More Awesome Than You!

I don't know if anyone else noticed, but bump mapping now appears to work correctly with Gforce cards

To enable bump mapping in the game with nightlife I don't have to force my Nvidia driver shaders to 2.0.  I have a Nvidia Gforce 6800GT and I was having to force my shaders to 2.0 with Riva tuner to get bump mapping working in the game.  I recently upgraded my drivers to version 68.01.  I checked at that time and still had to force the shaders to 2.0 to get the bump mapping to work, but now with Nightlife all is well leaving them set on default.

Uh, say what?

Had a little clash with my anti cookie/popup software, putting the site on my white list seems to have fixed it.  Sorry about that.

LOL Oh okay, no problem. :)

I always had bump mapping but I have ATI cards for what it's worth. I can't imagine why it would be disabled for a 6800 though as that's a really recent video card and quite capable of bump mapping obviously, but then again Nightlife seems to have this tendency to want to turn all the settings down by default no matter what card you have.  >:(

Yeah well I have the 6800 Ultra, and never had bumpmaps either, until I discovered the Rivatuner workaround. Evidently, it's TOO good a card and the game doesn't understand it. :P  Actually, before I even started up NL I had gone back into the Graphicsrules to fix what I had to change before.  Didn't even try it without--wonder if I wasted my time?  ;)  YYZdnl, have you tried it with the 77.77 driver?

Nope, I was forced by Steam to upgrade my video drivers to play Halflife2 even though it was running fine with my older drivers.

I'm curious: how is the roof detail in hood view? Are there gaps between walls and roof? Do you have shingles?

Crappy as all hell.  >:(  No, I don't have shingles and yes, I have gaps.  Large ones.  Case in point:

[attachment deleted by admin]

You can avoid those big gaps if you use the hipped roof instead of the shed gabled roof or whatever it's called to do pieces of roof that are half way up walls, etc., by stretching it so the other half of the hipped roof is inside the walls of the house, though you can sometimes see the hidden part of the roof in neighborhood view if the windows disappear, which seems to happen quite a lot.

I have 6800 Ultra, and got bump maps with Nightlife, but lost object specularity (that I had, unfortunately, already gotten used to after buying this card a couple of months ago).

Ok, I'll bite...
(hiss, bleh, etc)

1. how do you know if bump mapping is enabled?
2. Where are driver shaders and how does one force them to do anything?
3. What's a RivaTuner?
4. What's object specularity?
5. Would you expect a GeForce 5700 to show bump mapping?
6. Is this anything to do with anti-aliasing?

1. It may be hard to tell. For months I thought I could see bump maps, but turns out I didn't (I could see them in Bodyshop but not in the game). You can see the bump map effect on some clothing (but not all, since not all outfits have bump maps at all) where it makes the surface seem more 3D. A lot of sweaters that have a texture to them have a bump map. Also the bump map makes underwear look elevated from the skin even if the mesh itself is just flat. It may be hard to tell if you can see the bump maps or not, some comparison pictures with and without might help.

4. Object specularity gives the objects a reflective surface. Say, a table top looks shiny when the light hits it at a certain angle. The Maxis piano looks shiny when object specularity is working. Without it, most objects have a matte surface with no light reflecting off of it.

6. I don't think bump maps or object specularity have anything to do with anti-aliasing.

I am so thrilled with this!

I updated my 6800 Ultra with the 77.77 drivers (thanks for the rec. MokeyHokey ;) ) just before I installed NL, and when NL loaded I found I now had bumpmaps!  ;D

I wasn't sure if it was NL, the new drivers, or a combo of both, but whatever it was that enabled the bumpmaps, I am very grateful for!

Only thing now is, I have to rework some of my clothing to fix the texture maps that are showing thru improperly  :P

I hadn't noticed the loss of object specularity yet..I'll have to check that out. Thanks for the heads up on that, Ignorant Bliss  :)

wow, cool, i didn't know the game had bumpmpas at all. actually i did'nt know at bumpmap were.

Now, are the bumpmaps one of the image files that is contained withing a clothing file? i mean, if i export a clothing file, i will get different image files for the texture, for the alpha and for the bumpmaps?

Yup, the bump map is the gray image file some of the clothing has. I think it's called a "normal" or something similar.

I don't know what bump-mapping is either, but I did some test or other that I found on a site and it appears I don't have it.  Have no idea what anti-aliasing is either, or smooth edges (which are greyed-out in my game). 

Here is a nice guide to tweaking your 6800 (although it works for other cards too)

Some people have been having problems with the 6800 and 7800 and Sims 2. No hard reason why locked down though.

Okay since we are exposing our ignorance to one another here....what is the more/less smooth edges option? Mine is set to low by default but so were all my other settings since installing NL (I have a Nvidea GeForceFX5200FT 128DDR, 2.167 ghz AMD Athlon, 160 GB HD and 512 mb). I tweaked all of the settings to high except the smooth edges bit (since I don't know what it does) and have been wanting to ask someone what the UI (something) setting is? Mine is off by default but I don't know what it does so I haven't touched it. Would someone mind explaining that to me?

Smoothing edges makes the edges less jagged. If you have the smooth edges slider all the way in the low end, when you look at something like walls in the game, the edges look jagged, kind of like a saw. When you slide it all the way up, the edges look very smooth and straight, but it's more demanding on your computer graphics.

In fact smoothing edges is what anti-aliasing does. That slider bar is anti-aliasing, just not called that in the game. My default settings pre-Nightlife with a GeForce 5700 256Mb RAM, put the slider at half way. When I turn it all the way up for taking photos, my game runs perceptibly, but bearably, slower.

It takes quite a bit more processing power to smooth edges more. I think the chip on my g card is 400Mhz, still there's a possible bottleneck. Can't remember the bus size offhand.

That's pretty much what I thought but I wasn't sure. Can anyone tell me what the UI Transparency setting is for in the options? It is set to off by default in my game.

It's for the blue menus where you see the sim's picture and the stats etc. With Transparency on it's partially see through, with it off it's solid blue. I'm not sure if it makes a difference in how the game runs or not, but I keep mine off.

Oh okay...thanks Motoki. :)

And square pixels? Why would I want square pixels?  What shape are they normally?

Could someone tell me how to enable bump mapping? Is there a cheat that works?

If you don't get it by default, you can try first editing the GraphicsRules.sgr (it's in Program Files\EA Games\The Sims 2\TSData\Res\Config). 

Scroll down until you see this line:

# disable shaders by default for NV3x generation, only enable for high end cards
if ($maxVertexProgramVersionHWMajor = 2)
boolProp useShaders false


Change "useShaders false" to useShaders true"


Keep scrolling down until you see this:

# since we don't do bumpmapping on less ps2.0-capable hardware, eliminate tangents
# from the vertex data
# also, the presence of per-vertex tangents in the vertex data stream causes
# "exploded" polygons on the Radeon 9000, even if the data is ignored by the shader
if ($maxPixelProgramVersionMajor < 2)
boolProp skipTangentsInVertexData true


Change "boolProp skip TangentsInVertexData true" to "boolProp skipTangentsInVertexData false"

Save file.  Note that the path is different if you have expansion packs installed.  You'll need to edit the GraphicsRules in the Config folder of your latest expansion pack.

Cool, I've found out the answers to lots of things in this thread, particularly how to edit the config file. I still have one question left unanswered, what's a Rivatuner?

Also someone asked about square pixels, that intrigues me too. Anyone know what they are and why we might want to turn them on or off?

RivaTuner is here: http://www.guru3d.com/rivatuner/.

You only needed it for upper level GeForce cards, since the game evidently didn't realize that the cards are in fact capable of rendering bumpmaps.

I've also wanted to know what "square pixels" were. It sounds so odd. I thought pixels WERE square.

And if anyone wants to know, what object hiding is:

If it's on, when you're on the first story of your house, the objects on the second story dissapear until you go up to the second story to play. It saves memory on behalf of your computer. If it's off, all of the objects stay where they are whether or not they are near. It's a good idea to have them off, really, considering there's no use in having objects just sitting up there if your camera's not up there.

OK. Is a GeForce 5700 with 256Mb RAM an upper-level card? I know in the manual for my card, it said I could turn on tweaking features if I wanted but couldn't guarantee stability. Is this tweaking/overclocking the same stuff the rivatuner accesses?

Oh, PS, Thanks MokeyHokey :)
*goes off to learn some manners*

You are welcome, Witch.  (That sounds vaguely deragatory!  :D)  I'm really not smart about technical stuff, but I've been reading and absorbing a lot of this crap since Sims2 came out.  ;)

Now, I believe that the RivaTuner applies only to the 6600 and upwards cards.  I'm not about to try to tell you how to overclock your card; mine came overclocked and I've no idea how to go about it.  :o

video cards are sounding more and more like hotrods every day...and now you need a tuner too!

overhaulin.....

I don't mean to sound like an idiot, but am I going to need this tuner thing? I have a Geforce 6600 PCI Express 256 mb just sitting here. I am afraid to install it with all the hype I've been reading about different cards. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

Braveheart if you get that new ATI card of yours working you should have it without any cheats as I've played the game with several ATI cards (including a 9700 which is pretty close to your 9800) and always got bump mapping.

I got bump mapping all right, but I never got object specularity.  :'( Now, no wonder all my objects look a tad shade darker than in the thumbnails. Is there any way to enable that though?

Sigh... I just realized I didn't provide the link...

http://3dgpu.com/archives/2004/08/09/geforce-6800-tweak-guide/