How to change what your kids wear to school

Normal children do not change for the school bus, but they do have a default "built-in" uniform, which is the Military School uniform, that they will wear at a simlogical school if you choose "Use uniform". If that uniform is what you want, then there is no need to go to any further trouble.

 

There are other objects at simlogical that change the outfit Sims are currently wearing, and some of these will put the children in their "work" clothes, i.e. uniform, while the adults change into formal.

 

What follows is some advice for if you want to change the style of the children's school uniform and are not already familiar with how to create skins and edit outfits in work.iff.

The uniform skin sets available at simlogical have their names optimised for the string substitution used in the career file, and also for appearing as a "normal" skin at a dresser, in case you have a mixed day/boarding school and wish the boarders to have the uniform as their normal outfit so they wear it all the time. As downloaded, each skin set contains the same set of file names as the other sets, and so will overwrite each other, but if you understand skin naming rules you can easily adapt them to use in other ways as you wish.

 

Unzip the uniform download that you have chosen, and copy the skin files to the Maxis\GameData\Skins folder

You should have obtained and installed the uniform skin files before editing the career file, otherwise unpredictable consequences may ensue.  The game hates bad skins more than most other errors it encounters (-:

All instructions will assume you are using IffPencil2, which may be downloaded from http://www.thesimsworkshop.com.  They have other iff editors too, but I have no experience with them and can only describe the use of IffPencil2

1. Look in Maxis\The Sims\ExpansionShared and see if you have a file called work.iff    If you do, make a safe copy of it and put it somewhere outside the "The Sims" folder (in case something goes wrong and you want to put it back how it was).

2. If you didn't find a work.iff in ExpansionShared, use a Far extractor to open Maxis\The Sims\ExpansionShared\ExpansionShared.far

 

See if there is a file called work.iff inside that. If there is, extract it.

 

If you don't see a work.iff at all, you probably don't have late enough expansion packs, and I would not feel comfortable trying to give instructions for very early game setups as I cannot test out the instructions myself.

 

3. Using IffPencil2 or similar, open the work.iff file you found or extracted.

4. In the left panel, click on the CARR line. In the right panel, double-click on #65535. That will open a new window.

5. On the left, the first line should be already highlighted and should say "#0 All Grades".

6. On the right, skip the first box and edit the next three like so:

Male skin: B1slMCChd_esunif
Female skin: B1slFCChd_esunif
Texture: B1sl$gCChd$c_esunif

7. Click OK, and agree to Save when you close the file.

In the event you have a problem in the game you think might be caused by the school uniforms download or your edited work.iff, exit the game without saving. Get rid of your edited work.iff, and if you had an original file you saved, copy it back. When you go back into the game, go straight into the school controller menus before doing anything else, and select School type|Do not use uniform.  End school if it had started, and make all the children leave the lot before saving the game.  Quit The Sims completely.

 

When you reload, it will be safe to play the school as normal, and you may use the uniform option again which will give you the default military school outfit.  Also it is safe to use the downloaded uniform as "normal" outfit provided it shows properly in the dresser's clothing collection.  If you get a crash when using the dresser, that means you also need to delete the uniform skin files from the skins directory.

 How to make your own school uniforms

Some previous knowledge of skinning is necessary.

An elementary school uniform pack contains the following files:

B1slFCChd_esunif.cmx
xskin-B1slFCChd_esunif-PELVIS-BODY.skn
B1slFCChddrk_esunif.bmp
B1slFCChdlgt_esunif.bmp
B1slFCChdmed_eslunif.bmp

B1slMCChd_esunif.cmx
xskin-B1slMCChd_esunif-PELVIS-BODY.skn
B1slMCChddrk_esunif.bmp
B1slMCChdlgt_esunif.bmp
B1slMCChdmed_esunif.bmp

All you have to do is extract, copy or create suitable cmx, mesh and skin files for girls and for boys, and rename them as above. Don't forget to edit the text inside the .cmx and the .skn files - download one of the packs on this site as an example to follow if necessary.