Hot Date Files - New Ways of Doing Things Whether We Like It Or Not
Things have changed. Custom things like swimsiuts and PJ's and formal wear are no longer assignable with names like UFFitlgt_pinkie or FMFatmed_don. Thats gone now. Maxis has removed the "bug", as they called it, squashed it, and made it so you have to spend more of your Simmies hard earned money to purchase these things downtown. The only thing they left us was the nudes. We can still have the .bmp and the bodymeshes, at least.

There are pros and cons to this. In a positive light, we can have many new choices in clothing, with new and different meshes, and it's easy to assign specific clothes to specific sims. You could have an army of skinny-dippers at your beaches if you like. You no longer have to design a .bmp to go with just that one kind of mesh as before.

In a negative aspect... why didn't they do this first?! We have all of those obsolete files now for all these skins... Grumble grumble grumble.... Sometimes I hate change, but well, thats the way things are now.

So the question is: What to do with all the files we have? The answer is: we rename them!

Here is a sample list of files from an older sim of mine, good ol' Elvira.

FFFitlgt_elvira.bmp
Pajamaflgt_elvira.bmp
UFFitlgt_elvira.bmp

Here is how I am going to make her all set for Hot Date: The naming is similar now to that of the bodies. Instead of "B"s they use "S", "L", and "F", and more recently in Vacation, a "W". This stands for

S- Swimsiut
L- Lingerie a.k.a. Pajamas
F- Formal
W- Winter

And the number series they use to represent all the old defaults is 100, to keep it simple to find. That means all the old tux's and wedding dresses and the fancy pink speedos are numbered F100 and S100. This is the directory they are in: C:\Program Files\Maxis\The Sims\ExpansionShared\SkinsBuy provided you did the deafult installation into the C Drive.

So Elvira's clothes will be easy to fix. I will keep the default meshes style for now, untill I get adventerous later. Keeping in mind that those meshes are numbered 100 here are the new names:

FFFitlgt_elvira.bmp will be renamed to F100fafitlgt_elvira
Pajamaflgt_elvira.bmp will be renamed to L100fafitlgt_elvira
UFFitlgt_elvira.bmp will be renamed to S100fafitlgt_elvira


Now its also possible to put new meshes into the skinsbuy folder as well, with the properly named .skn file and .cmx. These files are an example of another skin I did, Razael. As you can see from his shape, he wouldn't look right in any of the provided Pj's. His abdomen is quite concave. So I used his body mesh for all of the new clothes and made up the list of files.
Just make sure you dont use numbers you've already got in there to avoid conflict and that is how it works now, in a nutshell. Experiment and enjoy!