Trust me, they're much more appealing printed on nice soft flannel in nice soft colors.  (That said, I do prefer solid colors, but just try finding them in flannel that doesn't cost a mint.)

This is one of those unfortunate questions that makes it sound like I'm assuming you're an idiot (which I'm not,) but you did double check your game settings, right?  Patches and EP's have been known to reset them without permission before.

That aside, re. the skintone issue: you'd think they would have fixed that problem with TS3 and/or newer hardware and drivers.

Dark skintones and clothing (particularly in neutral tones) tended to look pixellated and crappy in TS2.  S4 had noticeable striation, EA included relatively few very dark clothing items, and running them through BodyShop tended to degrade the images and exacerbate the problem: if you wanted to make any dark-colored CAS content look halfway decent, you had to bypass Bodyshop, extract the images manually and use next to no image compression, resulting in godawful file bloat.  (This was part of what led, I believe, to charges of racism against creators who made their S4 skintones lighter than people considered acceptable.  If you didn't know the right SimPE tricks, though, going lighter was really your only option if you wanted your skintones to look nice.)

Now that I'm looking for it, I see it's either still true in TS3 or else they've actually regressed with LN.  Blotchiness and striation becomes more noticeable as you darken the textures.  I'm beginning to think there may be some hard technical limitation that prevents dark colors from rendering well.  Has anyone noticed similar problems in other games?

None of which explains why the books would go all fuzzy, of course.  :p  Unless they deliberately nerfed rendering quality across the board to compensate for the additional computing demands of running another EP.

I think they got those patterns from flannel bedsheets.  I own some that are similar, only they're all in soft, subdued blues, grays, purples and whites, not eye-scorching primary colors, and they're quite nice.  I definitely wouldn't put those patterns on walls or floors, though.

Hope you don't mind me using yours as a base!  I wouldn't even have thought of it if I hadn't seen yours.

Yes, it's purely flavor text (no pun intended.)  Which, on the one hand, is fairly pointless as you say, but on the other hand makes it extremely simple to change.

This is a mod for old fogies like me who wish to give our Sims JUST A CUP OF COFFEE DAMMIT.  (Or tea, or hot chocolate, or something similarly mundane.)  It changes the menu for the coffee maker and the choices on the tray to more traditional hot beverage fare.  Quite a few variations are included, and you can still score a cappuccino, espresso, etc. if you're lucky, but yeah...mainly just regular old coffee and tea with options for sugar, cream and the like.  A handful of "special blends" are thrown in just for fun.

The picture shows only a few of the options that the game will randomly generate.



It's based on ChannTL's More Beverages Mod, which has pretty much the opposite effect.  Seems to work fine with all three EP's.  Please report any problems.

Well, MTS is dragging its feet with the uploads as usual, so while I wait--here!  Have a grandfather clock.




Converted from TS2.  Includes four presets, each with a different clock face and 3 designable channels.  No tinkering or winding interactions, but the clock does keep the correct time.  ETA:  The pendulum, alas, does not move, just the hands.  If EA provides the correct animations in a future expansion I'll try to fix that.

This item should work with any version of the game; please report any issues you may encounter.  Presented in compressorized .package format.

---

Download:  http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/cheese/noncheese/Ambular_GrandfatherClock.rar

The Dashboard is very helpful, and certainly worth trying first (it's useful for just keeping track of everything and identifying some other issues as well.)  But it missed quite a few files that were slowing my game to a crawl.  So if the Dashboard doesn't fix everything on the first try, keep trying other options!

Concur.  I have a Core 2 Duo and only 4 GB of RAM, and a fair amount of CC, but killing the problem files tagged in Process Monitor made a HUGE difference in my game's performance.

I just got a new PC.  The technolergy is about three years old (Core 2 Duo), but it's got 4GB RAM and runs Windows 7 fine.  The Sims 2 with all expansions and several Stuff Packs, plus a couple gigs of CC, runs like a dream.  It all installed and runs without a hitch, much easier than TS3, which I find ironic, considering TS2 was designed to run on Windows 98 through XP (the system requirements on the Apartment Life case I own don't even mention Vista.)

I was told before installing that TS2 could have issues with the User Account Control feature in Vista and 7, and that this could be circumvented by installing the games to someplace other than the default location.  I can't say whether this was good advice, because the fellow who built the rig for me advised me to shut UAC off completely, as it would accomplish nothing for someone with my computing habits except to drive me insane.

idk, I think the doll itself is kind of cute, but DNW it infecting all my files.

Reminds me of the pre-Clean Installer days of TS2 when people were spazzing over hacked default replacement objects that were being uploaded with packages all over creation.

OMG IT'S A BLUESOUP! 

From a creating POV, I spent a lot of time acquiring the skillsets needed to work on it and still enjoy using them, and the tools available to mod TS3 have not yet advanced to the same level.  (I have TS3 and played around with making stuff for it a bit.  Another separate program to download and install for each and every task, and yay for tracking down instance numbers and hex editing!  It's a gigantic PITA compared to firing up Ye Olde SimPE plus Milkshape and doing whatever the hell I need to do, unless things have moved along a lot further than I think they have since I last looked into it.)

From a playing POV, the game itself and the cc available for it are still at least two or three EP's away from being really worth the bother, and the Sims themselves are just not as appealing as their TS2 counterparts.  Which, along with their houses and a lot of their stuff, I also put a lot of trouble into making and don't want to discard just so I can turn around and make them all over again in another game I don't like as well.  :p

ETA:  Good to see Lord Darcy is still around 

Whilst rummaging around the bowels of my Sims 2 folders, I ran across a couple of useful Apartment Life-compatible mods that I had set aside as "May need updating for Mansions & Gardens," and which were never revisted by their creators (Syberspunk and DumbFool, respectively.)   If anybody is still interested enough in TS2 to have a look at them and figure out whether they do in fact need an update, and perhaps fix them if they do, I'd be grateful.

Files are attached: carpoolbringfrienddialog and water inaccessible flowers fix.

I could tell you how on a Windows rig, but unfortunately I don't know the first thing about Macintosh.  I did find out via Google that the term for Macs would be a "shell script" rather than "batch file," so all I can suggest is you poke around some Mac forums and see if anyone can help you out.  Good luck!

Aha.  In that case, the only thing I can suggest (if such a thing is possible on a Mac) is to create a batch file or the Mac equivalent that would delete the cache file and then launch the game.

If there is, I'm unaware of it.  :/  I'll ask around and see if anyone else can suggest something.

ETA: One other question: are you certain you don't have the old, combined male and female version of the hair in your game?

That's very odd, and the first such report I have had.  Did you try deleting simcompositorcache.package?  Also, have you run any sorts of file utilities on your downloads?

Anything that has redundant copies from EP to EP, you should be able to just edit the version in your most recent expansion.  The only real pitfall I can think of no longer really applies, since there won't be further expansions or patches whose installation would be messed up by changes to the core files.

I'm tempted to do this myself, but I have so many things hidden or recategorized it would be a mammoth undertaking.  Still might do it sometime though, just to save some disk space. :p

For the record, if anybody notices this on the Exchange, I made it and posted it first and I have the source image to prove it.  :p

For the record, the OP asked about the Insimenator, not the Inteenimator (which is the Kitten Killer.)  Although I'm not actually certain which of those two mods (possibly both) included the feature (s)he wants.

That area is black in all four channels and the background is set to white, yes.  I'd actually rather have the background be recolorable, but I'd have to sacrifice the details controlled by the alpha or else lose the recolorability of either the leaves or one or two of the roses.  :/

Thanks for all the nice comments, folks, I'm glad you like it.

Here's a pattern based on one of the most popular china and collectible patterns of all time, Royal Albert's Old Country Roses.





Three recolorable channels plus an alpha that controls the lightness of the pattern.  The background is not recolorable.

Don't run the file through the Compressorizer Redux or Pes's Recompressor; it won't like it.

Unfortunately, all Simslice did with TS2 was enable the hidden weather effects that already existed in the game code.

Just a note, BastDawn, I like thanks posts and would prefer that they be left here if possible.  Anyone who's being spammed as a result might just as well unsubscribe from the thread; I don't anticipate having to update these hairstyles again, and if I do I'll add a post at the bottom of the thread so it shows up in the 'unread posts' list.  Thanks.