There is debate as to whether this is a beta or the final release. Some people seem to be declaring it to be one or the other with a quasi-religious fervor without offering much in the way of evidence. On this subject I am agnostic. I haven't installed any of the Sims 2 games before at least the second patch was released because EA's original releases are all somewhat boned, however, some of the issues I'm hearing about are pretty dire even for EA. Perhaps if we look at the available evidence calmly and rationally, we may be able to determine the probable status of this release instead of having some sort of Dinesh D'Souza/Christopher Hitchens kerfuffle that will determine nothing.

These things we know:
EA announced that the game had gone "gold" on May 8.

The date for the .exe file on the DVD for Apartment Life is July 26, 2008.
The release date for Apartment Life was nominally August 25, 2008.

NOW...

What is the actual date of the .exe file of this release, and what is the latest date on any of the included files? All I have heard on this is that the date on the .exe is "about April." Although EA's work isn't always tight as a Swiss watch, I can just about guarantee that the file date is not "about April."

By posting this, I assume you realize that you will be told that Vista is evil, and that you should always build your own computer, and that preferrably you should personally visit the East Asian factories to watch as the sub-components are being manufactured.

However, my new computer is very similar in specs to yours and I can tell you that you should be very happy with the processor and 4 gigs of RAM (I have a slightly slower Core 2 Quad and 6 gigs, which may be overkill for The Sims.) I have all the expansions and some custom content and it runs very well.

Can't judge the onboard video. At least it's better than Intel. You may eventually want to get an add-on video card - even a moderately priced one will be an improvement. I can run huge lots with most effects on using a Nvidia 8400 board, which is nothing special.

Vista is tolerable once you get used to it. You will probably need new peripheral drivers for the 64 bitness. You might want to temporarily shut off the UAC during the process of installing your games if you don't want to find yourself kicking your new computer very, very hard as it asks you if you really want to do what you just told it to do OVER and OVER AGAIN. I haven't had any problems running the new expansions with Vista 64 - there was some bitchiness over DirectX with the base game and old expansions, but the new expansions solved that.

I don't think the number of cores is the limiting factor. My understanding is that it depends on if it's a 32-bit or 64-bit processor. If you have a 32-bit processor OR a 32-bit operating system you are physically limited to addressing no more than 4 GB of RAM. Other factors may reduce the amount you can actually use. If you have a 64-bit processor AND a 64-bit operating operating system you can theoretically address a ridiculously huge amount of RAM.

Core 2 Duos come in both 32 and 64-bit flavors, I believe. I have no idea if Macs and/or the MAC OS are 64-bit or not, as Macs annoy me.

The Sims 2 with multiple expansions under 1 MB of RAM was usable but borderline annoying on my old XP machine. RAMs are cheap. You will like them.

I use a program called "Sims 2 Enhancer" to change sim genetics. It's available for download at sims2programs.com. It's a pay program but you can try it out for free for 48 hours, and it makes changing genetics pretty easy (I'm not trying to shill for it, but I do use it. I've heard it causes problems if you've compressed your Sims 2 files though.) As stated, you can also use SimPE, which is free but more complicated.

I would put this system on death watch. I had an antique (1994 vintage) computer that behaved similarly for a while and it eventually had a fatal hard-drive controller failure. Tightening/cleaning connections might help, but the prognosis does not sound good. You might want to look for a second-hand or liquidated old-stock computer, as new ones will almost certainly come with Vista and that might make migrating your nippers' applications a pain.

USB "thumb drives" are reaching commodity price levels ($15-$20 can get you a few GB's worth of storage)and then your neighborhood and suchlike can be transferred quickly and easily - exactly what I did in a similar situation.

Gray spinning suitcase normally means "vacant owned vacation house." If this isn't a vacation sub-neighborhood, well, its appearance is probably not a good thing.

I didn't mind simultaneous time when I thought the "seamless neighborhood" meant , for instance, that you could tell Emma to take a bubble bath, instantly switch to controlling Goopy across town for a while, and then resume control of Emma as she stepped out of the bath. However, it looks like the Seamless Neighborhood is a Gigantic Load of Hooey. The sim family you're playing at any given time can go anywhere in town without a loading screen, but it appears that you need to re-load the entire town to play another family.

I'm guessing that The Sims 3 will be very similar to Apartment Life, with each controllable family living in an "apartment lot" the size of the entire town. Non-playable sims will probably only behave on free will when they're actually out in the "common area" and their time "at home" will be spent standing still while their motives magically recharge. It shouldn't be too hard to keep a non-controllable from doing anything life-changing if you keep your eye on them.

Reviews have stated that time passing for the neighborhood can be halted temporarily. I've seen interviews saying that saved games can be "merged" to combine developments from multiple family threads into the same neigborhood, but I haven't seen any description of how this works in practice.

It's certainly a "small neighborhood" concept, with play largely appealing to Simmers who only play a small number of families actively. I play a huge neighborhood currently but I might be able to adjust because my favorite part of the game is creating Sims and getting them started, meaning that I could make a lot of Sims but have most of them function as customized townies.

I'll probably get The Sims 3 in time but I'm going to wait months after the release before buying it to avoid paying a premium for a hot-mess-o-bugs. I learned that lesson about buying computer games LONG ago.

EA makes their share of mistakes, but not allowing customers to give them money for something is not the sort of thing they'd come up with.

I'm guessing that the reason for the delay is the obvious one - that a major part of the game is so incomplete that they can't even pretend that it's ready.

If the delay is strictly to jockey around earnings, it seems to me that they'd release it as soon as possible after their fiscal year ends on March 31.

If it's to "come up with an innovative marketing strategy," who in the Sims world is unaware of the game, and who else would they reach in four months that they haven't already reached?

What are you planning on using for the operating system?

I think it's an option that requires a certain number of "fitness" interest points before its available. How many fitness interest points does the sim in question have?

Do you have any trees on the lot? I believe no trees = no birds.

Another tactic, assuming you have Nightlife or OFB, would to be to attach a downtown/shopping district to Pleasantview that has terrain compatible with beach lots. Bluewater Village does, for instance. However, I advise you to NOT try lot-binning Bon Voyage lots and placing them in other subneighborhoods unless you like hearing your computer make a pretty musical "Glonk" and then crashing to your desktop. New from-scratch beach lots should work fine and I'm pretty sure beach lots in non-vacation neighborhoods support all beach activities. You can build regular full-time residential houses on beach lots that way too.

You are correct.

Nope, all occupied spaces have four conventional walls around them, which is what you need to weather-proof a room. The sides of the A-frames are shed roofs butting up to the walls.

I used the original cottage as a sort of support module with the kitchen, dining/reading room and stairs, and built a separate large single bedroom up a floor resting on beams framed into the fir trees at either end, spanning over a pond and deck. It ended up at 36,755. I have all EP's although University might not be required for this house, and shouldn't require any SP's (I only have Glamour Life Stuff and I don't think I used anything from it.)


Front View


Back View


Ground Level


Upper Level

Right click on link and "Save target as..." to download.
http://filebox.vt.edu/users/au8140/10OakSt/10 Oak Street (Theresa TV).zip

If you use the default settings for woohoo (they change into underwear while doing the deed) it might be someone's underwear, and you might have forgotten they're wearing it.

I think I extracted that outfit for my game. It was in University and the file was called "ambodyturtleneckslacksblack" - they might have included it in FreeTime too. There's a good tutorial on MTS2 on extracting hidden files using SimPE, or I can just send it to you if you ask nicely and PM me with your E-mail.

Do you have any custom content, especially clothes/hair, and are you using re-using any of your old files with your new installation or did you completely blow everything away? It might be a bad clothing or hair file.

Also, look in the directory \Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Logs for any files that are more than 0 bytes in size - they usually describe some sort of error that happened during the game. ("AppErrors" and "AudioErrors" will have information in them  because The Sims 2 ALWAYS starts up with slightly messed up audio but it doesn't usually affect anything. In your case "AppErrors" may have more than these usual errors - I'm not an expert on this.) Look for these files, especially ones labed "ObjectError" or "Sims2Exception." In time someone from this forum who is more knowledgeable but less friendly than I may want to see these.

Also it's a good idea to search the forum thoroughly to see if anyone else has had similar problems.

Have you tried starting Windows Explorer, opening your CD-Rom drive with it and double-clicking the "autorun" file? Windows Explorer is buried in the "Accessories" folder on account of its being useful. My sincere apologies if this was the first thing you tried.

No, they only appear as a snow-covered depression in the ground with a colorless shadow over it. With just Seasons, there was a light blue overlay on top of the snow to make it look like it was still a pond. This is particularly an issue for community lots or unoccupied houses that are never saved with weather/temperature effects. When a pond is "frozen over" on a residential lot I still see the "ice" in the neighborhood view.

I've recently added BV, FT and AL after running my game for a long time under Seasons. I'm generally happy with the new features but there are a couple of minor annoyances that I have, as they worked under Seasons and I see no reason that they should have been changed. I'm wondering if the relevant parts of Seasons could be used to patch them.

First of all, on-lot ponds no longer appear blue in the neighborhood view or on neighboring lots when there's snow on the ground - they are only shadowy holes. This is happening with all post-Seasons EP's in various combinations and on two completely different PC's, one older with an ATI card and one new and fierce with a Nvidia card. Seems to be independent of neighborhood and custom content too. I've searched for information and haven't found anything - is this a known issue that I'm the only one who cares about, and is there any way to correct it?

Secondly, Sim pathfinding seemed a lot more logical in Seasons - at least they avoided going outdoors to get from one point to another in the same building. Is the pathfinding system set up in such a way that the Seasons "logic" could be brought forward to the later EP's while still allowing Sims to do the new stuff?