Custom Icons for Collections

[mswn]

Here's another (better?) way to add custom icons without using Collection Creator.

Method 1: Create icons beforehand to add to any collections you make in-game
You can create a bunch of icons to go with specific collections you plan to create or you can make a library of random icons to have if you want to identify your collections by pictures of dinosaurs and kittens, say—the name of each collection will appear when you hover over the folder in-game, so the picture does not have to be descriptive if you don't want it to be. In this case, I am planning to make a collection of candles, so I'm just using a picture of a candle.

You can use (tiny) text, whatever you like, but the image needs to be 28 pixels wide x 22 pixels high. (As you see in the picture, I was making them 28 x 28, which has always worked for me; but the actual size on the collection folders looks rectangular, and other custom icons I've seen are 28 x 22, so that's probably the size to use.)

For it to show up when you're creating your collection in-game, save it in your My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/Collections/Icons folder. You can save it as a jpg, bmp, tga, or png file (all seem to work fine; I saved it as a png).

Now, open up your game. When you click the Create New Collection button,

your new custom icon will show up in Choose an Icon menu:

I've named my collection CANDLES and selected the candle icon.

Now I can start adding candles to my collection:

And here you can see my new collection shaping up:

Method 2: Adding custom icons to collections after they've been created
Let's say I'm in the game and make a collection that I don't have an icon for. In that case, I'm just going to pick a random icon from the menu (but remember which one you picked, especially if you're making multiple collections!). We're choosing a plumbbob. Simmy.

You can start adding things now, but since this is just a dummy collection for me, I'm ready to move on to the next step.

Exit the game and open up your photo editor to make another 28 x 22 image.

Aw. So there's the icon we'll use. I saved it as a jpg this time, whatevs.

Now go to your My Documents/..../Collections folder and find the collection you just made in-game.

The game has given it a random file name, but we can identify it by the Date Modified and (once we open it in SimPE) the temporary icon we chose for it in-game (remember: the plumbbob!). So now we open it in SimPE.

Under Resource Tree, select the (IMG) field, then under Resource List (the next frame over), click on the jpg/tga/png field to get the image preview to show up in Plugin View below. There we can see the plumbbob icon we chose before, so this confirms we're working on the right collection.

Right-click on that field and select Replace.

The heart icon we just made is again saved in the My Documents/.../Collections/Icons folder, which means the heart will show up in the Choose an Icon menu just like in Method 1; but if that doesn't matter to you, you can browse and choose an icon from anywhere on your computer. So, select the heart, click Open, and then when the popup says "This resource was changed blah blah," click Yes.

So here we see the image has been updated with our custom icon. Save and exit SimPE.

A good thing to do now would be to go back to your My Documents/.../Collections folder and rename the collection so you'll be able to identify it more easily later. (If you have multiple gibberish files, you can also identify the one we just edited and saved in SimPE because it will have that little lock icon next to it.)

Now we can open up the game again, and ta-da, there's our new collection with its custom icon.

FIN.

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