I also read what you wrote above when Maxis wrote it, but apparently it isn't true. I had a crash and had to install everything again a few days ago.  After the installation of each EP the install then said "checking to see if your game is up to date". If I did not install the patch for the previous EP, then the install would make me put in one of the disks from the previous EP to finish the patching. On the EPs that I installed the patch for before installing the next EP, it would say the same thing but instead of asking me to put an older disk back in, it just said "Your game is already up to date".

Either way works, but for me it was easier to install the patch before installing the next EP just so I didn't have to switch Cd's again. Besides, some of the patches were 'redone' so I just felt safer applying the patches from download rather than letting the EPs take care of it. The Pets patch needs to be installed before installing Seasons because they came out with the patch after Seasons was released.

They will stay asleep even with full energy until the set wake time. If you set the wake time for 1pm, then they will stay asleep until then. Otherwise you have Sims wanting to get up in the middle of the night. BUY only kicks in after they wake.

Check their wake time.

I have to turn off bed nazi in any house where neat Sims live or they get kicked to the curb. I've also recently started seeing the tuck-in get kicked as well. The other day 4 Sims went outside at the same time. Curious, I checked to see what they were all doing. It was a family of neat-nics all trying to make each others beds!

I think everyone, including those running without any CC have the freezes when Sims change their skin tone due to frostbite or whatever.

In my case, I had a pretty big freeze for each skin tone the first time it happened. It was more like a long pause when that same skin tone froze again later.

You really have decent stats on your computer. Nothing really sticks out as a problem. Along with what katenigma said, an overfull hard drive can also cause slowdowns because it needs a pretty good size area to keep writing to for the game's cache. But with a 160 GB hard drive, that shouldn't be a problem unless you put a bunch of stuff on it. Also be sure that your hard drive doesn't need defragging.

You are absolutely correct.


You are right. Everyone here has posted a wealth of good info, and although on the surface some things appear to contradict other things, they are all valid points.

Do some experimenting. First upgrade that video driver. Then check the amount of CC that you have now. Are there frequent slowdowns at the moment? If so, divide the CC in half. How about now? Keep doing it until you don't see a difference between a clean game and the one with CC. (Not counting load times as load times will always be longer with CC no matter how much updating you do). This will give you a ballpark figure on how much CC you can have in your game at the moment, although as mentioned earlier, not all CC is equal.

If you find out that removing CC makes a huge impact on the speed of gameplay, then go for the additional RAM. If you find that there is very little difference, then you should probably save up the money for a higher end video card, although your current card is really not out of date yet.

I know this won't be easy for you to decide, but there is enough info on this page for you to at least make a well informed decision. Good luck.

It's all explained here:

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,9091

What is "Bring out your dead"? Is it supposed to cause an error message?


Two days ago Windows became corrupted and I had to reinstall, complete with format since the in-place install didn't work. I had back-ups of everything, including my config folder. After reinstalling Sims I was quite surprised that I didn't have a reset.

Yesterday I shrunk my game to post a pic of a ghost bringing home homework. Just as I finished posting we had a blackout.

Before playing today, I needed to create a clean hood to test something so I renamed my Sims2 folder and ran the game. I then renamed it and went back to my regular Sims2 folder.

I loaded in the lot that had the ghost, expecting a repeat of yesterday's ghost scenario since the blackout caused the game to quit without saving. Her tombstone is still on another lot, the one she died on. I was quite surprised that my whole hood was reset. Which of these actions caused the reset? Especially since a complete reinstall of both Windows and Sims did not cause one.

Back to my question, I did not notice "bring out your dead" before the crash, but maybe I just missed it. Since it is under the fix menu and only shows up on this lot, I was wondering if that meant something had gone wrong, perhaps due to the reset, and now needed fixed.

I clicked it and got an error message. I chose reset. Nothing seemed to have happened other than the active Sim jumping out of their chair. I tried again with the same results. Now I fear that I touched something that I shouldn't have and decided to post before saving the game.

Here is the error. I have no idea why it is talking about grilling hamburgers. The active Sim was sitting in the computer chair, just sitting for comfort.

Morague,

Thank you so much. I tested this in a clean game. The beard in black is now showing up for both Adults and YAs, although it has the custom * icon.

The problem remains however, that when the Sim is aged to adult, the beard remains the same color. You get gray hair with a red beard, for example. This happens with all 4 of the beard colors. Actually, in my testing, I could get the beard to occasionally turn gray. (about 1 out of 10 times) but then when I de-aged the Sim back to adult, the beard remained gray and just the hair color would change. All of the other beards properly turn gray when the Sim is aged, and revert back to their original color when de-aged back to adult.

When I color bin hair, I found that all 4 colors plus gray have to have the same GUID for it to work properly when the Sim ages, as well as remain the same style when switching to a different color. Is it possible that they messed that up somehow and it is no longer familied properly? I've downloaded some pretty messed up hairstyles before but have never seen anything behave non-consistently like this.

At any rate, if you don't want to do any more work on this, we at least have our black beard back.  However I suspect that when the Sim turns elder we will have to go to a mirror to get the beard to be gray. I haven't tested that part yet, all these tests so far were done in CAS.

Thank you for working on this problem, especially since you don't have the problem in your own game. Which reminds me, I'd like to know the difference between those who are having the beard problem and those who don't. Do the people who don't have the beard problem have some sort of stuff packs installed? Or are they the European versions? I have only the EPs. My signature is currently correct, and I am using the American version.

I think the ladybug houses make such a big impact because of the constant animation. I downloaded more sensible ladybugs from Simwardrobe. Now they only swarm occasionally during the day and never at night although it works the same as it always did. That simple mod stopped a ton of sluggishness.

At the risk of having my lips ripped from my face, I'm going to have to disagree a little. I have 1 GB RAM. At one time I had 10 GB of CC and was definitely getting a performance hit. I pared this down to 4 GB and I am only getting a slight hit now as compared to a clean game. The CC I have now adds approx 4 minutes to loading time whereas I was getting a 20 min loading time when I had 10 GB CC. CC tends to affect loading time more than it does game performance.

Is it possible that the type of CC has more to do with it than the amount of CC? For example, I would expect mods to cause more slowdowns than clothing since mods must keep running and checking things to make their decisions. If I load in 200 dresses, all 200 do not have to stay in the memory at all times. Just the one that your Sim is wearing needs to stay in the memory. (Otherwise there wouldn't be a load time when you go into CAS or attempt to buy new clothes) But the mod has to keep asking, "does this Sim need to pee? Is it time to woohoo? Should I bring a friend home on the bus? Even when the answer to the question is "no", it still had to use memory to do the checks. Since these checks are always going on in the background, unlike the dress, they have to stay in the active memory.

The biggest slowdown I have at the moment is when it rains or snows. It is only slightly more sluggish with the CC in place than without it. On lots with very few items (CC or Maxis) and few Sims, there is no slowdown at all compared to a clean game. Using Jordi's more Sims mod I have some lots that have 2 adults and 7 kids. These lots absolutely DO take a performance hit, especially when several visitors are also there. The computer with the higher memory on the video card performs better during bad weather although it still takes a hit when too many Sims are on the lot, which makes sense since each Sim has to have the checks run on them.

One difference that I can see is how much crap is on any given lot. I tend to make lots with just the items that the Sims need. My daughter crams as much stuff into a lot as she can. Her game is always more sluggish than mine although she plays her game on my computer so the configuration and CC is the same.

I looked at the specifications and as pointed out by katenigma, assuming that this is actually your motherboard, yes. Pescado is also right in the fact that that much isn't really needed.

I'm curious as to why you feel the need for so much memory. If it is because you believe that Sims will run faster, then you are barking up the wrong tree. While you will see slight improvement in speed, you are much better off spending your money on a high quality video card with as much memory on the card as you can afford. How much memory does your video card have?

For example, my personal computer is using 1 GB RAM with a Radeon 9550 (256 MB RAM). Another computer in my household with the same processor speed is running the same configuration except that the video card has 512 MB RAM on it. Sims runs smoother on the 2nd computer. This 2nd computer was given the better video card because the operator runs many video intensive programs such as Half Life 2 and Oblivion. On the other hand, Sims 2 is my most video intensive program.

Whatever you decide, I'll help you get the right thing.

Also as katenigma pointed out, Vista is a bloated memory hog and will require more memory than XP.

I had a whole family of Sims that used to do it several times a day. I think it is the playfulness factor. I rarely see it any more though so it may also include low aspirations since I saw it much more often when I first started playing than I do now. Anyway, I kept the same fridge in that house that they started with and nothing bad ever happend to either the fridge or the Sims. The only problem was that whenever someone wanted to cook something, they would complain that they couldn't use the fridge because someone else was swinging on the door. Like you, I kept thinking that surely they would end up breaking the door off. It just never happened.

I build and repair computers for a living.

First you need the motherboard manual. It's that little booklet that you only get if you bought your motherboard separately and installed it yourself. So for most people, you need to look up the info on the net.

All motherboards have a maximum capacity for RAM. Each motherboard also has a different number of slots available. Some have 2, others have 3 or 4. Since you are running dual channel, I am guessing you have 2 or 4 slots.

Each slot can only hold a maximum RAM amount. If the motherboard has 4 slots with a maximum capacity of 4 GB, then each slot can hold 1 GB. Some motherboards only allow a maximum of 512 MB in each slot, some older ones, only 256. It is very important to find out this info about your motherboard.

The manual will also tell you your bus speed. Thats where the PC 3200 (400) type numbers come in. You can buy any speed of RAM and as long as it is the proper RAM type, and it will work. BUT you should always buy RAM that is equal or greater in speed than the bus. If you buy a slower one than your motherboard can handle, then the RAM will work but it won't be as fast as it should be. If you buy RAM that is faster than your bus speed, then it will work at the same speed as your bus.

For example, I had a computer that had a 2600 bus that I placed PC 3200 RAM in. It worked fine. But the computer will only run it at the 2600 speed because that is all it can handle. Why would you buy a faster one then? Because you can always pull your memory later when you are done with this computer and put it in another. If on the other hand I had a computer with a 3200 bus and I placed 2600 RAM in it, it will still work but it will only run at 2600 which would be slower than your computer allows.

For dual channel, you must be using 2 slots, and the amount of memory in each slot must be the same, (for every slot pair) and should have the same bus speed as each other. You can use other combinations, and it will work, but it will no longer run as dual channel, so I highly recommend that your memory modules match one another. If you have 4 memory slots, you could put in 2 pieces of 512 and 2 pieces of 1 GB for a total of 3 GB. That's assuming that your motherboard's slots will actually accept 1 GB memory modules. If you motherboard will only accept 512 MB in each slot, then you cannot place 1 GB pieces in there or it won't work.

So currently you have 2 slots filled (you may have more slots but they are just empty). You can find this info in the manual or opening the computer and counting the slots. Each filled slot currently is holding 512 MB, which gives you a total of 1 GB. Now, if you have 2 more slots available, you can just buy 2 more memory modules of 512 MB and add them to the 2 empty slots, giving you a total of 2 GB. I have read that it is better to use two 1 GB modules rather than 4 512 MB modules because it will run faster. I have not been able to confirm this. It may be one of those things that shows up with testing equipment, but is not noticeable when actually running the computer. I recommend whichever option costs you the least.

The important info about your particular RAM is 184-Pin DDR SDRAM . You must buy DDR SDRAM or it won't work at all even if the number of pins is correct. The 184 pin is a standard size so that is usually something that you don't have to worry about.

You mentioned that you currently have Crucial brand memory. Brand name is not important, however, how they obtain their memory modules IS important. Some companies pull memory from other computers and reuse them (usually from computers leased to businesses). Those that don't will usually announce it on their site because they are proud of it. The memory usually costs slightly more because it is actually new.

Crucial memory is nice because it has a lifetime warranty on it and they always use New memory rather than "pulls". Tigerdirect.com also prides itself on only selling new memory, and they have several brands to choose from. How can Crucial afford a lifetime warranty? Because usually your memory will become obsolete long before it actually goes bad. I have replaced very few bad memory modules in my lifetime. Those that "went bad" usually did so as a result of lightning strikes and/or repeated power outages, and is why it is recommended to disconnect your computer from the power source during a lightning storm. Surge protectors can only protect against normal surges that come periodically from the power company. They cannot protect against lightning strikes.

By now you should be thoroughly confused. If so, my job here is done.

Actually, once you locate the motherboard manual, I'll be happy to tell you EXACTLY what to buy as I'm sure that I probably left something out that I should have told you.

ETA: One thing I forgot. Some motherboards use the first 2 slots together to achieve dual channel (slots 0 and 1 for the first pair, then slots 2 & 3 for the 2nd pair) , and others use every other slot (0 and 2, then slots 1 & 3). Again, your motherboard manual will tell you which ones to use. Of course if you have 4 slots filled with exactly the same thing, then you can't get it wrong.

I have no idea what color hair Pescado should have if he were de-aged. I'm just remarking that the particular beard that his Sim is wearing is borked in the black color. I figured many people have seen that pic and would know which beard it was that I was talking about if I used that as my example.

I guess I should take some screen shots next time I'm in the game.

So that explains why I never see it. I stopped using the Maxis rugs when they went flat and no longer look like rugs. I sure wish Maxis would fix that. They may be worth using again though just to see stuff like this.

Is it just grouchiness that allows that? I've only seen it done by one Sim in the game. That's her in my avatar. She got stuck in that position and walked around with her brows furrowed and pointing at everyone she was interacting with. I've been trying to reproduce it ever since. I keep all personality types in my game. Some even have no niceness at all. IIRC, the girl in my avatar had about a 4 niceness.


I have 2 very lazy families in my hood right now. Some have zero active points. But I have never seen this. Do you mean they search under the couch cushions for leftover snacks?

I'll have to keep a better watch on the cops and robbers kids. I'd like to see the kick.

I like fish tanks, but I don't put them in houses where the toddlers are extremely playful or all they will do is stand around and watch the fish all day.

Get a water wiggler for your dog and you never have to bathe them anymore. They'll take care of it themselves when their hygiene is low enough.

Now I'll add my own observations:

Have you seen your bird freak out when a wolf is in the room? Cats don't seem to bother them like they did in Sims 1, but have a wolf where they can see it and they go nuts.

I didn't see anyone mention the Sims that go around the house washing the windows.

Hungry dogs not specifically trained on pet food will either knock over the trash can and eat the garbage, or will eat the flowers. It doesn't harm the flowers as far as I can tell, and it satisfies hunger.

Dirty dogs will find dirty puddles to roll around in, as well as the knocked over trash. (If you click it says something like scold/praise for rolling in filth).

Servos will sometimes fix your broken appliances while visiting your lot.

I have a pic in RL where a ghost is coming home from school with her homework in hand.

That would be great! I know how to color bin hair, but I've never extracted anything from the game and wouldn't have the slightest idea of how to fix the problem, assuming that I could even find what the problem was.

But now I have to search the site for the toddler hair fix, as I must have missed it, since I don't even know which hair was screwed up.

The part I can't figure out is how they managed to screw up facial hair when no new beards were added to the game. But then I also can't figure out how they screwed up the infants when as far as I can see, nothing with infants has even changed. It's not like you can change them into outerwear or anything.

ETA: Found it. I put it in the game as I was installing Seasons so I never did see the screw-up. Works great. Nice job.

Have you seen pics of Sim Pescado around the site? It is the beard that is on that Sim, the fullest Beard that Maxis has (not counting the Santa beard that came in a stuff pack). How many beards do you see? How many are in the black section? Only the black full beard is missing. It's there for the other colors.

I looked around for a fix and I didn't even find anyone else reporting the problem. But I remember when I complained about the elevators in dorms causing problems. Everyone thought it was just me. Then a couple of weeks later I found a fix for it. Hopefully someone will see the problem in their game and provide a fix. I did report it on the Maxis bug form, but since others aren't reporting it in mass, I doubt that they will even TEST the problem, much less fix it.

You said, "even if enabled". I take it that it was a hidden hat? The beard in question has been there since the base game and worked correctly before.

I mentioned in another thread that I lost my Maxis thickest beard in black, and assumed that I had facial hair that have overwritten its GUID. I was wrong.

After doing a binary search and finding the problem still existed, I loaded in the game without any CC. (I wish now I had done that first!) The problem still exists and I can only assume that Maxis broke it with Seasons or one of the patches.

This problem occurs both in body shop and CAS. If you make a male Sim with black hair and go into the beard section, there are 9 beards available. Change his hair color to any other color, and there are 10 beards. If you place the full beard on the Sim while you are in any of the other colors, and then switch the Sim's hair to black, the beard actually turns black. But it is missing entirely from the beards in the black section. So I can still create a CAS Sim with this beard by doing the color switch, but there is no way that I can take an in-game Sim to a mirror and apply this beard if he has black hair.

ETA: I went back into the clean game for a few more tests. The beard problem is the same both for CAS adults and Uni CAS YAs. Also, when you create a Sim with this beard in ANY of the colors, and then age them to elder in CAS, the hair turns gray while the beard remains its original color.

Although your error log is not identical to the ones I keep getting from SW, it may still be related. It seems that Paladin posted something about the Servo chore controller not quite working correctly with Seasons. I get error logs from that and the Servo security system. It may be the robot trying to get smart milk for a toddler.

He has a place to get help with his items now:

http://support.simwardrobe.com/

But don't expect the calibur of support that you get here. I posted the error logs that come up repeatedly in my game on June 13. He still has not responded.

ETA: There is also a sticky post there about the playable maid controller being buggy after Seasons. I don't know if it is fixed or not yet, as it is an item that I don't use.

So is "Dine Out" squashed completely or just when there is no restaurant on the lot?

Although it doesn't give many points and I hate it showing up on 'home' dates, it does add quite a bit to the date bar when fulfilled at a restaurant. It is usually enough to add more time to the date so that you have enough time to actually turn it into a dream date.

You know, you are right. There is no readme. The name itself should have tipped me off to the fact that I wrote it myself. The "readme" from MATY is always called RTFM.

Whenever a mod from here doesn't have an RTFM, I make myself a readme file by copying and pasting relevant text from thread questions. Much of my info came from a thread called "hack descriptions" or something similar. When I first started making my own readme files, I wasn't as good at it as I am now. First, I was unfamiliar with the hacks and hadn't experienced them in my game for very long, so I couldn't write anything from experience. Secondly, I neglected to copy the url from which I was quoting, which I now include so I can find my way back.

The readme for enemies accumulate is from 8/2006 and probably contains a mish-mash of info from both the enemies accumulate mod and the fight club.  If anyone is interested, this is what I had for the enemies accumulate readme. You can see how I managed to confuse myself.

It alters relationship decay slightly, making it so enemies will accumulate rather than disappear if you don't see each other for a bit, and moves relationship decay to a more sane hour instead of "we all hate you now". Also adds a slight offset to relationship loss so it's not an immediate mass scramble at the decay hour to get things patched before they all hate you now, and generally makes it less hectic and messy (although it doesn't really make things easier!).

Fights aren't infinite, but instead of the results of a fight being ignored, so you could see a sim winning the entire fight and then suddenly lose for no obvious reason, the fight rules are changed so that a certain number of randomly determined victories must be achieved in rounds. How it works is that every round, you will see the fight loop play, and whichever sim appears to be winning will gain an increasing advantage in the next round. The advantage will accumulate until the requisite number of victories is achieved, or the losing sim manages to make a comeback, which resets the advantage back to 0. The victor in a fight is the sim which achieves a certain preset number of victories over and above that of his opponent. So if the randomly determined count is 5, then the winning sim must win 5 rounds more than the loser.

If the sims are evenly matched, it will be bloody and long, but the advantage shift will tend to bring things to a closer sooner than pure randomwalk. Grouchy sims will enjoy fighting, though. Fighting is fun for them.

My pregnant Sims swim. I don't think they use the diving board though.

Pregnant Sims also cannot 'jump in arms', pillow fight, and at least one other thing, maybe kicky bag, I can't remember. Squinge has mods that enable all the actions for the pregnant Sims. I use most of them except for the hot tub one because it conflicts with something else I use.

I haven't seen inappropriate wants for pregnant Sims appear after they start showing, so there is just 25 hours that pregnant Sims might roll wants they cannot fulfill. That's what I've seen. I may be wrong but I haven't had any difficulty fulfilling the wants that my obviously pregnant Sims have been rolling.

I had to search through several threads to understand everything and finally made a plague.txt for myself. Most of the info is actually in this thread IIRC, but was difficult to find with the site's search engine. The War Room had good additional info.


JMP, if you like I can upload it so that you can add it to the debugger folder. I notice that this question comes up over and over again in the threads. It is just 'copy and pasted' quotes from you.

Here it is. This is an entirely lame place for it, so it needs to be moved if found useful.


EDIT: I reuploaded the file. I cleaned it up a little and took out the part about the biostation.

The readme for enemies accumulate is a little confusing as it appears to talk more about the fight club than the status of enemies. I understood the part about the enemies stay enemies instead of 'wearing off' if you don't continue to interact with them, but I need to know if a former enemy is 'recoverable' with the mod in place.

I had a married couple where the wife caught the husband cheating more than once and they became enemies. I tried to get them to at least not hate each other for the children's sake. First I let the furiousness wear off, then I attempted to have them interact in non-threatening ways. But I never could get the enemy icon removed and they would soon be fighting again. Is that because of the enemies accumulate mod or because I just didn't know how to work on their relationship properly?