DMCHESS - A lot of questions, but all smart ones

1) The testing recolours were removed long ago (they were interesting at the beginning, but are useless now that everyone can make his own recolours
I only forgot to updated the post.

2) The locations where the installer puts the files are still the same.

3) Understanding how to create recolours and how to configure the CEP was a very long process. You can take a look at the original thread HERE.
In short, the...GMND.package contains one (or more) Geometric Node for each object that Maxis shipped in only 1 colour: the GMNDs have been modified in order to enable the recolour options and override (not overwrite!) the original Maxis GMNDs.
The ...MMAT.package contains one Material Override for each original Maxis recolour: they didn't exist at all in the original game; RGiles and I have created them by hand. It was necessary, because otherwise the original colour wouldn't appear in the catalog. This file is located into the Gamedir (and not the downloads) in order to prevent the user to delete the original recolour from the catalog.

4) In a multi-user environment, the "...GMND.package" must be copied into each personal downloads folder; putting it into the shared docs won't work. You can either copy it manually, or run the installer multiple tiumes, one for each user.

When is the 3.0 CEP coming out? Sure need it even though the 2.0 is working and dose show everything in NL almost all. Thanks.

hi all. just a quick question here. with this will i be able to recolor the soma "wall-eye" tv screen. not the tv-wall part but the screen-off part. much thanks.

The screen-off part is just a placeholder: the texture is replaced by the game with the movie related to the channel your sims are watching; and when the TV is off, the game is instructed to always use the default black texture: no variations are possible without changing the object behaviour. Sorry.

thanks for replying, numenor... twice. lol

The weirdest thing just happened when I installed the newest version of CEP on my my MAC. I entered a house I just built and my objects changed & I lost all my recolors! This is what happened. I installed the new version for Mac a couple of days ago and because in the readme file it refered to the " _EnableColorOptionsGMDN.package" as "GMDN" and not the new "GMND" file in the zip, I left the old "GMDN" file in. The game ran fine. Then today I read this thread and realized that the "GMND" file is supposed to be installed afterall, so I removed the old one and replaced it with the new one and my objects & recolors left the building!!!
Also weird was that the objects that were cloned from Maxis objects reverted back to maxis objects (I had a tree that was cloned from a pedistal statue and when I entered the property I built, the trees were replaced by the pedistal! etc.) Does anyone know what happened so I can fix this?
frenchy

Maybe you have problems with the CEP, but you for sure have some other problem: a bad CEP installation can make you lose the recolours, but it can't make your custom objects revert to the original Maxis shape.

I suggest, first of all, to uninstall and reinstall the CEP. You should end with only 2 CEP files: the _EnableColorOptionsGMDN.package in the Downloads and the _EnableColorOptionsMMAT.package in the game "Sims3D" folder.
BTW, having in the game the newer MMAT file and the older GMND file doesn't harm: simply, the new objects included in the new CEP version appear as not recolourable in game; but all the objects already included in the older CEP version work fine.

As for the objects reverting to the original shape, are you sure that you haven't deleted by mistake anything from the downloads folder? Or maybe the Downloads folder was renamed or moved by mistake? Maybe it's just a silly suggestion, but it worths a check

Thank you so much for responding so quickly! I'm going to do as you suggest, then do some clean up. I just read in a MAC forum that people have had some weird, for no reason problems with objects dissapearing & changing. I guess, it just happened to coincide with my installation of the CEP file. Also I did have a backup of my downloads file and my neighborhoods file on my hardrive in a different place than my documents folder where EA games file resides. I moved them to another hardrive just in case.

Molto Gracie,
frenchy

just popping in to say, much of the weirdness that mac users have experienced with missing objects and weird misapplication of textures seems to be connected to problems packing (making sims2packs) of houses/lots and has nothing to do with the CEP files. The mac version will REMOVE custom content files (objects, skins, walls, floors) from the downloads folder when making sims2packs.

That's incredible! I know that Maxis doesn't like custom content, but deleting it without warning the users...
Thank you Frenchy and Laure for the heads up!

the content isn't totally deleted. It is moved into the sims2pack. Mac users can reclaim the files by using Peter G's DBPF reader (available from Atelier Québec ) to extract them. Attempting to reinstall them by installing the sims2pack may lead to problems with new mesh objects.

Oh my god, that's it! Thanks, Laure! I packed up a bunch of lots with sims2pack to put them into the houses bin from other neighborhoods just about the time I updated my CEP files. (BTW, I can see alot more recolors ever since I updated CEP,reinstalled Sims 2 and luckily I backed up my old downloads & neighborhoods folders)
Thanks!
frenchy

IMPORTANT
THE CEP V.3.0 WAS RELEASED!

From now on, please post your requests and ask your questions on the new CEP3 thread.

ALL THE PREVIOUS VERSIONS OF THE CEP ARE DISCONTINUED: NO SUPPORT WILL BE GIVEN FOR THEM. PLEASE UPGRADE TO V. 3.0