Stranger Things
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
if i look back, i am lost
No title available
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
Product Placement
Janaina Medeiros
Misplaced Lens Cap
cherry valley forever
styofa doing anything
⁂
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
hello vonnie
dirt enthusiast
h
NASA
trying on a metaphor
Jules of Nature
Kaledo Art
will byers stan first human second
seen from T1
seen from Malaysia
seen from Malaysia
seen from Germany
seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Vietnam
seen from Iraq
seen from Israel
seen from Israel
seen from Israel
seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
@ramblinsims
Hey all,
Exciting update this morning is that the wizards working on GOS have overcome all the update issues and have the site running on a lovely, modern PHP version and have managed to get many functions of the website working again 😊 I'm unsure how much longer they'll need to keep working out bugs and such, but they are continuing to do so.
Hopefully, the site will be back pretty soon! (good thing too cos I have CC I wanna download 👀👀🤣)
To my dear Sims 2 Community
**I am editing this post based on feedback in the comments.**
I would still like everybody to stop, pause, make some really tight fists with their hands, now shake them out, and do some deep breathing.
I would still like to ask people to sloooow down. The internet moves fast but sometimes, life moves more slowly.
There are still efforts going on behind the scenes to get GOS back online (and Sims 2 Artists).
New hosting has been secured. The website php needs upgrading and this has not been working, but people are working on it.
I know its hard when things happen and you don't know what's going on.
Instead of panicking, jumping to conclusions, making angry posts, it's time to offer support, be patient, wait, ask what's happening without getting mad.
And please, remember kindness and empathy. Lunie has been trying to update GOS for months, and she is exhausted. It's down right now, but not dead (yet).
I do not deny this situation has been handled badly. I do not condone hateful or aggressive language FROM anyone directed TO anyone.
The latest update I have is that the site PHP is ancient, and it will be extremely difficult to update it so that the site can be rehosted, but people are trying.
I'm even probably roping in my IT dude husband who does web hosting and deals with this sort of thing, but who is not a simmer and has no idea what GOS really is.
I will try to actively post more updates as I receive them so that communication can be clear and we can all know what's going on.
Cheers,
Tea xo
.......what do you mean GoS is gone
Did I make this mod up?
I swear there was a mod that fixed the "propose.../give pet" interaction because the game currently does a household funds check when it's not supposed to but now that I need it I can't find any trace or record of it anywhere ;.;
I honestly remember this as well... not on my computer atm but I think I might have it? May be Mandela effect but let me check when I get on. Reblogging for others if they know before I can get to it :)
🎉600 Followers Gift - NHdeco Catasway Pines RECOLORS🌲
🌳 Some of you know this, I already made a greener/darker recolor of @lowedeus' & @shastakiss' Castaway Pine Conversion and DR and @teaaddictyt's Default Castaway Forests several month ago. I propose it with my neighborhood downloads, because they are the ones on my preview pictures. I love those trees, but they were too blueish for me.
🌲 But recently, I needed custom versions to have seperate smaller trees. I realized when I was doing my TS1t2 neighborhood decorations that the trees were way bigger than the ones on the TS1 picture map. So I made a 30% smaller separate version of @shastakiss' Custom single Castaway Pines, to make the neighborhoods look more organic, more natural.
TS1t2 Downtown with normal sized trees and smaller size trees.
🍃 Meanwhile, a while ago someone asked me if I could make some custom recolors of those darker trees because they had @teaaddictyt' DR and wanted to keep it, but wanted also my recolor for some spookier maps. I thought it was a good idea, to propose several download options, allowing you to choose between DR and Customs versions.
🌲 The DR version is an edit of @teaaddictyt's one, so it replace a lot of Maxis Pine trees, more info on her original post. The custom versions contains the 6 CS Pines by @shastakiss + my edits of the large and the medium pine forests. All trees and forests are seasonned.
Credits : 🏆 @shastakiss & @lowedeus for their original conversions 🏅 @teaaddictyt for her forests default replacement and an additional Thank You for her help when I get stucked in SimPE... wich is very often 😆
💾 DOWNLOAD
🟥 DARKER Castaway Pines as DR : SFS - Mediafire 🟨 DARKER Castaway Pines as CUSTOM : SFS - Mediafire
🟩 DARKER & SMALLER Castaway Pines as DR : SFS - Mediafire 🟦 DARKER & SMALLER Castaway Pines as CUSTOM : SFS - Mediafire
☕ All the content on this simblr is FREE but you can also support me on KO-FI
Gosh the immediate and overwhelming love and adoption of Paralives is so freakin good.
Like, personally I probably won't pick it up cause I truly do not need another game to absorb me (got enough 🙃) but it makes me so so so happy that the little indy game fucking made it and folks are actually really enjoying it (in early access no less!)
Looking forward to (and already loving) all the Para stuff 💚
Salvage Trash not returning anything
Has anyone else had this issue? I've never used the salvage from trash interaction so don't know how often/rare the chances are but we've been at this for hours and my sim hasn't brought up anything at all. No objects, no simoleans... what I've seen online that doesn't seem to be correct. The only thing I have is Squinge's eat/salvage from trash enabled, and traits doing the same, but nothing comes up in HCDU as being a real issue (obviously the traits and squinge's mods conflict but to my understanding that shouldn't effect drop rates) I only started trying to salvage cause the beg for money interaction wasn't working either (again, on a test run after having no luck she was trying for 12hrs straight with not a single person dropping 'tips' no idea what's going on there).
I wanted to try a hardcore rags to riches but hadn't intended a fully impossible run haha
Ah, we were just in a bad mood.... fair honestly
Salvage Trash not returning anything
Has anyone else had this issue? I've never used the salvage from trash interaction so don't know how often/rare the chances are but we've been at this for hours and my sim hasn't brought up anything at all. No objects, no simoleans... what I've seen online that doesn't seem to be correct. The only thing I have is Squinge's eat/salvage from trash enabled, and traits doing the same, but nothing comes up in HCDU as being a real issue (obviously the traits and squinge's mods conflict but to my understanding that shouldn't effect drop rates) I only started trying to salvage cause the beg for money interaction wasn't working either (again, on a test run after having no luck she was trying for 12hrs straight with not a single person dropping 'tips' no idea what's going on there).
I wanted to try a hardcore rags to riches but hadn't intended a fully impossible run haha
Trying to make some noise
If anyone else would like to join me in petitioning EA to at least try to fix the object limit in Legacy Edition (maybe I'd bother using that version of the game instead, lol), please jump on this thread I've started in their forums and comment.
Hello,An amazing coder named Will Nixon has been digging into a bug in The Sims 2 called the "Object Limit" and has figured out how it could
🙏🏻
(yes, Will, I know you're still poking at the UC code being like "could I fix this...??" but it shouldn't be all on you, lovely)
(yes, I know Legacy Edition sucks but if they were to remove this cap, I'd "use" it... if you know what I mean 😏)
My Eyes Are Down Here
Download on Mod The Sims
Sims 2 Object Limit Fix
Soooo... I didn't intend for two highly requested fixes for The Sims 2 to drop within the space of a week and a half, buuuut...
Here's where you can download an experimental patch to fix the so-called 'object limit'!
https://github.com/spockthewok/TS2ObjectLimitFix
(Ultimate Collection only at the moment, I'm afraid).
The good news is:
Both @lordcrumps and @teaaddictyt have tested it with stupidly large CC folders and report that it works.
There isn't a dissertation the length of Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' you need to read through to understand wtf is going on.
The crashing wasn't caused by some hardcoded object limit at all! (That I know of).
An explanation of the issue for programmers:
And for everyone else:
The code for the Build/Buy menu was missing basic checks to confirm that the data it was trying to do things with was actually valid. No, I'm not joking.
Basically, it appears that all of the objects you can buy in the game are stored in something you can think of as being like a big, long list, which grows in size with the more custom objects you have.
The only purpose of the code that this plugin patches is to sort the items in the list into some kind of order. This is done by assessing if the value of the previous item in the list is larger than that of the item currently being looked at, and swapping their position if this is true (also known as an insertion sort).
In short, the game wasn't asserting that the data it was about to compare for sorting was valid before accessing it, and then promptly blowing up when it tried to do so and discovered it wasn't.
I imagine that the odds of the game making an oopsie and dumping some funky data into the list increases with the number of objects it is having to process - this might be why this issue only presents itself to those using multiple GB of Build/Buy CC. It was much easier to patch the code encountering the bad data within the list than to try and hunt down the mysterious culprit putting the data in there to begin with, so this is all the information I have at the moment unfortunately.
Either way, one of the first things you're taught when learning to code is to ALWAYS check that the data you're operating on has been initialised (i.e. it holds some kind of value). I guess someone at Maxis must have skipped that lecture :D
Is the 255 objects per subcategory limit theory true?
The Downloads folder I was using for testing had ~672 objects in the Deco/Misc subcategory (Maxis objects included). With the patch, I can freely navigate throughout the entire subcategory with zero crashes, so I guess not?
What about the whole OBJD limit thing?
People have varying beliefs of what the limit on OBJDs might be, but HCDU reports my Downloads folder had an OBJD count of 20,787. Again, without the patch the game would crash when switching categories in the Build/Buy catalogue, with the patch, no crashing.
If you want to hear my opinion on whether such a limit exists, watch this video.
Do I even need this patch if I don't use much CC?
As it adds some fairly important crash-prevention checks to part of the Build/Buy menu's functionality, I'd probably recommend using it anyway, just to be safe - we all know how much this game loves to crash!
Aaaah! I'm still getting crashes with the patch!
I'm aware that a few of you CC addicts out there have Downloads folders larger than the total size of everything ever uploaded to the internet, so if you still experience crashing in Build/Buy mode with this patch, please take a look at the mod's GitHub page and send me over the information requested there. Fingers crossed that shouldn't happen, but if it does, I'll try my best to investigate :)
Anyway...
Will
(I wish I had looked at this for my dissertation, as it was literally only a day's work).
Are you even real?
can I just say how wholesome it is reading everyone's posts here and on discord, seeing pics of their games without pink soup and how they can PLAY their busiest and heaviest nhoods for longer than 5-20min or even an hour without Sims 2 getting all confused and geriatric on them? It is SO wholesome and refreshing and GOOD to see that this patch is so far, the answer to the problem. We were even blessed with a technical breakdown as to WHY it happens!
My heart is so full. Its like this patch breathed new life into this game to allow us to play and enjoy it LONGER finally, without the frustration and heartache of it crashing mid-gameplay, not having saved yet.
Its SO good. Its a RELIEF to not be plagued with pink soup. Stressing about staying on windows or switching to Linux (still recommended tho, in general), trying to save and scour to upgrade hardware hoping by throwing money at it will really help (and now we know, thats not necessarily the answer either!) These stresses, relieved!
Thank you @spockthewok , thank you SO much for your hardwork on your dissertation that Ive been digesting over the past few days 🖤✨ this will go down in Sims 2 history forever.
Explaining the Pink Soup (In Layman's Terms)
Hi everyone!
First off, I just wanted to say thank you for all of the positive feedback I've received over the past few days — I'm really pleased to see that my mod seems to have been effective for so many of you!
I am aware that my dissertation/thesis is really rather technical, filled with lots of academic/flowery language, and probably quite overwhelming to try and understand if you're lucky enough to have not studied computer science, so I wanted to attempt to break the key parts of it down into the simplest terms possible, to hopefully help answer some of the questions I've seen people have.
What is the pink soup?
The pink/purple strobe lighting we all know and love is 1 of 4 uniquely coloured shaders the game uses to indicate a specific type of error has occurred when trying to display something on-screen. The 3 other colours it uses (you've likely seen at least one of them) are red, blue, and yellow.
These shaders serve two main purposes:
To let you know something has gone wrong in an obvious (albeit obnoxious) manner.
To allow the game to keep running in spite of whatever error has happened (otherwise it would just crash).
Internally, the error that the pink soup represents is known as a "material parsing failure", i.e. the game has failed to understand some piece of material data (textures, rendering properties etc.) about an object it is trying to render.
Part of the process the game goes through before rendering an object to the screen is checking that its data only contains specific characters (numbers, letters, and certain symbols) — an example of when this would fail and trigger the pink soup would be if the game came across a random emoji during these checks.
What does 32-bit/64-bit mean?
A 'bit' is just a single digit of a binary number. All you really need to know is that a 32-bit number is a binary number that is 32 digits (bits) long, with the largest binary number possible being 32 consecutive 1s (1111111…).
I'm not going to bore you to death and show you how to convert binary numbers to decimal, so you'll just have to believe me when I say that 32 consecutive 1s in binary is equivalent to 4,294,967,295 in decimal.
4.2 billion might seem like a pretty high value to be able to represent, but if I said this is roughly equal to 4GB, you might be able to start to see how 32-bit computers/software could be a bit (no pun intended) limited memory-wise. For comparison, the largest decimal value a 64-bit binary number can represent is 18,446,744,073,709,551,615, or just under 18.5 exabytes (EB)!
But what if I wanted to represent the number 5 billion in 32-bit binary? Here's the fun thing — you can't. If you tried, the binary number would 'wrap around'. As in, it would max out at 32 consecutive 1s before resetting back to 0 and continuing to count up until it reached the binary value of 705,032,705 (5,000,000,000 - 4,294,967,295 = 705,032,705).
This is what is meant when we say that The Sims 2 can only use up to 4GB of your computer's memory (RAM) — it is physically unable to access/store data in more than 4,294,967,296 different memory addresses (it's 4,294,967,296 because the range of possible addresses would be 0 to 4,294,967,295).
If you're not sure what I mean when I talk about 'memory addresses', you can think of the concept as being like your home address (your house number, street name, and postal/zip code). It's just the location a piece of data lives at in memory so the game knows where to find it if it needs to use it for something.
Once the game has run out of memory addresses to use to store things, it will crash. The only way this could be fixed would be if EA magically decided to rewrite the game's engine to be 64-bit, thus allowing it to use an exponentially larger number of addresses.
Why does the pink soup happen?
This is where things get interesting. While the game is loading, the material data for the objects in your neighbourhood/lot is stored at individual addresses in your computer's memory so it can be processed.
Part of this processing involves the game taking all of the shader code found in the Materials.package file and linking the relevant shaders to the relevant pieces of material data of an object (e.g. a reflection shader would be linked to the glass part of a mirror object), creating shader 'packages' for the whole object. Again, both these packages and the information that links them to the object are also stored in memory.
As you can probably imagine, if you have a large number of different objects in your hood/lot (particularly more complex/detailed objects with many rendering properties), the amount of free memory the game has to use to keep storing things starts to decrease FAST.
Back in ye olden days of 2004 when The Sims 2 was released, 32-bit was the most commonly used architecture for consumer-grade hardware and software. Despite its known drawbacks, the 4GB memory restriction was not really a huge issue, as the technical limitations of the time meant your parents' PC would likely catch fire and explode long before this level of memory usage could be reached in-game.
Windows XP (the operating system the game was primarily developed for) was also a 32-bit operating system. The way XP handled the 4GB memory limit was simple:
2GB was given to the kernel (the core of the operating system).
2GB was given to applications (i.e. The Sims 2).
This is why it is commonly recommended to apply what is known as a '4GB patch' to the game, as by default, it still thinks it's living in 2004 and is only allowed to use 2GB of memory — the 4GB patch therefore permits the game to use the full 4GB of memory it is able to support.
So, where does the pink soup come in to this?
Basically, there is a piece of logic within the game's code that is used during the process of linking shaders to material data described above. All this logic does is check whether the material data it is being given is stored at a memory address above or below the 2GB mark, presumably some kind of relic of the Windows XP days.
For whatever reason (either due to a bug or intentional design), for data stored above 2GB, the game performs additional checks which will ALWAYS FAIL, and the game will treat this data as being malformed/invalid, refusing to link any shaders to it.
Hopefully, the chain of causality should now be clear:
The capabilities of our hardware has increased dramatically in the past 20+ years.
We've all been applying a 4GB patch to the game to allow it to make use of more of our RAM.
We've also all been installing a load of cool custom content and creating highly decorated hoods/lots because our fancy graphics cards can handle them easily.
All of these objects are causing memory usage to quickly surpass the originally intended 2GB range.
The game is considering any data for the objects stored above this range to be invalid and refusing to do anything with it.
The pink/purple error shader is instead being applied to these objects because the game thinks there is something wrong with their material data.
In conclusion, The Sims 2 is confused and elderly, frequently soiling itself when presented with high-tech information from the far off future of the 2020s that its puny 2004 mind can't possibly comprehend.
What are the differences between v1/v2 of the mod?
Both versions of the mod patch the same piece of logic in the game's code, but with differing approaches.
With v1, the additional (and always failing) checks the game performs on material data stored above the 2GB mark are essentially patched out, meaning they are not executed and shaders will always be correctly linked to them, regardless of their location in memory. This is great, as you should never see any pink soup that would usually be triggered by these failed checks. Consequently however, the game will give you no indication that it is running out of memory, except for when it inevitably crashes once all free memory has been used up.
On the other hand, v2 makes use of these faulty checks. Instead of removing them completely, they are repurposed to warn you of high memory usage, with the game not performing these checks until material data starts being stored above the 3.5GB mark. This means you will still see pink soup, but only once memory usage exceeds 3.5GB. This is intentional, and is meant to be a trade-off between allowing the game to correctly process more data in memory, but also still letting you know that a crash may be imminent some time after the pink soup appears, giving you enough breathing room to save and restart the game before this happens.
To illustrate these differences better, here is roughly what the code is doing in the vanilla game, v1, and v2 of the mod:
Vanilla:
if memory address <= 2GB everything is fine, continue as usual if memory address > 2GB pink soup time!
V1:
if memory address <= 2GB everything is fine, continue as usual if memory address > 2GB everything is fine, continue as usual
V2:
if memory address <= 3.5GB everything is fine, continue as usual if memory address > 3.5GB pink soup time!
Which version should I choose?
There's no correct option, but if you play with a lot of CC or with highly decorated hoods/lots, I would probably recommend starting with v2, only for the so-called 'safety' reasons I outlined above.
I personally use v1 because I play very vanilla, so I know memory usage should never really get that high. If you're like me, or you just don't care about potential crashes and want to be rid of the pink soup, then v1 of the mod is the one for you :)
I know people likely still have many questions, so I've enabled the 'Ask me anything' option on this blog - feel free to use it!
Thanks again,
Will
this is a fabulous break down, thank you Will! this part in particular is killing me:
In conclusion, The Sims 2 is confused and elderly, frequently soiling itself when presented with high-tech information from the far off future of the 2020s that its puny 2004 mind can't possibly comprehend.
lmaoooooooo 🤣🤣🤣 i knew it!
🔆Old Intercoms [Decorative]
Download: SFS | BOX
Retro Intercom (digital pad): 86 poly, Vintage Brass Intercom: 308 poly. Both found in Electronics/Misc. View interaction disabled.
*Glow effect only visible if you have Extended Standard Material Shader by @crispsandkerosene
*this is for The Sims 2
Enjoy :)
The Sims 2 Purple Flashing Patch
(yes, PURPLE, because I always saw it as purple and the shader name is literally called the purple error shader. Sue me!!)
Just in case anyone missed it, "pink flashing" in The Sims 2 has finally been busted wide open by a lovely chap named Will Nixon, see here.
I thoroughly recommend reading through the entire dissertation pdf, it's a good read! Even if your eyes glaze over and you skim past the super technical computer engineering jargon, you'll pick up some interesting tidbits from it. Just wanted to share that
1) the patch is fully compatible with Linux and works to improve Linux performance even further, as testing by myself and my dear friend @niamh-sims
2) Some screenshots from testing my medieval hood on Windows 11:
No patch:
With patch:
I also stress-tested the hood by loading into the main Castle lot and having a sim travel between 4-5 different lots with my settings on max. (This is how I play on Linux now so I've gotten used to it, no more turning neighbours and hood deco off for me!!)
Without the patch in, the game crashed and wouldn't load the castle lot for me at ALL, so that was a great start.
Ooft, lol.
With the patch in, I could load into the castle and travel freely around the hood. I noted that that game also generally felt smoother.
This is an absolute breakthrough, people. Linux is no longer absolutely required if you want to play TS2 without pink flashing! Get excited!!
I will personally continue to play on Linux because I honestly enjoy the OS and prefer it over Windows, and my game still loads faster and runs smoother on Linux, but I recommend every simmer download Will's patch (V1 or V2, but V2 is likely safer) and keep it in your essential mods list forever.
Functional Sketchbook
Over at GOS.
🏡 6 Arroyo Lane 1 Sim Victorian Starter
Here's a 1-sim starter! It's move-in ready and costs around $16,000. Keep in mind this was built for my desert hood, Talon's Peak, but feel free to edit the lot as you see fit.
Watch the video! It'll be worth it, I think?
⚠️ required
bespoke build set, silent hill build set, carolina kitchen, super stone set
⬇️ download
sfs || mega || mediafire
