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De-censoring patches

This page is the odd one out, because, for once, it's not about files in the UserData directories; but it does affect how Sims are displayed in the game, so this is the section where it belongs.

When I first put up the Sims Support Page and its links list, I included a link pointing to some animations that I though were for general use. It turns out they were not, so I removed the misleading link. Sadly, it also pointed to the only place I knew of that had the HD anti-censor patch. Comparing the patches to the original files, and having become more familiar with CMX files by then, I could see what the trick was, and will now explain how to make one's own anti-censor patches. It's as simple as editing an ASCII file.

The blur that covers Sims at certain times is a set of meshes, just like the head and body mesh. Like any mesh, it is referred to by a CMX. Like ordinary mesh and CMX files, the censor files are inside a FAR file, but if altered files with the same names are put in GameData\Skins, these files will be loaded instead of the defaults. The anti-censor patch is a set of CMX files with the same names as the censoring CMX files, but containing no mesh data; hence, the "blur" meshes never show even when the CMX is called.

There are three pairs of censoring CMX files. The first two are the files for adults and children located in GameData\Animation.far, "adult-censor.cmx.bcf" and "child-censor.cmx.bcf". The "bcf" extension means that they are in binary rather than in ASCII format, but they can still be opened in Notepad or some other ASCII editor to extract the necessary information. For the original Sims, LL and HP, these are the only files that need changing. The next two are "adult.cmx.bcf" and "child.cmx.bcf", located in ExpansionShared\ExpansionShared.far or, if the ExpansionShared directory doesn't exist, in ExpansionPack3\ExpansionPack3.far. These are needed from HD upwards. The last two are the cat and dog files, "dog-censor.cmx.bcf" and "kat-censor.cmx.bcf", found in ExpansionPack5\ExpansionPack5.far or ExpansionShared\ExpansionShared.far, but only from UL upwards.

The first thing to do is start an ASCII editor and type (or cut and paste) the following lines:

// Character File. Copyright 1997, Maxis Inc.
version 300
0
1
cmxfilename
1
0
0

For the pre-HD patch, save this file twice, to "adult-censor.cmx" and "child-censor.cmx". For the post-HD human patch, save this file twice to "adult.cmx" and "child.cmx". For the pet patch, save it to "dog-censor.cmx" and "kat-censor.cmx". There's no need to add the "bcf" extension or convert them to binary, ASCII files will do. Now, in any of the two to six files just created, replace "cmxfilename" with the CMX filename, without the extension.

For the pre-HD patch, "cmxfilename" should be replaced with "adult-censor" and "child-censor". For the post-HD patch - and this is where it gets tricky, and why the censoring CMXs should be extracted to take a look inside - the names to put in are not "adult" and "child" but "adult-needs" and "child-needs". (I get the feeling the Maxis-people tried to make it harder to locate and replace the nude patches. Ha!) For the pet patches, likewise, "cmxfilename" is not replaced by the exact filename, but by "dog-needs" and "kat-needs". Drag the new CMX files to GameData\Skins, and the job is done.

These anti-blur patches are not the same as the nudity patch for SS and MM. What happens in these two games is that "PersonGlobals.iff" has been rewritten to dress the Sim whenever it's idle. This means that a Sim not wearing anything and not doing anything suddenly becomes dressed. This may be a patch for the problem that Sims can sometimes get stuck in a state of undress (I've had that happen exactly once, in a family moved from a Deluxe installation to an LL installation) but is probably the game company's reaction to letters sent by the Old Prude about the many fan-made "nudism" objects. It is silly, because I can easily assign Sims a birthday suit for their daily wear. How to undo this is explained in Beyond the Gay Marriage Hack.





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