More Awesome Than You!

I've never seen this happen before so I dont know if it's part of the game or some strange glitch, but while I was playing a custom sim in his house in Strangetown there was this large dark blue flare on the screen and I have no clue what it was or what caused it.

Also, I noticed when I have the cheat window expanded I get all kinds of repeating audio errors with duplicate resource instances, failed initializations and failed getsounddefinitions.

While I was looking at those (I noticed at the end of the list there was a different error that I'm not sure if it has to do with that blue flare or not since the flare occured shortly before I checked the error list and exited the game, I wrote the error down though.

And that bug with the Sims freezing when cuddling in the hot tub still exists.

Here's the error:

ERROR Material Parser: Error whilst parsing material definition 'censormaterial'
packed:/sims.matShad(70):Missing vertext program
        in command 'end'
        in definition 'CensorCompositingMaterial', line 28
        in command 'create CensorCompositingMaterial()'
.\sourceGZSceneGraphMaterialParser.cpp (5926)

There were 5 or 6 of those errors one after another.

Where exactly was this blue flare? Was it on an object? Like when you used a custom recolor that you no longer have? I got a lot of flashing blue objects with NL, even though the custom colors were still there. The GrandTrianon beds, for example, from MTS2. All I had to do was go into buy mode and use the redesign thing to change the color back.
And do you have a censor patch installed? If so, which one?
I *think* all those audio errors, etc, are benign. I've gotten them since I started playing the game. I could very well be wrong and my machine and yours will blow up at any minute.

No it wasn't on an object, the house it occured in was a maxis house and was barely furnished since I had just recently moved the guy in, I dont think I was using any objects in the house that were using custom recolors. I have Quaxi's censor patch for NL.

The flare was just that, a flare, it had no discernable shape and wasn't like the flashing blue of recolored objects, it was there for a few seconds and then it was gone, it was about 3 inches vertically and about 1 1/2 inches wide and fuzzy around the edges. Being Strangetown, for just a second I almost thought someone was beaming in to my Sims house.

I've noticed with freshly restored houses in Pleasantview (Pleasant and Lothario in particular), a couple of side tables have started flashing blue and need replacing.  When I look in the catalogue there is a blue recolour of this end table which I can't delete, but I don't know why the original table in the houses would be recolours.  ???

EDIT: this is post-patch.

Haven't had a flare, but like Brynne, I have had constant audio & missing texture errors in debug mode since the release of sims2. That's the main reason I don't play with debug mode enabled.

Are you talking about the flash that happens when someone is meditating and then they start levitating?

I've never had any of my sims meditate so I don't know if it was similar or not, but it wasn't caused by meditating. My sim was busy shuting off the computer, the flash occured to the right of the computer and the sim and wasn't the computer screen because the view I was in had it faced away from me. It was a large solid blue flash on my screen that was there for no more than 5 seconds and then was gone.

I'll just forget about it I guess and if it happens again then I'll start to worry.

Do you have Quaxi's censor removing hack?

Yeah

Doesn't everybody?  ???  ;) ;D

Just kidding - thanks Maxoid Tom for helping us out.

I'm not familiar with what Quaxi did to modify the censor--you may need to ask him about it.  He may be forcing an error with the material so that it does not appear, but that's just conjecture.

I just was thinking...is the computer still working? I get a little flash by the computer when it breaks. It always breaks (for me) when the sim is turning off the computer. If you click on the computer, does it say "repair"?

I've had it break halfway through a term paper!  I think my sim was trying to avoid the task!

I figured it out. It was TwoJeffs NPC and Visitor Zapper, I had it set to zap uninvited guests and anytime a townie would enter the lot they'd make it to the middle of the sidewalk and then disappear in a blaze of blue light that bled through the walls of the house (which was what I was seeing, being unaware of the presence of townies on the lot) and made them all appear as though aliens were abducting them. I had never used the zapper before so I was unaware that it would do that.

As for that error, I watched the error list and it only occurs when the censor is supposed to be rendered. So I'm pretty sure that's caused by Quaxi's no censor patch for NL, but it doesn't seem to hinder my game in anyway so it probably wont be a problem.