vampirebird - Tumblr blog

[vampirebird]

The Ottomas twins. This time they ended up being a boy and a girl, and I named them Billy and Betty. Billy on the left and Betty on the right.

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Samantha persistently stayed close to the newly engaged couple.

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Samantha casually walked up to their table and stole Kimberly’s food? Rude!

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Armand and Kimberly went on a date and Carlos Contender gossiped about Kimberly to Samantha just a few steps behind them. Guys. They probably could hear you.

Meanwhile Denise Jacquet and the gang are having the time of their lives blowing bubbles in the background.

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While everyone was busy in the photo booth, Samantha joined some others blowing bubbles.

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...and the high witch ended up being a third wheel. A fifth wheel even, in this case. Both pairings ignored her and went to woohoo in the photo booth.

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Kimberly called Armand to invite him for an outing. Armand chose Bernard’s Botanical Dining, hoping to turn the outing into a date later. Well, when they arrived there, I saw that it was quite a group of people...

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Armand DeBateau just walked into the Cordials’ house and kissed Kimberly. Lisa Ramirez just stands there staring at them like, “Get a room, you two”.

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Kimberly Cordial and Jessica Picaso putting out some rad tunes.

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An unexpected pairing, the courtesy of ACR: Samantha Cordial and Chester Gieke. Ocelot the dog is seemingly not pleased to see that.

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A day in the life of Chester Gieke in a tiny home in Bluewater Village.

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Allegra accepted Martin Ruben’s advances happily, but she wasn’t super attracted to him... Looks like she found the attraction she was looking for in Castor Nova.

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Allegra Gorey dances as Brittany Upsnott performs.

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Hello lil waddler.

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Hello lil stinker.

[vampirebird]

A walkthrough of how I solved my graphics issues for the Sims 2

So... I had to install the Sims 2 on my new laptop this week and I think I should note down everything I did step by step, so that I can have guidelines available for a potential future installation process as well.

Step 1: Install the game.

Installed Directx 9 and Visual C++ 2010 before I installed the game.

As my installation location I chose Program Files (x86) instead of Program Files. It seems 32-bit apps go to the Program Files (x86) folder and the Sims 2 is obviously an 32-bit app.

Step 2: Edit the Graphics Rules.sgr and Video Cards.sgr files

For this step I did not use Graphics Rules Manager. I edited the files myself by first copying them over to my Documents folder (Desktop would be fine too).

The files that need to be edited are found in the Program Files (x86)/The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection/Fun with Pets/SP9/TSData/Res folder. (According to my installation location, that is.)

I specifically edited these lines in the Graphics Rules.sgr file:    seti textureMemory 32 (line 140 and line 154 according to Notepad++)

I changed 32 to 2048 for these two lines (because it seems 2 gb is the max limit for any resources the Sims 2 can use).

   option ScreenModeResolution (line 776 according to Notepad ++ again)

Here I changed all the numbers seen next to the lines starting with uintProp maxResWidth and uintProp maxResHeight to my laptop’s screen resolution, which I found out to be 1920 x 1080. So, 1920 for width and 1080 for height.

Saved the file. Copied the file to both Config and CSConfig folders. Now, onto Video Cards.sgr file:

I added my dedicated graphics card’s data into this file so that the game would recognize it. My card is NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1050, so I added a new line at the end of the list of cards that begin with this line:

   vendor "NVIDIA" 0x10b4 0x12d2 0x10de (line 324, column 37, according to Notepad ++).

Now, you can apparently find out what to enter here if you check out your config log in the Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection/Logs folder, and your game is trying to use your dedicated card, but my game was still refusing to use my dedicated card and was showing my Intel integrated graphics in the log, so I had to google to find out. In my case what I had to add to the list was:

   card 0x1c8d "GeForce GTX 1050".

Saved the file. Copied the file to both Config and CSConfig folders.

I really should have used the next step first though which is...

Step 3: Force Sims2EP9.exe to use your dedicated GPU through Windows 10 Graphics Settings

Well, I ran the game again after dealing with the .sgr files, thinking my game would finally use the NVIDIA card... Surprise, surprise - it did not.

I went to Settings > System > Display > Graphics Settings. Typing Graphics Settings into the search box in the start menu brings it up anyway, so yeah. Under “Graphics performance preference”, through the “Browse” button, I found the Sims2EP9.exe and added it as an app that should always use the dedicated graphics card.

After doing this, the game finally started using my NVIDIA card and all my graphics settings in game were set to high and I could change resolution, adjust smooth edges and all that. Success!

The game runs pretty smoothly and I experience no pink flashing or crashing.

Additional information:

I use SimNopke’s shadow fix, available at ModTheSims, which solves the blocky sim shadow issue without having to turn off shadows.

I didn’t want to change anything that didn’t need changing. It looks like the game runs well this way, so I didn’t apply the 4 gb patch. I keep my Downloads folder pretty minimal, right now I have about 3 gb of content there. I remember I took special care to get low poly custom content when I curated my folder, so there is that.

From what I understood looking at the Graphics Rules.sgr and Video Cards.sgr, the Graphics Rules.sgr file tries to find out what your card is, then looks at Video Cards.sgr to find a match there. If nothing matches, then it opts to use the lowest settings possible for the game. (Which is 800x600 resolution and only 32 mb of texture memory.) Video Cards.sgr has a list of a bunch of cards that were on the market during the time the Sims 2 was actively being developed, and Graphics Rules.sgr has code that is supposed to run according to which card is detected. The lines contained within hashtags seem to be commentary from the devs on why they coded things the way they did.

That’s all I can think of so far. This was lengthy. What I noted down might not even be useful by the time I need to reinstall again somehow, but still! I enjoy documenting things.

Yeah, I assume nobody’s going to read this far. Kudos to you if you did.

[vampirebird]

It’s alive!

I come back from lurking in the shadows.

After many years of not playing the game, I installed it on my new, fancy laptop this week and managed to make it work. I don’t quite vibe with my current username here though, so might change that soon. I still have my old save files and might return to my Pleasantview x Strangetown save as I’m quite attached to that neighborhood pairing, but for now I plan on playing other premade neighborhoods. Here’s a pic from my “test” neighborhood, Belladonna Cove. Pictured: Grand Vampire and Connor Weir.