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The Great AntiJen
retired moderator
#26 Old 25th Jan 2018 at 9:07 PM
I'm reading this thread with interest as I'm also starting to have problems. I'm guessing Windoze 10 updates are a part of it. I just rolled back the recent update and my game is working again and not flashing pink as it was after the update. That won't stick, however, since it will try to update again (once I let it) and no doubt succeed. Besides, I appreciate I need the security updates. But what I wanted to say is I have the disk version of the game installed, mainly because I wanted to be able to use AGS, but do not have a NVidea card - mine's a Radeon. I've noticed the game getting more and more difficult to run with each of the recent Windoze updates and I can't now run AGS at all. It just won't load. I've been thinking over potential solutions - installing the UC, which I thought was stable with Win10 and/or getting myself a virtual machine with maybe Win7. So much for UC for the time-being. I'd be really interested in people's experiences here (and any potential solutions).

I no longer come over to MTS very often but if you would like to ask me a question then you can find me on tumblr or my own site tflc. TFLC has an archive of all my CC downloads.
I'm here on tumblr and my site, tflc
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Test Subject
#27 Old 25th Jan 2018 at 10:40 PM
Hello all,

I was going to start a new thread, but I think that "Inexplicable crashing - tried many things" pretty much sums up my current situation.

(My setup is the same as OP, except I have the GTX 1060.
I, too, installed from the orginal discs.)

Been playing TS2 on this laptop since September, didn't play it for a month, today I load it up and get constant crashing.

Went through everything mentioned in this thread, and it still usually crashes during any loading screen.

I am wondering if it has to do with the most recent Windows update, since I can't think of anything else that's changed since the last time I played.
(I'm also seeing mentions of reinstalling drivers...)

I thought I would at least check in and see if anyone has come up with any new solutions, before I end up resorting to more drastic measures.
Not actually evil.
#28 Old 26th Jan 2018 at 1:48 AM
@maxon - @rocketcopter23 - You may also want to take a peek at my thread here and gwynne's thread about UC crashing. We have both been experimenting and had some success. Epi7 at leefish has also been experimenting, I got some great advice from Epi. The graphics cards forum at leefish has threads by gwynne, Epi, and me where we go over our experiments in awful gory detail. Here's a summary of what worked for me and gwynne so far, we both have Windows update 1709 and nvidia cards. I am able to get the game to not crash but more testing needed.

* clean reinstall of graphics driver using DDU and manual reinstall (custom, clean) NOT using GeForce Experience
* modify the video cards sgr to add my card
* modify the graphics rules sgr to fix the 32 texture memory issue [edit] use dedicated memory value from dxdiag, not 1744
* modify the graphics rules to allow the driver to manage its own memory
* can't really discuss this step on MTS (I will just say I do have all the CDs and UC, I legally own the game and am not advocating piracy)
the noCD exe is the only one right now that will work for me without crashing, am trying to get Origin UC to work, no success so far
* I am using the 4gb patch (done with CFF), works with the noCD exe, can be done with the Origin UC exe but that exe still crashes
* [edit] I'm running in windowed mode with CPUCount set to 1 and compatiblity for XP sp2

I would give links for everything above but it its time to read to the kidlet, I have to go. Sorry for no links, I can do links tomorrow.
I should make myself a copy paste thing I can post... I have this all documented for me but it's lengthy

[edit] And then there's the folks who have UC working on 1709 with no big headache. I am happy for them and so jealous.

Please spay or neuter your pets. --- Cat Music Video! --- my meshes
Test Subject
#29 Old 26th Jan 2018 at 2:59 PM
@CatOfEvilGenius Thanks for the response Cat!
I was hoping to hear from you, since I think we are in a similar situation!
(only I used the original discs, not sure if it matters...)

Well, I did all the things you suggested (except reinstall drivers) and...drumroll...I was able to play the game without it crashing!!!

Only my excitement was rather short-lived, because now I'm having other graphical problems.
1) The "black square" problem (fixed by setting Shadows to Medium...I guess I can live with it...)

2) FLASHING PINK EVERYTHING upon visiting a community lot. (That was a psychedelic experience! )
(I think I have fixed that now by changing the texture memory in Graphic Rules.sgr to a higher number.)

3) Now my current problem is that whenever I enter a lot, there is a weird dark overlay across the screen.
I can get it to go away by changing the screen resolution (doesn't matter which one) but it still comes up the first time I load a lot.
(I'm attaching a photo of this glitch.)

Let me know if I should start a different thread about this (not trying to hijack this one) but it seems like a lot of us are having similar issues, so maybe it could help someone.
Thanks!
Screenshots
Not actually evil.
#30 Old 26th Jan 2018 at 8:49 PM Last edited by CatOfEvilGenius : 26th Jan 2018 at 9:25 PM.
@rocketcopter23 - I'm so happy your game is now playable! Yay! I think UC from Origin and the original disks do behave differently, but there is some overlap in some problems and solutions.

1) Nopke at MTS has an awesome shadow fix download. Have you tried using it? It worked for me. You can turn shadows on, all the way to high, and you won't have black squares because Nopke changes which rendered\r is used to shadows. Nopke uses the tree shadow renderer which was NOT borked by newer nvidia graphics drivers.
Nopke's shadow fix

2) Kiri at leefish has a video about preventing/reducing flashing pink trippy stuff. I need to go find the link... Yes, increasing texture memory the game can use should help. So can reducing how much it needs by not having as much cc, for example, or lowering graphics settings, neither of which is much fun. You can try lowering lighting to medium, does not make much difference unless you're using some fancy lighting mod. You can try setting view distance to medium. If you do get pink flashies, you can try removing thumbnail files from the Thumbnails folder, sometimes helps.

3) I would strongly recommend reinstalling the graphics driver (manually, not through Windows, not with GeForce Experience). Doing so might maybe help with issue 3 and it did help me not crash as much. I'm not sure what is causing issue 3, honestly, have not seen it before. Need to find link to video about driver reinstall...

I'm glad you posted. More data is more data!

Please spay or neuter your pets. --- Cat Music Video! --- my meshes
Not actually evil.
#31 Old 26th Jan 2018 at 8:56 PM
@maxon - Sorry to hear you're having troubles too! Have you tried a manual reinstall of your Radeon driver? Not through Windows.

* Turn off Windows driver updates.

* Download your latest Radeon driver from Radeon.
Don't do an auto install from the website. Download it for manual installation on your own. (not sure if necessary for Radeon but was needed for NVidia since auto install was borked for NVidia)

* Get the free DDU from guru3d, run it in safe mode with networking (make a restore point first). Select the remove drivers and reboot option.

* Don't mind the bad resolution and icons scattered all over. Manually install your driver. If it were nvidia, select custom install, clean install, not sure what radeon options are, but do a clean install.

* Reboot, graphics should be fine, and then reboot again because why not.

* Try the game again, see if it is any better.

-----

edit - I think UC was stable, and then the updated version of it on Windows 1709 wasn't, for some, so you may be best served by the disks for now, if/when you get them working well again. Or the next Windows patch will fix the old Windows patch, ha ha! I can dream.

Please spay or neuter your pets. --- Cat Music Video! --- my meshes
The Great AntiJen
retired moderator
#32 Old 26th Jan 2018 at 9:00 PM
Interesting CoEG - I have, of course, done all those things though not updated the video drivers in a while (in fact, I rolled the last update back). I am giving some serious thought to trying a virtual machine. The game was running beautifully before Xmas. I've rolled back Win10 - I think to 1680 now. It's working well atm but that's not sustainable in the long term.

I no longer come over to MTS very often but if you would like to ask me a question then you can find me on tumblr or my own site tflc. TFLC has an archive of all my CC downloads.
I'm here on tumblr and my site, tflc
Not actually evil.
#33 Old 26th Jan 2018 at 9:30 PM
Quote: Originally posted by maxon
Interesting CoEG - I have, of course, done all those things though not updated the video drivers in a while (in fact, I rolled the last update back). I am giving some serious thought to trying a virtual machine. The game was running beautifully before Xmas. I've rolled back Win10 - I think to 1680 now. It's working well atm but that's not sustainable in the long term.


A vm may be doable. Do please let us know if you find one that works well. Are you thinking vmware or virtualbox? Something else? My issue with vm is having to put all my tools and projects and cc on the vm and the vm having not a ton of disk space for all that stuff. Also had trouble before getting the vm to see host machine drives and vice versa but its been years since I used a vm.

I recently saw Windows version 1707 (not 1703, not 1709) on a Win 10 Enterprise machine at work. I have no idea if Sims 2 works on 1707 or if 1707 is even available for Win 10 Home or Win 10 Pro. Asked ITS peeps I know at work at @gwynne here at MTS. Do we know any other folks who might know?

@maxon - forgot to ask, which driver version are you currently using? @Honeywell is using nvidia 382.05 and has a mostly working game. I tried 390.65 (current) and have a somewhat working game but only with noCD. I also tried nvidia from a year ago, 376.60, and more recent, 388.79, but can't get Origin UC to work. May not be a driver issue but I'm still curious what combos of game/driver work for people. I know you don't use UC.

Please spay or neuter your pets. --- Cat Music Video! --- my meshes
Test Subject
#34 Old 26th Jan 2018 at 9:31 PM
Well, I played the game for over 2 hours...which was great!
Ran at close to highest graphic settings (except for shadows. I'll take a look at the shadow mod!)
Unfortunately, it ended with a crash. (Still...progress?)

Also, I did encounter the weird glitches again (see picture)

Didn't see any pink stuff since changing the texture memory setting.
(I have a GTX 1060, 16 GB RAM, i7-7700...should be able to handle my mountain of CC!)

I think I will look into reinstalling the graphics card drivers.
Have to admit, I'm a little hesitant to do so...because if I screw that up, that means not only no more sims, but no more games period!
Screenshots
Not actually evil.
#35 Old 26th Jan 2018 at 9:36 PM
@rocketcopter23 - Don't worry, I was hesitant too, but just make a restore point beforehand and you won't need to worry. Just follow all the steps carefully. DDU was not hard to use at all, it's install, run, press one button. Very handy utility.

I'm happy about the hours of playtime! Still no idea what those black overlays are from but his one looks smaller than in your earlier screenie.

*eyes the 16gb card jealously*
*looks at 6gb card*
*cries*
*remembers when there were no 6gb cards*
*cheers up somewhat*

[edit] - wait, did you mean 16gb or 6gb? Are there 16gb cards?

Please spay or neuter your pets. --- Cat Music Video! --- my meshes
The Great AntiJen
retired moderator
#36 Old 26th Jan 2018 at 10:51 PM
@CatOfEvilGenius I don't have a NVidia card. I generally prefer NVidias but when I built this machine the card with the best reviews in my price range was the Radeon I'm using. It's a little old now but it was a kick ass card when I installed it and runs modern stuff without problem. I used Leefish's advice and graphic rules downloads to get the game to recognise it and it was fine. Was.

Him Indoors used a vm to run some obsolete software they had in a Win XP environment (he works in a university - they have all sorts of legacy crap). He said it works well. The only things that concerns me is the extra memory usage though I have a pile of RAMz. I could use an existing smaller HD for the vm and the game (and probably nothing else) that I cannibalised from my previous build or I could just buy a new external drive maybe? I think we'll look into it over the weekend.

I no longer come over to MTS very often but if you would like to ask me a question then you can find me on tumblr or my own site tflc. TFLC has an archive of all my CC downloads.
I'm here on tumblr and my site, tflc
Test Subject
#37 Old 26th Jan 2018 at 11:35 PM
@CatOfEvilGenius @maxon
Okay, that worked!
I uninstalled/reinstalled drivers using DDU.
Launched game and set it to max settings... looks great!
Shadows look great, Nopke's shadow fix did the trick!

Oh, and Cat... I only have 6GB on my graphics card, 16 GB of RAM on the PC.
It's the GTX 1060. We have the same one right? It's not a bad card.

I think 16 GB cards do exist now, but they're only needed for really high end stuff.
Of course it's only a matter of time before games will use them...

Okay, now the real test is to actually play the game for a few hours... *fingers crossed*
Test Subject
#38 Old 27th Jan 2018 at 3:44 AM
Reporting back with mixed results...

Reinstalling the drivers helped, but at some point it went back to it's old ways.
I ended up having to reinstall the drivers...again.
I wonder if it somehow auto reinstalled the bad driver...
(It doesn't look like it did though, I even changed the setting in Windows to tell it not to...)

I'm keeping that computer offline for now, and the game is playable... but now I have a new graphical issue.
Whenever I enter a lot with snow on the ground, it looks like this (see picture)
(You can't tell from the pic, but all those dark spots flicker when I move the camera around.)

If I turn off "Snow On Ground" in the graphics settings it goes away, but there has to be a better solution.
(Plus, I really want to play my winter hood!)

I can't believe how many problems this game is having, when it ran fine on this computer for so long!
Seems like it has to be related to the last Windows Update.
(I'm starting to fear that Windows 10 will just continue breaking this game in the future...)

I won't have much time to test the game over the next few days, but if anyone comes up with anything... please share!
Screenshots
Field Researcher
#39 Old 27th Jan 2018 at 9:13 AM
Quote: Originally posted by maxon
Him Indoors used a vm to run some obsolete software they had in a Win XP environment (he works in a university - they have all sorts of legacy crap). He said it works well. The only things that concerns me is the extra memory usage though I have a pile of RAMz. I could use an existing smaller HD for the vm and the game (and probably nothing else) that I cannibalised from my previous build or I could just buy a new external drive maybe? I think we'll look into it over the weekend.


@maxon I run my old Windows 7 install in VMware so that I can access SimPE on a Mac. Sims 2 starts up okay, but goes through the entire repertoire of flashing pink, purple and red because the VM doesn't expose your actual graphics card, just the VM's pass-through driver (e.g. "VMware SVGA 3D" instead of "Radeon HD 5750"). I think fidding with graphicrules.sgr and videocards.sgr should sort that out though - I haven't bothered until now, because I'm mostly only using the VM for SimPE and Mootilda's tools.

Make sure you assign the VM as many CPU cores as you can as well as RAM. I couldn't get SimPE to even launch until I gave the VM a second core. My Windows 7 VM has about 100 GB of disk, by the way, and could be smaller. You can pretty much get rid of the pagefile and hibernate files in a VM, which reduces the size considerably on a modern machine with lots of RAM.

It'll be sluggish though, because a VM has a lot of extra processing overhead. Worth a try on a fast machine, but it'd always be a second choice to playing native.
The Great AntiJen
retired moderator
#40 Old 27th Jan 2018 at 11:29 AM
Quote: Originally posted by muridae
It'll be sluggish though, because a VM has a lot of extra processing overhead. Worth a try on a fast machine, but it'd always be a second choice to playing native.

Yes, that was my thought (and to be fair Him Indoors too). I'd only be using the vm for TS2 - nothing else but the memory issue was what made me think it might not be worth it. Since the flashing pink seems to indicate that Windoze and/or the video cards are combining to create problems with processing memory or memory available for video processing, putting an extra load on might be counter productive. I'm going to look into it anyway. Never done it before.

I no longer come over to MTS very often but if you would like to ask me a question then you can find me on tumblr or my own site tflc. TFLC has an archive of all my CC downloads.
I'm here on tumblr and my site, tflc
Not actually evil.
#41 Old 28th Jan 2018 at 12:16 AM Last edited by CatOfEvilGenius : 28th Jan 2018 at 12:30 AM.
@frogz2007 - Thank you for the warning! I am tempted to try that myself but much less so now.

Meanwhile, maybe disabling or entirely removing Windows Game DVR might help? I'm wondering if that's what's eating up texture memory and when does it get turned on. Supposedly only for fullscreen whitelisted games but do I believe Microsoft? I'm curious if anyone here has tried this already. I'm going to but with such variance in hardware and software, I'm curious if it works for other folks.
https://www.windowscentral.com/how-...creators-update


[edit] In addition to disabling or even removing Game DVR, has anyone tried disabling Game Mode? Can't turn it off in settings anymore because Microsoft is #*!&@ arrogant and thinks they know better than us what features we want to be able to turn off. You can turn it off supposedly in some games with Game Bar (Windows key + G) and here's how to turn it off in the registry. I should not have to try to kill stupid features in the registry. Haven't tried this myself yet. *fumes*
https://www.addictivetips.com/windo...ate-windows-10/

Please spay or neuter your pets. --- Cat Music Video! --- my meshes
Lab Assistant
#42 Old 28th Jan 2018 at 12:41 AM
@CatOfEvilGenious I disabled the game bar and the game DVR earlier. I was sick of that annoying pop up. I have had no issues at all. I wonder if that is interfering with the game? I had forgotten I had already shut all that down. I did not however go into the registry to uninstall it all together. I don't like playing with the registry.
Not actually evil.
#43 Old 28th Jan 2018 at 2:11 AM
Quote: Originally posted by Jules1111
@CatOfEvilGenious I disabled the game bar and the game DVR earlier. I was sick of that annoying pop up. I have had no issues at all. I wonder if that is interfering with the game? I had forgotten I had already shut all that down. I did not however go into the registry to uninstall it all together. I don't like playing with the registry.


@Jules1111 - Good to know, than you. Did you do that through Windows Settings, Gaming or did you have to uninstall stuff and if so, what? I saw this less than helpful quote from Microsoft

Quote: Originally posted by Microsoft
If you’re experiencing stuttering on the Fall Creators Update, you need to completely delete the files related to Game DVR. - bold added by me


Do they mean the recorded video files in the video folder for DVR or do they mean uninstall DVR (how???) or what?

Please spay or neuter your pets. --- Cat Music Video! --- my meshes
Lab Assistant
#44 Old 28th Jan 2018 at 7:14 AM
Quote: Originally posted by CatOfEvilGenius
@Jules1111 - Good to know, than you. Did you do that through Windows Settings, Gaming or did you have to uninstall stuff and if so, what? I saw this less than helpful quote from Microsoft



Do they mean the recorded video files in the video folder for DVR or do they mean uninstall DVR (how???) or what?


Ya I did it through Windows settings. Actually the page you first linked was what I found when I googled it when I first got that annoying pop up for it. I followed those instructions. I didn't uninstall anything. I can tell you I had no videos in my video file, of course I turned it off pretty much right after the update. I have no idea if you would have any or not. I would imagine they would be safe to delete if you did. They can be found in C:/users/(whatever name you have on your pc)/videos/captures.

I don't think there is a way to delete DVR, without editing the registry. Something I do not want to do. Turning it off got rid of the annoying pop up, so I was satisfied with that.
The Great AntiJen
retired moderator
#45 Old 28th Jan 2018 at 1:56 PM
I'm pretty sure Win10 with it's forced updates is slowly becoming a disaster for them. I'd be really interested to know what you get when you disable it CoEG.

I no longer come over to MTS very often but if you would like to ask me a question then you can find me on tumblr or my own site tflc. TFLC has an archive of all my CC downloads.
I'm here on tumblr and my site, tflc
Mad Poster
#46 Old 28th Jan 2018 at 2:54 PM
I use the (updated ) UC with (updated) Windows 10 and a Nvidia card and I don't have any of these problems mentioned above.
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