My old CRT monitor died about 2 months ago.  I reluctantly went with an LG brand (1440x900 19" widescreen) LCD montior because basically widescreen was all I could find in stores - the only option was a cheap-ish ($100) CRT like that one that only lasted me 8-10 months.

If you get a low response time (mine is 2ms), there's no blurriness, though some people are more sensitive to it than others. And if it has a decent scaler built in (which the LGs do), non-native resolutions aren't that big a deal, either.

But the trouble I've had with it is the viewing angle.  The colors change color slightly as you change your viewing angle. In something with textures of different colors, you don't notice it so much, but if you have a solid color on the desktop, the edges are slightly different colors. It doesn't bother me in games, but I when I'm doing other stuff, or writing, it drives me crazy.  It's also supposedly got a 170 degree viewing angle, so I would hate to see any one that is worse. It's not so much the side to side angle, but the vertical angle - you have to have your head above the monitor and look down. So I can't slouch any more.

Also it's very weird getting used to the brightness of the whites on it. On my CRT, white was actually  sort of blue-ish. I had to change my desktop colors, because staring at a bright white background like in applications started to hurt my eyes.

I think part of the problem is, they test it, then try to fix bugs, but sometimes when they fix the bugs, they break more stuff. But they don't test it again to see if there are new bugs, only if the old bugs are fixed.

Like the Crying baby.

It's not just PC games,  in the PSP game Puzzle Quest, it somehow shipped with a major feature disabled.  And apparently, my scenario is what happened. They went to fix something, broke the feature, but didn't notice until too late. At least on PC, they can patch it. But I think developers are just skimping on testing these days (or publishers are)

Since installing Seasons, I've been getting these weird pauses on community lots sometimes.  It doesn't always happen, and I've been trying to figure out why it happens.

Basically, usually after being on a community lot for say, 5 minutes or so, the game just pauses for a second or two every 20-25 seconds. It's not graphical related, because it doesn't skip any frames of animation, it just simply freeze for a second (although sounds continue), then continues where it left off.  (And I've tried playing with the graphic settings and such).

Anyway, I've been taking out hacks to see if any of them was the culprit (since I'm not sure when it started, I know it was after seasons, but not sure when after seasons).  And I noticed that it only seems to occur when Mrs. Crumplebottom is on a lot (and happens after she shows up).  I used to use the visitor controller from here (which I think automatically gets rid of her), and got it then, so I dunno if it's actually her, or the routine that triggers her or something.

Has anyone else seen this problem? Could it be my objects.package with the Crumplebottom data got corrupted?

My point was, just reducing access to a sims hot tub isn't good enough, you also have to watch them like a hawk when they are in a hot tub because a storm can spring up suddenly, and zap, they are dead.

Unless you completely cut off their using the hot tub entirely, at which point why did you even buy one?

Yeah, a gazebo or roof is the safest way to go, because even if you reduce access, if you don't pay attention for a minute, the weather can change and "zap" a sim is dead.  Just now, I was away for a minute, wasn't raining when I left, got back, and found the Grim Reaper paying a visit. D'oh.

I don't think I ever had a sim killed by accident in my game before getting Seasons, and now, thanks to the hot tub, my sims are dying in droves.  My favorite community lot has a hot tub on it, so I send my sims there a lot. But not that's not really feasible, because it's too deadly.  First them catching on fire (which there's a fix for), now the lightning. 

It's funny when it happens once. When it happens a dozen times, it gets really really annoying. And it happens to love tubs, too.

Seasons is much more of a memory hog than any previous expansion.  You can hit ctrl-shift-S  while in the game to see your frame rate and how much memory the game is using.  Seasons seems to be using about 200-250 megs of memory more than Pets.  (On my computer, I was using about 500-600 on Pets, with Seasons it's jumped to 700-850).  And note, I don't really have much custom content other than clothing and hair (ie, no furniture).

I also am getting a really bad slowdown at night, down to about 20 fps, and then when the water is being used, it drops to the 10s.  While in Pets, I got a pretty steady 70-50 fps (and during the day, that's what I get in Seasons)

I used to have a 6600 (it died) and Nvidia was terrible about the drivers for it.  The newer ones almost never worked right for the Sims or most other games. Nice card, but horrible support by Nviidia

Which 7600? GS or GT? And AGP or PCI-Express?  I've been playing a 7600 GS AGP and have no had a crash or any other sort of problem, and I probably play 2-3 hours a day at least.

Yeah, I just binned some myself and it worked fine. (I think the only thing that gets broken is loading a neighborhood)

The price of the pets seems to be determined by how well trained they are.  Ones that know a lot of things are more expensive than dogs that don't.

Which is just like real life.  A brand new puppy is fairly cheap (depending on the breed and breeding, anyway), but things like guard dogs and guide dogs which have gone through training are not cheap.

In my game, whenever a Servo shows up on a community lot or is brought home from work or is invited over, they simply sit there and do nothing.  Turning on the testing cheats, I get an error about a Invalid constant, and something about a motive check.

Since I'm the only one that seems to have this, I'm guessing it's a conflict with some sort of pre-OFB hack and a motive that a robot doesn't have. But I can't figure out which back.  Anyone have this problem and figure out which hack is causing it?

In my experience, it's really neighborhood size (in terms of number of sims) that determines how long it takes to load a neighborhood or lot. (Which is why I'm afraid to get Pets, which will have the potential to increase the number of "sims" by a heck of a lot)

I used to have around 1200 sims in my main neighborhood - took me about 3 minutes to load the it and about 2 minutes to load a lot.   Got that down to about 850 (using the deleter tool in the QA version of Simpe, which has some side effects), and the load time dropped to 2 minutes and lot about 1:30.

And brand new neighborhoods take almost no time to load (either the 'hood or the lot).

It could be that EA signed some sort of deal with Gamespy so that they would get the "scoop" on the new EP first. (Thus the secret page there).  Thus the crackdown.


Still, things like this are why I really wish some company would make a competing Sims clone. If nothing else, it would force EA to be less jerk like and more open in order to win business.  It's baffling that you get so many copies of other games, like Doom clones and C&C clones, but no one has made a serious Sims clone (at most you get the sleazy things like Playboy the Mansion or Singles or 7 Sins)

D'oh! I had noticed the problem, but didn't realize it was patch related, so I re-did most of the lots with that problem (either taking out the counters or the whole restaurant, in the hubs case).

Though for me, it's like they don't want to do anything but eat.  They eat, then go right back to the podium.

The sheer number of cars done by 3rd party people compared to the 5 that Maxis did really makes Maxis look lazy. As this thread points out, they didn't even bother to make all of the ones in the game buyable.

if you have families in the sim bin, make sure they don't have any memories of any other sims. Otherwise you can make your problem worse, because they bring along a copy of the sim they have a memory about (albeit a hidden sim).

The thing is, for most of the expansions of the original Sims, they also came with updated versions of the files for previous eps (since the files had to be udpated to accomadate the new features of the EP). Otherwise they really could have fit on one disc. It wasn't until the last couple I think that Maxis discovered they could simply patch the old files, they didn't have to include entire copies of the old files.

This is actually how I got a couple of the eps (Vacation and House Party). I simply extracted them from the disc of a later expansion. Took some fiddling with the registry to prevent them from disappearing.

If you get the QA version of SimPE, there is an tool that deletes a sim entirely (including memories about them).  However, there is a slight snag with it which mucks up genetics - recessive stuff no longer gets passed on. Which is why it's only in the QA version.  But for people like me who hate children and so rarely have them in game, it's useful.

You might have accidently made the camera center on a sim.  It looks like it's shaking, because the sim is moving a little. I do it all the time.

Yeah, that's been my experience - it only generates 3 new reporters, nothing else.

When I installed OFB, I stupidly added the sample neighborhood, which adds about 100 sims (a number of them just for the family trees of the playable ones added). Thankfully I made a backup, and just made an empty shopping district (though in retrospect, that was pretty pointless, as they are the same as a downtown)

Do you have OFB? I used to have this problem, but I updated the drivers to play Oblivion, and the problem doesn't seem to exist for me anymore.

At any rate, this has convinced me to buy an ATI the next time I got a card.

How could you think anything but? I don't think EA/Maxis is making any pretense about it, the "shopping" packs are pretty much meant to compete with Sims paysites. They figure if people will join paysites to get objects which have no new animations or such, then they will buy them from EA, too.

I started having that problem, but I solved it by using Carigon's memory bottle to delete all the memories (which worked but is overkill)

I love Nightlife - it added cars, restaurants, a DJ Booth, the attraction system, and dates. Conversely, I despite Uni, all it did was add 100s of useless NPCs.  And I can't graduate sims from college, because if I do, their UI gets so big it blocks up the entire screen. (Well, not quite, but I don't know why they had to expand it upward to accomadate the extra wants, not just move the bar to the right)


I do suspect the next ep will be pets. The reason it hasn't been announced yet is that everyone will spaz out and forget OFB or the shopping packs.

And then EA will take a page from Bethesda and MS and sell cat and dog armor for $2 each.