The Sims 2. SMOOTH. NO PINK FLASHING. NO CRASHING. In 2022.
Hi again Simmers!
Last year (2022) I am really frustrated about running TS2 in my new computer. Short story: as many of you, I can't play normally.
Today I had an idea: a dedicated hard drive only to play safely the game. Installing a Windows 7 2021 Edition (it can be installed in new machines with UEFI) in a new hard drive and later installing The Sims 2 in this hard drive with Windows 7 2021 Edition.
One computer. Two OS. One with Windows 7 to play The Sims 2 and another with Windows 11 for the rest. Only booting the computer with Windows 7 when I want to play the game.
I will try this option next days. Has anyone tried it before?
2 days later...
I did it... and it is working. My game is working as old good times finally. Smooth. No pink flashing. No crashing. And finally I can "play" this damn beautiful game -or (rather) toy- again.
Update (20 Jul 2026): Fixed reverse kinship scoring calculation. The parents of the deceased will no longer incorrectly receive a higher kinship score than their children. Redownload the core part.
Bug fixes and more plugins! Theo's Color Binning tool, Theo's Alt Sim Surgery, and JFade's Collection Creator are all added and working. It is on my Github for all 3 platforms, Windows, Linux, and Mac. You can download all three from my Github. You can also download the Mac Mootilda's Clean Installer and Mac Delphy's Download Organizer. Still testing the Mac Mootilda's Hood Checker, but it coming very soon.
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This project took EONS. I have retextured my favorite of the 3t2 University Life rabbit holes converted by @delonariel and they light up at night! @softerhaze has done beautiful versions already, but they were unfortunately too high-poly for me. When I spotted a post on GOS where @sterina-sims had meant to make lit versions of the low-poly ones, I had to make it happen. (You can find a super cute lit version of the bookstore by sterina-sims in that thread!)
Here's the Administration building after I remapped its absolutely hellish UV and improved the textures. It's night version looks like this:
And I did all the rest!
(Except for the annex, bookstore, and theatre--didn't like them as much. Working on the annex still but it's rough so I might finish it... and I might not.)
Anyway, download and details below the cut!
Daytime & night:
Art
Business
Science
Student Union & Library
The original library and student union daytime textures were okay, so I only fixed glaring issues. To make the other buildings match, I used the textures from these, extracted TS3 files, and some maniacal UV maneuvers. I also hand painted quite a bit.
They aren't super detailed, but I like them this way. At the very least, they're an improvement upon what was in the TS3 files.
For example, the tower windows. They were a challenge but now they're pretty and none of these meshes exceed 3200 polys!
I didn't light the tower windows at night because after looking at example images, it seems to me that most large, gothic-style windows are left dark at night. I'm working on some exterior lights, though, so we'll see.
Texture sizes were increased from 512 to 1024 and mipmapped. Each building has a new mesh and GUID. They were cloned from @criquette-was-here's Zagoskin Town Hall & School. I used criquette's textures for the lit windows. A HUGE thank you to them because I have so many of their beautiful neighborhood objects. And a thank you to delonariel for the original conversions!
An important note: the night texture is not game-generated--I adjusted the colors/brightness of the day texture to match the way most buildings look at night in my game. I think because of this they might look ever-so-slightly different in other games depending on what lighting mod you have. I use @dreadpirate's Maxis Match Lighting Mod.
REQUIRED MOD: Better Nightlife
DOWNLOAD (Mediafire)
Includes six of the 3t2 University rabbit holes: library, student union, art, business, science, and administration.
After much hair-pulling, I finally feel satisfied enough to release my mod to restore those glorious shiny floors from The Sims 2 beta! (Forever in our hearts...)
You can download it here :)
Prerelease (2003):
Doesn't the beta lighting look so nice? :(
Mod (not 2003):
Why yes, I did painstakingly try to recreate the room from the prerelease image and make elder versions of the Sims - it was absolutely a productive use of my time.
I've made sure to make a number of vanilla TS2 floors reflective out of the box. These are mostly marble floors, but there's a few stone/tile/wood floors in there too. If you want to add reflections to custom floors (or other vanilla floors not included by default), I've left some basic instructions on the GitHub page on how to do this :)
Because this is a cut beta feature, there are a few minor issues with it - I have detailed these in the README. Please take the time to read through them!
I also had to include an edit to the mirror reflection shader to fix a bug where mirrors visible in the floor reflections would be flashing red (Castaway Stories has the same issue with mirrors reflected in the ocean, funnily enough). I'm not aware of any other mods that touch the mirror shaders, but if there are, let me know and I'll whip up a compatibility patch.
Oh, and in case you missed it, I released a small update to the reflective water mod, as per the request of @lordcrumps. I didn't realise houses didn't reflect in the hood water, but now they do!
Did you know sims in this game are supposed to autonomously tease eachother for their bad memories just like how they congratulate their good ones? Unfortunately they broke the teasing feature in a patch at some point.
To be exact, the teasing was broken with Nightlife. It never worked anymore after as the error they introduced was never caught in any patch after that.
A while ago I have released a mod that fixes this as well as issues with the Congratulate interaction where Sims could congratulate each other on bad memories. Here’s the link. Look for “Stupid Congrats and Tease Begone!” :)
For anyone wondering what went wrong: Firstly, Maxis changed the Guardian BHAV in a way where the game would never recognise a memory to be negative because the wrong Temp value got checked.
And secondly, they also reworked a large table with all sorts of constants for each social interaction, likely switched some places around and accidentally gave Tease the “Kiss of the Vampire” values, which of course are all wrong (e.g. leading to Teasing increasing the Attraction Score, or unintentionally locking the interaction from children).
Special thanks to @lordcrumps for making maxis and clean ui pics and counting pixels with me. It was his and @simnopke's idea to make this thing bigger
Some behind the scenes under the cut
Stage 1, breaking out of the tiny window
Stage 2, figuring out how to mod UI again
Stage 3, going big! But not quite there yet
Stage 4, "should I move it 1 more pixel to the left"
🤓
Secret bonus version for behind the scenes viewers who think that smaller is better, available exclusively and only in starship colors (you can only have one version)
Old recolors will not work for this (anyone seen any?). Please note the fix goes into CEP-Extra folder in Documents. The simplest way to fix this lamp would be to delete lightpattern subset from GMDC but I took a different route, removed lamp interior subset so the other one could work. That's why it looks less bright inside.
• Orbs Of Connectedness Ceiling Lamp [UNI]
Light fix & texture replacement (optional)
Also includes a fix for the Circle Of Light Friendship aka Groovy Floor Lamp.
Have you ever wondered why Bodyshop makes your PC work so hard?
BODYSHOP HAS NO FPS LIMIT
With limited frame rate, Bodyshop only puts a strain on PC when it loads CAS content. If your GPU fans go significantly faster the entire time you have Bodyshop open, then FPS is very likely way too high.
It's similar case for TS2 game - but FPS also depends on your system / PC /Laptop and the way you run TS2.
➤ To check FPS in the game, use a shortcut: Ctrl + Shift + S to bring up FPS HUD. FPS is displayed right in the upper left corner.
Tip: if FPS is changing too fast, take a few screenshots so you can read FPS from those
➤ If you set a limit to 60 FPS, that tells CPU/GPU to produce 60 game frames per second. This is the sensible number for TS2. Without FPS limit, your hardware is trying to put out frames as fast as it possibly can, heating up and using unnecessary amounts of energy.
The Sims 2 engine was not designed to run any higher than 100 FPS
➤ When you play The Sims 2 with TS2 RPC & borderless window, Windows Desktop Manager usually handles frame rates. Same for windowed TS2 Legacy edition. This is thanks to Vsync*, which forces desktop's default refresh rate on game window.
*In case of high-refresh gaming monitors / laptops, FPS limit imposed by Vsync may not be low enough for TS2.
*I showed a screenshot of my hood, but I recommend checking FPS in lot view, because in hood view, 'heavy' particle effects like clouds can dramatically slow down FPS even on a modern gaming GPU.
➤ On older gear, FPS may never go beyond ~70 even without the limit, but CPU / GPU still try hard to reach the unachievable frame rate.
Varying FPS numbers may be an indicator that the game is running uncapped, OR that the default frame rate is set too high for your system to handle.
➤ On modern gaming GPU, you'll have no problem telling the game runs uncapped - FPS in lot view usually oscillates between ~200 - 600.
➤ A few ways to set FPS limit:
Playing a game in windowed mode often solves high FPS issue. Unless you have a monitor with high refresh rate. But the general recommendation for old, uncapped DX9 games is: do not trust WDM, do not rely on Vsync, set a hard FPS limit.
If you use DXVK, you can set FPS cap in the DXVK config file, both for the game, and for Bodyshop (you pick the same 32-bit d3d9 version). *I've explained how I tweaked my DXVK's FPS in this post here.
If you don't use DXVK, and Windows Desktop Manager doesn't affect your game's FPS for some reason, or if you insist on playing fullscreen, you can set FPS limit for TS2 with driver-level GPU settings: Nvidia 3D program profile* / AMD adrenalin. Same applies to Bodyshop.
*Nvidia's global FPS cap may not work in fullscreen mode, often it's required to set FPS limit for TS2 exe specifically.
➤ In case of laptops using "Mux-less" or "Optimus" technology, the integrated Intel/AMD graphics card may be forcing FPS adjusted to screen refresh rate, ignoring Nvidia 3D profile's FPS limiter settings.
If so, you may need to use DXVK with FPS limit, or an external tool like Riva Tuner Statistics Server. RivaTuner apparently can make FPS feel smoother ;) It can be used along DXVK, too (but in that case you set limit with RTSS only, ofc).
TS2 game actually has the option to adjust screen refresh rate, it's in the middle of the graphic options tab. I was told that in the Legacy Edition, the Refresh Rate box is blank and permanently locked, meaning you cannot fix FPS inside the game menu.
I have Mr Dj's repack, and this box was always greyed out for me because I always used FPS cap. When I uncapped FPS, the refresh box became active, game allows me to switch between 59 and 60 mhz refresh options, but these do nothing. FPS stays at 80 for a while, then it goes uncapped.
Some say the Refresh Rate setting is broken in Legacy version, but ,more likely, it got disabled cuz it doesn't work anyway on modern systems.
just gonna go on about how i fixed the ofb uniform bug a little bit bc i'm feeling like yapping:
i found out that going to plan your swimwear outfit on a dresser after setting your uniform, then cancelling without making any changes fixed the uniform (for some reason only swimwear worked consistently)
so i assumed there must be some englne-level code that runs when the plan outfit dialog pops up that "validates" all outfits to make sure hair, accessories, the sim's face, etc. are all synced across outfits.
i thought i'd try to find and transplant this code to run when the uniform dialog is closed instead, which would solve the problem, however the disassembly looked too nightmarish, and i don't have the game reverse engineered enough to figure that bit out, so i did something easier:
i edited the uniform bhavs to launch the plan outfit dialog right after the uniform one. obviously this looked stupid and brute forced as you'd have to cancel out of plan outfit everytime afterwards, but it "solved" the problem, and it'd be perfect if i could manage to automatically close the dialog as soon as the code that fixes the outfit runs.
so that's what i did next. found the bit of code that runs when the plan outfit window is opened, found the bit of code that runs when you press the cancel button on it, and ran that right after the window is opened. worked good, but you could still see the window pop-up for a split second, which wasn't ideal, so the next step was to figure out where in memory the window visibility was stored and mark it as invisible on creation. that did it! seamless.
after all this was figured out, i created a variable/flag that gets set to true when the uniform dialog pops up, and this code to hide and auto-close the plan outfit dialog only runs if that flag is set to true, then sets it back to false. this means that only the plan outfit dialog that pops up after the uniform dialog is hidden and cancelled, so you can still use the plan outfit interaction freely!
this also does mean that if you install the fix .package without the TS2Extender .asi you'll get a plan outfit window everytime you set uniform. i guess that could also be some sort of fix/workaround if you can't install the .asi for whatever reason.
I'm looking for fresh new Sims 2 content to fill up my dashboard!
Reblog if you're currently active as a gameplay/storytelling Simblr. Whether you post daily, or once every few days, I wanna see what you're up to!
Ideally I'd love rotational gameplay, long-term 'hoods, BACCs, uberhoods, etc. I will still absolutely check out your content if you only do legacies or single-family households though.
i'm in my 30s so preferably only people who are 21+. i'm lgbtq-friendly.
Hello everyone, you may have seen my wonderfully useful no face slider april fools post - It's now time for something a bit more... everyday. This is what I was actually making before goofing off there for a bit. It's a full-face slider for well, face size.
It shrinks/increases the size of a sim's facial features (eyes, brows, mouth and nose) as a whole without altering the outer margins of the face where it connects to the neck/scalp, and I'm hoping the images above illustrate this a bit more effectively than I'm currently describing.
Available in both bodyshop and CAS
GET IT HERE
As always, if you spot any issues let me know and I'll try and fix them asap
