More Awesome Than You!

I was playing the game perfectly fine yesterday and last week.  Suddenly, today, everything screws up.  Here are screen shots to demonstrate:

(http://img365.imageshack.us/img365/5241/wtf15as.th.jpg) (http://img365.imageshack.us/my.php?image=wtf15as.jpg) (http://img392.imageshack.us/img392/2890/wtf6nc.th.jpg) (http://img392.imageshack.us/my.php?image=wtf6nc.jpg)

Basically, the neighborhood, university, and downtown in Pleasantview and Strangetown will load.  However, after the loading screen, the university and the downtown in Pleasantview and the downtown in Strangetown will screw up, as seen in the above pictures.  (I haven't played Veronaville so didn't test it.)  For some reason, animation and movement seem to stop.  The camera won't move around the screen (technically it does, but the screen will remain fixated on the original spot and won't show the changes), and animation on the screen will stop (cars will stop moving, for example).  Hovering over anything such as lots will leave a trail of pop-ups that never fade; the various boxes from changing views/modes won't fade; and mousing things across the screen results in image streaking that won't fade either (as seen in the second picture).  There's no way to get the camera moving again and the pop-ups/image streaking to fade other than through pure luck.  At one point in Pleasantview's university, changing to Decorations mode fixed this problem, but I couldn't duplicate this effect again.

Last week, I was playing Strangetown's downtown fine with no hitch whatsoever, and now I get this problem.  Strangetown's La Fiesta Tech has the problem, sort of, but the camera will eventually move around and stop the image streaking.  I never noticed this problem until tonight either, and I've been playing it almost exclusively for a few weeks.  I was actually playing this university two days ago perfectly fine.  I haven't tried entering lots to see if there's problems with them, too, but I was playing Pleasantview's neighborhood just last night without any problems.

I removed the Downloads folder to see if it was any hack/mod causing it, but I got the same problem.  Anyway, the only recent hacks that I downloaded over the past few days were syberspunk's apologize hack (today) and Pescado's romance mod in testing (which worked fine before, no problems).  Last night, one of my lots froze on loading, but I restarted and deleted the pool lights (causing the problem) in debug mode.  After that, I played the lot fine and saved.  I haven't touched it since today, which is when I noticed the weirdness.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.  Do I have to completely reinstall my game and get rid of my current saves, or is there another way to figure out WTF is suddenly going wrong?

I don't think it's your game. I think your video card drivers are either too old, or the card itself may be on its way out, but it's definitely not save corruption, the effects are purely graphical artifacts. Reinstalling your game (your save data should be fine) may, but probably won't, help. Try reinstalling or upgrading your drivers, or trying another card.

Thanks, Pescado.  I installed the latest Omega Drivers for my ATI Mobility Radeon 9000, and everything's working again :]  Strange how the previous drivers suddenly started fritzing though.

I think some drivers are just incompatible.  Some people have reported their problems began when they upgraded and had to return to the previous version.  Very wierd!