I'm not entirely certain if this is possible. My Google-fu is weak and I couldn't find anything related to this issue. I have some nice custom skins I downloaded for my human sims, which I've recently geneticized and townified. The problem is that they refuse to show up in any logical order in CAS. When I go to the custom skin tab, the thumbnails are ordered all willy-nilly with light and dark tones mixed up, rather than showing up in a natural progression from the lightest value to the darkest. For a brief time in the past, I used Cidira's set and I'm almost positive that all the thumbnails showed in order from light to dark. I tried renaming the skin files to see if that might work, but no luck. Neither having the files start with a number corresponding to the genetic value (001 for 0.01, for example), nor putting the creators name and then the number worked. I even deleted the Accessory and Groups cache files before restarting, in case that might be the trouble.

Can anyone help me, or have any ideas on how to achieve this? (And how to keep my fantasy skins from getting all mixed up with the human ones? )

Thanks!

Custom stuff tends to show up in date order of the time the file was most recently saved.

That's interesting - I thought it was ordered by hash, which would end up with the order reflecting the date that the content was made in Bodyshop.

Sorry - yes, the sentence should have finished 'in Bodyshop' - was in a rush this morning.

Ahh, I see. I haven't touched Bodyshop except once or twice to just poke around at it. Would it be a fairly simple thing to open the files in there and re-save them without making any changes? If that's all it would take to get them in order, I think I could manage XD

I haven't tried it myself, but I've heard you can use SimPE to change the order in which cc shows up in the catalog by changing the sortindex number.

[Retrieved from here (under the Sortindex header)]



I'm not sure how the numbering system works, though.

I don't think making copies in Bodyshop would be a good idea, since I'm pretty sure the thumbnail resets to the default colorful picture every time. It'd be a huge pain to remake them on your own.

You're right it's a bit long-winded and would require the OP to delete the original copies but the thumbnail is just a case of copying over the original version.

I hadn't intended to make copies or remake the files, just open the files and save them again to update the file dates. But, as I said, I haven't used really used Bodyshop, so I don't know if it would even allow for that. I tried to read a tutorial once on how to make a default replacement and it was a bit beyond me I'm a bit more comfortable with SimPE, though I'd hesitate to muck around with hexadecimals. It looks like I might just have to accept the mixed up thumbnails for now Thanks for the info, though!

You can extract the thumbnails with SimPE. Just open up the file, locate the thumbnail (with the jpgs I think), right-click on the picture and choose extract.

I go with the method ~Shasta~ recommended. For what it's worth, the sortindex hexadecimal value is pretty easy to deal with. I changed the sortindex on my Imperfection skintones and they seem to remain in the order I intended.

My method was simple; I gave the sortindex the genetic value. Example: Ebony's genetic value is .99, so its sortindex is something like 0x00000099. (I just clicked on it, punched in 99, committed the change, and SimPE handled the rest.)

In-game or in Bodyshop, the larger number loads first for me. So, Ebony is the first skin to pop up, which works for me because it's the most dominant anyway.

Sorry for not replying sooner. Things got kinda busy for me. Thanks everyone for the info. When things have settled down again, I'll take a closer look at what I can do =)

You can't open existing files in Bodyshop, but you could clone the skins and resave them in Bodyshop. If you decide to do that, make sure you do them in the right order. I agree with the previous posters that changing the sortindex would probably be easier.