Tutorial: How to Package Genetics and Clothing for Upload

How to Package Genetics and Clothing for Upload

This tutorial is to help people package up their creations without packaging up an entire Sim. Although creating a sim2pack is the quickest and easiest way for you to share your creation, it isn’t the most user-friendly and is not recommended. Creating sims2packs (entire Sims) can cause a number of problems.

Although the first time you follow these steps to package up your creation properly might take awhile and although it looks like alot to read, once you’ve done it a few times, it will be fast, simple, and you wont have to worry about anybody complaining that you’ve uploaded an entire Sim (with custom content not specified) or that your recolor isn’t working (because you uploaded the wrong file). So here, finally, is the tutorial.

After you’ve created genetics or clothing in Bodyshop, you will find your creations in two places: your C:\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Projects folder and your C:\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\SavedSims folder (your file directory may look different depending on your computer’s operating system but you should be able to find the projects and savedsims folder easily).

I am going to use a piece of clothing I have made as an example; its called jmadeoutfit. When I go to the projects folder I can find it clearly labeled jmadeoutfit.package in its own folder—but it needs to be left there because if it gets packaged up and uploaded, it wont work in anybody’s game.

To find the correct file, you need to go to the savedsims folder. In my savedsims folder, the file is called 5f261a21_jmadeoutfit.package so it was a little tricky to find. Look around for your file; it will have numbers in front of it then an underscore and then the title you gave it (like my example). After you've found the file, you need to decide how you're going to package it up so you can upload it later.

There are several ways to do this. The way that I do it may seem easy to some or the hard way to others but I’ve tried other ways and this just seems to be the quickest way for me.

1. Right-click on it and choose copy, then go to desktop and right-click somewhere in an empty space and choose paste.
2. Then right-click on the new file on the desktop and choose either “Add to 5f261a21_jmadeoutfit.rar” to make a rar file OR choose “Send to…compressed file” to make a zip file. (remember your file names will be different than mine and you may be using different compression software than my winrar and winzip)

Note #1: I recommend that you DO NOT rename your files--it may cause them NOT to work properly. You can rename the compressed rar or zip file if you want.
Note #2:This is the way I recommend doing it for ONE file, if you have more than one file--such as a bunch of recolors or if you’re adding a read-me or something with the file--it might be best to make a folder on your desktop to copy the files to and then either rar-ing or zip-ing the folder itself so the files will be in a group instead of separate.

If you’ve got both options (to rar or to zip), I would suggest going with rar because it tends to make the end-result compressed file smaller than zip does, although more people use zip, rar is just as easy to use.

And now you have yourself a compressed file to upload. Feel free to delete the .package file still on your desktop, you don’t need it now. Now go to wherever site you’re going to post the creation on (hopefully this one :lol:) and upload your zip or rar file and don’t forgot to include screenshots!

Posted by Jessica!