More Awesome Than You!

Just stumbled over a thoroughly nasty bug with FreeTime (well, nasty if you use the Sims to write stories) and am really hoping someone here has already heard of it and squished it, or knows where it has been squished, or can squish it.

Basically, when you use the job-reward drafting table to create a sketch, it leaves the screenshot shader set to the "sketch" mode until such time as you do something to reset it, such as exiting the game or using the BV camera. I used the drafting table in one house to have the inhabitant make a sketch of his building, and three houses later had someone take a picture using the BV camera. Every single screenshot taken between those two points came out like the samples in the attached rar.

This was mentioned in the Free Time Bork List thread here (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,11194.msg315902.html#msg315902).  I don't know if a fix for it has been found yet.

It is an intermittent bug, I haven't encountered it since.  purplebunny suggested trying boolprop postprocessingenabled false to see if that cleared it.  I haven't had a chance to try it as I said, I haven't seen it since then.

Sounds rather interesting - I have an architect sim at present.  I'll see if I can "reproduce" this in the next day or two.

cheat didn't help :(

Ms. B, with all due respect to a Sims 2 storyteller as great as you are:

Why the *heck* are you still using the in-game camera?

Get a good Screen Capture program, like Gadwin PrintScreen. I have been using that, with Irfanview to batch process after, for years.

http://www.gadwin.com/printscreen/

http://www.irfanview.com/

Both free.

It's free, the pictures are big enough and high enough quality for my current purposes (in fact, part of my own post-processing drops the .jpg quality in favor of smaller file sizes), it automatically subtracts the UI, which screen cap utilities don't... and for those times when I actually do want the UI and/or a bigger image (such as when making set preview pics of my objects), I still have a copy of Sims Camera floating around on my desktop ;)

Now if someone figured out how to make a hack that made the in-game camera take screen-resolution screenshots, with a toggle for turning the UI capture on or off - and maybe with that annoying camera flash firmly squelched - now that I would want!

And now back to re-shooting what I can of what got borked yesterday by the bug... *Grumbles about not being able to set age -> baby so she can replay a birthday*

What's wrong with TAB and Printscreen?

Ms. B, do you know about hitting f10 to make the ui disappear? You probably do, but just checking.

My Printscreen is bitchy. I was trying to document a (failed) attempt at being able to set any lot, any where, even pre-existing, as a hobby lot, and could not for the life of me get it to take new Printscreens after the first couple. And my key doesn't stick. For my normal purposes, there's absolutely nothing wrong with the in-game camera + camera hack. Instantaneous pictures. I have them at highest quality and biggest size. I don't do those silly mouse-overs-to-see-the-names. If you can't tell who I'm writing about in the photo, pay more attention! :P

I'd also volunteer that Printscreen & TAB is only a viable option if you have a good PC. My old laptop took a good 20 minutes to TAB out. Addison takes a second on a bad day.

I'll second that! I have a 6 year old P4 1.7GHz machine, with it's max of 1 GB of RAM, and I force the poor thing to deal with around ~6-10GB of downloads (just did a cull the other day and haven't run a recount of file size yet).  On the (thankfully rare) occasions when I do need to toggle to desktop for some reason (such as to start up the aforementioned Sim Camera), it takes for-freakin'-ever.

I really need to run another cull. Even after getting rid of the insane poly count downloads from Caravan Shop and a bunch of "nice, but I never use that..." stuff, my game loading time is still in the "start it loading, go do something else for an hour" range.

And yeah, I know of F10, but it's easier to just ignore the UI, point, and shoot. And the red pause frame, as far as I recall, remains up even when F10 is used. Yes, I know there's a hack to remove the red frame too, but why do all of that when the in game camera is adequate?

Don't you normally crop the picture anyway? Otherwise you get all sorts of stuff that you don't want in the picture, stuff that is potentially incriminating.

Like what? Other sims? Background deco?

I play the game full-screen, so if I'm doing something that needs to show the UI, it's no biggie (except that I play at a really high resolution, so my UI's tiny). If I'm taking pics elsewhere (like something that's windowed), nah. I only have my first name on my comp, and that's already out there. I don't keep my porn on my desktop, either.
(http://img98.imageshack.us/img98/6008/desktopss0.th.jpg) (http://img98.imageshack.us/my.php?image=desktopss0.jpg)
The image is fluid, as it's my last-taken image in-game (Gen 5 firstborn, yay!). The only slightly controversial thing I have on there is my PS emulator and the folder for my N64 emu.

Yes. Everytime I can't avoid having some irrelevant background character caught in the frame, people always ask about them. So I generally crop the images to remove irrelevant extras and things that would confuse the action.

I see what you mean. That's just because we want to know if it's us! My sims are thoroughly fake. I also take my photos so that there's rarely empty space that I don't want shown. Partially because I'm lazy. Ok, mostly because I'm lazy.

See that is why I like Gadwin, cause of the rectangular feature. So I crop as I am taking the picture, not in post-processing. I have the no-red lines pause mod thingy doohicky, so I take pictures this way:

F5 - to get out of live mode and get rid of anything queued up
F10 - drop UI
F9 - Gadwin Hotkey

Then I take pic, then go back, by F10, F1.

I have been doing it so long, that it is automatic.

I have a very bare-bones screencap program (MGrab)...so I can play full-screen, not use up much resources, take pictures with the UI if I want, without the UI if I want.  I get .bmp images that are the same resolution as my panel (1280x800).  I frame my shots knowing how I generally crop them (more at a normal ratio), and if I see something interesting after the fact, the image is still big enough to "zoom" in on that detail, if I want.

...I don't mind the pause frame (or even the action queue) because at this point, it's such a small proportion of my visible screen.  I wasn't too fussed about it when I was playing 800x600, either, but I had other picture taking issues to maximize my sucktastic graphics chip then, too.

Like the teleporter painting hanging on the wall, yupyupyup. I frequently crop just for better framing and (again) smaller file sizes for the finished images.

I recently upgraded to a widescreen flat monitor and am also now having the aggravation that "what I see" and "what is captured in the screenshot" is slightly different, with a strip being added to the top of every shot that often unbalances the framing the scene, or captures things like the stairwell openings in my ceiling tiles. Bah!

Maybe I´m missing something here, but what is wrong with the ingame camers ... (other that it now is acting up after installing FT)  ???

Rose

It's just that it gives a fairly low res image, which is a JPEG (compressed format)- so sometimes you get a lot of compression artifacts (those blocks of solid colour in areas of similar colour). I like to use Screenhunter (http://wisdom-soft.com/products/screenhunter.htm).

I used to have that problem, and was it ever aggravating to wait forever for the game to finally minimize!  (Okay, it wasn't 20 minutes for me, but I get impatient after 3.)  Now I keep my game in windowed mode, so switching to my picture editing program is easy.

I have tried to run the game in window mode, but I can´t tip the camera with the scroll button then ... which is more annoying that crappy pics ... thoug I don´t think that the pics the in game camera is bad.

Rose

You get used to dragging with the right mouse button instead of scrolling.  The truly aggravating thing with windowed mode is when you're yanking things around in buy mode and accidentally click outside the game.   >:(  I hate that.