I've posted this same question at PlumbBob Keep, where the default replacement came from, but I thought maybe somebody here might know something useful. This DR is supposed to make the standard Sims 2 bowling lane (came with nightlife?) turn into the medieval game of skittles. It basically makes the ball and pins look like they're carved out of natural wood, turns the return apparatus into some straw-packed crates, and vanishes the lane itself to make it look like you're bowling on grass (if you place it outside, that is). In my game, although I certainly made sure to grab all the parts of the download, the bowing lane is unchanged. Since it's a DR - and you can only have one - I'm wracking my brain and scouring my downloads folder, looking to see if there's possibly some DR for the bowling game that I already installed. I can very vaguely picture a mod of some sort that I might have installed, to do with the way Sims play the game. Something from More Awesome Than You? I don't know, and if so, I don't know if it would've been a DR. I tend to treat those with a lot of caution, and don't install many of them. Can anyone out there think of any bowling mods DR or otherwise, that might interfere with my using the medieval DR from mortia? I've also sent mortia a message at the Keep, but I figure it sometimes takes a village to solve these problems.

Search your Downloads folder for
*bowling
*lane
*pins
(and other possible options).
Not sure if this is the same for Mac as for Windows, but the * does a deeper search - it finds words even if they're buried in text (a normal search without an asterisk for "bowling" would find "bowlingDR", but not "DRbowling")

If you still can't find it, take a picture of the bowling lane/pins/ball and post it here. Much easier to find something with a picture.

(and if all else fails, put "zzz" at the front of the filename of the one you want to keep, "zzz_Filename.package", and put it directly into the Downloads folder. This should make the file load after whatever other DR you have. Would at the very least test if the DR works for you).

Also, delete cache files. Plus, if you've only recently put the DR into your game, the thumbnail might not be updated, so try out if the object works even if the thumbnail shows the wrong one.

Well, for future reference, no - the asterisk trick doesn't work on Macs. The only thing called "bowling" in my downloads is the medieval DR that I just installed. So I don't think I probably have a conflicting DR... but the "zzz" trick is worth a shot anyway; wouldn't hurt. And - I didn't think about removing the cache files... further bulletins to follow.

The replacement game doesn't appear in the catalog at the moment, but it's when I placed the bowling game that I saw it was just the Maxis one instead of something different. I thought a direct link to where I got the download from would be more useful than just a screenshot... but I can provide one if that'd help.

About the picture - Could be you have something that looks very much like the Maxis version, with small differences (so much you're not recognizing it to be a DR). A picture would make it easier to tell.

Do you use any recategorizers, catalog price mods, placement mods (or other mods that potetially could have OBJDs in them)? Those can act as DRs too, and override this type of DR.
It's one of the reasons forcing this one to load last might work.

You can also test without other CC than the mod (keep in mind that items placed in the installation files could still be interfering, like recategorizers).

To my knowledge, I don't use any of those things you mentioned.

I've attached screenshots of both what the medieval DR should look like, and also what I have...
The bowling ball does in fact seem to have been switched to the medieval one. But in all other respects, the game appears - to my eye - to be the Maxis one, or possibly a recolor. I will also send these pics to the folks at PBK.

The bowling lane has multiple parts, so it's possible only some are showing through.

What are your ingame settings?
Most DRs (and a lot of other CC as well) need the "Texture detail" and "object/sim detail" to be on high, or the meshes won't show up (Maxis items have low-res versions, CC don't).

Unless you're using a very old Mac version, you may be able to take screenshots by pressing Shift, Command, and 3 on your keyboard (screenshots taken with a phone or similar tend to look a bit off, so it's sometimes difficult to see the details).

If you try the loading method, or testing by just having the DR in your Downloads, you'll more easily figure out if you have anything interfering.

Re: settings, I believe Sim detail is set fairly high, as without it, I was having some serious issues getting CAS sliders to function properly. Object detail... I'll check.
--> Sim/Object was set to high; textures only medium. I cranked it up, to no avail. (see new screenshots). Maybe there's something else in my settings that you can point to? I took a pic.

Re: screenshots, yes I can take them, but... I can't post them on MTS from my laptop... the dialog is absent (old browser issue). The workaround involves sending screenshots to my phone via SFS, which I will do, provided I remember to take them. From the phone, I can post images (although other things, like typing and formatting posts, are a real pain). A bit of a process, but if you think it would help... stay tuned; I'll update this reply after I've looked into it.

Re: testing with just the DR -
If I do that, I'm not going to remove the CAS content, since I doubt anything Sim-related would screw up a DR of an object... right? It's just that whenever I've added a bunch of body-related CC back in, after removing it (e.g. for a binary sift), it takes the game like a million years to re-display said outfits in the catalog.

PS - I did put the zzz in front of the package name, and the files are sitting loose in my downloads. So it should be loading last.

Last screenshot: this is with everything taken out of my downloads except for the bowling DR packages, and my Bodyshop CC, which shouldn't have any impact. It's the Maxis bowling lane, with the medieval ball.

Are you using TeaAddicts pay to play mod? This was mentioned as an issue in discord, but I don't know if Tea patched it?

No, I don't think so. What does it do?

Should be fine (as long as you don't have any hidden DR files among them).

So this is still an issue. I posted my problem on the PBK Discord, and it was suggested that I create a "fresh copy", one which I would then install a single piece of CC: the bowling default replacement. The suggested method was as follows:

1. Re-name the folder where all my data, downloads, neighborhoods lives ("The Sims 2") This will cause the game to create a new one without any of my built-up hoods, and a brand new downloads folder. Fine, makes sense.

2. Put the bowling DR into the downloads folder, and see if it will appear (being the one and only download installed). Sounds exciting!

3. Here's the scary part, for me: Afterwards, get rid of the newly created folder, or re-name it and save it for future testing, and then... re-name the original to its original "The Sims 2" name... and somehow... by magic... the game will be able to locate it and use all the data within? And my neighborhoods will all be back, just like they were before?? I find this HIGHLY unlikely. Is that how things work? Is there a way to direct the game to use a specific Sims 2 folder? Some people claim to have several Downloads folders, one for each set of stuff, that they swap in and out. I could see that working, and ditto the neighborhoods, I can always swap in old ones when something goes horribly awry, right?

But RE-NAME the "The SIms 2" folder?? I DON'T THINK SO. Am I not better off just removing all my downloads (except for Bodyshop CC), and then putting that one bowling DR in? I've already tried that, and it made no difference.

I've already posed this question to a few people, so we'll see if that gets any results. But I thought I should update this thread with the suggestions from the folks on the Discord.

If removing all your CC made no difference already, no point doing that again.
I don't have a Mac, so ymmv, but this has worked for me for a long time now. The game will load only the save which is named exactly as EA set it up. Any save folder with an altered name is non-existent as far as the game files are concerned.

I have a number of TS2 game folders which I swap between by renaming them (slightly). Here are some of them:

The Sims™ 2 Ultimate CollectionMAIN ...this is my main game (surprise!).
The Sims™ 2 Ultimate CollectionVANILLA ...as vanilla as I can make it, anyway (still includes alterations made to ProgamFiles). This is so I can check how the game is supposed to look/work from time to time, and for testing things in the cleanest-possible environment.
The Sims™ 2 Ultimate CollectionTEST ...a messy save with all sorts of things happening, where I may or may not tidy up after testing.

Whichever one I want to load, I just remove the capitalised word from the end (~MAIN, ~TEST, ~VANILLA), and add the needed suffix to the folder was previously in use. So, if I want to test something but was playing my main game, I would add MAIN to the end of the game folder name, and delete TEST from the name of the TEST folder, making it visible to the game launcher. When I'm ready to play again, I rename the testing folder to ~TEST, and delete MAIN from the maingame...rinse and repeat.

I do it this way so as to never disturb the original naming of the game folder. I only mess with the capitalised bit on the end. Hope that helps!

I do what aeflaed does. One folder appended with -H, for my game with historical defaults, dirt roads, hiders for the space-age chairs etc; one with -M for my main game, which is overstuffed with downloads yet difficult to prune because I don't want to mess up my 14-year-old hood by removing the wrong CC and ending up with gardens full of vases; one with -LITE with only the most necessary mods and a little Maxis Match CC; one with -Bodyshop so if I only want to make sims or test out how makeup looks with my skins, I can load up faster without any Buy and Build files.

Just changing the name of the folder, so that the game can't recognise it, is faster and easier than telling the computer to cut and paste all those gigabytes of CC to a different location. I assume that if I move the files the computer just updates its file table to point to the same data, rather than copying every byte to a different part of my hard drive, but with the number of files involved that still takes a lot longer than renaming one folder. As long as you return the name of your original folder to exactly what the game is looking for, it'll read it just like before you did the test.

I have Mortia's skittles default in my historical game folder and it works just as it should for me... which I know isn't any help.

Yes. You do it by naming that folder the thing that the game expects it to be called, just like you were told to do.

Now that I've had a chance to think about this, yeah, it makes sense. The game created the folder in a certain location, which is where it will look for it every time it launches. I will give it a shot... but only because I place more trust in you than I do in my own computer.

And I'm liking the idea Aelflaed and Pebblerocker gave about having multiple folders, each with its own flavor of downloads.

UPDATE: Good news/bad news.
The re-naming thing worked seamlessly, just like you said it would. Thank you for knocking the training wheels off my bike; I needed that.
However, the result is exactly the same as before. The only thing that changed is the color of the bowling ball, which did, as advertised, take on a natural wood tone. But no invisible lane or anything like that. So I am taking this problem back where it belongs, to the Plumb Bob Keep.

Just to check, that download seems to come with a large number of files, presumably one file for each overridden texture. Did you install all of them? Or only the bowling ball package?