More Favorites – Add Custom Favorite Food, Music, and Colors

This framework allows modders and CC creators to add their own foods, music genres, and colors to the list of selectable favorites. It supports music stations added by gamefreak130's Broadcaster and foods added by douglasveiga's CCLoader in addition to foods included with the unmodded game and its add-on content.

Hereinafter is information relevant to modders. To users simply wanting to install packages that include new favorites, you can stop reading.

Information for Modders
I have included a generator as a program to add new favorites. It creates a new package that the base package accepts to add favorites into the game. This will be familiar to those who have used Broadcaster and/or CCLoader Generator.

Within the archive of that download is an executable that when double clicked will create a template XML in the same folder, which you can make a copy of and add entries to. You would then drag and drop the modified XML onto the same executable to generate a package.

In that XML, you'll find example entries of different types of favorites. Do not remove these entries. Simply insert new ones after the example entries of each type. For favorite foods and music genres, one will need icons in the form of IMAG resources, both small and large, and their keys will need to be specified in the entries in unhashed form (e.g., "cas_favs_music_i_alternative" and "cas_favs_music_i_alternative_s" ). For music types, the "Station_Name" attribute should match the one found in the XMLs made by Broadcaster. For food types, the "Recipe_Key" attribute should match the one found in the XMLs made by CCLoader Generator.

To add a favorite color, one only needs to add the name and hex code for the color, as well as the display names of it and its corresponding drink for Into the Future (not relevant for people without the expansion). The program will automatically generate the icons with the correct colors and the STBL entries, making adding new colors possible for non-modders.

As for the "Parent" attribute—leave that as an empty string unless the favorites entry is a member of a group of similar entries. It's to allow for, as an example, pasta to be a Sim's favorite food, and therefore spaghetti, ravioli, angel hair, etc. are too.

Source code available here

Credits

• Bietjie (Created the default replacement for the drink synthesizer drinks to add material states for 256 colors; my code finds the closest of these colors to the listed favorite colors to use for the drinks)
• douglasveiga (Created CCLoader, useful for adding recipes (among other things) to the game, and also reverse engineered to make this framework)
• gamefreak130 (Created Broadcaster, useful for adding music stations to the game)
• garrettgivre (Made Converted Sims 4 Radio Stations (23 Stations, 226 Songs), which is what the TS4 music example package was made for)
• LazyDuchess (Allowed me to borrow a method from Mono Patcher)
• MihaiA10 (Provided me with information about unused favorites for the game)
• MonoChaos (Provided the icon for the generator)
• Pirombo (Provided me with the TS4 icons for the TS4 music example package)
• pljones (Provided the s3pi library which serves as the basis of this framework's generator and many other Sims 3 tools)
• thepancake1 (Showed me how to reload LAYO resources without restarting the game)
• Twinsimming (Came up with the idea for favorite groupings)
• zoe22 (Came up with the idea of adding a bunch of colors as material states, which the favorite colors will resolve to the closest of)
• Likely others whose names elude me (sorry!)