A walkthrough of how to manually change the eye colours of your sims in SimPE, without using the Sim Surgery tool or requiring template sims.

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Overview

You made this great new character, and the next time you went to play it, realized you didn’t like that eye colour so much after all. Or you just found a nifty new set of custom eye colours and want to switch some of your existing sims over to the new colours. Or…

 

Well, you get the idea. For some reason, you’ve decided that your sim needs a change. There are several ways you can make this change; this tutorial outlines a fairly simple one, and doesn’t require doing things like using up character files just to get a template sim with the right eye colour into your game, as the Sim Surgery tool does.

 

Software needed:

-          SimPE

-          Notepad

 

Meet our victim for this tutorial, the oh-so-creatively named “Eye Colour”.

 

 

Now… before we go any further – always back up your neighbourhood files before doing any work with it! That way, if you do manage to hit the wrong thing and break the ‘hood, you can revert to your backup.

Step 1 – Determining the GUID of the Eye Colour

The first thing we need to do is determine the unique identifying number (GUID) for the eye colour we want to change our sim to. This can be done by simply opening the .package file for the eye colour in SimPE and looking it up.

 

Now, if you’re lucky, you’ve organized your downloads and the eye colour files you have were intelligently renamed by their creator. If you’re unlucky – well, rather then sorting through the umpteen hundred files in your Downloads directory to locate the correct file, you might find it easier to redownload a copy of the eye colour involved and save it somewhere else on your drive to make it easy to refer to. In either case, you need to locate and open the relevant file:

 

We can double check that this is the colour we want by looking at the texture. Click on “Texture Image (TXTR)” in the resource list and then on the entry in the resource tree. The eye texture will be displayed in the plug-in view.

 

Once we’re sure this is indeed the colour we want to change our sim’s eyes to, we need to look up the GUID for it. This is found by clicking on “Texture Overlay XML (XTOL)” in the resource tree, then the entry in the Resource List, and then looking up the “Family” value in the list of information that will come up in the plug-in view.

 

 

Note that if you select the “family” entry that you can then copy the relevant lengthy string directly out of the “Value” entry field. Now, you can trust that you’ll not do anything to accidentally remove that string from the clipboard before you’re done with it, or you can pop open something like Notepad and paste a copy of it down. You may want to note the eye colour name with it (note that the tool tip name for the eye colour can be found in the “Text Lists (STR#)” entry). If you’re planning to change a bunch of sims to several colours, it’s worth the time to make an organized list out of all the codes in the set or sets of colours that you’re planning to use. This also keeps them handy for later reuse.

 

 

Step 2 – Editing the Sim’s DNA

The next step is to open our sim in SimPE. We need to start by opening our neighbourhood. This is found on the “Tools → Neighborhood → Neighborhood Browser” menu. 

 

This will pop up a visual list of all the neighbourhoods we have. In this case, I have only one neighbourhood on that login, so it’s the only one being displayed. I select and open it.

 

 

There will be a wait of varying length (depending on how big and populated your neighbourhood is) and then eventually SimPE will be displaying a rather lengthy Resource Tree of all the contents of the neighbourhood file. Now we need to locate the information about our sim. This is done very easily, by using the “Tools → Neighborhood → Sim Browser” option.

 

 

After another wait (which can be quite lengthy for heavily populated neighbourhoods) the Sim Browser window will open. Clicking on the column entitled “Name” will sort the list by character name, then it’s just a matter of scrolling down and finding the relevant sim.

 

Once we’ve found the right sim, we click on open. The plug-in view will now display a tabbed information screen about this particular character. All kinds of fun things we could edit! But we’re only concerned with one thing right now. Click on the “More” tab at the far right and then select “Sim DNA” off of the resulting drop-down menu.

 

This will open a fairly simple viewer displaying the most basic dominant/recessive information about our sim. Since this is a CAS sim, the information will be nearly identical on both panes. What we want to do is overwrite the Dominant eye colour with the GUID we copied earlier. You can also optionally change the recessive colour as well, to the same or a different eye colour code. Take note of the value you are changing! You’ll need to refer back to it later. In general, just noting down the first handful of digits is sufficient for our purposes – it’s incredibly rare to run into numbers similar enough within a single file that the first few digits aren’t enough to tell them apart.

 

 

Once we’ve pasted in the new eye colour, we click on the commit button, then save the neighbourhood file before continuing on to the next step. You can close the “Sim DNA” window at this point, or just switch back to the tab with your character’s name on it – either works!

This has made the new eye colour our character’s genetic colour, but it hasn’t changed what eye colour he’s actually going to display in game. That requires some additional work.

Step 3 – Changing the Displayed Eye Colour

Now we need to open and edit the character file for our Sim. This can be located very easily since we already have his neighbourhood information open. Once again we go to the “More” tab, but this time we select the “Open Character file (filename)” option.

 

 

The neighbourhood view will go away, and instead we’ll see a Resource Tree of the contents of the selected character file. You can double-check that it’s the right one if you wish, by looking at the “jpg/tga/png Image (IMG)” entries, one of which will show you the in-game thumbnail of the character’s head.

Now we need to change the eye colour recorded in the character file. That’s located on the “Age Date (AGED)” entry. Find the line in the plug-in view marked “eyecolour” and change it to our selected GUID.

 

Commit the change once you’ve made it.

Now, this last step may not be necessary – I’ve heard that just changing the “AGED” data may be enough – but it’s a step I do so I’m including it as well. The eye colour GUID is also used in some of the “Material Definition (TXMT)” entries in the character file. I go through them one by one, looking for any overlay entries using the GUID of the old eye colour, and change them to the new eye colour’s GUID.

Note: that the overlay entries end with a comma - be sure to keep those as you cut and paste the new GUID.

 

 The number of material definition entries can vary a lot. The least I’ve seen is two (as seen here) and I’ve had some sims whose clothes, hair, makeup, jewellery, etc. lead to them having 20+ entries.

Once all the instances of the old eye GUID have been changed to the new GUID and the changes committed, it’s time to save.

We’re almost done!

Step 4 – Going Back In-Game

Once we’ve changed the sim (or sims) it’s time to go back in-game and make sure all the changes worked, and we haven’t inadvertently done something bad which is now making our game crash.

Reload the game and find the sim whose eye colour we changed. But wait… what’s this… don’t those look suspiciously like his original eye colour still!?

 

Don’t panic! The explanation for this is actually pretty simple. It’s much faster for the game to use a pre-generated texture then to, at run time, be thinking “this skin plus these eyes plus that stubble plus plus plus…”. Every character in our game has a custom texture that’s all of this information condensed into a single texture. So how do we make the game regenerate the custom “all layers assembled into one single texture” so that it has the new eye colour rather then old one?

Dead simple. Give our guy a mirror and tell him to change appearance!

 

 

 

 

There’s the new eyes showing. And the final test – take a look at him again after clicking the checkmark to approve the “new look”.

Be sure to check all of the sims you’ve changed before playing, that way if you did make a hideous mistake game-crashing with one (but you’d never do that, would you!) you can fix it (or revert to the backup if necessary).

And we’re done! Enjoy your changed Sim(s).