IMI

Welcome to Imi's gaming blog. I am a maxis match simmer who regularly disappears into inactivity, but always comes back eventually... I apparently cannot escape my obsession with TS2 no matter how hard I try. This blog used to be purely dedicated to The Sims, but I now sometimes use it as a screenshot dump for other games I'm also playing. TS2 will forever remain my main obsession though.

[i-mi]

Things have been looking "wrong", different, since I started messing with ts2 again recently. Couldn't put my finger on what was different but there was definitely something. Went through all the troubleshooting, started to think something must have changed with my WINE profile again... Turns out my userstartup.cheat must have got overwritten at some point. No idea why! But everything is back to normal and long live uintProp lotSkirtSizeIncrease 120! 🥰

One day I will actually play rather than just finding more problems to fix.

[i-mi]

BEAUTIFUL PERSON AWARD! Once you are given this award you’re supposed to paste it in the asks of 8 people who deserve it. If you break the chain nothing happens, but it's sweet to know someone thinks you’re beautiful inside and out. 💜

Oh, how lovely! Thank you, hexagonal, and right back at ‘ya! 💕 You’ve probably noticed me raiding all your traits mods and I am so excited to try them out! Thank you so much for all your hard work.

[i-mi]

First time I've opened the game in months.... And it's not working again. It was working flawlessly last time I touched it!!! This is why I never actually get around to playing this stupid game 😂😂.

(Also, hi, guys)

[i-mi]

Oh it’s working now! And it only took me a day, haha. It seems that I’m getting better at this. And fixed the shadows again by switching @simnopke​ shadow fix to the “misty” one. No idea why that’s changed and I suddenly need a different mod but there were go. 

[i-mi]

First time I've opened the game in months.... And it's not working again. It was working flawlessly last time I touched it!!! This is why I never actually get around to playing this stupid game 😂😂.

(Also, hi, guys)

[i-mi]

Asking on anon because I don't have a tumblr account but any chance you could tell what missing dependency you needed to get the HCDU working for Sims 2 on Linux, I've been trying to figure it out without any luck. (And if you've had any progress on getting Sims2Pack clean installer working, because I sure haven't.) (Oh, and if you haven't added CEP and camera mods yet, I jused the exact instructions for the Ultimate Collection (minus changes for file paths) and it worked perfectly.)

Eeee, anon! You have no idea how happy this message has made me! Someone else playing ts2 on Linux! I thought I was alone :’)

Long rambling explanations under the cut, but it feels good to share some of the knowledge I’ve gained over the last few months.

I sadly cannot remember exactly what the dependency was to get the HCDU working, but I do remember how I tracked it down. I decided rather than simply running the exe file (through double click or Lutris) that I’d try running the HCDU.exe through the terminal using the command:

wine “path/to/HCDU.exe”

When the exe failed to load, as expected, there was an error message in the terminal that I was then able to copy and paste into Google and that told me I was missing a windows dependency. I remember the forum post I used said it to be installed with winetricks and I think it might have been “virtual runtime” or some other windows thing like that, but I can’t remember any more details than that (and searching my browsing history for winetricks is coming up with nothing), so I think your best bet is trying the exe in the terminal like I did. Sorry I can’t remember more than that and hope you get it working too!

The Sims2Pack Clean Installer is working perfectly for me too now! I could always open the program itself, but I just didn’t know how to open sims2packs with it. Hours of googling (again!) about file associations in linux vs windows etc, but eventually I realised the easiest way was to just use the terminal like this:

wine “path/to/Sims2Pack Clean Installer.exe” “path/to/.sims2pack”

The quotations marks are really important! It took me ages to work that out, but you need them because the file path will almost certainly have spaces in it. I use this method to unpack a sims2pack and then just copy and paste the .packages into the right folder (e.g. Downloads, Saved Sims…). If you want Clean Installer to actually check your Downloads folder then you need to open the exe using Lutris, so that Clean Installer can actually find where the game is installed. Click “Run exe under wine prefix” after clicking on your TS2 banner. I haven’t yet found a way to combine these two methods (so that packages would be installed automatically in the right place), but copy and pasting manually doesn’t bother me too much really.

Glad you have CEP and camera mods working too! Same here, along with Compressorizor, Scriptorium, the Hood Checker… and most CC that I’ve tried. I’ve had a couple of exploding hair meshes, but that’s about it and I’m not convinced they were caused by installing the game on Linux anyway. Now I’ve got the game working fully, it’s really no different than playing it on Windows. Which is pretty amazing really!

[i-mi]

MY SMOOTH EDGES ARE BACK! The Lutris developer and I spent practically the whole afternoon reinstalling and messing with it, but they are back and it’s beautiful!! He also says he’s found 2 bugs with Lutris while helping me, so now I don’t feel so guilty about wasting so much of his time haha.

TS2, I will play you sooooon.

(But not now, because now I am exhausted!)

[i-mi]

Smooth Edges?

Sorry, more troubleshooting. But I am completely lost and have no idea what else to try. Has anyone ever had smooth edges one moment and then experienced them randomly disappearing out of nowhere, when everything indicates they should be there?

I was so close to being ready to play. For a well over a month, smooth edges worked perfectly and I have no idea what suddenly caused them to stop working. I had changed nothing about my system the day they disappeared as far as I can tell. The setting is not greyed out, but if I drag the slider to "low" it looks exactly the same as “more”. I’ve tried multiple different Graphics Rules (which wouldn’t have made sense if that had been it anyway anyway, because the Graphics Rules I was using worked for over a month?), cheats in my usercheats, being in contact with the Lutris developer and trying different Linux stuff/wine prefixes, but he’s convinced it has to be do with the game settings itself, because according to everything else it should be working.

So frustrating.

[i-mi]

Sorry, everyone, I have another “is this normal for ts2, a 2004 game, or is this another Linux graphic glitch” question! Can anyone running ts2 on Windows (10, 8, 7, I don’t think it matters) check if their neighbourhood mountains in Riverblossom Hills look like this in snow if using the “uintProp lotSkirtSizeIncrease 120″ cheat in your usercheat.startup. I’ve tested in multiple households (Roth, for example) and this is how they look to me. Thank you! :)

Pictures below cut (and yes my smooth edges are broken in the second photo...they were working a day ago but they’re gone again now oops!) :

[i-mi]

Look who got the Hack Conflict Detection Utility working, finally!! Yet again, Me/Linux 1, Windoze 0. Apparently, I was missing a wine/Windows dependency (wow, they are never ending).

I’m sad that Romantic Standards seems to conflict with Same Sex Marriage though :’(

Now if I can just get sims2packs to open in Clean Installer, I’ll be sorted.

[i-mi]

Has anyone ever had this problem with snow before? Just opened Riverblossom Hills and tried out snow for the first time and thought nope that’s not right. Lot view snow is absolutely perfect, outside the lot boundary is obviously not… It may be just one of those things I have to live with playing on a Linux installation (the other one being slightly funky reflections), but thought I’d check if it’s not something else that may or may not be an easy fix.

[i-mi]

Had a response from the Lutris developer and he has this problem too and is currently looking for a solution. Great news because it means it's not something I broke!! If he can't find a solution (I have faith he will though...he seems to be a bit of a magician!) then I'm happy to play without winter/snow. Everything else runs like a dream!

[i-mi]

Animal Crossing: New Leaf (3DS)

I've been playing animal crossing on and off while I was on my break, so have a few screenshots.

[i-mi]

This week:

I have successfuly installed The Sims 2 on my Linux laptop and got it fully working. An absolute miracle. I really just thought I was purposely wasting time and hadn't really considered the possibility that it might actually work! It seems to be running smoothly and looks fine, although I am going to be very, very slowly adding in CC and play testing it properly, because I really don't know if the game on Linux can handle heavy CC. Who knows, maybe I'll be surprised again? And if not, maybe it'll be good for me to go low CC.

I have also got Body Shop fully working, despite the creator of the Linux script apparently not knowing of its existence, and it also seems to be working, apart from an apparent glitch with the (original maxis) skintones not matching the head and body entirely. Some googling seems to suggest this a common glitch on Mac systems and some people fix it entirely by using custom skins, so maybe it won't be problem when I put some defaults in.

The Compressorizor is also installed and working fine!

I have changed my blog theme (just spent way longer on this than I'd care to admit haha) and I have reogranised my tags page yet again. I seem to do this everytime I come back from a break.

Finally, I've created a new sideblog imi-reblogged for inspiration and CC finds, because the pinterest account I was using has become such a mess and I think I need the proper tagging system of tumblr. It's not properly set up yet (still tweaking the theme!), but if you start seeing this account reblogging your stuff, now you know it's me! I'm also going to try and keep this new resources page properly updated with what I actually have in my downloads folder (especially as I think I need to not let it grow too much, at least until I know if Linux can handle it).

What I hope to do next:

Install and get fully working CEP, Scriptorium, SimPE (oh boy, that could be fun), Sims2Pack Clean Installer, Mootilda's Hood Checker.

Decide on my defaults. Especially important if I'm going to keep my Downloads folder small. I have so many favourite maxis match skin and eye sets that I can't decide between and I think I need to go in game to compare. I am also so freaking excited that I now have the opportunity to have a tidy Hair folder. In my old downloads folder, I had about a million different maxis match textures in there with the odd non-maxis match texture getting lost in there too, but this time I will use one texture and it will Poppet's V2 and it will all match and it will be beautiful.

Work out what basic mods I need to stop hood corruption etc.

Download and get camera and lighting mods fully working (so excited about the new lighting mods I have yet to try and fingers crossed they work in Linux!)

Actually play-test for a long period time, not just the few minutes here and there like I have been doing up to now, plus test each bit of CC after adding it to my downloads folder (because, again, unsupported operating system that not many people have tested...).

So that will all take forever...

[i-mi]

@hexagonal-bipyramid said: That’s super cool that Sims 2 can “work” on Linux. There’s someone that managed to make it playable using Lutris :)(youtube.com/watch?v…)

I know right! It's so cool! It's his script I've been using actually and I've been in contact with him today about various problems (think I accidently deleted some important stuff oops). This is his script if anyone else is interested: https://lutris.net/games/the-sims-2/. He was super helpful and the game is now fully functional! No more graphic errors...which actually took me less time to fix then on Windows 10. Funny that, huh? Leaving it for today because I'll probably break something else if I don't, but I am feeling pretty chuffed with myself right now

[i-mi]

From screaming with excitement to oh this isn't right to oh no definitely not right... Well, it may not be playable yet, but this is the closest I’ve ever got to a functioning game on Linux! I’ll take that as a win and try and tweak it again tomorrow. Guessing it might be a similar unknown graphics card on issue that you even get on Windows 10?

[i-mi]

I may have completely lost my mind, but I've started an attempted install of TS2 on a Linux only laptop. There is no way I am ever putting windows on this (beautiful, flawless etc) laptop, but I can't help missing Sims a lot sometimes... I attempted this once before (years and years ago) and it was just as much of a disaster as you'd expect. So wish me luck! I may well be regretting this decision in a few hours time. If so I hope to restart my tumblr lurking, even if I never post anything myself ever again haha.

[i-mi]

Some days, I actually feel like I have enough energy to start up my game and play (or maybe I don't but I can't help thinking I'd like to try it) but then I never do it.

And this is why:

185 pins currently on my to download Pinterest board! 😩 I see that number and my motivation dies. So I continue to lurk. And because I continue to lurk, that number keeps growing. It's a never-ending cycle... Beginning to think I should try a CC-free (or CC-lite, I guess) save to try and get past this. But honestly I don't think I'd ever do that 😂.

[i-mi]

Those days when you just miss playing the sims so badly, but can't play the sims because it is as exhausting as hell, and I need to conserve energy so I can function to a minimal level, which I struggle to do most days even without playing any sims. One day, when I've got over this hurdle, I will have the energy that I can do more than one thing I enjoy in a day 🤞.

I just miss you, beautiful game 😢. So I will continue to live vicariously through others' games...