Doing epic at the moment so I can play with the new things I've not seen yet. Will drop that back to normal and let babbies happen when I've finished.

Thanks, hope you enjoyed it.

Is the anisotropic thing the key here?

That I cannot answer. I've never seen good integrated graphics work for gaming, not without severe lag. My laptop can play Lord of the Rings Online, but it's like steering a bus from the rear, even if the picture looks reasonable.

Interestingly, my new card doesn't seem to render as crisp an image as the old one. Pescado is always saying you need the jagged bits and I have to say the new images initially looked almost a bit blurry to me, they were smoothed so much. You just need to make smaller jagged bits.

Oh look, you know, I've been dying for someone to ask me to show off my epeen.

I bought a core i7 chip with Ivy bridge architecture, socket 1155 - couldn't afford the socket 2011. I made sure the motherboard had 6GB SATA connections and I used a SSD for my primary. 16GB RAM - I was going for 32GB but changed mobos midstream and forgot to check the number of RAM slots in the new board. C'est la vie, it seems to run sweet on 16GB. (I could still upgrade to 32GB if I went to 8GB RAM cards, but I got a good deal on the 4GB ones). I went ATI Radeon for future Crossfire capabilities. The video card is HD 7850 with 2GB RAM, three generations advanced from my previous card, I think this and the RAM has actually made the biggest difference to my gaming. /smug

My sims game used to stutter and lag and I don't get any of that now. It will still occasionally crash but I suspect that's just EAxis.

I don't know why I'm getting good ingame images, tbh, I am not a graphics geek by any means. I usually try tweaking various things in the Catalyst control till I have fucked up the graphics completely, then I reset it all to factory defaults. A few rounds of this and I just let the game set what it wants. Then I turn everything in the game up to high.

It may be that your PC just can't handle AM story progression, it does take a bit of grunt to run. You said you don't get crashes if you turn it off, so I suspect that's your problem right there.

I don't believe the difference in performance between online games and the sims can be put down to server side stuff. Your local machine still needs to render the images you see, no matter what you are playing. I think it's the sims itself. It's always been said that the sims is a very processor oriented game, yet I have also heard that it is not intelligently coded enough to take advantage of extra cores. I use the frame limiter app Pescado has on this site for the sims and I still experienced lag spikes and rendering pauses at 30 fps with the old machine.

My old PC had a 4870 (with 1GB RAM) and although I had lags, including during online games, it was still managing on lower settings. Your card is a whole series later so it's probably fine for now. How's your performance? If you are getting frustrated with gaming it is maybe NOT good enough.

Yiss, my new PC has a SSD. It is actually 7 seconds to boot to desktop, but who's quibbling?   

I got sick of trying to find a suitable fambly starter house from EAxis' offerings. I was also sick of my own starters that I always play, so I knocked up a new starter house. Thanks to 'wandhere' I was able to build an actual fambly home, which also conforms to Awesomemod's requirements for breeding. It turned out quite a bit more green than I was expecting, but hey, your sims probably aren't going to be there very long. I left enough room for two cars at the front and there is a reasonable amount of space left at the back of the 20x30 lot. There is plenty of room to expand the house if you wish.

There are three bedrooms; one double, one with two singles and one with two cribs. Two full bathrooms, both have showers not baths. The showers are the only Kewian based items, the stove and beds etc are not. There is a washing machine and space for a dryer, but in the meantime there is a clothesline outside. There is everything you need for one cat or dog.

Last time I looked at the price it was around §19,906. You won't be hiring a maid in a hurry.


















Download

Oh and do be careful - there's no smoke alarm.   

I've just built a new PC in the last couple of weeks and want to pass on a tip I was given. Apparently if you have an Nvidia video card and later on want to use SLI with another card, you will need the identical Nvidia card. Whereas if you go with ATI Radeon, you will be able to do Crossfire as long as you have a similar GPU. I thought Crossfire might be a cheap way of upgrading my video card in a year or two.

HDDs can be a bottleneck too. When I was researching parts for my new PC, I discovered a lot of the new HDDs are labelled 'green' and often run as slow as a notebook/laptop drive i.e. 5700rpm. I don't game with any less than 10K rpm and the faster read/write can help with the over all system. In my old machine I had 2 smaller HDDs and put them in RAID 0 which helped keep my now 5 year old machine up to the task for a lot longer.

If you get a secondary HDD for data, you can also put Windoze page file on that, save having to access your main drive(s) for that as well as what you're doing.

No wonder you're a good modder and fixer Havelock, you have an amazing attention to detail. Thank you very much.

I somehow still missed the towel holder, I thought you meant the one in the kids' bathroom with the blue towel. I will have a look at the the other one and let you know.

Fair enough, but I don't use the launcher either. My launcher is not allowed on the internetz, it can't be trusted to behave itself.

Crikey, you need to get yourself a Sherlock Holmes hat, that's awesome.

I will check out sheets and other things later. Sorry, miscommunication, the cover of the bed I would call a 'duvet' or 'eiderdown'. The sheets are the bit by the pillows.  

I will double-check colours and hopefully make a map of the lights, they really are the most fun part of the house and make it most like a real one. Give me a day or two.

Edit to add:

End table top in main bedroom: #af998c (Dunno what happened there!)

Double bed:

Lighting colours. Unfortunately there is no way of seeing what brightness the light is set at. Mostly the coloured ones are dim, but not all. I left the pics full size to make them easier to read.
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/poofs/Woozelbury_Mews/downstairs.jpg
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/poofs/Woozelbury_Mews/upstairs.jpg

There is an extra light hanging in mid-air near the wall in the garage bathroom, it should not be there. There should be just one central light in the room.

I'm presuming you're talking to Jezzer, but I'm going to comment on this anyway.

I do not use the MTS patch tool and I don't actually understand why anyone does. In my view it's just adding yet another thing to be updated and managed and made compatible with the already dodgy sims game. Personally, I do not see what is so hard about downloading a patch and double-clicking it. YMMV

Oh god yes, what is it with the stairs and sims? The house I recently uploaded, I couldn't change colours on the lounge chairs, I had to remove blinds and windows upstairs, I had to run rings around, just to get things to work in the general fucking VICINITY of the stairs.

I saw the routing wasn't straight through in your lot, but at least you had a link from kitchen to lounge, so the stupid sims didn't get stuck in rooms.

Dining Area Chairs: Pattern, Colors
I don't know how to tell what the pattern is. It's under plastics and rubber. Seat #99869c. Frame #2a2d2f.


Tikibookcase: Pattern, Colors
Colour 1 = #d5c9b6, colours 2,3,4 = #2b2c2f
The engraved pattern was already there. It's a very flat plain wood, hardly any grain.


Masterbedroom:
Bed: Sheet Colors, For the Headboard pattern i have used the same as the wall behind and colored it like the endtable is this correct.
Headboard #af998c. End tables the same except on the top which is #f41e4. Sheets #9ecba7. Wall section #9dcba5. Wall decoration #eccb99.

Loveseat: Pattern, Colors


Blind on Door:Pattern, Colors
Same as end table wood. Main #af998c. Contrast stripes #eccb9a.

Masterbathroom:
Sink:Pattern, Colors
Sink #ecf0e8. Taps #545454.


Mirror:Pattern,Color
Paint pattern - don't think i changed it from default - #f4f1e3.

Kidsbathroom:
Sink:Picture, Colors


Towel? I see the towelring from basegame. Default color.
Blue #3c73af. Metal #bec1bd. 3rd colour #dedfe9.

Kidsplayroom: Toy Xylophon the Cat one? The base one is there.
Yes, cat xylophone.

Garagebathroom: Towel? The Base Towelbar is there default color.


That's pretty rough, but may give you an idea.

Let me know if the light colours came through, or do they get lost too?

I like it, it's very atmospheric. Pity we haven't got to the CC place that sims 2 got to, with emulations of Victorian washtubs and so on. But it looks great, I can see a lot of work went into it.

Oh boy. You've stumbled down a dark alley in town and you're demanding common politeness from the ruffians that lurk. You didn't read the street signs and you're way off on reading the social signs. My kindest suggestion is to run for it. You have the information you came for, if you have any sense left at all, you will leg it. Now.

Ach, try putting the .dll file in every game/bin folder - each SP and EP has one.

Sweet, thanks. I will look that stuff up tomorrow. It's bedtime now and I have an early date with Sarumon in the Tower of Orthanc, so probably close to 24 hours before I'll post the data.

Cheers Painkiller.

India inspired living, Arga jars


Haute Hacienda gecko
Mid-Century modern toothbrush holder


Mystic butterflies - no idea where from


Met the Monkey


Fish and mirror, did these first and didn't write the names down. Colour #9b9c81

The bedding pattern is from Sionelle at Mod The Sims
http://socialsims.net/finds/african-pattern-pack-include-9-patterns-by-sionelle-at-mod-the-sims/
http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=469303
I see she's done some smaller versions of the patterns as well, maybe that would suit the bedding better.

If you wouldn't mind, it would be great to have your version for download, maybe people who use packages would be able to use it? I'd be happy to take more pics and give more info if that's something you wanted to do.

Cool, thanks. So now I just have to track down the pattern.

OTOH I went straight through, just installing in order. Each release does a min patch/update of the prior release as part of the install process. Then at the end I applied the latest super patch. I have had no problems with this approach, I have done it twice now. It's a lot quicker, I would imagine, than waiting for patches in between each install. It also feels cleaner to me in terms of programming.

Aww, sorry Havelock. I will have a look in game tomorrow and see what those things are and if I can share. I really didn't think I had extra cc.

I don't know.

Do you have ALL the store content? Is any of the content showing? Can you figure out a common denominator for the stuff which does show? Is your decrapper the latest version?

Hehe. Many thanks for the words of appreciation. It took around 30-40 hours to make, so it's nice to find that other people like it too.

There is no CC except from the store stuff - as far as I'm aware. Since Moryrie stopped doing the bulk packages I have gone back to decrapped sims3packs. This is a new install of the sims on my new PC, so all content has been only recently added.

THIS HOUSE IS NOT ECO-FRIENDLY. THIS HOUSE IS PACKED TO THE RAFTERS (WHICH IT HASN'T GOT) WITH HIGH-TECH ENERGY-CONSUMING STUFF HIDDEN IN ALL THE WALLS. IT HAS HEAT PUMPS AND DE-HUMIDIFIERS UP THE WAZOO. IT'S INTERNETZ ARE RUNNING OVER THE POWER LINES AND IT CAN BROADCAST TO AROUND 300 METRES. IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW, JEZZER?

Ting, the colour combos aren't entirely my own, I downloaded heaps of photos from the net and used a little colour picker app to steal the colours off the images. 

Excuse me now, I must go and have a word with the Woozel.