The DDS plugin for Gimp...For us n00bs XD

http://nifelheim.dyndns.org/~cocidius/dds/

I think that sims 3 looks far better. Have you updated recently? I can't see why mine would look way better then sims 2 and yours would look worse. Your not playing on the highest settings(Without Adanced rendering) right? Because I thought that the textures were terrible until I changed to almost full settings.
Really, the only thing that changes between cards are speed. As long the card is good enough to run on full settings you can't blame anything on the card. Your un-ancient newer card probably also has game crashes just like everyone else with better cards then me. This makes me chuckle and say "Even with my old as all heck graphic card I have not had one crash and have no lag. On almost full settings."
I don't know why the game runs like it does on my computer...But it does, and it runs really nice.

Heyyy, I have a 6150SE and it's awesome XD. The only thing that kills my game is advanced rendering . Even then it's playable.

*high fives Leticron* That's my card XD. By the way, with good memory/CPU and such you should be able to put almost every on the highest except for Advanced rendering and shadows. Also I have it on 8x, so unless my cards just magical, I think you should be able to crank it up to there. I only have 2 gigs on Vista, so it's not my computer is that almighty and I get no lag on pretty high settings for the card that's apparently not even supposed to run it...EA should really update their card list, because it's a dumb one.

Well ingame there certainly is a difference, just thought I'd let you all know since the whole blurry ground/blurry roads were killing me. I'll go in game later and get some pictures of the game without it and with it. For some reason once I turned it on, the beach ground textures finally came in for me. Before, they were plain old green paint and plain old tan. Now they both have real textures. (The green 'paint' is now grass, and the tan is now grains of sand). I'm not too sure if this will take affect on everyones computer as it has on mine, since my graphic card is a piece of crap that can take a huge beating and still be relatively fine. Setting it up to 8x gave me this result:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3331/3635258398_af3f18f2a2_o.jpg
If your game already looks like that, I'm not sure what else you'll really get from it. But then again, if I turn advanced rendering on my game becomes a laggy disaster, so my game may look like that on 8x and someone elses may look thousand times better on that setting then mine. My Nvidia 6150 fails at life, I hate retailers that sell good computers with crappy cards...

This is weird, and a problem I haven't heard before. But for some reason today when I got a burglar my alarm just didn't sound. It didn't do anything, and hasn't since June 2nd. I was wondering why I had to call them every time. If I don't call them they never come even though there is a alarm. Is there anything I have to do to set it? Or is my alarm just made of fail? And by the way, I do not have AwesomeMod yet. I'll get it eventually, I'm just slow and lazy with these things. I was just wondering if anyone else here had a problems with the burglar alarms not working at all 

The annoying thing for me is, I think my ghosts could be borked. They never show up anywhere . I've gone to the graveyard everyday and they're always no where too be found  

By the way guys, this is my source. She also posted a comparison, so you can see what it does and what difference it makes.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tictic/3628160485/

For some reason the smart ones at EA have Anisotropic Filtering turned off by default, this will show you how to turn it on. And I'll tell you all what it does in a minute  .

Just to be clear with you all, I'm reposting this here. This was originally made by a person from Gamespot, then was brought to my attention from Tictic on Flickr. So I'm not trying to steal anything, just thought I'd be helpful seeing as it doesn't appear anyone here knows about it, as I haven't heard any talk of it.
Now, what it does. It improves textures like ground textures when they are further away from the camera. In my game I would notice while driving on the road that as I'm driving the white lines would slowly become unblurred, making for terrible looking roads as it was very noticeable. Also the grass only a few feet away but still on camera would be completely blurred out, also everything seemed to have a look of unsharp, but when changing these settings things seemed to be a bit sharper. What caused this I have no clue. So overall what this mainly will do and where it's most noticeable, is when your seeing things like the ground and trees and even sims will all appear sharper from further away. I found this was helpful, mainly because even with my old graphic card at x8 had no lag even when changing the settings.

Now, here's the annoying part. I only have an Nvidia card, so if you guys could try this on your ATI cards I'd add the instructions here. As it is right now, I only have these for Nvidia. So I have no possible way of knowing for sure that it will be the same way with ATI. I'd appreciate it if someone could test it out for us .

Now without further ado, the instructions :].

-Right click on your desktop
-Go to nVidia Control Panel
-Go to Advanced Settings
-Go to Left Panel then to Manage 3D Settings
-You will see on the right panel the tabs: Global and Program settings
-Click the Tab Program Settings
-Select a Program to Customize --- Add TS3
(you'll find two - TS3 and S3 launcher Choose TS3.exe not the launcher). Program files -- Electronic Arts -- The Sims 3 -- Game -- Bin
-Anisotropic Filtering is on the first option and you will see initially that it is Application Controlled. This is the part you have to change.
-Change it to whatever you think your card can handle.
-Apply.

By the way you can find the .exe from add then go to the programs directory and such, you guys probably all know this and find the executable that is called TS3.



EDIT: Just thought I'd post here to let you people that already have overheating and crashing problems to not even bother with this. While it made a difference for me, this won't help your crashing game. It could only make it worse, and more frequent to crashes. I've never crashed myself, and I haven't crashed since. So for those people who haven't crashed or don't crash very often, or if it isn't related to a hardware problem, I don't see why you can't try it and see if you see a difference. There may not be a difference that is significant enough for you, and you can easily turn it off again by going back to your graphic card options and disabling it.

Nope never for me, I tried bulldozing the entire neighborhood the other day (didn't touch the community lots or rabitholes) and I was fine, everything looked as it did before and had no corrupting. Are you using the retail or one of the leaks?

Guys, there's a new slider for almost all facial slides, as well as body, available at modthesims. And there's also skintones there. I'm not too sure on the skins yet, but I'm not using the slider, it seems to extreme for me .

I have a 6150 with almost maxed out settings, I can only turn it up to low without extreme lag. Then after that I drop down to like 5-10 fps from like 20-30. Damn old thing

Do you all have the sim detail on very high? On high makeup smudges and pixelates. On very high I've noticed no issues outside of CAS, except when outside. Then I just get splotches again.

Yup Im sure they can die. You have to bring their energy all the way down and they usually fall asleep Or you can starve them to death while in the pool. Haven't tested it myself but thats what EA said ;]

You can drown them  

Just cancel the action.  

I dont have much experience with these But my first dl that worked was from torrentseed(leaked version) I only had to wait 57mins in the re-download of it. I might try and download the full version...Don't know yet, I probably won't :p. Anyone found any huge bugs that weren't in the leaked?

Oh yes, the loading is extreme :-). I also get half loaded pages with the html of posts showing .

EndlessSims...really? I predict your a troll. Really, How did you find this post if you can't find anything else? There are simple navigation tools, unless your five...Anyway, back on topic. I think I may just keep the older build and mess with it until June 2nd. Its only a few days away. Good luck though guys, sounds awesome that the launcher is fully functional and such. I'm also gonna guess it's overall securom free(?)

You mean, you downloaded it the internet-faster kind of way? . Please tell haha I want this version now, instead of leaked. So how about some spilling of the beans :p i dont like torrents as they take to long and make me feel guilty

Only problem is, it apparently has a trojan...I'd stay away from it, they didn't even use the right cover.

Thanks you guys MagicISO it is

I need help, the new daemon tools installs spyware/whatever, right? Can someone link me to an older version. Im racking my brain trying to get the game to install again and there's nothing that I've used before. If not daemon tools and something else please make sure its spyware free and doesnt install anything extra. I plan to remove the program once installation is complete .
Thankss

I would think they would work, since builds are pretty much just patches if I'm correct. Oh, and by the way. By installing this is it still possible to install the purchased retail version and not worry about cracking it or anything. I know dumb question as it's most likely a yes, but just making sure. You can never be too safe ;]. I plan to buy it on June 2nd. So EA put a block on klepto's and they can only steal 3 times a day, that kinda sucks. I hope that's taken out in the final build because I like being able to do exactly what I want when I want, including stealing things for my little sim-klepto's.

wooow crashes or worse...Whats the worst that can happen? The sims uninstall them selves and take over the computer? Really. Haha they make it sound like doomsday. You'll crash...or worse. *Dun, dun, dunnn*

Sims 3 Package Installer. Hehe, oh yes I suck at names.