What changed?

The new and improved game engine that will ship with the latest expansion pack will also be the beginning of new and improved integrity for our recolours and custom objects!

This is great and exciting news as things will become much more stable and reliable for us; however, our beta content up until now may require being brought into compliance with these new standards.

What does it all mean to me?

You will want to get your current custom content into compliance with this new standard so it’s use will blend seamlessly into future expansions and game engine advancements.  Your NEW custom content will already be in compliance, so don’t worry about converting it, these instructions are merely for things made with versions of SimPE prior to v0.15

CREATORS: Please update to the latest SimPE and let your downloaders KNOW that you have at least version 0.16 so that they can rest assured your downloads are already in compliance!

SimPE v0.15 is ready with a very easy to use plugin for just this purpose, so let’s walk through the steps to bring an object into compliance together and you’ll see it’s really very easy and quite painless!

Preparation

First, I suggest separating out your custom objects (new meshes and recolours) don’t worry about your skins, walls or floors, just leave them in \Downloads.  Set aside these custom objects in a before folder so you can go through and fix each one in an organized fashion.  Remember to create a Backup copy of that Folder.  Once you do your existing objects, you should be all set in the future if all creators use the newest SimPE version.

Let’s begin…

Start SimPE and Open a custom object mesh or recolour from your Before folder.  For my example, I will use my Ballerina portrait painting which is based on the Lady In Red Painting.

Open the object to be fixed and on the Plugins menu, choose Fix Integrity

The Wizard dialog box opens up showing your current ModelName for the file types.  What we need to do here is write a new ModelName that is quite unique and not likely to be used twice in the community.  We’ll use our highly recommended naming convention of initials_nameDATE, so for this example I’ll use:

SEDD_ballerinapainting020305

After you type in your new ModelName, click Update and you can see your changes on the files below.  Close the dialog box by clicking the little red x in the upper right corner and wait a few seconds while SimPE makes your changes.

Click FILE and SAVE on the main menu and go test your newly fixed object in game or move on to the next one in your list!  That’s all there is to it, told you it would be painless!

If you’re curious what has gone on, it’s to do with a Group ID change and enhancement to our custom content.  With SimPE v0.15 and future releases, all Scenegraph Resources (Fix TGI items like CRES, SHPE, GMND, GMDC, TXMT, TXTR, LIFO, ANIM, CINE, LIGH) will have the new Group ID of 0×1c050000 and for remaining types like Material Override, Object Data, Text Lists, etc. the Group ID will remain 0xFFFFFFFF as you’ve seen it already.

Looking toward the future with confidence, and SimPE is here to help you get there!