Custom skintones not showing up in CAS

[spookymuffin]

Recently when I go into CAS and go to choose a custom skintone, I notice that some of them arn't there.
If I randomise the sim, sometimes the missing skin will show up.
I don't understand why this is happening, as all of my skins show up in bodyshop.

[BeosBoxBoy]

spookymuffin, it's possible that your thumbnails are out of sorts or that the skintones you have installed were made with the old (bad) version of Body Shop that came with Pets EP.  If you have Pets EP installed, they also may be misbehaving because they are missing the parts= and priority= flags that Pets seems to require.

In my own experience, I have managed to get custom content to work when it was problematic by doing the following:

• Run the game once, disabling custom content
• Delete all .cache files from \My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2
  
• Delete all .package piles from \My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Thumbnails
  
• Move the contents of the Downloads folder to a secure location such as the Desktop or C:\z\
  
• Run the game one time, enabling custom content
• Connect to the Exchange by using the big * in the User Control Panel
• Download one item and let it install
• Exit the game
• Restore the Downloads to the Downloads folder
• Run the game one final time to check to see if things are working as they should be

If this fails, try applying the patches from:

http://thesims2.ea.com/update/

Make sure to get the CD patch unless you downloaded the Pets EP from the EA online store.

If this continues to be a problem, you may have to uninstall everything and re-install a number of times until everything works; I have had to do this a number of times also.  Unfortunately for some people the only choice is Custom Content or EPs/SPs, Maxis/EA does not really offer any solution for this bug.

[spookymuffin]

Well, said skintones where indeed made with the crappy un-patched pets bodyshop. If i "re-made" them using the patched bodyshop, may that fix it?

My gaming computer isn't conected to the internet, so I can't do the exchange thing

[BeosBoxBoy]

are they shower-proof skintones?

[spookymuffin]

Nope, just regular skintones, all of my shower-proof ones are showing up fine

[BeosBoxBoy]

ok - then start a project with Body Shop of the darkest Maxis skin tone, exit out of that project back to the new project screen, then start new projects for each of the problem skin tones.  then one by one, copy all the BMP files from the buggy skintones to the Maxis skin tone project and finish it, then re-open it and go again.

Make sure to check the hair is all changed (not all skintones have the same number as Maxis, some have more, but these will not be used by the project if they don't match with the Maxis scheme) and make a new Swatch.bmp for each - even if it is nothing more than a resize hair texture.  The swatch can be any size as long as it follows the following pattern: 64x64, 128x128, 256x256, 512x512, etc

That will probably solve the buggy behaviour, but don't delete the originals since you may have Sims using them.

[spookymuffin]

Ok I'll give that a shot when I get home, thanks!

[BeosBoxBoy]

you're welcome, I hope this solves your problem =)