Graphics Card of Suck? No Pond Fish & Snow Cursor
Ellatrue:
1) So, I can't see the fish in the pond with seasons (no word yet on the fishtank, as I never use them because of the puddles/cleaning/dead fish, but I assume it's unrelated).
My graphics card is decent, but old- until now it's generally been good enough for most things in the sims, and I don't get the red water. Do the fish require the mysterious "pixel shading" to show up?
For those of us who can't see the fish, is there a file we can try tweaking to make it work?
2) How do we use the cursor to reveal what's underneath the snow? Hold down shift, etc? Or should the game do that automatically when you have a non-suck graphics card? There are roaches on the lot, still alive in the winter and somewhere under the snow (I suppose they are hard to kill), and since I can't see them I can't have the sims spray the infestation.
KatEnigma:
2) Yes, the snow cursor is supposed to happen automagically. Did you check your graphics settings to see if you can turn it on?
Kralore:
boolprop useshaders true
is what your looking for :)
This can be used either in the cheat console (control,shift,c) or it can be put in the userstartup.cheat file so that the shaders are always on.
With the shaders on you will see the fish in the aquariums and the fishing ponds, the water in the swimming pools will have better ripple effects and will also be reflective. It will also turn on the snow cursor.
This may slow your game down though. If you find things a bit too slow, there are several graphic/performance options you can adjust.
Shadows- put on medium or off.
Reflections- turn off. You will loose the reflections in mirrors and water reflections in the swimming pools, but will still have the ripple effects in pools.
Smooth edges- less is better performance.
You can play with those settings until you find a setup that your happy with.
Pixel shading seems to be mostly dependant on CPU speed. I have a 512 meg video card and only a 1.4 gig CPU and Sims 2 setup insists on turning off shaders on my system, so i put the boolprop cheat in my userstartup.cheat file so that it's always on.
Hope this helps :)
ZiggyDoodle:
Is your pond deep enough? Guide says about 4 x 4 x 2 tiles deep.
KLGFCG:
I tried the useshader cheat but still no fish in ponds. I don't really care - as long as they can catch them (they can) they don't need to see 'em.
I'm a bit concerned that it's a symptom of another minor issue I'm having, however. Before Seasons, all my graphics were on high by default (except shadows which I turned off - personal preference) with no problems. After Seasons, everything had been reset to low. I changed it all back and there are no obvious lagging problems but why would that happen? My computer is waaaay more than adequate (specs: 3.4 GHz CPU, 2046 MB RAM, Radeon X300 series with 128 MB memory) for the game. Also, many of my objects now look "shinier." Like more reflective or something. Finally, the fish in the tanks disappeared for me without the useshader cheat - again, never an issue in the past. None of these issues are huge or uncorrectable, but I'm a little worried as to why my game suddenly thinks my set-up is poor. The weird thing is this only happened on my desktop - my less-good laptop (specs: 3.0 GHz CPU, 766 MB RAM, NVidia GeForce Go5200 with 64 MB memory) didn't reset and doesn't have any of the shaders/reflectivity issues. Any thoughts or anyone having the same experience?
By the way, since I'm obviously having a problem with the whole shaders thing, how does one go about setting up a startup cheat file so I don't have to type the cheat every time I play now?
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page