Like I said on my microblog, I'm back on my Sims Classic mishigas once again. Really, I'm never OFF of that, it just ebbs and flows like the tide. But this time, it's resulted in some new custom content, including 7 new skins.
I already talked about making ENA for The Sims, but what I didn't mention is I remembered how to get her hands to change colour. The only thing is, The SIms Make-a-Date (the utility I used to take these scrots) doesn't load custom hands, so once again I had to colour them in with MS Paint. It turns out that you can colour each hand individually in the CMX, but I didn't bother doing that in ENA's case; I just coloured both her hands yellow in-game. So, yeah, a little photo editing makes it look like I'm more competent than I actually am lol.
Apart from ENA, we also have 2 springtime pinstripe dresses, my own take on a schoolgirl uniform (which may or may not have been inspired by ULTRAKILL 2-S), a utilitarian black tanktop, and for our ladies with hourglass figures, a tight white button-down shirt with high-waisted jeans, and a teeshirt and baggy sweatpants. While I'd been trying to use only head skins that I had made myself, it turns out I need to make more head skins; the 2 on the right were made by others. I've had the brunette in my skins folder since 2011 while the blonde came from the Killersims datahoard, who I just installed like last week maybe. I haven't been able to find any information about the brunette, because someone probably renamed the mesh and skin when they put it onto the Date Exchange way back when, and I can't find her in my datahoard either, so if you recognise this sim, please let me know.
Therein lies the problem. When The Sims Legacy Edition was released, I kind of hoped it would spark a new era in Sims 1 CC, but it didn't. Instead, ModTheSims now has almost 80.000 individual pieces of CC for The Sims 2-- entirely the wrong game to take off! But, when you look at the totality of Sims modding over the past 26 years, you find that most of the tools for The Sims Classic stopped being able to run on modern computers all the way back in Windows 7's time. The only way I was able to make all my Sims modding tools work was through sheer tenacity and the ability to bring necessary DLL files and DirectX runtimes over from Windows XP. So, even though The Sims built an empire on the Old Web, people largely just gave up on it once The Sims 2 was released. Honestly, the quality of CC started to go down even during The Sims 1's lifetime! When The Sims Creator came on the scene in 2002, most of your new mod sites were populated by shitty skins that were made in Creator out of the default doll-clothes and forced to work on meshes they weren't designed for. While a few people disregarded the doll-clothes in favour of Paint Mode... really, if you knew how to paint on meshes in Photoshop, Paintshop, or whatever else you used back then, you were probably using SimShow, not The Sims Creator.
Basically, what we need to do at this stage is completely rebuild TS1's modding tools for the modern age. SneakySims has already done this with HomeCrafter, creating a HomeCrafter workalike and alternative to FarOut that can all be used in the browser. However, this is all. At least, all I've been able to find. As I understand from skimming various Reddit posts and help forums, the lion's share of modding tools either don't work without extensive per-use-case troubleshooting or don't work at all with modern computers, including the most important ones: Transmogrifier, Creator, and SimShow. Plainly, if you can't use The Sims Creator or SimShow, you can't make your own custom skins. There's a plugin for Blender that makes it able to read SKN files, but without SimShow, good luck making it work with your game.
Most of the blame for this can be laid squarely at the feet of EA Games, who, for some damn reason, decided to change the registry entry that all the modding tools look for when trying to decide if you have the game installed or not. There's a LOT that's wrong with The Sims Legacy Edition, and really now that there's a viable way of overriding SafeDisc, it's completely unnecessary. Well, I guess Microsoft has to take some heat for this too, making it harder for the average user to modify their system files and requiring admin credentials for everything under the bonnet. While it seems that its stance on registering non-standard DLL files has relaxed a bit since the Windows 10 days, it still adds unnecessary complexity to running an old game like The Sims Complete Collection and will probably make a lot of people just give up.
It's not like The Sims Classic is anywhere near as stripped down as The SIms 3 core game was, but it's still nice to have an idea, spend a couple hours making it happen, and then seeing it work in your game. While certainly Sim Archive Project has several hundred gigabytes worth of other people's custom content that you can just download and install at leisure, one of the most fun bits about the OG CD-ROM release of The Sims was how easily it could be modified (relative to other games, some of which you had to decompile first). Like, Maxis intended for people to mod the game. SimShow and Homecrafter were released several months ahead of the main game so that you could make stuff and immediately make it work in the game once you had it.
Another one of the most fun bits about The Sims Classic was The Sims Exchange, which has been gone for about 20 years. Even though we don't have a centralised archive of custom content and stories anymore, we do have static site generators and free web hosts! Anyway, I have some ideas on how to revive The Sims Exchange, but it's still a secret.