All well and good if you live in a country that hasn't blocked it yet of course. Then again, with a lot of EA's "games" these days, once you strip away the shitty DRM, there's very little of substance left.

Still wouldn't touch it with a 100ft pole. Never forgive, never forget.

Also, more advertising for their crappy Store if you have Store Mode enabled, and a buy now button for TS4. As far as I can see, TS4 will consist of TS1-level gameplay (and AI) and a shitload of popups for real-money purchases.

Indeed - EA are insufferable cunts to be sure, but I fail to see what they have to do with a bunch of genocidal genetically-inbred retards with a racial superiority complex.

You've not indicated what hardware specs/OS you're running. Is it just the card that's recent, or is it your entire PC? If it's just the card that's new, then have you tried deleting all references to The Sims 3 from the Windows registry (I'm assuming you're running Windows and not the Mac OS)?

You might want to look at this if you're having trouble getting TS3 to recognise your card:
http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title=Game_Help:Getting_new_graphics_cards_recognized_by_the_game

Don't forget that later EPs introduced changes to the water shaders that may in turn be giving you grief with the loading screen/missing text, and apparently the latest patch messes with the lighting, going off what people over at SimsVIP are saying.

Sounds like another half-arsed, broken product from EA. Who would've thought?

It's necromancy if the thread hasn't been posted to in over a month. The last time anyone bothered posting in this thread was in January and it is now March.

In a parallel universe perhaps. In this one, all EA does is buy up the real talent and put them to work on the next BookFace social crap or Battlewasteland 600 sequel, whilst injecting worthless "social" elements into existing IPs and monetising every little thing so you have the 12ish sheep jumping up and down, squeeing with joy because now they can pay real money to bath a virtual lava. Oh, and SecuROM.

It wouldn't be so bad if these patches actually fixed anything. I'm still waiting for the vanilla 2009 (pre-nuclear holocaust) lighting/running bug/broken pathfinding/watching-tv-through-the-back-of-my-head/fuck knows what else fixes. But then I realise this is EA and no doubt this new patch will add even more Shop spam to my build/buy modes even though I have that intrusive crap switched off.

I am quite frankly surprised that the only thing it managed not to grammatically screw up was the item name itself.

Having been away from TS3 for a while, it was disappointing to come back and see that little had changed on the modding front: There's still a gazillion retextures for crappy paysite hair; a million "contact lenses" for those players who like to view their sims' slightly different irises on 60" monitors; cosmetics that only really work with the appropriate skin packs and clothing items that appear to be minor tweaks of older clothing items that came before it with few of them working properly on fat morphs.

Virtually all of my downloads consist of bugfixes and enhancement scripts just to make the game vaguely playable seeing as EA never bothered fixing anything they broke in the first place (lighting, running bug, pathfinding, 4am club dancing-induced wake ups, nomadic ghosts - the list goes on and on...) whilst adding a load of online social crap nobody asked for or even wanted. A lot of those scripts from Buzzler, Twallan, Pescado et al also added the sort of stuff that EA simply can't be arsed to do whilst fixing much of the crap that the community have been screaming out for since 2009. Just a shame there's no light fix.

I think what makes the situation worse these days is that there isn't really a cohesive community as such anymore. Many established modders have either left the scene altogether or set up tumblr accounts (or "simblrs" as some in the community embarrassingly call them) with no real way of tracking new mods unless you create an account yourself and seeing as the whole tumblr thing seems to be more about 12ish drama and popularity contests, I'm not even remotely interested.

Add to that a flood of people who fawn over Peggy's latest abomination or squee at the latest bit of TSR tat, or more alarmingly, a rising number of people I've come across who flat out refuse to use mods at all because they believe they are "illegal" (WTF?) and that only Store items produced by EA are legitimate, then things start looking pretty grim. Of course, it doesn't help that EA themselves back in 2009 tried their best to lock out the modding community by deliberately placing their own microtransactions-based crap front and centre whilst forcing the modding community to find inventive ways of actually getting mods into the game itself. Whereas TS2 was mod-friendly from the start, TS3 was very much about the $$$ through microtransactions and over-priced and considerably empty (and broken) expansion packs. It's EA's actions that have created a new fanbase consisting of whiny 12s who love Peggy hair and Twilight and who bitch at each other over at Sim Secret (surprised that's still going!) over 12ish crap that no self-respecting human could possibly give a shit about.

I'm sure there was a point to this post somewhere, but I have appeared to rambled on instead.

It actually happens in both cases. For instance, if I have my sim change into its swimwear at the Old Pier Beach lot and then direct it to the sea to swim, it will change back into everyday clothes in order to leave the lot boundaries and then change back again once it reaches the water. Then it will happily walk back to the Old Pier lot but will change clothes again if it chooses to go for another swim.

I've recently decided I hadn't killed off enough braincells over the Christmas period via the usual means of alcoholic consumption, so I've decided to reinstall TS3 to finish off the job. Here's the thing: I sent a family of sims to the Old Pier Beach in Sunset Valley, and now thanks to the amazing ability to swim in the sea, my sims appear to enjoy doing this, and I can leave them to it. The problem, however is that they also get thirsty and head back to the pier for refreshments. No problem so far. Except, now they want to swim again, which apparently entails them switching out of their swimsuits just to walk off the lot to reach the sea and then switching back into them again to actually swim in the sea. This is clearly stupid and annoying and needs to stop.

My usual Google-fu has drawn a blank apart from a 12 asking for something similar in a MTS forum thread and a fellow 12 exclaiming "me too!".

Anyway, getting to the point, does anyone know of a mod out there that will stop my sims from changing clothes just to leave the lot, or specifically to stop them changing out of their swimsuits for the sake of walking a couple of yards?

The Sims 4 will just be some shitty BookFace or forced social crap with no AI or any form of simulation anyway. Just like the new Sim City in fact.

Excellent! Finally, no more annoying overalls and a reason to start using Riverview again. It was interesting when I was looking through all the base game clothing in CTU just how much of it wasn't enabled for random, yet every piece of clothing item EA put out after that is automatically set to random through sheer laziness on their part, no matter how stupid huge pirate boots look when combined with a dressing gown.

Bit of a long shot this, but it's driving me nuts. Is there a small mod out there that prevents those farmers' overalls included with Riverview from being assigned to nearly every other randomly-spawned adult sim in-game? I've tried playing around with S3PE and CTU but the latter will only let me change the settings for base game clothing and I'm pulling my hair out trying to locate these overalls with S3PE to change the settings there. These damn things along with the semi-bald hairstyle (for YA's no less) means my town's quickly taking on the appearance of the male equivalent of Stepford Wives.

Why the hell did EA think it was a good idea to set those overalls for random? Oh, wait this is the same EA that set those flippers (free store item) for everyday wear.

I would like to see just how far EA believes it can override the legal systems in those countries that are not expressly excluded, and that's only if EULAs in general are considered legally-binding anywhere outside the US.

So EA's up to their old tricks again?

It still exists as I used it for the first time a few days ago.

Is there a mod out there that automatically highlights LN hotspots rather than faffing about with the newspaper?

Yep, it's only the custom music channel. On this particular lot I had eight speakers set up and all eight of them were playing completely different tracks. In the end I took the mod out and just switched back to the electronica channel.

Nope. Shimrod's admitted on MTS it's a problem because of the way the XML's structured and the only solution is to have one speaker on the lot. This would be fine if I was trying to play custom music on a small lot, but this is a 30x30 nightclub and even a speaker with its audio set to high only fills a small area with sound. Ah well.

That's the one, although now that I've tried it, I've hit an annoying problem with it. In a room with more than one wall speaker, each speaker's playing a different track!

You'd think that Late Night would've been a more appropriate EP for vending machines, but not according to EA. No, it would seem that if we want vending machines in our games, we have to put up with bloody pets too. Why not chuck in some weather in there while you're at it so at least this EP might be worth picking up?

Nah, wishful thinking there.

WCIF a fix for the borked LN wall speakers not playing any custom music? I'm fairly certain that MTS had one but I can't find it despite many searches. All I get at the moment when I switch them to custom music on community lots is silence. Regular stereos seem to handle custom music perfectly fine but look hopelessly out of place in nightclubs.