I didn't kill them myself, the game killed them as part of story progression.  In the newspaper, it said my sim's baby died (he is the father, babies lived with their mothers).  A couple times it was due to fire, several times due to starvation.

I wish my fugly sim chicks looked like Thora Birch, she's not bad!
A lot of the female sims do look a lot like Kelly Osbourne.

I saw this awful lady on the news.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090608/ap_on_re_us/us_pregnant_woman_killed
I thought, "hey, some of my female sims look kind of like her".  I have some with fat faces and skinny bodies, it looks so disproportionate.

They don't leave a tombstone, urn, nor do they show up in Manage Dead at the mausoleum.  They've vanished, but still show in my sim's family tree.

I had a female sim eat watermelon 3 times during her pregnancy.  It's all she had in her inventory.
No apples at all.  I think she sneaked in leftover lime pancakes when I wasn't paying attention and had a life fruit once.

She had a boy.  D'oh, I was hoping for a girl.

I've been complaining about the lighting since day 1.
I don't think the textures look bad, they look better than Sims 2... I think.  I'm running a 9800GT with all settings max.
The lighting makes sim skin turn a slight reddish hue in the shade (especially pale sims), and detail is reduced.  It turns their eyes inky black and blush looks like bruises.  In full sun, it makes white hot spots on their faces.  In general, it makes them look creepy.  I don't think better skin textures will help much unless something is done about the lighting.
My sims do look a lot better indoors with night lighting.
Their pie menu face always looks sooooooo much better.

BAH!  Changing households also results in the loss of non-purchased inventory.  For example, any of the crap your sim scavenged... seeds, produce, etc.  Gone!  Worse than that, if your sim bought a business, also gone!  I had a sim who had completely bought out 4 businesses.  When I went back to play her household, they were all gone.  Not even sold.  Very annoying.  I had to motherlode her 4-times to give her back the value of her businesses.

I also noticed when you go to change households, a dialog pops up with 3 options, "Yes, Save", "Just Continue", and "Cancel".  I had clicked "Yes, Save" every time, but I noticed you don't lose anything if you click "Just Continue".  At least, not from simply switching households.

I thought there is a difference in the official release in that it will install unmodified .sims3pack files while the rzr version needs to be run through Pescado's tools?

I think the dudes are okay looking, maybe even better than Sims 2, but chicks are fugly.  There is not one female in both Sunset Valley, Riverview, or the Sim bin that look good at all.  Fat cheeks, large double-chins, and round moon faces seem to be the norm for women in Sims 3.  It really looks disproportionate on the slimmer sims.  First thing I did was make a better looking female sim, she came out alright, but the ones I made in Sims 2 are still better looking.

Also, the in-game lighting makes them uglier.  I noticed the pie menu pic of my female sim is far more attractive than her in-game appearance.

My Windows 7 RC 7100 still makes me reboot when I turn off UAC.  Well, it doesn't make me reboot on the spot, it's like Vista where it says changes won't take place until after I reboot.

That's right, they don't dream anymore do they... just large Zzzzzzzzzz's.  If they dreamed, that would at least give me something interesting to see while I wait out the painfully long sleep time and slow ultra speed (seemingly not helped at all by even the most expensive bed).  They also don't open and shut their mouths when sleeping as if snoring anymore either.  It seems they took out a lot of cute and endearing things from the game.  No more cut scenes (I loved the engagement rejection one), no more memories so you can't tell how many times they peed themselves, no more "boing" and rage when they discover they've been cheated on... I used to have a sim invite all his lovers to a party just to see how many of them would go "boing" at the same time and start slapping each other silly.  It doesn't seem like they die of fright from seeing ghosts anymore either.  I guess that means no more houses of horror with cemeteries in the back yard to see how many sims can die in one night.

I had that problem.  You can't put the chairs near a door for some reason, even if it fits and would have worked in the old game.

I've been having fun with the game for the most part, but it's getting annoying.  For one thing, nearly every-other sim day, a family moves out for no reason, never to be seen again.  Not that I was particularly attached to them, but so far I've lost about 6 households.  The game keeps moving in uglier and uglier townies to replace them, so what was the point of them moving out in the first place?  Apparently it wasn't for population control.  I also find myself spending too much time watching them sleep.  They should have greatly reduced or speeded up sleep time like they did with eating.  It seems sleep takes much longer in Sims 3, though I haven't timed it.

I've been having Gage Briody knock up chicks all over town.  Funny thing is the game seems to favor its own adopted spawn as Gage has lost 3/15 kids to various accidents (fire, starvation).  I haven't yet seen an adopted kid croak yet.

Yeah, the fat ones do look sort of normal.  They look exactly like someone I know in fact.  I wish the game had a breast adjuster too.  I wonder if such things could be tweaked in the character files at some point... if there are indeed Sims 3 equivalents of character files.  I'm guessing the bodies are a base mesh with some kind of morphing algorithm applied.


I envy you.  

Agreed, though I think males look okay for the most part, females are fugly.  You can make your own good looking sims, but I managed to hit slider limits (i.e. face width) before getting the look I wanted.
You should, however, be able to make acceptable looking sims.


You're the first (other than me) that I've seen mention that.  Most people think the new eyes look more realistic, but I completely agree with you.  They look creepy in game, especially when facing away from the lighting.  I got used to it though.  It was one of the first things that disturbed me about their appearance.  Don't forget also that even the lightest blush makeup on a female sim comes out looking gray/black, making what may have been an ugly sim look even uglier.  The sims always look soooo much better in CAS and the pie menu than they do in game for some reason.  I think they really need to tweak the lighting.


I can't really add anything that hasn't already been said, but how long have you spent with the game?  For me, it's still real enjoyable, but then I might play my game a bit differently.  I like making corrupt families and corrupting towns.  The sims I'm playing are a dysfunctional couple who cheat on each other, but don't know about the other's sexcapades.  The woman has babies that don't belong to her husband.  The man goes out and knocks up just whoever, and then doesn't care to visit his illegitimate love children.  He'll hook up with and impregnate mothers and daughters in the same household.  I've got a Jerry Springer-like story going on in my town, and it's been quite amusing so far.  Sims being able to impregnate townies was something I thought would be fun, but couldn't be done in Sims 2.

I agree, the graphics to me look superb.  The lighting makes the sims look creepy and weird sometimes, but object textures and detail looks great.  Sims are quite obviously much higher polygon models than before.  Skintones are generic, but it's a necessary evil since the skintones are one-size-fits-all.


The sims were really fugly to me at first, but I've warmed up to them.  The male sims look somewhat decent to me now, but the females still look ugly to me with their big chins and round fat faces which looks really disproportionate on the skinny ones.  Several Sims 2 female townie faces look good with makeup, but I can't think of a single one in Sims 3 that looks attractive and oddly, makeup in Sims 3 makes them uglier.  Well, that one blonde that lives with Cycl0n3 Sw0rd is kind of okay looking... anyway, I was able to make a somewhat decent-looking female so I'm happy with that.
I've definitely been having fun with it too.  I see a lot of complaints, but personally, I think it's a great.  The change is refreshing and makes things interesting.  I won't be uninstalling Sims 2 though, there might be times I want to go back to old style gameplay and have some good looking female sims to look at.

I'm almost sure most peoples' crashing problem is due to overheating.  The game itself seems quite stable, but it'll find ANY weakness in your PC's cooling system.
I had 2 different PC's that would overheat and cause a BSOD with 0x00000124 as the error code, one running AMD processor w/Vista x64, the other running Intel w/x86.  I replaced the CPU heatsink/fan on the AMD X2 PC and now it never crashes.  I don't have a better CPU heatsink/fan for my Intel C2D PC, so I just ran a health monitor program and set an alarm at the CPU's maximum allowable temperature of 61C (Google says it's 61.4C for my C2D).  The alarm goes off about 5-minutes into the game!  It doesn't BSOD immediately at critical temp, so I just shut off the alarm and save often.   It managed to go 4+ hours last night without crashing, though I don't even want to know what the CPU temps were like.

Overheating is probably going to be more likely in home-built PCs because I think OEMs are more likely to put their machines through vigorous testing.  Not to mention home PC builders tend to do fun stuff like overclocking.  My Intel box is overclocked to 3.0GHz from 1.8GHz, that's probably the reason mine overheats so easily under load.

I.Am.She, thanks for the alternate link to the EA patch.

I did a binary compare and the updates were very underwhelming.  Only 3 files changed:
Default.ini - added "InstallationRequired = 0"
GraphicsRules.sgr - in the very last line with the #, changed "éE?¿-žšKa‡•�÷À†d¿}³ä" to "0bfffcc9753aabac325f".
skuversion.txt - changed "1.0.631.00002" to "1.0.632.00002".

That's all.

Anyone have an alternate link for the patch?

It's probably been mentioned before, but the lack of a physical response to jealousy doesn't make sense either.  An adulterous Sim can be woohooing some other chick in the bedroom with his wife present, and the wife barely reacts.  No rage?  No fury?  Sure, she has mean wishes towards him and it shows in her mood panel, but she doesn't even let on that she even notices.  She carries on like nothing has happened.  I got a little more reaction out of a guy putting the moves on some guy's wife, the husband put his hands up in the air in frustration and said "aaaah aaaah aaaaah", but that was about it.  No physical action toward his wife or the other guy at all.  The slapping in TS2 got old, but at least it was more convincing.

Ah, yeah, that explains it.  I think once your video hardware surpasses a certain point, TS3 can take advantage of it and actually seem quicker than TS2.
I tried TS3 on my Hackintosh with GMA950 onboard graphics at 1280x800 resolution and it was ridiculously slow and completely unplayable.


Thanks, now I know it's not just me.   It would seem that's a somewhat serious problem.  I don't even put blush on the female sims I've added because it looks horrible and creepy in game (always looks fine in CAS).  Lipstick is iffy.  I also noticed their eyes turn dark black and looks creepy.  It seems they still need to tweak the contrast or shading a bit.

I think all newer EA games put their files and saves into Electronic Arts rather than EA Games.  I seem to recall NFSU2 put its saves in EA Games, but NFS Carbon and whatever the new one that just came out is called, put their saves into Electronic Arts.  The Sims Stories also put their saves into Electronic Arts.


I've actually found the opposite to be true.  For me, scrolling is smoother, anything having to do with graphics feels faster than TS2.  I'm using a clocked nVidia 9800GT's at 1920x1200 with all settings maxed except building detail which I left at its default of 4.  What graphics hardware are you using?
Only thing that seems wrong is makeup seems to turn black in the dark or shade.  I don't know if this is typical, I'd sure appreciate it if someone would check out these screencaps and let me know if that's normal.
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,14987.msg433017.html#msg433017

I would just use Rapidshare.  I use a handy program called Rapidshare Auto Downloader.
For me it takes <24hrs as a free user on a slow Wifi connection.  I started out with uTorrent, but it was estimating 1 to 2 weeks.

I couldn't go more than 5-minutes before getting BSODs in Vista x64 with the code # 0x00000124.  I ended up downgrading my Zalman "super silent" low speed CPU cooler with a noisy AMD Ajigo 4-pipe stock cooler.  Now my computer sounds like a jet engine with TS3 running, but doesn't crash.  TS3 is rock-solid stable for days on end now.  TS3 will definitely expose any weakness in your CPU cooling system.

I wouldn't know about real life, I don't wear blush.  Not that I would admit anyway.

Is it normal for makeup or more specifically, blush on the females, to look like they've taken a beating and are badly bruised, especially in the evening/night?  It happens even with the lightest, most subtle blush color.  Of course, it all looks perfectly fine in CAS.
http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y15/GnatGoSplat/Sims/Screenshot-3.jpg
http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y15/GnatGoSplat/Sims/Screenshot-6.jpg

In low light conditions, they also have a general creepiness with black black eyes, reddish tint skin, and light complected Sims are worse and get red and blotchy looking in certain lighting.  They also look creepy in the daytime with high contrast highlights, like the one on the left with the hat:
http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y15/GnatGoSplat/Sims/Screenshot-5.jpg

Is all that normal?  A bug?  Graphics card problems?