I've been working with CmarNYC's Skininator tool, and it's going quite well. I just need help with the issue of disabling skins for random generation.

I understand that, to disable a skin for random on HUMAN sims, you just have to remove all archetypes from the TONE file - this was stated in the tutorial, and is working as intended. However, this same method (removing archetypes) does NOT work to disable a skin for random use on ALIEN sims. The alien-exclusive skins I'm working on are otherwise functional, but before I can finalize them, I need to sort out the randomness issue.

Am I missing something obvious? Any help with this issue is much appreciated.

Thanks

(Wonderful tool, by the way, CmarNYC! So much easier than digging through the fullbuild files by hand!)

If I recall correctly, if there are no available skintones with an archetype then a skintone will be chosen randomly from the skintones with no archetype since the game has to chose something in a random situation. No archetypes doesn't actually disable random, the archetypes just give them preference, and in fact the more archetypes a skintone has the more often it will be chosen. The EA alien skins have no archetypes. Therefore the only way to prevent your custom skins from being chosen randomly would be to do default replacements for the EA skintones with archetypes added so they would always be picked first. Hope that makes sense!

And thank you!

Hi CmarNYC.

I tried the fix that you suggested, and made a package of default-replacement alien skins with "Archetype: North American" on each TONE file. However, it doesn't appear to fix the issue. With the package of default replacements in my mods folder, I am still seeing my custom alien skins being randomized along with the default colors.

Is there anything else that I could try?

Thanks for taking the time to help me.

I get the same result - I may not have tested randomness in aliens back when I was experimenting with skins. Of course, EA could also have changed the game behavior. I can ask in the forums.

Ah, okay. So it isn't anything I did incorrectly. Does that make me a bug tester now?

For now, I guess I'll just use my alien skins locally, and wait to share them until sometime in the future. Hopefully the forums will have some answers - this really is a strange problem. I wish you luck with figuring things out!

Thanks again for all your help!

Here's the answer from SimGuruModSquad:

"Hey @cmarinetti,

It just picks randomly from all skintones that are tagged as valid for aliens via the Occult_Alien tag in the skintone's object instance.

-SGMS"

Not what we wanted to see - but good to know. I assumed the alien skin randomness would work the same as human, but no. I'll update the tutorial and thanks for pointing it out.

Sorry you went through the trouble of trying my suggestion with no good result - yes, that makes you a game tester!

It was no trouble at all! Even if it didn't work, at least I was able to help with testing the Skininator, and we both learned something new.

It's a shame that skins can't be disabled for random use on alien sims, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.

I really appreciate all your help with this - I'm just sorry it ended up wasting your time.

Thanks again!