Just tested on advanced Catalyst AI settings and haven't noticed any difference yet after playing for a little bit. 

Also, it should be noted that people should be a little careful using the higher settings on systems that can't handle it.  Considering that the damn game already causes many people's machines to overheat because the CPU temp jumps something like 20 fucking degrees when playing, just imagine the amount of pissy folks adjusting their settings for shinier graphics and then getting toasted motherboards.

Mine's been set to standard ever since I started playing the 'arred version, and I haven't noticed anything spectacular (of course, I'm still trying to see a difference between this 3200HD and the X1550 I had in my old machine; not much difference, graphically speaking).  I've upped it to the advanced setting just to see what it does.  I'll report back unless this machine goes up in flames.

As far as I know, you just go to Anisotropic Filtering under 3D in Advanced View in CCC and set it to whatever you think you can handle (mine is at 16X).  ATI doesn't seem to have the same Global and Program settings as my old FX5600 did.

My biggest wish is that I could actually use adaptive anti-aliasing with this game instead of it causing shit to look like...well, pixelated boxy shit.

New clickable pictures from my new bizarro dysfunctional family.  The first is young Poppy and her child-hating grandfather, Chester the molester Merle.



This is dumbshit Merle getting ready to scare Poppy. 



Then he tells her that he's working on digging a grave for her.



She replies by fainting.



Upon waking, she desires some PB&J.  Notice the lovely dirty, old house.



This is her brother, Whatshisface, playing guitar in the, uh, garden.



Merle's interesting way of peeing.  How does he do it, folks?

Yes, thank you.  Both my husband and I could be considered super geniuses (I've been told my number; whoop-dee-fucking-doo), but every one of our children has a learning disability (one more severely than the other two, as well).  Also, my oldest brother and I are the "book smart" children, while I have another older brother who is a goddamn idiot.  We're all the product of an inbred moronic mother (gah, embarrassing, yet true) and a father whose IQ was tested as 115 back in the '50s but is surely higher than that.

Edumacated parents =/= edumacated children.  Thank you, faulty genetics.

Ouch, if you're going to have the same username, could you at least remember to end your sentences with some sort of punctuation?

Ah, I'm having a problem with time, one could say.  More specifically, the game is crashing to desktop whenever I select ultra speeding.  I've only had this damn issue since I got the -- le gasp! -- the legal version (I broke down and got it on the 2nd because I wasn't sure if anyone would figure out how to get the crap off the Store's site and into the Razor version), but I never had it with the Reloaded or the Razor (actually, ultra speed just didn't work in my copies).

Color me confused on the subject, but the simchild ugly pudding I was playing earlier tonight was mauled by a zombie bear in the Catacombs, and I was able to change her appearance with no problems (and thus, without a bath) right afterwards. 

Actually, I grew up in a small farming community in southeastern Indiana where if you weren't Christian, you were some sort of freak, and since my father was a "loud and proud atheist," our family was not liked by many.  Also, "being involved with the community" is all fine and dandy when it means actually doing community work, but what our school board meant by "being involved" was "going to church".  Yes, I was discriminated against, and I suppose my family could have fought to get me included, but I had no backbone in those days (hence, I didn't want to be even more ostracized by my peers), so I chose to remain silent on the matter.  Probably wouldn't have won against the school anyway considering that I went to school in the '80s, and atheism was still relatively a new concept in small town America.

Eh, even if the requirements were actually about community service instead of religious intolerance, I still wouldn't have been able to participate.  I lived 5 miles outside of town with no way to get to town (as in "not allowed") to even do any sort of community service.  In the end, someone always loses out no matter what.

In closing, Indiana (most parts of it) = armpit of Hell.  

It sucks for all involved, truly.  The only program they had for "gifted" kids when I was a wee lass was something called PACE, and I was a part of it for only a short amount of time before I was kicked out due to my non-religious family (something about "being involved in the community" was included in the requirements for being a member).  The same thing happened to me with National Junior Honor Society and National Honor Society (couldn't even begin to join those because I wasn't "involved in the community").  Advanced classes at my high school were also a joke, and since we were a very small school of about 200, if a class in which you wanted to enroll had less than 2 kids in it, that class was canned.

I know all about IEPs.  We have them in America, too.  All three of my kids have one (my oldest has ADHD and a speech impediment, my middle child has a chromosome disorder which makes him moderately retarded, and my youngest also has ADHD and a speech impediment), and something I've noticed in this school corporation is that they don't even bother to follow the ones they write up and have you sign.  Example:  my oldest son's IEP states that because of his disorders, he must have an assistant help him with his regular classwork (and no one helps him at this school, but he received help at previous schools with the same IEP), and as requested by his doctor, he needs to complete his homework at school because his medication wears off around 4pm, and he starts to get too irritable and tired to concentrate (another thing they don't do).  I help him with what I can (I can't help him with this newfangled math; it was never my favorite subject in any case), but I can't control what those dimwits do with him at school.  Hell, he has asthma that's aggravated by the outdoors, so he's not supposed to go outside for recess, but they ignore the doctor's orders and still send him out anyway.

Eh, I know they push kids along because of social reasons (just like they don't tend to skip smarter kids ahead several grades anymore because they aren't "emotionally" ready), but the desire to look successful and receive funding also pushes kids along who shouldn't be (as was told to me by a friend of mine in the Minneapolis urban school corporation).

Here's a couple I remembered to take. 

NOM NOM NOM NOM.  Holy shit, I'm so glad I've never seen my own kids' faces contort like that.  Damn scary, it is.



Here is ugly non-contorted-by-block-eating pudding face toddler, Kouga, about to grow up...



...into something...I can't decide if he's still fugly or what just yet.  He does look rather horrified by the aging process though.  Aren't we all, little man.  Aren't we all. 



I suppose that reaction is what you get when your kid is some sort of insane, over-emotional, neurotic freak.

I've only had one crash with the version prior to the one uploaded yesterday (or was it the day before?), and it was the 1am crash.  I was playing in Riverview at the time, so who knows if it was Awesomemod or the truly non-Awesome Riverview neighborhood.  Never had a crash while playing in Sunset Valley. 

Testing with new mod here shortly.

Actually, no.  Thank you for assuming that my son attends a city public school where, yes, there's hardly any funding and teachers to go around in over-populated classrooms, but he doesn't.  He attends a township school that's small in a classroom where there's only 17 kids.  This is a classroom where the teacher even has two goddamn assistants to help her.

In my day, if you received quite a few Fs on your report card, you were held back, but that's no longer true.  It has more to do with schools trying to push kids ahead even though they're barely grasping what they're learning because of the No Child Left Behind Act.  For something that's supposed to help children succeed and reward corporations that are doing an excellent job of teaching, it's really just causing school boards and superintendents to get their panties in a collective twist over trying to make their kids look like they are exceptional geniuses, and that the teachers aren't just there to collect their paychecks and make tenure (hell, that happened in my day; teachers who didn't care anymore after they made tenure).

Well, some with ATI cards are experiencing issues with graphics, while others aren't.  I suppose we're the unlucky ones. 

As was suggested to me elsewhere on here, I had to disable adaptive anti-aliasing in Catalyst Control Center, and then I was able to set edge smoothing up to the highest level in the game options without weird effects.  I've noticed though that not all edges look 100% smooth still, so I would use Pescado's recommended Vodka option.  Either drink until they are completely smoothed or drink until you don't care.  Whatever works.

Agreed.  Another Virgil line -- "haud ignota loquor" -- pertains to what you said, methinks (as it were, you speak things that are not unknown).  Nothing is truer than the truth.

Or even windows?  Mine wasn't near a door, just a huge window. 

It would be nice if I could place just one damn chair near the chess table, but it won't even let me do that.

Damn it, is anyone else having a problem placing the chess table and chairs?  No matter where I put the fucking chairs, and no matter what way I face the chess board, it still tells me that I need to place chairs before I can use it.  Jesus, this was never so difficult in the old game.  I don't know if I'm riding the fail train or finding another bug.

My God, the toddler and where her hand is positioned is so wrong, yet so hilarious.

I hate to be the bringer of bad news, but I was told (and have also read) that those of us with ATI Radeons (and apparently the HD cards) are having crashing issues.  I never had any problem installing the iso (but I've been installing iso-ed games for a long time) for either version, and yet I'm still crashing occasionally (and this is with the patched Razor version which is supposed to be the final version).  Now that I've had more time to play continuously, I've noticed that the crashes are definitely random.  It's like the Nvidia nightmare all over again; sometimes the crashes are a few minutes into the game, sometimes I can play for hours before crashing, and sometimes the crashes don't come at all.

Well, that's certainly nice to know!

I've yet to see invisisims, but I've had their pleasant little dough faces disappear from their control center a few times.

And are there many ghosts who would rather be nude (considering that's not the only naked one I've seen)?

Out of curiosity, I've seen several people say that the free neighborhoods are up for download already as long as you register.  Has anyone with the 'arred version been gutsy or stupid enough to register the serial they used?

I was never in the habit of taking screenshots for the other Sims games (because the screenshots generally sucked, and I was too damn lazy to alt+printscreen everything or get a program), but I'm going to try it with Sims 3.  I also hardly ever use Photobucket (having spent a while trying to shove all of my Sims-related pictures into one neat folder to post here, I gave up because Photobucket clearly couldn't be arsed to do what I wanted), so please let me know if this shit is too big.


This is the family I'm currently playing.  This sim was made by me in CAS.  She's insane and neurotic, so she talks to herself a lot and has a hissy over every little thing that happens to her.  I named her Eleanor Rigby, and you can be certain that she'll be buried alone with as batshit crazy as she is.  She's a computer whiz and a genius who rolled the want for the forensic science career (the top level for the cop, if I remember correctly; I never play the cop career).  Half of the damn time, she goes to work in her underwear, and when fat ass works out, she wears formal wear.


Prudence is Eleanor's daughter via sperm donor (a.k.a. CAS), and she's a bit camera shy here, but she's not as nutty as her mother.  In fact, she makes all sorts of friends easily because she's a sex freak charismatic.  She's a handy little shit, always fixing and upgrading stuff.  Also, I love that when sims "upgrade" or "fix" objects, they stick the screwdriver almost all of the way through whatever they're working on.  Sure, they'll fix the computer -- by buying another one to replace their fuck-up.


This is an adopted pudding face named Stacey.  She doesn't look terrible for adopted spawn, but still, pudding face.  She's a daredevil sim just like Prudence, and the only thing I've seen it do is a desire to do everything "extreme" and show off to other sims by eating nasty shit from the ground.  She's also lucky, which I've never seen before.  Apparently, when it's their lucky day, there's all sorts of crap for them to collect.


And this is the lovely home.  Oddly, I'm an artist, but I can't be bothered to design nice looking properties.  I'd rather someone else do it, so I can spend more time decorating the interior.

I was having the jagged edge problem.  You need to go into Nvidia's control center (I can't remember what it's called now because it's been about two years since I had a Nvidia card) and make sure that adaptive anti-aliasing is turned off (because it usually isn't).  Then you should be able to go into the game's graphical options when you load it and turn the edge smoothing all of the way up.  Of course, things would like prettier (like in GTA 4) if the adaptive could be used, damn it.

Yes, this was it.  Thank you.  I'd tried fiddling with the anti-alias and edge smoothing settings, but forgot about having the adaptive settings still on.  Can't believe that caused all this damn wonkiness, but nevertheless, thanks again.