Most of the paintings are just generic photoshop filters, I hope they change them in the final version.

Well... You kinda made it the point when you used them for your argument that the Sims 3 paintings were crap, but apparently I digress. Sims 2 paintings merely being screenshots always defeated the purpose of having sim "paintings" for me.

Can we still drop custom paintings into a Paintings folder and have sims paint them at higher skill levels?

I see now that it is in traditional media, so that was my mistake. However, I don't think that you understand what I meant by a digital painting. "Digitally made photo" implies something rather different, so I feel the need to explain. Painting on a canvas, and using a stylus to paint inside an art program both take equal amounts of skill. The weaknesses and strengths of the mediums are different, though. Thanks for the correction, but it doesn't actually change anything about my argument. A boring ass painting, is a boring ass painting, no matter which medium was used. Your last example in a separate post was a much better example of your point, but guess what? It's still not perfect realism.. The artist is still using a lot of impressionistic elements to influence the feel of the painting. This can mostly be seen in the background, and in the exaggerated light and darkness to draw your eye to certain details. I totally agree that the painting filters in the Sims 3 leave much to be desired, but I respect what they were trying to achieve. If the sim paintings were merely screenshots slapped onto a canvas, then you may as well have taken a screenshot and called it a day.

Some people will think I'm crazy, but I actually prefer that third picture sanmonroe gave. At least it has some personality! Granted, it's amazing that the first artist is able to make a digital painting that looks exactly like a photograph, but making a painting that looks exactly like a photograph is pointless. You may as well just take an actual picture, and call it a day. Not to mention, in order for such artists to make those pieces they need a photograph of it first, which makes the whole situation redundant. I'd rather have imperfect creativity than robot-like perfection any day.

Aside from that rant, I would actually prefer to see diverse filter effects for sim paintings. I think it'd be pretty spiffy to see a sim using pointillism, a charcoal effect, ect.

I'm not disputing that the paintings look like poo… Photoshop filters are for sheep. However, the examples in you counter argument are perhaps not the best. That Chuck Close painting would be in a museum long before that photo referenced mess. Like so much of what I've been reading about TS3, the abstracting of paintings should be an optional feature. On the up side, photography is almost guaranteed to be in an EP.

Where exactly in the newspaper does it say about sims moving away, dieing or getting married? Whenever my sim checks the newspaper there are only news about sporting events, chess tournaments and eating contests. From what I've noticed around the neighbourhood, the original townie sims are all still there and the houses I've entered had only one family in them. My game is set on high free will, epic lifespan, aging is disabled, story progression is on.

The still life paintings don't necessarily bother me because unless you're taking a photograph (which would be awesome) or creating via computer-generation, the quality of the work isn't going to be 100% photo-realistic. In the eye of the beholder, though.

On the note of having a camera, I would welcome that feature with open arms. You could open up your own photo gallery! What's that Stewie line? "Every hot girl who can aim a camera thinks she's a photographer. Oooooooh, you took a black-and-white picture of a lawn chair and its shadow and developed it at Save-On. You must be so brooding and deep."

Painting is still amusing me. Well, amusing and annoying. I was really into doing portraits and texture still lifes in TS2, so wanted to do the same in TS3. However, camera controls on still lifes and portraits are near non-existent. The camera moves too violently, and you have no control over the Y-axis. You can control tilt, but it will randomly reset itself. Then you have the stylization that sims do for still life:



Portraits seem to be without the stylization, but are even more impossible to control the camera on. Now, it does seem like they get a little clearer as painting skill increases. The first from the left was at level 6, then level 7, then level 8.

One can only hope that EPs will help boost The Sims 3 the same way EPs rounded out the base game with The Sims 2.  Personally, I would love to see one of the other game companies give EA some well-deserved competition.  Maybe that would slap the smug smiles from their faces , and make them realize we fans are a fickle bunch when it comes to being taken for granted. At the moment, they have no competition in the Sims Franchise.  History has pointed out that monopolies in any form do not have long life spans.  Dictators usually end up dead or imprisoned.  Anyone else here have a want  to remove the doors at EA's Redwood Studios and watch as the developers suffer a bit for making our Sims suffer lives of pudding faces and scavanger hunts?

I hope El Presidente can unleash his Awesomeness and give us the game we really wanted with some well-placed mods and annoyance killers.

The sims 3 store is going to be awesome since it will generate tons of revenue to keep many programers on pushing out patches, bug fixes, extra content, and new ways to play!

So, bin another thread someone figured that it cost players 710 dollars over the life of TS2 to buy everything. What is the potential impact of the sims 2 store for people who want to get everything?

The sims 3 store for the first month would cost you 275 dollars for everything that should have been in the box, plus the base game at 70 for the collectors edition.

So EA wants you to pay 345 dollars for the full release day game, otherwise you just have the crappy base version. You want to be cool don't you?

Just think, if they release 20 bucks of stuff a month, plus 2 expansions and 2 stuff packs a year, for 5 years...

345+ 20*12(months)*5(years)+20*2*5+50*2*5

hmm

345+1200+200+500=2245!!!

2245$ compared to 710$

And I am not sure if the guy included the cost of TS3 collectors edition in that 710$, so it may be 640$!!!

Inflation sucks.

Thats a little over 37$ a month. You could play every single SOE online game (EQ, EQ2, vanguard, matrix, etc) and WoW for the just 3 bucks more per month.

Ok, so I'm new to arr-ing and I'm pretty sure I downloaded the Sims 3 RELOADED from Pirate Bay, but it's taking a really long time. I left it on all night and it's still at 45%. The ETA keeps jumping from 22 hrs. to 3 days depending on how many KB/s is going down or up. I have all the expansions installed. Should I uninstall a few of them? Would that make it go faster? Oh and the entire package I'm downloading (with utorrent) is 4.93 GB. Is that too much?

Arrr it all   

Thank God I don't live next to you.

Yes, I would be intrested to know if it ever works. I have a level 10 in the science field.

Hi!
Where did you guys download your game? cause mine it taking FOREVER  I started it a few days ago and I only got 900MB...
If anyone has a link to a good torrent (or some other kind of downloading method) I would be grateful!!!

   
Today when I opened the game this message appeared: 

"You are playing a non-final, unauthorized copy of The Sims 3. Purchasing and registering an official copy of The Sims 3 will entitle you to benefits including access to an entirely new game town called Riverview, 1000 SimPoints which can be redeemed for game objects in The Sims 3 Store, and access to The Sims 3 Exchange."

Is it true that it is not the final version?

sorry for my google english

Picture of a child playable ghost.

http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/7329/screenshot78.jpg

and apparently this is what can happen if you have no jealousy (which TS3 does not really have) and a sim with all the romance/loving traits, perks, and the fertility perk (100% impregnation rate with high chance of twins/triplets).

Yes that is 4 pages of family tree babies.
http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/3914/picture1amu.jpg
http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/4951/picture2p.jpg
http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/8789/picture3m.jpg
http://img41.imageshack.us/img41/3867/picture4r.jpg

Edit

Apparently evil women hate noisy birthday parties and sneak up on their victims.

http://img5.imageshack.us/img5/4834/screenshot7u.jpg
http://img5.imageshack.us/img5/7237/screenshot11w.jpg
http://img14.imageshack.us/img14/117/screenshot27fkr.jpg
http://img33.imageshack.us/img33/3280/screenshot31e.jpg

Or just get the Observant reward. It's only 5,000. Usually one chat will give a sim three trait discoveries. My sims get the Observant reward, the multitasking one, the one that makes coworker relationships easier. Those are the starters. Then they'll get other rewards based on their personality or LTW.

I had an unlucky, pregnant sim start a fire. I sent her ghost parents to put it out, because I'd never meant to resurrect the buggers in the first place. Not only did they succeed in putting out the fire before dying again (if possible), but she and her husband kept running in from outside to scream about it.

I know that virtual memory isn't real memory, but you sure run out of it fast while playing TS2 when you don't have enough RAM.  Not to mention that I prefer not to run off virtual memory at all, considering it's so much slower than RAM and fragments your hard drive that much faster. Yes, you could run with 256 RAM and 30 GB virtual, but you'd run damn slowly, and at that point you'd be working against yourself as writing to the disk so much just slows you down even more.  If you really knew half as much as you pretend, you'd have known that.

And don't be such a condescending jerk and say that I must have spyware/malware just because I know you're talking out your ass.  I run a clean system and take the necessary precautions against malware- which in itself uses RAM, naturally, but even if TS2 itself only uses 1 GB, you still have to run Windows and there are some services you can't disable, so you'd better have more than that.  I could care less what you do on your own machine, and if you're too cheap to buy extra RAM and want to run in virtual memory, go right ahead and chug along, but I'll continue to tell other people what the reality is.

Check your actual system wide usage next time. Start your computer fresh and play for an hour. Then bring up the task manager, goto the performance tab and have a look at the peak. Regardless of what incorrect number the task manager reports in the processes tab, the peak listed in the bottom left is the amount of ram usage your system has peaked at (including virtual memory usage). I've never seen anyone play TS2 and not have that number not be in the 1.3-1.5 GB range.

Then why does my computer use just under 1.5 GB when I'm running the game?  And why was I, and others, still getting the occasional "low virtual memory" warnings when we only had 1 GB in our machines? (and no, I did not have mine set at the Windows default) I don't believe Pescado's rule that you need twice as much RAM as downloads, but if you do have a fair amount of downloads, you need more than 1 GB.  I've run on this machine with 1 GB (X2 3800, Radeon X850, Raptor HD) and I've run with 2GB- 2 is better.