Introduction

I initially installed portions of Warlokk's first Bodyshape series soon after it came out. But I found myself frustrated in using it because when buying new clothing from a shop it was quite difficult to find and correctly match up custom sizes, resulting in Sims filling their wardrobes with ill-chosen clothing. So I uninstalled the various Bodyshapes and left it at that.

But in recent months the named Bodyshapes began to be released. I downloaded the sample Classic Pinup family and I was hooked again. Then The Dark Project was issued, with period Sims in both Bodybuilder (BB) and Renaissance Gal (RenGal) sizes, and I had more custom sizes to deal with. Then I discovered that jwilson5 had made linked skintone sets between the Warlokk and Marvine series - and she was kind of enough to build such a link between RenGal and Body Builder.

Pretty soon I found myself drawn to jwilson5's linked sets for Slim Bodybuilder (SBB) and Classic Pinup (CPU), and male Athlete (Ath) and Fashion Model (FM), so I installed those. Then I resurrected an old favourite - the Mr.Bill series - and found a compatible size in Warlokk's new 34Denh-36 as described here.

There I was, back to a big confusing mess whenever I sent a Sim shopping for clothes! But this time I was determined that there had to be a way to manage it, instead of just giving up.

First I tried renaming the clothing files to have standard prefixes according to body size, but that did not affect the strange ordering of clothing within either CAS or the in-game clothing rack selectors. I did notice that when new clothing is added to the Downloads folder it often appeared at the beginning of the clothing selection. But then these additions jumped around to seemingly random locations as I installed yet newer clothing.

So I temporarily removed all my clothing recolours, deleted all the game's cache files from My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2 (Accessory.cache, cigen.package and Groups.cache), and then added the clothing back in order, starting with folders for RenGal and Bodybuilder, then Classic Pinup and Slim Bodybuilder, and so on. But the game somehow remembered the order it had first received the clothing in - including the same quirky jumps to random positions - so perhaps there was another database that had not being cleared.

Indeed, there may be a better and more fundamental way to reorganize clothing than the method I am about to describe. But from extensive online research I have to say that if someone knows it, they are keeping it well hidden. So until that better system may be revealed, here is the workaround that I have come up with, and it seems to me to be a fairly realistic approach in terms of the game itself.

I still have a few of the old Mr.Bill Mini clothes in my collection. I have been wondering for some time which of the Warlokk Bodyshapes would be closest to the Mr.Bill shape - close enough that I could just substitute a Mr.Bill outfit without a drastically noticeable difference.