0x0000127F like it is for clothes? I've noticed that a lot of the maxis styles in the skins files end in 37F. I'm not sure why it would be a 3 and not a 2, as that doesn't seem to add up with the rest of the hex values. Also, is there a way to enable hairstyles for maternity? Maybe that's where the 3 is coming from, I'm not sure... but in any case, I hate when my adult females change hairstyles when they're pregnant.

Thanks again!

Not sure about the category number, but if you want to enable it for maternity, I would suggest go look at the category number for a hairstyle that is already enabled for maternity and copy that. Thats the only real way of figuring things out. Good luck!

Is it possible to move CC jewelry from glasses to right jewelry section? It's been bugging me for a while.

Um, this isn't about recategorizing CC at all, I'd suggest the Wardrobe Wrangler for that task though.

How does this work if you want to make a hair style availble for children and toddlers that is normallyh only for teens and older. IE mohawks. Personally it's been making me nuts I want to make my kids as sims and can't they all have mohawks and are toddlers. There are also a few other hair styles I would like availble for my younger sims that the teens have.

1. No
2. Still working on that solution myself, but I believe the answer lies in how the extra tiles in multi-tiled objects are categorized.
3. Search for 'hiders' or set the flag of the outfit to be an odd number.
4. Not sure yet.



That can not be done with these methods, you need new meshes for each age, search for melodie9's hair age conversions, she has already done most of them for you.

AmberDiceless made a hider for walls and floors. for those interested.

Now a question for hiding cloths what do you mean an odd number and hiders? Are you refering to the hider mods? Also I thought you said that using the hiders with the custom catalog mods would cause a crash. Was I miss reading sometime?

I don't think it should crash, but I don't know which one would take precedent over the other. There are tutorials already written on how to unlock the hidden clothing, just follow it in reverse.

Ok thanks. Ill try that and let you know.

Thanks I found them. Most of what I wanted there. Except still no short (female) mohawk for guys and toddlers. Oh well I'll have to keep looking. I'm still lost when it comes to using anything to edit a mesh. probably gonna be a while before I get that down enough to do it myself.

That's awesome. Thanks for sharing!

How do you hide unwanted Maxis clothing? I would download the hider mods but they hide things I don't want hidden.

Add one to the value in the 'flags' section of the item's Property Set (so 00000008 becomes 00000009, etc.) Depending on how much stuff you want to hide, it may actually be easier to download the hiders and just delete the Property Sets for the content you intend to keep.

Is it easy to work out which property set relates to which clothing?

For the most part, they all have names that mostly describe the outfit. Usually its best to look up the name somehow first. Creating a bodyshop copy will do it, so will boolProp inside CAS. The texture files themselves also share the same name and thats the method I use since I'm already in SimPE.

Hi Phaenoh,

It's been a while! Howdy!

I'm working on organizing/binning my hairs now (I've been using the Wrangler; but there's something it can't do, which brought me back to you.) Do you know what number I change to get all the recolors of the same hair-style to show up next to each other in the CAS catolog? For instance: if I have 3 shades of brown for a style, how do I get them to show up together? If you don't know - do you know who else to ask? I've tried renaming the files so they are together in my 'hair' folder, but that still doesn't work.

Thanks!

I found the answer from Lord Darcy over at MATY:
Hope it helps!

Great tutorial

Just a couple of questions:
--If I'm doing recats for clothing, the new package files I create go into the "Skins" folder for the respective EP/SP, correct?
--Does it matter if I do each age group individually? Last night I went through with paper and pen and wrote down all the Toddler things I want to recat. Can I do those first, save the file as something with "Toddler" in the name, add it to my "Skins" folder(s), then go on to children, etc.? Will it corrupt my game if I don't do them all at the same time?

You can make as many packages as you like, as long as they are made correctly (following my tut) they can't crash your game. They should ALL go into your highest EP's 'Skins' folder though, no matter which EP they came from. Best of luck!

Thanks So far it's going well. One more question--do I extract the CASIE property sets as well as the others? I have been...well, just because it makes sense, LOL. But if I don't need to be doing the extra work I'd be glad!

I never touch the CASIE property sets and everything seems to work out fine. However I'm not a Maxis coder so everything I've learned is from trial and error. If something doesn't work at first, try something else!