I'll throw in a little bit of cash this time round. Where is the link to donate? That link on the front page only gives the option on 40 bucks, which is more than I can afford to pay.

  Just brilliant! I really like how you've stretched what the tools are capable of.

That particular update allows you to use Create A World. Unfortunately it also add the bloody stupid "store mode" to your game which allows you to shop at the Sims 3 Store while you're playing your game.

Rainne, there's a thread at MTS about this issue. The solution is to run Process Explorer and you will find out which piece of custom content is broken. http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=379085&c=1&ht=&page=11&pp=25#startcomment

Hope it helps.

Very true DarkBlue, although doing a clean install of the game can be a valid process of elimination step if it doesn't work when you try to patch over the top.

Apologies Drakron, I was counting it in the first half of the year because it was released in June..

Keep in mind that your brother in law works for Activision/Blizzard. When he thinks profits he's probably thinking WOW, which gets server fees every month and most games aren't like that.

He's wrong.. if the Sims wasn't a cash cow it wouldn't still be open. Sims 3 was one of the few things they made money on in the first half of this year apart from Dragon Age Origins. Sims 3 sold something like 3.7 million units of Sims 3 at the beginning of the year.  EA has just finished cutting a massive chunk of it's worforce and cut them in places like Pandemic and the old Maxis studio which produces Spore.. the layoffs didn't happen in the Visceral Studios which makes Sims 3 these days. They would have if they weren't making money from the game. The reason for the lack of quality control is nothing to do with profit or lack of profit. It's to do with the fact that EA has always had crappy quality control and decisions made by marketing guys, and they're getting worse.

Greyform my suggestion is more what I've noticed it takes to make the game run well, it runs on older spec cards however the way EA's coded the game results in some strange rendering of the game at times.

The one I experienced the most with the 512mb card was that once I had a couple of peices of CC I'd get "white objects" on larger lots for anything up to a minute while the game struggled with rendering the textures.

My experience has been that Sims3 will run adequately on a 512mb graphics card, but the game runs much more smoothly on a card with at least 896mb of graphics ram.

Pescado, I had that bug yesterday, except it was a French visitor who came to live in the house I was playing. I nearly fell off my chair when she got up in the morning and she was buck naked. I don't have the no blur in my game. Everything except her everyday outfit consisted of a naked top and bottom.

Pescado, I'm so glad you said that because I was coming here to ask if you'd look at turning that nonsense off when it arrives in the patch. All it's going to do is load my game down with junk I REALLY don't need.

I've run up against the same issue, and I'm still figuring out what the exact problem is. Does anyone know what you need to change besides the registry code to get both the base and the EP to play happily together?

Edit: Ok, I fixed the issue. I must have changed too many things in my registry last time. This is what I did to get the update to work. Firstly I did a full uninstall of the game and cleaned out my registry with CCleaner. Then I reinstalled the base game and I patched. I changed the number in my registry to the number needed for the EP, installed the EP, changed the number for the base game back to it's original number in the registry, installed the EP patch and it installed without any issues. I hope this helps someone else.

I'm waiting til Pescado's updated AM before I go anywhere near this patch. Why would you want to go anywhere near EA's sucky story mode anyway?

Thank you for that ShortyBoo, I must have missed that thread when it was discussed. At least I know the fix now if I ever get that issue again.

  So we could call it the Sims 2 and 3 thumbnail of doom.

I can go one better than that, I have a family with Alice and Kev, and Alice's thumbnail actually gender switched on me. I still have no idea why it happened, I ended up restarting my 'hood afterward.

  That's brilliant, Ingeli. I admire your dedication to getting a Medieval Simverse up and running.

Rather than spamming the forum with a new thread for every type of pattern I end up creating, I thought I'll just turn this thread into "Saraswati's Patterns", and update here with whatever I create.

Today I've updated with a couple of Gothic brocades for Halloween. They were supposed to be up a few days ago, but I got preoccupied with real life instead.

Anyone who wants them can get them at Sublime Sims.

Immortelle, that issue used to drive me nuts, but when I turned on the Awesome Story Drivers, the issue went away. Maybe you could try that and see if it helps?

That's just brilliant, it must have taken you a while. On another note, has anyone done TS3 Medieval garb yet?

I've just updated with another Kente pattern. This one is the Awia Repue pattern (rising sun)


If you want to download the pattern you can get it here.

Maurie, I hope so. A lot depends on whether I can get Jacqueline creating for TS3, she absolutely adores African stuff.

But definitely expect more of that type of content from us, it's the type of stuff we love doing. I think half the trouble with base game Sims is that the content that comes out of EA is always so bland. I'm hoping EA is true to their word (for once) and actually provide a proper neighborhood creator so the 'hood starts to lose the wooden and predictable feel it's got at the moment.

Sparkles, that just sounds like their garden variety "end background processes" advice they give PC users too. I'd be careful when it comes to being sure it's not SecuROM, that error message is very similar to one we used to get with early forms of SecuROM. I'm not saying it absolutely is that, it's just something that's good to check off the list.

The information I've got when it comes to Macs is confusing, to say the least. While they said the disk version should be SecuROM free, around the same time we were getting information that the company that was going to port PC games to Mac was putting SecuROM on all of the games that it ported.

It's difficult when the information is thin on the ground, to almost nonexistant. I can't even say for sure that video I found is accurate but I hope it is.

We used to get people who use Macs turning up semi-regularly when I was running Reclaim Your Game, and it was extremely difficult to help them because SecuROM only started turning up on Mac very recently, so there wasn't the knowledge to draw on.

PhantomNeko, anyone who's got SecuROM on a Mac has a bit of an issue because the path to remove it isn't the same as for a PC. There is a removal tool on the SecuROM website, but as far as I know, it's just for PC. I did find a video that explains how to remove it for Mac on You Tube though, hopefully that can help Imortelle. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYKkYTUNX4w