More Awesome Than You!

My laptop went KABLOOIE yesterday and I am now being forced to use my pc for the sims. I installed my backup and all that, but the smooth edges setting is grayed out. The graphics look alright, but the edges are horrid! I can't stand it. Is there something I can do to fix this problem or am I doomed to looking at this monstrosity? I changed every setting and nothing enables the smooth edges option.

Videocard dependent.
Or more accurately: TS2's impression of your videocard's capabilities dependent.

Does your vidcard driver allow for anti-aliasing? If so, set it from the drivers, not in the game. This usually works better anyway.

If your vidcard doesn't do anti-aliasing at all (if it is crap card like an Intel onboard one), you're out of luck.

I always leave "Smooth Edges" turned off, otherwise the game crawls like ass and looks like a blurry mass of poo. Edges are *EDGES*! They are not supposed to be smooth! If an edge was smooth, it would not be an edge!

Yeah but if you don't smooth the edges you get zillions of edges, all triangular, pixelated blobbieness. Much better to have just the one edge.  :P

I have no such problems. Perhaos you also need your graphics qualities higher? Because I never use smooth edges, I like edgy edges!

I max all of my settings, except for visual effects (or whatever that's called), and do not allow picture-in-picture, yet my game runs smoothly and quickly, even with a gazillion downloads. Not only that, but it takes less than 5 minutes to load. Then again, I have a fairly new computer with plenty of RAM and a high-end graphics card. My old computer took 10-15 minutes to load the game, and didn't allow edge smoothing until I upgraded my RAM.

The computer I'm playing on is a media center pc...one in which no one in the house uses because we run cable through it. I've never attempted to play the sims on a pc and I don't like it at all. I thought the graphics looked ok, but upon further inspection it looks like shit. I attempted to allow anti-aliasing, but I seem to have a piece of shit card which cannot be upgraded because it's "integrated" and there is no slot for a new one. 

I don't even want to play anymore. I never knew how good my game looked until now. Well, I'll add HP to the list of manufacturers never to buy from again...


My laptop was able to run smoothly with all settings maxed out. I never had a problem with speed, except on occasion when the actual laptop was acting up. This pc looks like it has the settings on low, even though they're on high. At least I can still see fingers, I guess.

maybe you need to do something with the game you don't normally do to take your mind of the look of the thing... Playing around with your albums in wordpad and sims2blog doesn't even involve booting up the game...

Well, now that I've bragged about my nifty game performance, I'm having to uninstall and reinstall Pests Pets. Figures. Since I have to do this anyway, I was thinking of doing the same with all my EPs and SPs, as well as the base game, because I kind of want to see all the scenarios that got borked after Uni (had I known ahead of time that they'd get borked, I would've played them all the first time around). So, my question is: Once I reinstall the base game, do I need to play the scenario households for any length of time, or can I simply go into the lots, immediately save and exit each of them, and then go about installing the rest of the EPS and SPs? In other words, will the scenarios still work even after installing the rest of the EPs/SPs, as long as I've already entered, saved, and exited the lots with only the base game installed?

Edited for clarity.

Nothing like deliberately misconstruing a term to to get a cheap laugh. I set my edge smoothing (aka anti-aliasing) to the second position, and my game does not crawl like ass (whatever that means—do you not clean yourself, J.M.?) except on busy community lots with lots of stuff on them. If an edge is not straight, it is not an edge! Edge smoothing makes straight edges look straight when they are aligned on the diagonal, rather than looking like a series of steps ("jaggies"). Objects look much better in the game with some anti-aliasing applied.

The original poster's problem may be driver-related. Either she needs to install the most recent drivers for her graphics board (if ATi, intel, or some other non-nVidia GPU) or some older driver set that works with TS2 (if nVidia). If this desktop machine has integrated graphics, it may have a graphics controller of modest capabilities that isn't capable of anti-aliasing, or at least isn't capable of AA without taking such a performance hit that the game won't allow it to be enabled. Note that even integrated graphics controllers require drivers that can be updated; for example, the Intel graphics controller in my laptop. If the PC vendor or motherboard manufacturer does not offer updated graphics drivers on their Web sites, you can always go to the GPU supplier for drivers (ATi, nVidia, Intel).

In all cases, anti-aliasing should be applied from within the game using the Smooth Edges slider. The AA settings in the Direct 3D section of your graphics driver should be set to "application preference" (this is per Maxis).

And here we disagree. The EAMaxis method often fails after alt-tab, or causes grass etc. to blur. If I do it from the Nvidia settings, I don't get these problems.

I have never experienced this. Sounds to me like a driver problem.   ;D

I think it's far below modest capabilities and is definitely not capable of anti-aliasing. This sucks!!

I assume the desktop is an AGP machine?

It's not great, but it will get you back in the game:  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102038

Or this, if the reported heat problems with the X1600 concern you:  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102043

(I don't think the higher cost of an X1300 compared to an X9600XT is worth it.)

A Media Center PC should have a decent card in it- it needs one unless you want to watch whatever you're running through it and have it look like crap. What are the specs of what you're running?

And I max out my Smooth Edges too, and it runs fine on my desktop (I did try on the laptop once. ROFL That didn't work, then it ran like ass, I agree) and despite setting the card to let the application set them, I've never had a problem when coming back from Alt-tabbing in TS2. Civ4 is a whole 'nother story, but Sims is fine.

Now if you want a patch that broke way more things than it ever thought to fix, it's that Civ4 Warlords patch. Oh, it fixed lots of stuff for online gamers, and broke all the Hot Seat and Lan stuff. And those 2 were the ones that needed the most patching in the first place and none of those problems were even addressed.

I'm going nuts trying to find a good card AND drivers that will satisfy both Sims and Civ. I'm using Radeon 9550 with 256 MB RAM and drivers that were released a few weeks ago. I still can't make both games happy. Civ4 at least will give hints that it is ready to crash when the ice turns black. Sims actually crashes less since I installed Pets. I thought maybe they fixed something to play nicer with my drivers.

There isn't a PCI slot on the motherboard for a new video card and I'm definitely not buying a new motherboard. Stupid HP!

The media center has a card capable of playing video...games are a whole other ballgame. I did try to play CIV 4 on it before and couldn't even get it past the opening without the display driver crashing. My hubby also tried to play the sims on it a while ago. It didn't look that bad, but that might be because it was just the base game at the time and the pc was brand-stinking-new. It did crash back then, too, but after about 45 minutes of playing. Dunno...I think if I get rid of a few EP's it will look a little better, I guess, but then I lose all the work I've done and can't even install all of the lots I've made.

I could always buy a new HD for my laptop.

I never crash TS2, and only crash Civ every now and then. I have an X850 XT, though, and am running with the drivers from August, since nothing has given me reason to update- I used to update every month, but now I stick to the "if it ain't broke" school of thought.  ;) At least Civ autosaves for you.

You know I read about the scenarios getting borked too so I went and checked them out - well, the Curious brothers, the Goth house and Daniel Pleasant (is that his name?).  I originally tried the scenarios when I first got the game.  Then Windows, would you believe, crashed and burned just before the release of University, so I had to reload.  I've never played the Maxis hoods since: Pleasantview and Strangetown are just sitting there while I deleted Veronaville altogether.  Anyway, the scenarios worked just fine for me.

I have a Radeon X850 XT, running driver version 6.14.0010.6635 (23rd August) and I can run sims 2 with graphics settings maxed out. I've been doing it from within the game and had no problems.

Civ 4 is fine too, I wasn't aware it had crashing problems. I haven't patched it.

Hegelian - jaggies is a great way to describe the effect, pixellated triangles doesn't really cut it.

But that's what they're SUPPOSED to look like. Computers render things in discrete pixels. Therefore, something has to change to an upper, lower, lefter, or righter pixel at some point. "Anti-aliasing" instead turns this into a blurry mass of undifferentiated poo, so you can no longer tell where the edge of an object is and instead only see this blurry blob, like someone has spilled something on your picture. Without "smooth" edges, my edges are crisp, sharp, and well-defined, instead of looking like a broken JPEG.

ok, each one with their own preferences.

I'd rather have Anti-aliasing turned on in my game, it is so much easier on the eyes!

However i leave it turned off becuase i'm a lagfree maniac , and i hate any frameskip.

I prefer the animation and screen scrolling and rotating to be smoother than the 3d models.

If it helps, you can think of it as dithering. This is a nice cheap way to trick the eye into seeing more color than there really is, but it's not a very convincing illusion.  :D

Dithering always looks awful, and so does "anti-aliasing".