Greg's Fantasy Download Manager

[Greg]

Once again I'm daydreaming about a really great download manager utility, one that would stand on the shoulders of the Titans like Delphy's Download Organizer.

What it would do:

Read Data and Generate Reports

1. Scan all your downloads (like DDO)
2. List any corrupt files by both filename (vital!), directory, and tool tip (like DDO)
3. Check for orphans. (Like DDO)
4. Sort downloads by category (like the DDO)
5. Read all the neighborhood, lot, and character data (Here's where it gets good.)
6. If it is clothing, scan all the character and household data and generate a report:
   • What characters are currently using that clothing item
     • Neighborhood
     • Household
     • Character's full name
   • What households currently have that item in the clothing chest but nobody is using it
   • What items are not being used
7. If it is makeup, face paint, eyes, hair, or glasses, handle it like clothing except skip the clothing chest.
8. If it is an object, do the same thing as clothing except show what households are using it.
9. Handle terrain, build mode, and similar things the same as objects.

Fix Problems

1. One button to move all unused items to a different folder, retaining the folder path hierarchy that's under the Downloads folder.
2. One button to move all corrupt files to a holding tanks, again retaining the folder path hierarchy, and generate a report
3. The same tools that the DDO has to move or delete one file at a time, or a selection of files
4. Option to save any report to disk in plain text or csv format
5. Put a readme file in the folders for things moved out of the game noting the date that the action was taken and what utility was used.
6. If the corruption is a known compatibility issue with a known solution, include a utlity to fix it without moving the file.
7. Log all actions. (I think DDO does this.)
8. Option to reverse actions. (I don't think DDO does this.)

Other Nifty Features

1. Display thumbnails.
   • Thumbnails of textures would be great.
   • Thumbnails of 3D objects would be fantastic.
2. Build a database of where you got the things. (I doubt this is feasible, but I can dream!)
   • Site
   • Creator
   • Direct link to the download page
   • Direct link to the download
   • Flags for rules about cloning, redistribution, copying, and whatever
3. If the database of sources turns out to be feasible, a feature to scan a character file or household file and generate a list of custom content
4. Variation on the above: Option to extract a file with no custom content or only custom content from selected artists. (Mostly used for distributing stuff you created yourself.)

[Miros1]

If the database of sources turns out to be feasible, a feature to scan a character file or household file and generate a list of custom content

Whether or not the database is feasible, you could at least get a list of file names and tool tips, which might give clues as to where it came from.

Rose's Nifty Feature Idea: Randomly select a bunch of stuff from the "unused" folder to be popped into the game. If not used, it gets moved back to the "unused" folder next time the utility is run.

Another Problem Fix: If trying to move/delete read-only files, prompt!

BTW, if the author of this wonder uses Windows shell commands instead of C++ routines for file deletes and moves, the files will go to the recycle bin when deleted for easy retrieval of accidentally deleted files and both moves and deletes can be "Undone" from any Windows Explorer folder window (Edit->Undo).

[Greg]

Oh! Neat idea!

[Hokieman]

Hi guys. Hope you don't mind me joining in.

Greg, you nailed most of it. Especially the 3D one. Miros, most certainly agree on the move/delete.

I'd add the following:

Be able to generate a list of all in game sims using the same skin tone. Also, indicating which are linked to any meshs like Warlokk's. Sorta same as you said for clothes. I can't tell you the number of times I've deleted a skin tone that some sim I didn't play very often was wearing.

Same thing you said for orphans but for duplicates too

On the listing of objects - include which recolors are being used.

Generate a list of clothing by the mesh they use including the maxis ones.

Locate all recolors of objects and match them to the object using the catalog language and filename. (The Categorizer does this already but only for custom objects - doesn't work for maxis object recolors)

Be able to recategorize clothing & edit the description (Wardrobe Wranger does this)

[Greg]

You are very welcome to join in any of the discussions, Hokeman.

Too right! Skin tones definitely need to be on the list of things to analyze! What happens if delete a skin tone that someone is using?

While we're talking about Wardrobe Wrangler, I thought I ought to provide a link to it, so there it is!

I haven't tried it yet, but it looks pretty neat!

[Greg]

Two things I've learned so far about Wardrobe Wrangler:

1. I had to install .NET v1.1 even though I had .NET 2.0 installed.
   
   
2. Patience is important. If you have lots and lots of files, Wardrobe Wrangler will take a long time--several minutes--to scan through them all every time you apply a filter.

[Miros1]

Ew! Not like DDO that scans once, consuming vast amounts of memory, but applies filters and sorts very quickly...

[Greg]

If I can figure out how to use it, this Wardrobe Wrangler looks like it will be a great tool! But so far it has stymied me.

I tried filtering on Everyday Adult Female and then Texture Overlay, and all I got was makeup and stuff like that. Then I tried Mesh Overlay and I got no files at all. I must be doing something wrong here, or maybe Wardrobe Wrangler not recognizing my clothing files.

[Hokieman]

Bear with me guys - here's another long post (I really do wish I could figure a way to write this up better) and I have this really bad habit of overexplaining things to death.

Believe me, after spending better than 4 months cleaning up the mess in my downloads folder and trying to recover my game after a hardware failure, I know exactly what you mean about the time it takes to load these programs. 'nough on that.

Greg, I found that WW works best in small batches.

I used Clean Installer and DDO to sort stuff in directories 1st then went to WW. You can do it with WW but it is faster with the others. After having WW choke on files it didn't like or wasn't designed to work with in the 1st place (like some meshes - not to mention object files) I made it a point to only have only 1 type of file in the directory I was working with be it clothing, skins, what have you.

It worked best to use just 1 filter at a time, progressively sorting and moving stuff to new directories each time - 1st sort by gender, then by age, then by category. I ended up with lots of directories 3 and 4 deep and the game can still find stuff. Plus it gives you natural stopping places when your eyes go buggy from staring at the screen for hours on end. (just one more directory tonight then I'll quit - oh, god - 300 files, nope I'm done for now)

Anyway, here's a few helpful hints and quirks

it WILL crash on duplicate files (filenames) EVERY time guaranteed so when you try to move a file to a directory where the file is already there, it will not overwrite, just crash. Clean them out with DDO or Clean Installer 1st - not necessary if you had everything in the same directory in the 1st place - it only looks at the filename, not the internal stuff.

same goes for selecting the directory in which they are already in. That is really easy to do since the save is right below the select directory button. Result is usually either lock up or outright crash and start over.

If you hit the select directory button by accident you have to go through with it and reload and start all over - you can't back out once the window pops up.

For hair rebinning - use the add on in SimPE - WW will rebin correctly but for some reason the game will keep the original thumbnail in the old hair color bin and create a 2nd one in the new hair color bin - SimPE doesn't. (I didn't try deleting the thumbnails and letting the game create them again - that might work). SimPE was faster anyway.

Make sure you have at least one button in the clothes section on the right selected if you make any changes to category - the files will not show up in CAS, buy mode or the wardrobe otherwise one is checked but they will still show up on any Sim that was already wearing them. It took me a while to figure that out after some of my favorite clothes went missing. Also found a bunch of stuff I didn't know I had.

watch out for assigning the wrong or no gender - they won't show up anywhere afterwards. I think it's the mesh that actually controls that so you create a mismatch between the mess and texture.

Same goes for age - except they will show up in CAS in the age you selected sometimes. I didn't try in game. But if no age is selected, nada. I noticed that it was really easy to either inadvertently deselect or change the selection to the wrong age cause the click isn't confined to over the box.

If you want to ever see a skin again, don't mess with the gender, age or category boxes. You can change the description with no repercussions.

Have fun with the shoe button. I never really noticed the shoe sounds in game before but playing with it was kind of fun for a while putting the high heel sound on everything one of my HBBs wore and the boot sound on clothes for an FM. Yeah, I'm entertained by the strangest things sometimes. It did get annoying after a while and I changed it back but it was funny for a while.

I have no idea what will show up if you mess with the bottom section on the accessories tab if you don't have BV. I seem to remember you saying you didn't have it installed somewhere. But if you do,

watch out when you do accessories - there is a specific set of steps you've got to follow if you're gonna covert the jewelry to BV compatible. The saving is different and done by a different button. And don't try to do too many conversions at one time until you get the hang of it - for some reason you might have to reload the directory everytime you change an item (if you flip between the 1st and 2nd tab, you'll notice that the description line doesn't change sometimes between files and that somehow upsets something. If you do mess something up, you can fix it though.

don't worry which ear you assign the earrings to - either one works. If you've got earring/necklace sets, you can assign to either necklaces or earrings - only place it seems to matter is in the CAS thumbnails. Shows up in the game just fine.

When you assign the jewelry to one of the BV jewelry bins other than normal, it will not show up in CAS or the commercial lots in base, NL, U, or OFB. You can still find it at the vacation spots in game though as either buyable or treasure.

You also can't convert jewelry that was done as costume jewelry unless it has a mesh (I think). See below.

If you mess up on the jewelry (it disappears from the game) that was originally done as glasses, you can recover those by reloading and making them glasses again and trying again, but not on the costume jewelry that was basically painted on. I lost all of those files I modified and had to dig in my archives or go back to where I got them in the 1st place to replace the messed up files.

Once I got used to it, I went through a lot of files quickly like when I set up all my YA and adult clothing to show for both. No longer have to create the same clothing twice - yaa!

Anyway, if you run into something I haven't mentioned, I probably did so give a yell and I'll do my best to help out.

[Greg]

I noticed that Wardrobe Wrangler gives you the option to make adult clothing available to teens.

Does that work? Aren't the meshes the wrong size?

[Miros1]

I've tried it with SimPE. The female mesh was a little "over-developed," but it looked ok.

[Hokieman]

Yep, you can do that with some clothing but not everything in WW - it will still be adult size though. I accidently did it on a couple of files. It showed up in CAS but I didn't try it in game. It looked strange since the head was teen size and the body adult size and had a mismatch at the neck. It's kinda hit and miss. Probably something to do with how the mesh is coded. But it's no different than what I did with the Warlokk bodyshapes by making all the adult and YA stuff show up for elders for those meshes he has retaining their shape as an elder.

[Greg]

I think that means I wouldn't want to do that. If it scaled the mesh to teen size, that would be reasonable; but having my teens all suddenly appear with adult bodies and teen heads doesn't seem to make much sense. If you want a teen face on an adult body, you can create a Young Adult.

I also know that it works to put an adult body on a teen sim, using SimPE's Sim Surgery option. I did that once when I wanted a teen behavior (doing homework) for an adult character.

[Hokieman]

The only way I know to scale clothing to teen size is through bodyshop. Just did it the same way I did to copy textures between the Warlokk shapes. For the adult to teen, it worked out ok, nothing to call home over, but only for the basic body shaped stuff - undies, swimsuits, athletic and a few jeans/t shirt full outfits. Some of the tops worked ok as long as it was a plastered on type fit. Meshes with heels, skirts, etc didn't work for the most part. Tho I did find a couple that would using meshes that were close to matching. I haven't figured meshes out enough to shrink them and give them a new unique id. My only attempt was pretty much a disaster and I have lots of teen clothes anyway so it wasn't like my teens don't have anything to wear. Maybe I'll try again one day.

I haven't ever tried SimPE's surgery option - I was going to try it since I wanted to change some body shapes. But about then, along came the christenlov skin selector and solved the problem - changing a linked skin using it also changes the body shape.

[Greg]

Yeah, that's the trick. If you don't have a compatible mesh, then you either have to adjust the outfit (almost always) or get out the great guns and go face down in MilkShape and SimPE to build a new mesh.

Christianlov's Skin Tone Selector is great if it has the skin tones you want. I have seen tutorials on how to add your own list to it, but it appears to be a daunting task. At least I am daunted by it!

[Hokieman]

*shivers* I tried Milkshape way back when. All I managed to do was pretty well mangle whatever I was doing. Nothing productive whatsoever. Thank the stars for the likes of those who can use it.

You'd be surprised how easy the skintone selector is to use. Here's the link in case you don't have it already

on rereading, I deleted the link, since the link is to a thread at ISA. Don't know if it's ok to link to there from here given the age thing. It's one of Jank Falcon's posts on 2/15/07. Skintone Changer Warlokk's XHi-res Series

Everything you need, including directions is there. Just follow and you're in business. Use the skintone selector4 package.

Worked first time - almost. I did find a few of skins it didn't like for CPU, RIO and Ren but once I moved those in another directory, it zipped through the rest. But as it turned out, those were easy to find since the directorys were small and I had copied the scan window. And it doesn't like files with multiple skins like the paradise files or defaults - won't read them (watch the scan counts and compare to the no. of files in the directory) Only other problem I ran into was I think I overloaded it (wouldn't change anything) so since then, I've just loaded just those skin tone directories I wanted to work with in game. Mostly, I just change canned sims anyway.

One note, there is no way to take anything out of the selector - just put them in. And if you copy the window at the bottom after you scan, just dump it into notepad or word, its an incredibly easy way to get a list of all your skins. If you want to take a file out, then just copy the selector file over the old one and reload without the files you don't want in the directory.

[Sita]

But the skintone selectors aren't updated for BV are they?

[Miros1]

Pretty sure some of the people using them are also running BV...

[Hokieman]

Works fine in BV. That's where I'm using it. Other than the issues I noted earlier, it really does work pretty well.

[Greg]

Hokieman, yeah, I want to avoid linking directly to adult sites from here. I figure that anybody who can get there and ought to be there probably knows how.

Maybe this skintone selector thingie isn't as scary as it sounds.