I understood that, RoxEllen, thank you. I think the discussion just went either/or because I was asking for one simple thing to get started with. I went with the skies you recommended and I like them. Since the three hoods I play are all lush, with the day/night/rain/shine differences, they are enough variety for now, but, maybe I'll get a skybox for a different situation, now that I've started down the slippery slope.

Okay thanks for clearing that up. You and iCad sounded like you thought it was an either/or thing.

I know what you mean about the slippery slope. It starts with a skybox or two, then you add some animated clouds and seasonal farm fields and then you notice Criquette has some really cool new 'hood deco objects and before you know it you have gigabytes of neighborhood deco and replacement textures, much of which you'll probably never even get around to using!

Yeah, what Sunrader said. Just talking about "economy," since they had concerns about resource usage. For my own game, I like to have a different sky for every neighborhood, to suit its "feel" because they all have a "feel" or a theme. So, for me it doesn't make much sense to have a default if I'm just going to cover it up pretty much all the time.

What MIGHT be interesting (which is the reason I'm posting this) is to look into the DR's files and see what the textures look like and how they change from state-to-state. It might be an interesting idea to make some defaults using some of my favorite skybox textures as a "base." Then I might be more inclined to use such a thing from time to time. As it is, the "native" textures in the DR look a little too "watercolor" for my preferences. Nothing against them at all, just not textures that I personally prefer. So, yeah I might look into that at some point, so...*adds to ever-growing to-do/to-look-into list*

EDIT, because I forgot:


If you have a water mod, the little placement cubes can be hard to see in the water. Especially for that horizon because it's cloned from Criquette's original, older one, and the placement thing is a flat square, not a whole cube like GCP's horizons. So, it's a little harder to see. Also, I think the terrain is pretty heavily messed with on the Elsewhere terrain to lower everything? That might affect things like placement of skies and horizons and stuff and how they display, since it's all dependent on terrain elevation. You might want to backup and make a small little hill (with the modifyneighborhoodterrain cheat) somewhere out of view that you can sit placement cubes on.

Has someone done cliff face DRs because with the higher res terrain for clouds and grass, the cliffs suddenly look all wrong?
S l i d i n g f u r t h e r d o w n t h e s l o p e...

Voeille has some lovely ones here on MTS. Three versions, one the dark brown from Castaway Stories, a lighter brown, and the standard Maxis gray but high-res. They also affect the deco rocks, so that rocks and cliffs match. They're all high-res, but you could probably size down the textures, if you want. Wouldn't make much sense to do that for the gray because you'd be back to Maxis, but maybe for the other two. (I use the dark brown, currently, but I'm contemplating trying out that lighter brown one because sometimes the dark one is a little too dark.)

(And yep, this was exactly what happened when I decided to replace the creepy Maxis eyes. Then the skins had to go. Then the crappy low-res Maxis hair texture was all wrong... I didn't really want to do it, but I couldn't stand those eyes anymore. And now I wouldn't go back. Same thing with neighborhood deco, but I decided I didn't like that pretty much from the get-go. )

@iCad, I was trying different pond water mods - I've used Voeille's for a while, but do I find it a little over the top - SO ripply and SO reflective. Must be a stiff breeze blowing 24-7.

I do like Niol's deep blue or deep green (can't see much difference in my game). Your picture looks a lot darker than either of those do for me. Was it night? Winter?

I am using dreadpirate's 2.5.5 version of Radiance Lighting, which includes Niol's water shaders - but only the basic colour, not the darker ones. Their lot water file is much smaller than the original mod. I am wondering how hard it would be to change the colour in the smaller file.

Luckily, it seems to work to just drop Niol's mod into the downloads folder anyway, but I'm always looking for smaller file sizes where possible. Maybe dreadpirate would do it if I figure out how to ask.

That pic was taken at dusk, with Dreadpirate's no-blue-nights Radiance lighting tweaked with Almighty Har's "World Lit by Fire." Unfortunately, I don't do on-lot water too often, and the one neighborhood that has a lot of it I pretty heavily Photoshop the pics to give them a matte, vintage-y, sorta sepia, sorta half-color look. But here's one of those taken during the day in that neighborhood:

I haven't tweaked the shader at all, so the way it looks in my game shouldn't be too different from anyone else's, though there may be some difference due to different lighting mods and whatnot.

Oh! And to me the blue version looks a little too much like chlorinated pool water, brighter and blue-r. The green version looks like there's algae growing, so I like it better for pond water. Long ago, I tried them both and took pics of the same water, and that's what I decided. You're right that it's not a huge difference, though. Probably because of the reflection, if you've got a blue sky above it. With the less-blue-nights lighting mod I use, you can really see the green at night, while during the day, it reflects the blue sky more...if I'm using a blue sky and not an overcast one like in the pic above.



I've never looked at any files for a shader mod, myself so I don't know what changing them would entail. I imagine you'd need to look for a set of three numbers indicating RGB values for light color in some resource or another. I have no idea what resource, though!



She seems pretty open to asks on Tumblr. She added the "A World Lit by Fire" tweak that you can switch on and off if you don't always want your neighborhood to look like it's lit by fire/candlelight to her lighting mod because I was complaining about lighting mods being "universal" in that they're in Program Files and not neighborhood-specific. I don't know if you have a Tumblr account, but I'm pretty sure I've seen her answering anonymous asks if you don't, so if you go to her Tumblr and send her an ask, you can see what she says. She's at https://dreadpirate.tumblr.com/

@Sunrader Like other said, depends if you have pink flashing:



This was my game when my texture memory was at 32MB. The game runs out of memory fast, the more sims you have on a lot.
Now I can have 25 sims in a fully furnished, large community lot no problemo.

ALTHOUGH It seems to do more flashing when doing a lot of travel between lots or changing to different families? Loading screens I mean. More loading screens without fully closing and rebooting the game, sooner my game starts to flash. Even if I only have like 10 sims on the lot. TS2 must suffer from terrible memory leaks?

@iCad Lovely pics, will check out the mods!

Thanks, I will try that. I don't have a tumblr so am a bit limited contacting people. Worth a try in this case, I think. I have a much worse problem to fix in SimPE just now, with my lots randomly disappearing - need to give my concentration to that at present.

Apart from the 'World Lit By Fire' mod, it sounds like we use a fairly similar setup.

Edit: probably I'm just being idiotic (and too tired to think sensibly), but I can't see how to post an ask without signing up to Tumblr. Help? Is she on MTS under another name?

I had a look and found this in the FAQ.

Q: Why can’t I message you?
I have messages enabled to mutuals only and anon turned off due to multiple instances of harassment, so for my safety and peace of mind I have my messaging and asks set as it is

I was wary of downloading this but finally did. I like it a lot! It's such a pain to pick and choose which skies to put into a neighborhood. This solves all of my problems.

I went ahead and changed it although it's been at 32 all these years and I've never seen that before in my game. Maybe I just never play large enough lots with high res textures. Anyway, I raised it just in case. Thanks for posting about it.

FranH, me, too. Very happy with my new skies. I also really like how the sky changed the water with its reflection. But then I had to add a terrain replacement and a replacement for the cliffs and rocks, too. But, NOW, I'm completely happy and not looking at any horizons, nope, not looking....

Yeah, that's pink flashing. It has been known to be caused by things like Win10 and graphics driver updates because when you get down to it, the game and Win10/the latest graphics drivers don't really understand each other and then shit happens, but more usually it's just running out of texture memory.

TS2's whole texture-memory processing works like this. Think of a box of finite size. When you open the game and load up a neighborhood, the game dumps all the textures needed to display that hood in hood view into the box. Depending on whether or not this is a large, heavily-decorated neighborhood with lots of high-res stuff, that could be a lot or a little. Then you open up a lot. Now the game dumps everything needed to display that lot -- the building, its furnishings, the resident Sims, the surrounding lot imposters, everything -- into the box without removing any of the stuff it loaded to display the hood view. Then you send someone to a community lot. The game then dumps everything needed to display that community lot -- its structure, furnishings, all of the Sims who visit the lot or walk by it while you're there -- into the box, again, without removing anything it had previously loaded. Then you change to a different family, and the game dumps in everything needed to display THAT lot. Etc.

Eventually, if you do the above a lot, the box is going to get full, so stuff is going to get pushed out of the box as new stuff gets dumped in. And it seems to dump randomly; it's not necessarily the first stuff loaded that gets dumped first. And the stuff that gets pushed out? Is forgotten by the game, AND IT WON'T LOAD AGAIN because, paradoxically, the game still thinks those textures are loaded. All of those now-missing textures that the game still thinks are there but really aren't? Will render as flashing pink because the game can't find them. This is what I mean by "texture memory processing issues." It is inherent to the game. It was deliberately done this way to cache as much texture as possible, in order to reduce lot-loading times and strain on 2004-era video cards. No one in 2003 when the game was in development dreamed that the game would still be played so much 16 years later and/or that people would be shoving it full to the eyeballs of high-res crap in an attempt to make it look like Skyrim or something. The game really isn't meant for that, and game developers aren't clairvoyant. So, you can't escape this issue. You can mitigate it, to a point, though, by:

--Force the game to use more texture memory, but even this has a limit. You can still pink even if you have a supercomputer with a video card that cost a gazillion dollars. It'll just take longer. Because, as I said, it's a problem inherent to the game, ultimately. Doesn't matter what hardware you have. So for anyone who has those new 2000-series NVIDIA cards: Don't be smug.

--Monitor and check what you download and use in your neighborhoods carefully. The best way to do that is to open stuff you download in SimPE and look at the texture sizes. Or, if you can't/don't want to do that, just look at file sizes. The vast majority of a piece of CC's file size is its texture image(s). So, the bigger the file size, the more space that piece of CC is going to take up when it gets dumped into the box. By far the biggest culprits are custom hairs (most of which have 1024x1024 textures and I've even seen ones that use 2048x2048 textures lately, so there goes a chunk right there, every time the game displays a Sim it hasn't displayed before, just from their hair) and, lately, high-res neighborhood pretty-fying stuff like high-res skies/horizons/terrain defaults and high-res, lit-up neighborhood deco, and those pretty, pretty trees of Criquette's and stuff like that. (So, pretty much all the stuff in the video of this thread's original post. You may not need "a good computer" to use all that stuff, but you will definitely be bringing the flashing pink down on your head faster.)

--Be careful of how you play in a session. Shorter sessions obviously won't be as vulnerable to pinking as marathon ones, as the whole issue is a cumulative one. And if you're treading a fine texture-size line, limit community lot visits per session, as those add stuff to the texture-memory box quickly, with the way that lot visitors come and go and the way that some players cycle through a lot of them.

--Make compromises. If you want the pretty, pretty neighborhood, be more careful of what you put on your Sims. Go easy on the hair, check texture sizes of the clothing you have and also the accessories. Some of the custom jewelry out there now is ridiculous, for instance, both in poly count (which is a whole different issue) and texture size, which is the issue at hand. Also, check texture sizes on some of those pretty, pretty furniture conversions from newer games. Some of them are huuuuuuuuuuge! On the other hand, if pretty Sims are more important to you, then go easy on the pretty, pretty neighborhood stuff. If you want it all (like me) then be careful of how you play AND accept that you may have to do a lot of exiting and reloading the game, as doing that empties the box and you start again. In that case, you might want to limit how much CC you have, overall, keep it to just stuff that you use often, to reduce game-loading times.

So, um, yeah. There's that.

EDIT to add to an already stupid-long post, sorry:


The way to message someone on Tumblr without having an account is to go to their blog and look for a link that says something like "Ask me anything." Depending on the person's theme, it can be hard to find and some people don't allow anonymous asks and some people limit asks to mutuals only, meaning you have to have a Tumblr and be following the person and they have to be following you. ....Which, as Charity posted is the case with Dreadpirate, alas. I, however, am a mutual with her, so if you'd like me to pass along a question when you get your other issue solved, I'd be happy to do so. (There's a character limit, I think ~500 characters, so keep that in mind. )

^ One method to the madness is to have your CC separated by theme and time of year, or any other method that works, so your game doesn't have to load up all those items you only use occasionally.

Put all the holiday items you only use once a year in one easily removable folder, constumes you may only occasionally use in another folder, or your medival stuff separated from the modern stuff. That way your game doesn't have to load those thousands of Christmas items when you're playing summer, or all those hundreds of medieval clothing items in your modern game.

One way is to have several different themed games. All you need to do is to rename the "The Sims 2" folder in Documents, run the game, copy the folder and rename it to whatever theme you want it to be, and then set them up separately. The game named "The sims 2" is the one that'll run when you start your game, so you can name the others something like "The Sims 2 Medieval" or "The Sims 2 Future" or whatever else you want. Very nice method if you have enough space on your computer.

Look at me! Replying to myself!

I'm doing so to say that I downloaded the DR sky and opened it up to take a look at the possibilities of making some new ones because I'm kind of digging that idea. And, as more info in the "texture economy" discussion of DR vs skyboxes and pink flashing in general, here are the file sizes of the stuff needed for the DR sky. All of it is texture and it's already Compressorized (I know because I tried to compress it again):

Total compressed file size: ~8.5MB, so the actual file size that gets dumped into texture memory as the sky cycles through all of its states is probably about twice that. I know from experience that skybox files compress by about 50%, so I'm figuring the same for the DR, since it's all just texture.
Total compressed size of a skybox: It varies by skybox, but most of mine are about 2MB, compressed, so about a quarter the size of the default.

Now, if one were to use the default and also a skybox (if you want a different look for a particular neighborhood), then you're dumping both the above amounts into texture memory, so probably about 20MB. Which isn't terrible if you've got a few GB to work with but is more than half of what you have to play with if you're still on the game's 32MB default setting.

But if you throw in a high-res terrain default...Well, my lush one is 6MB, compressed, and I think it was 11MB uncompressed. And you probably don't want to know about road defaults. CuriousB's (which is what I use) weighs in at 18MB COMPRESSED, closer to 40MB uncompressed, because road defaults have upwards of 20-some textures, and all of them are each 512x512 in size in CuriousB's and most other custom ones. (Maxis's are 256x256, for the record, so that still adds up to quite a bit.) And then if you add a horizon, seasonal ones run about 10MB, compressed. The texture repository for GCP's popular seasonal fields? 12MB, compressed. Just the terminal for Criquette's airport set? 7MB, compressed. Criquette's trees? About 22MB for the set of 6, compressed...and then about the same again if you use the default that Lowedeus made that put those textures on the Maxis "forests," too. (Note: I'm not criticizing any of this. I use all this stuff, myself, and I love it all and you will only be able to separate it from me by ripping it out of my cold, dead hands! But I'm aware of it, is the point.)

You can see how it easily piles up just from hood deco. And then if you actually play and don't just look at and take pictures of the pretty, pretty neighborhood, and you have dozens of Sims wearing hairs that are 1MB apiece, not to mention their clothing/accessories and their skintones...which are about 4x bigger, at least, than hairs, so if you have a lot of custom skins on the Sims wandering around your hoods...Yeah. Pinkity-pink-pink-pink! And we haven't even added in build/buy textures yet!

All that being said, I think there's some bit of "translation" or compression that the game does between yanking the file and actually putting it in the game, making stuff take up less room, so perhaps the compressed numbers above are more reflective of what's actually being put into the game. But it's still proportional and in some cases the compressed number is still big. Some CC is much bigger than other CC, and if you're worried about system resource usage, you'd be wise to be aware of stuff like this. Think before you download/use, if you're concerned about this stuff. If you're not....Well, carry on.

Do we know if compressing files actually have an impact of what gets loaded into the texture memory? Has anyone actually tested this, or can share some knowledge?

I compress the files I make mostly out of neccessity, because otherwise they'd take up a ridicolously large amount of space. If it also can help on texture memory, then maybe more people would start doing it.

I've learned after some trial and failure that if there is unused space in an UV-map, it's a good idea to flood-fill it with white or black, because then the files will be smaller. The more detail there is in a texture, the larger the compressed filesize will be.

Just a few observations, and depending a little on the mesh - an uncompressed recolor file with a 512x512 map is usually 250-500 kb. An 1024x1024 map is roughly 1000-1500kb. A 2048x2048 map is roughly 2-5 MB. Recolors of the same item (objects) tend to have the exact same filesize when uncompressed. The polycount for the mesh also influences the filesize. Small polycount has little to no effect on the size, but a very high polycount will make the mesh file much larger. Not as much as bigger textures, though.

@Sunrader
Can I ask you, where did you make the change? Silly question I know, but in which of the packs...M&G, AL...? I also have the Store edition which I use to start the game, so maybe in there as well.
I just opened my config folder (Documents) and it says 32mb. Like you, I never had flashing pink, but this makes me wonder.

I do not know, but I do not believe so, no. However, I suspect that if one doesn't compress one's files, then possibly the game compresses them in some manner, anyway, before loading them into the texture memory. If this is so, then it's possible that using compressed files might help with neighborhood- and lot-loading times, if it's less work for the game. Probably has no effect on game-loading time, which is what more people seem to fuss about. Anyway, I suspect that the compressed file size is a more accurate measure of what's going into the game in terms of texture memory usage.. And you're right that other stuff makes up some of that size -- meshes, animations, stuff like that -- but for most things, the texture is most of the file size.

Again, this is not something I know for sure and I don't know that anyone CAN know. But given even just the texture sizes of basegame stuff when it comes to the neighborhood view, it seems to me that the game is doing some sort of compressing or else people would be pinking even when playing a vanilla game, if their neighborhoods are big/detailed enough. Because some Maxis stuff is pretty resource-eating, too.

Aha. Thanks, Charity, I didn't find that. And thanks, iCad, I'll keep your offer in mind for later.

I do suspect that smaller files will help with loading times. Maybe not if it's just a small amount of files, but if you compress as much as possible, there's got to be less for the computer to read. We're probably talking microseconds here, but it does add up. Enough files, and you may shave off some minutes from the loading time.

It would be interesting to see the difference between loading times for a CC folder with only uncompressed files, and the same folder with only compressed files (but if anyone decides to try, make sure delete cache files and thumbnail files before each try, and do a game restart from machine restart, because the game does load a bit quicker the second time around even with the cache cleared). Same on whether it affects texture memory and pink.flashing.

File names and subfoldering probably also has something to say with loading times.

I haven't had any pink-flashing issues on my laptop, but I've usually kept the CC around 5-12 GB which loads in 5-20 min, and I've got Win7 (8 GB RAM), which generally isn't too bad with the pink-flashing. My desktop has Vista (only 4 GB RAM), and I've had the pink issue for years, but I've used 20-35 GB of CC, so that might explain most of the problem. And now they both keep freezing/crashing/pixellating, so there's that...

I'm planning to buy a new computer sometime very soon, but does anyone here have any experience with TS2 and the Nvidia 2000 series (since it was mentioned somewhere above)? Considering it, but they're a bit expensive, so I don't want to buy something that doesn't work at all for what I want to use it for. Also wondering if it's possible to make the game access more than 4 GB, or if that's still the set upper limit. With the over-the-top graphic cards accessible nowadays, it would be fun to have the option of going a little over the top. I'm not a fan of the pink-flashing, and I'm considering starting my story hood over from scratch with some of the tricks in the video above, so it looks like a proper neighborhood (right now it's just a modified Pleasantville I've used since 2007 for various things, so it's a bit crappy). I'm a bit tired of the old lot imposters and whatnots (they look terrible).

I have UC and I followed the directions in the link we talked about above - so I changed C:\Program Files (x86)\Origin Games\The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection\Fun with Pets\SP9\TSData\Res\Config\Graphics Rules.sgr
I have only ever changed one Graphics Rules file, the, I guess, final one? If that's been wrong, I guess it's good to find out now.

iCad, I really appreciate that explanation. I do best if I know how things work. Even now with the recent additions, my Downloads, due for a purge, is 1.70 GB and the game loads in about a minute, so still ok, I guess.

While mine is about 15 GB and I do sometimes get pink flashing so I can use all the help that I can get. I tried the horizon's yesterday but I am not that keen on them. Pretty yes but they look too much like Sims 3 to me.

I sort of did that, once, when I was reinstalling on a new machine anyway, just out of curiosity. I downloaded a bunch, maybe 2 or 3 gigabytes, of random CC, mostly CAS stuff since those are the bigger files, and put it in to test game-load time. Some of it was probably already compressed because a lot of creators do that now, myself included, but I know that some of it wasn't. Long story short, there wasn't too much of a difference in load time between the uncompressed and compressed folder. MAYBE a minute. It might make a difference if you're talking about 20 or 30GB of stuff, but with just a relatively small amount, not so much.

Reducing the amount of subfolders DOES help. I had a noticeable difference when I dumped a lot of the subfolders I had and put stuff into larger, less-organized folders. But there's also disadvantages to disorganization, too. So...toss-up. And, again, it's probably something you're only going to notice with higher amounts of CC. The game loads fast with less than about 2GB regardless. I've always kept mine at less than 10, usually about 6-8, and un-foldering did speed up the loading, so I would imagine that if you've got a 30GB, heavily-subfoldered Downloads, you'd probably notice a big difference. So then I guess you'd have to decide if it's a good enough trade-off to overcome the disadvantages of disorganization, with that much CC. Comparatively, I don't have a lot, and it was never rigorously organized anyway, so for me I left it less-foldered. I've heard mixed reports about getting rid of special characters, some saying there was a big difference, some saying there was no difference. I've never done that in a big way, so I have no evidence to offer.

I've no idea if there was any effect on texture memory or pink flashing due to compressing, though. This was years ago, before the pink thing was a prevalent problem...which is likely happening BECAUSE of the push for pretty neighborhoods and high-res stuff in combination with pretty Sims.



I think there's a thread in the Help forum where someone had gotten a machine that had one and they had problems with pink flashing. But I don't know if it was problems with that particular card or just the usual problems with new computers and Win10 and all that. But I do know the game can't use more than 4GB of RAM because it's a 32-bit game. You need 64-bits to use more RAM than 4GB.

Yeah, I remember now it was the 32 bit problem... I doubt Origin/EA would ever update TS2 to 64bit, so I guess 4GB is what we've go to play with.

Now when Win7 is losing support, and Win8 is probably on the fast track to also lose support in a few years, I've got a feeling I can't do much else than getting Win10. I know it's possible to do a virtual machine with Win7 or some such, but unfortunately I'm not that technically advanced...

I am however going all-out on my CC reorganizing, and I've already started. I'm roughly 90% done with my old stuff, with a few files left, and I've recently fixed up some old items to categorize them a bit better (price, category, etc.), plus I managed to cut down subfoldering quite a bit, and renamed a bunch of my own files so they'd make more sense. My CC folders tend to end up like a mess of "test, tested, CAS, CAStested, Hacks, NEW" and so forth, and it's fine for my current laptop (which I've mostly used for random screenshots and testing CC), but perhaps not for the new one on the horizon...

Yes, I was impressed when I came back to The Sims 2 a couple of years ago with all of the graphical overhauls. It's a shame that nothing can be done for the dull lighting on lots. No matter how good you could make the textures, the lighting on houses and indoors is so, well, dismal.