Managed to get Hoodchecker, SimPE and the other editor programs working again... No idea why or how it refused to work for so long.

Also it seems I've hit the 4gb limit with my Rematra hood, it tends to crash after playing for an indeterminate amount of time, regardless of if in hood or lot. It doesn't load half the details half the time, semi-occasionally pink flashes and even red flashes. If only Sims 2 Ultimate Collection was 64bit...

Sounds like your video card is failing, to be honest. You might check into that.

@sims2christain Welcome back! I'm glad you've got SimPE etc. working again. And I hope you get your game to run properly again soon.

And thanks for posting. It means I can answer Charity and simsample without double posting!

If I had played by normal Maxis aging, he would have been pushing up daisies for years now. I'm glad I've kept him alive -- and young. Instead I regularly play Joan Baez singing Bob Dylan's Forever Young to him. Sometimes I just read or recite the words to him:
"May you stay forever young!"


Well, it maybe doesn't quite stand still, but it certainly creeps forward at an exceedingly slow pace. I might say a "funereal pace", but I fear the good folks of Veronaville may have forgotten what funerals are. There certainly have been none since Andrew, Gloria and I arrived in the town twelve years ago. But when I look through the memories and biographies of the pre-mades, it seems that Capps and Montys were killing one another at a rate of knots until shortly before we arrived. Hence we have teenagers staying with grandparents because their parents are dead. Back then funeral processions in the streets of Veronaville must have been an everyday sight.

The transformation since then has certainly been a change for the better. Since then Veronaville has become a very desirable place to live, which keeps me busy in CAS. With the downtown area turning into a centre of gay culture, Veronaville has become particularly attractive to the young LGBT set. This has led to a lot of new-build housing in the fast growing Monopolis suburb.


A few months ago I physically broke my Simming laptop by trying to fold the screen back further than it would go. Somehow it has continued to limp on since then, and I've been able to play, but I intend to takr it to a repair shop this week to have it fixed before Christmas. This is likely to mean that I'll absent from the forum for a few days. I'll be back ASAP.

Don't worry about my game; it's well backed up.

Oh drat, that's a bit of a bind! I hope they can fix it and you can get back very soon.

"Can't believe I haven't had a fatal error in months"

Hope you knocked on wood there.

Red/pink flashing and crashing can have several causes - wrong settings in Graphic Rules, low-powered computer specs (CPU, GPU, RAM...), too much CC, CC issues (especially particular types of red/pink flashing linked to shader-dependent mods or shader/lighting mods), lot size (large lots), weather (snow on the ground), "helper" mods/programs with issues or being wrongly installed (DXVK, 4GB, GRM, or similar - An older version of GRM caused pink-flashing in my game, and an older version of DXVK made my game crash randomly until I removed it. The 4GB seems easy to install, but if your game is in Program Files, you need admin access to apply it to the files, and some things can interfere with it, too). or a combination of all of them. Not always easy to diagnose, either.

Not loading details sounds like either CC issues related to needing shaders on (CAS issues?), or wrong Graphic Rules settings, or the game not properly reading the graphic card. I've seen this once, back when I was setting up my old gaming laptop. My game wasn't properly recognizing the graphic card or some such, and the first time I played it wasn't properly rendering details, so objects would disappear, sims' heads disappeared, and all kinds of bizarre things (pics below). Got it fixed, and the game worked fine again.

This one
https://s26.postimg.cc/d72sffx61/Screen_Shot001_wtf.png
Was supposed to look like this:
https://s26.postimg.cc/ylu5zykrt/Screen_Shot009_red.png

If you've got the mod by LD that "removes pink-flashing, that one can also cause items to disappear (sounds like it just makes pink-flashing items appear invisible).

Figuring out why the game is troublesome isn't easy. I spent way too long figuring out why mine was pink-souping and crashing all over the place (over a year), and it turned out I should've just skipped using GRM + DXVK, done a couple other fixes instead, and it probably would've been fine...

The surrounding area too — I've had pink flashing caused by too much neighbourhood deco and have to bump down the lot view settings when playing Downtown.

Given Rematra itself has around 150 lots and the game runs nearly 3.0 GB when loading the main hood. I'd suspect High poly CC and lots being the primary issue.
my personal unclean version of Nga moutere ngaro - Lost Atoll Islands and my testing hoods run without issue.
I've got Lazy Duchess's mods which is why they stop rendering instead of pink flashing everywhere.

Probably well past time to rebuild the hood.

Yeah I have an apartment building in a densely filled area of my downtown and I’ve had to put view settings at small and in some cases turn off neighbors if I want to throw a big party or something RAM-heavy like that.

Following on from this, I hit another bug today:
My sims pet wolf died and instead of being successfully put into a hell lot as it was intended it had got lost to the void. Interestingly, it was now part of two Family Information(s) (FAMI). One was the 'hell' lot, the other was a unique, new family as part of the subhood 0x0000000C. It was listed as a member of the hell lots residents (the tab thing before you enter lot), but once you entered, the pet was neither present in the sim list nor on the lot.

I removed it from the hell lot fami, leaving it only in the unique one it had created and changed the subhood to 0x00000001, and thus it now showed up in the families list where you move them in, I then merged it with the hell lot, and no problem, the ghost showed in that lot as it should, and its own unique family was deleted.

Now, I began to wonder is this a hood corruption or one of my other mods conflicting with hatch's stuff? So, I straight up deleted the "The Sims™ 2 Ultimate Collection" folder from EA Games, and let the game cook a new hood. I loaded up a pre-made hood (I didn't even change resolution ), entered a family, invited a sim they knew over, proposed move in, it was accepted, saved, exit lot, re-enter, sure enough, the moved in sim is toast and not present in the sim list.

Check with SimPE and yup... Sim has it's own family instance as part of subhood 0x0000000C and is not listed in move-in able sims in the UI. This behaviour matches what I had seen in my own hood, thus ruling out all my other mods + my hood itself as the cause as it too, turned into an apple crumble.

But this is progress, it helps me narrow it down, if only a little. Next is to test with base game alone, no hatch EP. If that works, it's comparing time to look deeper into that moving logic.

Meanwhile I can only think what in the name of apple pie is causing this? Like seriously, what the fudge stick?

(Once again, mostly notes for myself and slight rant. )

What sort of evil sends a puppy to Hell?!

It's well reasoned, the puppy didn't once show up to church with the other sims, nor did it practice any form of religious alliance with their god, and had poor adherence to the rules, thus must be punished.

Thus, when it died of old age, hell was awaiting for its sinful soul.

A Satanic evil? Maybe the Devil wants a puppy.

To be fair I can't see anything in iforgot's post to suggest that the pet wolf was a puppy (or a cub?). Maybe he/she died of old age after a long and wicked life spreading ruin and scattering ban. Though, to be honest I'm not comfortable with the idea that an animal can be wicked. I seem to be getting into dubious areas of theology where I feel very uneasy. Maybe my Sims and I would be better sticking to safer areas of traditional theology, like discussing how many angels can dance on the point of a needle. . .


I'm still here! I ran out of time on Wednesday. So I think I'll take it to the repair shop on Monday -- after I've run my weekly full backup on Sunday night. I really want it repaired before Christmas (when of course I hope to spend some quality time with Andrew and Gloria ).

P.S. I wrote this before I saw iforgot's reply. And by the way, I understand that some medieval theologians really did spend time debating how many angels could dance on the point of a needle. Maybe those of you who play medieval 'hoods can include that in your game??

I call dogs of all ages 'puppy'. XD My 5 year old cat still gets called a kitten.

I never knew that Chris Hatch's EP included animals in religion. Poor dogs and cats can't really be held to the same rules as human sims!

There needs to be a nature deity who takes all animals under her wing, even if they were aggressive, trashcan knocker overers. XD

Joking aside, the hell lot really isn't that bad. It has beds, a pet food bowl, pet toys, pet bed, functional kitchen, living area and topped off with always burning trees outside. And! he is also not alone, there is another sim there too!

On the other hand if he went to heaven, his got a nice beach house, sure. But said beach house as yet has no furnishing's, that's no bathrooms, no kitchens, no pet beds, no beds, etc. It's simply an empty shell. It's heaven, you don't need those things in heaven.

He can also go out haunting his past owners home, where if he went to heaven? No ability to haunt.

So, after all, hell is where the fun is!

It's also useful as it ensures all ghosts are assigned to a real lot, so you can go in and check they are still there, and even play with them for a while if you miss them.


Interesting concept, but does the game allow animals to be the only residents in a lot? That sounds like it might be an issue in that case.

I've been running my game for the past week, and I had the vague feeling I was missing something..something very integral to the game itself.

Funny how routine some things become-I'd forgotten to install the Hoodchecker into my new game! Upon realizing my error I had to download it (again) and install it into the new set up.

Running it for the first time, I remembered how cluttered up the game could get-and how the program probably is the one reason why I still have a playable game. It cleaned up tons of crap!

Hunter Long brought his girlfriend Josephine Carrington the Bluewater Bistro to propose and the first person to show up at the lot as a visitor was her mother Rose.

Once I got over my initial shock, I decided to not interpret it as overbearing helicopter mom and imagine Hunter invited her as a surprise for Josephine so they could celebrate after.

You can propose sitting down?!

Yes, it's called surprise engagement.

I love that the proposing sim always makes a nervous face

That's right; you can get engaged while sitting down:


Oberon and Titania - 8th March 2013


Andrew and Julian - 3rd January 2020

Apologies for the poor picture quality in the Summerdreams' picture. I had barely been playing for three months, and hadn't yet realised that I could set picture quality high for in-game pictures, even on a low end computer like my Packard Bell netbook,.

After decorating the entire perimeter of Cornerstone Condominiums with cornices I hope I never have to open the Architecture tab again

Aww- Andrew and Julian!

Hard to say for sure with 6 months being the longest time to look back over download statistics, but I'm pretty sure every December my three Christmas lots all see a consistent bump in popularity!