Funny Sims graphical glitches - with Videos!

[baratron]

I've been testing Plasticbox's new row or terraced houses to try to find out what's making them crash. This has involved lots of changing the combination of my Downloads, booting up Sims 2, playing for a bit, then quitting. Repeat.

I also have a graphics chip that shares memory with the computer itself. Yesterday while testing the lot I managed to run out of memory to the extent I obtained some utterly bizarre graphical glitches. Of course, I videoed them to share .

The first video seems fairly normal in terms of texturing - the house and sims are recognisable. However, there are strange and random jaggies and lighting effects. I especially like the way the sofa inside the house appears stuck in the legs of my playable sim outside the house ~20 seconds into the video!

The second video is a complete & utter freak of nature. The house has no floors, the sims have no faces or animations - just meshes with the arms stuck out to the sides. There is a strange strobing effect on the meshes, and yet more random jaggies. My favourite part comes at the very end, where one sim walks to the toilet, trailing his arm across the screen - then splits in half!

The videos are hosted on my Sims 2 site on Pescado's Malaysian server, so if MATY itself is laggy, the video downloads will be too. Right-click and hit save to be sure of them arriving... sometime, or click & attempt to stream them through Windows Media Player. In my copious free time this evening (), I might upload them to YouTube as well.

Enjoy!

[ebonyspiral]

My god, the second one looks like it's full of hovering, winged monsters. Scary. The toilet bit made me laugh aloud.

Not quite as bizarre, but I wish I'd filmed when this kid had a bad hair day.



No matter where she walked, her pigtails remained stuck to the floor. Ouch.

[cwykes]

Serious lag buffering those videos.  10mins or so for a 50sec video - twice.   

I have weird graphical issues at the moment - similar but not identical.  I don't have BV, only base + OFB + Seasons patched.  My first problem  is random jagged stuff across the screen - quite like your video 1, but I've never seen grey lines like your foreground problem. I've had multicoloured jagged stuff like your grey foreground.  I've also had lines like those on the fight and in post 2.  It doesn't happen all the time either - some days I'm fine and happens on the hood screen as well as on lots.  I've cleaned up the PC in case it's memory/caching related and I'm working on reducing downloads in the hope it's a conflict.  Not that I know what I'm doing, but both seemed worth doing in their own right.  I'll take pics next time it happens.

I'm going to mention my other problems in case they are related and/or ring any bells:

Second problem is serious lag on the 'hood screen of my biggest hood (it's not that big as I don't have a uni or downtown attached or pets)  It lags so badly I can't navigate around it at all until it's caught up with itself.  I actually had to reduce the graphics settings on the 'hood screen to be able to move around and select lots!

Third is that I can't get into a couple of hoods at all - the loading screen for the hood just flashes on and off.  I can get into sub-hoods though.  It was OK til the seasons patch.  I re-installed Seasons and now can't get into different hoods.

[Riez Forester]

Malaysian server huh? Good thing I'm in Malaysia then .
*click and watch*

[Gwill]

My god, the second one looks like it's full of hovering, winged monsters. Scary. The toilet bit made me laugh aloud.
Not quite as bizarre, but I wish I'd filmed when this kid had a bad hair day.
...
No matter where she walked, her pigtails remained stuck to the floor. Ouch.

I had that same hair glitch.  All her hair was centered on a point smack in the middle of the screen.  It didn't matter where I moved the camera, or the sim, the hair stayed anchored in the centre of my view.

I used the lot debugger to change her hair, and I haven't seen it since.

[Bruce Banner]

  Bad graphical artefacts like you're experiencing Baratron are often the result of either a bad graphic driver glitch , a performance issue because a computer's graphics specs may only just meet the minimum requirements , or a graphics hardware issue caused by overheating of the card . It can also be caused by overclocking a graphics card ( causing artefacts when said card is pushed beyond it's limits ) . What is your make and model of graphics card ? 

[cwykes]

Overheating huh - first time I saw the problem, I'd been playing for hours...   Maybe it's now partly fried?
Don't think I'm overclocking unless that happens by accident - I haven't set it up that way.
Mine's a Nvidia Radeon 9250, so it's low end, but not off the bottom of the scale. I'm hopeless with drivers.  I've got ATI catalyst drivers version 8.252.0.0 is installed and I think that's the latest.   I'll do some more poking around.
Maybe I'd just better turn the graphics settings down all round and see if it helps.

[Bruce Banner]

  If you don't know if you're overclocking , and you're using your Catalyst drivers without mucking around with the settings then you aren't overclocking your card because it's a deliberate action ( usually with ATI Tool for ATI cards like yours ) to squeeze as much performance as possible out of your card but if overdone can cause artefacts due to the card being pushed beyond it's limits . While not being a World beater , your Radeon 9250 should be able to cope with Sims 2 without artefacting ( you should probably get a bit of jittery movement on big , busy lots if your graphics settings are set high but you shouldn't get artefacts ) because it's well above internal graphics chips and most people with those won't get artefacting . Try various things to test your problem out though . Turn ' Smooth Edges ' down , Shadows lower and Lighting lower for minimal visual impact and then only turn down the ones like textures etc if you really , really have to because they are the ones that will make the graphics look a bit crap if you turn them too low . You said it happened after playing for hours though , so I would personally play more frequent but shorter sessions if you think the card is feeling it's age a bit . Try some older Catalyst drivers too because the newest couple of sets (7.9 and 7.10 although listed as compatable ) havent worked at all with my Radeon 9600 Pro so maybe they're not paying much attention to older generation cards like ours now with all these fancy new ones available these days . So maybe try some in the low 7's and the high 6's so they aren't TOO old 

[ScoobyDoo]

I've got a 9250 too, at least until the 8800 GT are no longer being overpriced.  The Catalyst drivers are a couple years old i think, the latest ones I don't think support it anymore.  I know for a fact their not supported in Vista and can cause studdering issues with Sims 2.  I temporarily switched to a 1600 and sims ran very sweet.  I've had their hair vertices get stuck in the middle of the screen one in a very blue moon.  I usually just close the lot and reopen it and fixes it, so I'm guessing a Sim/driver issue.

[baratron]

Bad graphical artefacts like you're experiencing Baratron are often the result of either a bad graphic driver glitch , a performance issue because a computer's graphics specs may only just meet the minimum requirements , or a graphics hardware issue caused by overheating of the card . It can also be caused by overclocking a graphics card ( causing artefacts when said card is pushed beyond it's limits )

Yup, I said that . I was testing the lot for Plasticbox, and by the time the graphics went that wonky, I had booted up the Sims, played for a few minutes, quit or let it crash, rinse, repeat, something like 15 or 20 times in a row. I was also running Xchat and Opera at the same time, and Opera & Sims 2 don't play well together at the best of times. And I had also turned all of the graphics options up to maximum, even though I usually don't play using those options. The videos show what happens when you completely run out of memory. I videoed it because it was funny, not because I need advice.

Once I'd rebooted Windows, everything was back to normal . To be honest, it's quite impressive that you could run the game 20 times in one Windows session before things are wonky enough to need a reboot.

[Zazazu]

Face templates gone bad (while this isn't one of mine, I have made this mistake before):

Elder face data replaced by child data.

[ebonyspiral]

They say everything heads south as you get older...

[cwykes]

Once I'd rebooted Windows, everything was back to normal . To be honest, it's quite impressive that you could run the game 20 times in one Windows session before things are wonky enough to need a reboot.

well that's another thing I've been doing a lot while trying to fix my own set of problems.

My drivers are the last set of catalyst that say they support the 9250 - that's 6.11 from Nov 2006, but the actual driver inside is 8.3somethingorother from May.  I've been using it a long time and the problems are new, so I'll stick with it.

So - keepthe PC lean and mean, reboot if I've been in and out of the game a lot, give the graphics card a rest ocasionally, turn down a few graphics options and maybe all my problems will be solved.... 

thanks for the thread Baratron