Hello,

I was reading this House Party interview with a Maxis producer and I'm interested in the official instructions mentioned on how to add custom outfits to the trunk:

TL: One of the objects we’re really excited about is the costume trunk. Want to have a toga party? Open up the trunk and select the toga option, and everyone in the house (including guests) will walk over and change. This is a powerful tool, because now you can have a black-tie affair or luau on the beach without having to create sims in those outfits and keep them dressed in them all the time. We’ll also provide instructions for replacing the outfits in the trunk with whatever the player chooses from his or her own personal or downloaded skins.

I've searched around Google, archives of The Sims website, and the House Party Prima guide, but I haven't been able to find anything. I've been having trouble finding even a fan-made guide. Does anyone know of tips or where to find a guide on adding costumes? I tried to wing it using this guide and how files are organized in the ExpansionPack2>Skins folder, but I don't think I'm doing it correctly. I haven't gotten anything to show up in my game so far.

I've also been wondering if it's possible to add heads to costume trunk costumes. I really want to make that weird Alien Baby into a child costume.
Thanks!

You could possibly add a head if you attach them to a costume's CMX.

Your CMX will have to be named something like ct-cost-mafit-##.cmx where ## is the next number following the last Maxis costume in that category.

Split the following parts with a dash:

ct: costume trunk
TYPE: cost, cow, disco, luau, nice, rave, swim, toga. (There seems to be an outfit ID, 15, for some kind of pajamas related to the costume trunk but it appears this isn't used).
##: A two digit number beginning at 01 and going possibly up to 99(?). I'm pretty sure you can't skip numbers.
Gender/Age: Same as for regular skins, ma, fa, mc, fc.
Shape: Blank for children, all adult skins seem to be named for the fit shape. I'm not sure if the other bodyshapes, or custom body shapes would be supported.

I think you can probably just attach the new head like a prop. It looks like the Beauty or the Beast charm transformations are all one mesh attached at the head, which might be another option for you.

Thank you for all the great info!

I was struggling to get a simple skin to show up, but then I decided to revert from making it a #11 skin and replace an existing one, #03. (I remembered in the interview they specifically used the word "replacing" ) It finally showed up!! I'm not sure if that's because there is a cap at 10 costumes, if it's because I was using a skin with only one skin tone available, or if it has to do with the "cmx.bcf" file that the existing costumes have. If anyone has any insight on that it would be appreciated! I'll do more playing around soon.

I was looking around online for downloadable custom costumes so I could compare files, but I haven't been able to find any. I didn't realize how rare it would be.

You can add more than 10, but they're numbered 0 to 9 for a total of 10 items. So, the 11th skin you add will be at index number 10.

Correction: The offset ID runs 0-9 but Maxis numbered the skins 1-10 so the numbers of the files are offset from the CT offset in the person data. This slipped my mind when I originally replied.

.cmx.bcf is just a compressed cmx and a regular cmx will work just fine. You need either a whatever.cmx.bcf or a whatever.cmx -- but not both.

I was literally looking into this whole system a few days ago, funnily enough. Maxis were merely referring to replacing the existing skins in the "\ExpansionPack2\Skins" folder with custom ones. You cannot increase the amount of options available in a category, nor is it possible to add an entirely new category (with one exception...sort of) because the way the game handles all of this is hardcoded. I've recently been examining the executable with ghidra to understand how exactly it works.


Yup. ID 15 corresponds with "pj", which was a pajamas costume category that was planned but not used. It still functions if you populate the Skins folder with correctly named skins (prefixed "ct-pj"), but you need to create new entries in the costume trunk's TTAB linked to BHAVs #4117 "Dress in PJs" and #4137 "Dress Everyone in PJs" to have it work in-game.

Since this category is unused and there are no assets for it, it could easily be repurposed to effectively make a new costume category...



Only skins numbered "01" to "10" are valid for adults, and "01" to "02" for children. This is hard capped; skin files with higher numbers are completely ignored.

The game has a function to randomly select a skin in the range (based on the Sim's age). If an adult Sim is already wearing a costume of the same category, the game will avoid picking the same skin, and for children it will simply swap to the skin they aren't currently wearing.

If the game rolls a number that has no corresponding assets, the Sim will just appear to "change" into their Normal skin. So you can technically skip numbers but this results in Sims randomly not wearing a costume, which isn't at all desirable. This is something I observed while testing the PJ category, since I didn't fill all 10 slots with skins.

This is not exactly true. The cap is only because of the Maxis trunk's random selection routine. If you manually set the offset higher, or use a hacked object to roll a higher random number the game will see the skins and they work fine. (Unless this is different in Legacy, it works in CC) You could use this to make a "library" of sorts with specific ranges for specific assignments.

Update: I did a little test and it seems like you can also skip numbers, for example at trunk offset 11 I have ct-rave-mafit-12.cmx with no entry at 10, no ct-rave-mafit-11.cmx.

Out of interest, did you test this by renaming an existing skin file? And if you did, did you also renumber the values inside the cmx and skn files? I realise I forgot to mention something important: the filename itself is largely irrelevant outside of the usual business of matching the mesh with the appropriate textures. If it's still numbered 01-10 within those files, then as far as the game is concerned, it's still that original variant number regardless of what the file itself is named. That's what the function is looking at.

Well, yes, I didn't make a whole new mesh and texture just to test this. I did modify a texture so that I could tell it was working, see screenshot below for an outfit with a giant 11 on it. It looks bad because I deliberately wanted it to stand out.


Yes. You need to make a new CMX and the numbers in the CMX have to match the filename for any CMX to work in the game. There's nothing inside the SKN you need to change for an outfit. The CMX says which mesh to use and it can be (pretty much) any arbitrary mesh in the game.


I assume you just didn't read the part where I explain I had ct-rave-mafit-12.cmx and, obviously, textures named to match it or it wouldn't work at all.

Further, this is something that peterg had working years ago. Unless there's changes to legacy collection, this does work in the CC release.



This is ct-rave-mafitlgt12.bmp with ct-rave-mafit-12.cmx

Perhaps you misunderstood me. The actual filename of a CMX file doesn't matter at all, other than the extension. You can literally name it "crap.cmx" if you want and it will still work as long as the contents of the file are properly defined.


No need to get snotty with me. All you said was that you tested having a CMX for 12, and not 11. I'm not going to instinctively know whether you simply renamed an existing CMX file as a test, or actually delved through the whole chain, which is why I asked you about it. I'm certainly intrigued that you can get this to work, because I'm unable to replicate the behaviour despite making the same changes. But this is the second thread in which you've been oddly rude to me, so I'll be adding you to my ignore list and won't be engaging with you any further.

Well, since you don't read what I write anyway I'm not sure that really affects me.

How do you manually set the offset higher? Sorry, I'm a total beginner when it comes to this stuff.

@Dorsal Axe @damondamore Please be nice!

Don't you think it's kind of cheeseball of you to be abrasive, put incorrect information in bold then @mention me after throwing a tantrum about how you're putting me on ignore?

Function 2, Expression. It's available as part of the PersonData. You can set it to any number you want. Based on what I've read the game does not handle three-digit costumes correctly, so any offset over 98 will yield unpredictable results. Costumes 01 through 99 should be available with offsets 0 through 98. Assuming you added additional custom costumes past 10.

T'wasn't me. Anyway, it doesn't matter, let's all be nice and carry on with the good info in this thread!