Well, it’s been a while since I’ve updated here, partly due to my usual "blogger’s block" and a lack of foresight when taking photos. Even now, when I know I’m going to be blogging the story, I forget to take good photos. The headmaster came to dinner yesterday, and I didn’t take a single shot! 
Big thanks to Jenn the Simmer Girl and her tips for getting your sims into private school, btw.
My other hold-up is one of my occasional "tidy up my custom content" projects. Lately I’ve been working on updating the genetics and such - making sure hair colors go into the right bins (tedious process, since I’m afraid of DatGen and have to do it the slow way with SimPE, lol), having skin and eye colors set up so they are inherited like normal instead of having the custom content always be dominant.
In the interest of full disclosure for my legacy challenge, I should mention that I’ve altered some of my game files in keeping with this. There are 4 categories you can use to determine how dominant or recessive a hair or eye color is, but the base game only uses 1 and 2. For example, the standard eye colors in the game are either dominant (alien, dk brown, dk blue) or recessive (green, lt blue, gray). I’ve reassigned them so they’re spread out over 4 catagories: 1-alien and dk brown, 2-dk blue, 3-green, 4-gray and lt blue, and have added in my custom eyecolors as I feel they fit, shade-wise. (some of my custom grays are so dark they’re practically black, so those would be a 1, for example). I did the same with hair color, although that was simple, 4 colors, 4 numbers.
I’ve also been altering the genetics of my townies and NPCs so they pass on the prettier custom-colors. This doesn’t affect their appearance, unfortunately. (Still working on that, but WDS has "contact lens" versions of all their colors, so that’s my current solution) But it will mean that their children will inherit a custom shade instead of the standard Maxis ones. Since the custom shade will have the same genetic weight as the townie’s original one, or close enough, this doesn’t affect how the shade will inherit, just means that it’ll be a prettier one when the kid is born.
Personally, I don’t think this affects gameplay in any meaningful fashion, outside of asthetics, but as I said, it’s all in the interest of full disclosure.
I’ll also be working on getting my "virtual tours" of the houses and such up here, so I can have all my links and credits for custom stuff in one place instead of scattered at the end of each post.
Thanks as always to everyone who keeps coming back and reading my posts, and for all the wonderful comments!
-rugs
