More Awesome Than You!

Well, Maxis have come up with a 'solution' to the missing karaoke voices and it has to be the worst excuse for "WE DON'T KNOW/WE DON'T GIVE A SHIT" that I have ever seen.  Basically, their solution is: "Turn your audio quality up to highest" ... er, excuse me, WE ALL TRIED THAT.  Here is a link to it:
http://bbs.thesims2.ea.com/community/bbs/messages.php?&openItemID=item.81,root.1,item.43,item.41,item.23&threadID=3696ec62dc0abda21866ad7bc52ab3aa&directoryID=81&startRow=1

Anyway, someone has created a patch and it WORKS.  I can fiinally hear my Sims singing!  The sound quality compared to the rest of the game is not particularly good (it's sort of echoey) but I've only tried it briefly.  It can be downloaded here: http://shaklin.sh.funpic.org/modules/PDdownloads/viewcat.php?cid=9

There are also a couple of other downloads that sound like bug fixes, although I'm not sure what they're for.  One has to do with teen vamps and the other is missing job titles.  The site is in German by the way, but the patch can be found easily on the main page.  I've emailed the webmaster to see if he can create a patch for the missing bowling alley sounds, which a lot of people probably don't realise are missing.  I got the same error for those as I did for the karaoke, but only realised it when I happened to see the reports when I opened the debug box.  In my case the missing sounds are when the ball hits the pins and when the pins drop.  Listen carefully, you may not have them either!

eh now that you mention it, it's true I have no bowling sound...

I stuck shaklin's site in google translate - the teen girl vampire skin is too blue and doesn't fit the face or something, that's what that's for - I've not played a teen vamp yet, so not experienced it.

Also add me to the no bowling sounds. I had also not noticed. I'm going to check out the fix for the karaoke in a minute.

Maxis and/or EA tend to have a habit of assuming that if they can't reproduce a problem then it doesn't exist. Of course, if they are basing things off of posts on the BBS to be quiet honest, the user base there is so utterly clueless that if someone there was having a problem that I don't I would just assume it was something stupid that they did or didn't do.

Still, from a customer service standpoint, blaming the customer even if it really is their fault is unacceptable. :p

I don't recall hearing the bowling sounds and the karoke for me is sort of mixed. I get it for some sims and not for others. Oddly, it's the low creativity ones I seem to be able to hear and high creativity ones I seem to not be able to. I guess they are just so damned creative that it's beyond the auditory scale that humans can hear. :p

The thing about Maxis saying they can't fix something if they can't reproduce it is probably more a case of they can't fix what they can't see broken. And if they can't reproduce it, it might be an intermittent problem and their time is better spent on consitent problems. I know the developers I work with (I'm a technical writer) have the same attitude. They need to see the error in action before they can do anything about it.

Jen

Then they need to starting asking people for more specifics like their hardware configurations and particularly their sound cards and driver versions for them. I understand they can't fix something they can't reproduce, but they really need to work from the assumption that the problem does exist for some people and work on getting as much info as they can from people who have the problem and start looking for common denominators to try and reproduce it.

It doesn't seem to be a sound card problem.  When I (and others with this problem) have checked in the cheat box, the message the two messages that come up (for both the karaoke and the bowling in my case) are "Failed to get sound" and "Failed to initialize sound".  I know my sound card is fine, it's only 18 months old, has the latest drivers, and actually produces very good quality sound.

Talking of weird messages in the cheat box, I received a strange one when someone was singing on the karaoke. I don't know if it was the karaoke caused this as other things were going on at the time, but the woman singing didn't finish her song so it may well have been.  It went like this: ERROR Production: Want tree 0x6fed93f0 is facing a combinatorial explosion. This is probably due to having a sequence of similar wants that are easy to achieve multiple times. \source\TSWantsSimulator - cpp(3018).

Now, if anyone can make anything of that, I'd love to hear it.  I mean, a COMBINATORIAL EXPLOSION?  I was expecting my monitor to blow-up any second.  Where on earth do they get these strange terms?!

Thanks, Ancient - just added it to my NL folder for the future...:).

Heehee, I didn't know that not hearing the singing was a bug...I was sorely disappointed that I couldn't here the singing though, but i thought that Maxis had just made it so there was music but no singing! Thanks for the link AncientSim..I'll be testing it out promptly.

It may well be something other than the soundcard, but I don't think soundcard incompatibility necessarily means your soundcard is old or bad or produces poor sound quality. A lot of times these games are made and tested with particular hardware and driversets, and although Maxis' catch phrase for whatever they don't know how to fix seems to be 'upgrade to the latest drivers', I have actually seen cases where newer drivers conflicted with a game because the game was made on an older driver set and the hardware company made some changes in the newer drivers that the game didn't agree with.

At any rate, I hope this gets sorted out one way or another. And if it takes other users to fix it, then I suppose better than nothing.  :-\

WHAT??? is maxis insane?? that doesn't work. it doesn't make any difference turning the audio settings to high, medium or low. my audio setting, by the way, were always on the highest!!

Maxis (or EA, for that matter) being insane is old news.  ;)
(No offense to employees; some like MaxoidTom are morededicatedthanyou!)

 :o I cannot believe my ears! Err! My eyes! Is this TRUE what I am reading??? After they'd asked for specs over at the BBS they come up wiht THIS?!!! :o

Just two words! "Extremely disapointed!" >:(

I really think (i really hope) that post is just some news that *might* help some people, but they will fix this in the patch. Especially now that someone already made one, cause now they can study that hack and include it in the official one

Greetings from Germany, pals!  ;D

Just for your interest, the Female Teenager Vamp-Body "BugFix" mentioned before from http://shaklin.sh.funpic.org/modules/PDdownloads/viewcat.php?cid=9 is for fixing the skin tone of female teenager vamps. Apparently the body was too blue compared to the head, and that has been changed by this fix.

If there are any other questions regarding german stuff, just ask and I will translate it (hopefully with my lips intact...)  ;)

I hadn't noticed I didn't have bowling sounds either, but the strange thing is that i did have singing with the kareoke machine.   ???

Can anyone speculate as to how long we must wait for the official patch?

 :D  ahahahahahahahahaha  :D

"official patch"???

 :D  ahahahahahahahahaha   :D


whew....its ok, Im alright now   ;D  seriously, who knows?  look at the lame-ass response to the karaoke: Maxis asked all sorts of questions about peoples computers and specs etc and what did we get....a stock "it must be you" response   :-\