I realised I hadn't updated the lot imposters for most of my lots since I've started using Sims2RPC, which explains why there were no noticeable differences in lot imposters. So this afternoon I set out to update my entire hood, and it was great at first! The difference in some lots was amazing, I was loving it. That was, until I entered the final lot I had to update (probably a coincidence that it was that lot in specific), where suddenly everything was pink. It was the first time I had ever experienced the dreaded pink flashing in my game, and I'm sure it was because of all the new high-quality imposters. The game crashed and I changed Sims2RPC settings down to "optimised", then booted up the game. The entire hood was pink, I started updating lots one by one in the hopes that that would fix the pink - it seemed to at first, but the game crashed again when loading the 2nd lot. Slowly, one by one (as the game crashed either while loading the neighbourhood or while loading the 2nd lot - the 1st seemed to load, but it consistently crashed when going for another in the same session). I dropped it even further to "classic", bulldozed unoccupied lots of which I have a copy in the bin, deleted my hood deco and slowly made my way through the lot imposters. Still the same. Then I came across this "fix" for pink flashing from Lazy Duchess which did help me load the hood and its lots, but it's like a ghost town now, everything was invisible. I loaded one of the lots, one of the "heavier" imposters IMO and updated it - the lot itself was empty except for walls, floors and a few lights. The neighbourhood then looked fine, imposters, water, deco, everything was back (though I'm yet to know if it's just this once or for good), except the Sims which all remained invisible. I loaded another lot to update the imposter and once again everything was invisible, objects, Sims, thumbnails...

So what do I do now? How does this stop being a ghost town? Here's an image of what's happening, the lot is one I have uploaded here if you want to compare it with how it should look.



EDIT: Using the mirror (one of the few objects I can still see, at least the back), I was able to update the thumbnail of a Sim. There are a few passerby Sims as well, they seem mostly fine. Using some (few) objects also brought them back, namely a bed and a crib.

Lot Imposters and lot view distance set to highest increases pink flashing. The mod by Lazy Duchess to fix pink flashing, simply disables textures. So everything will be invisible. You'll have to reduce view distance and lot imposters. 4to2 hood deco tends to be high poly with very large textures. 2048x2048 rather than the 512x512 that the game is designed for.

I'm back at classic and I've been updating the lot imposters back to the classic setting. Shadows I haven't had any problems so far. Tbh I don't see why my hood would be lost, the pink flashing is a texture memory issue and the mod from Lazy Duchess simply ignores it and turns it invisible. It seems to have stopped the crashing (my big issue before), so I can now update my lot imposters.


Yes, I have been reverting back to the classic lot imposters, but I haven't yet changed every single lot. I've also deleted most of my hood deco, though not much 4t2 stuff was there anyway. I know the mod doesn't really fix the pink flashing (hence the quotation marks), but it seems to have stopped the crashing which was making it impossible to update the imposters. Some of the lots are now fine, both unoccupied and occupied, including the one I showed in the original picture (and the Sims there are also fine again). But there's at least one lot I tested still invisible and with invisible Sims, not even changing the appearance in the mirror has fixed it. I will continue updating the imposters and look for progress, though I would have thought that by now it should have been fixed given the problems really only came after specifically the final lot was updated.

Now, something I found in my laptop (not where this happened, that was in my desktop, so it'll have to wait until later) is that the game is using the integrated chip instead of my dedicated graphics card, which makes sense why I felt it had been a bit laggy in my laptop despite having an even more powerful graphics card than the older desktop. I will have to check the logs in my desktop, but since this same thing already happened years ago (Cities: Skylines was extremely laggy after ~40k pop for no apparent reason, turned out it was inadvertently using the integrated chip instead of the graphics card) I wouldn't rule it out.

After windows updates or GPU updates, it does seem like sometimes TS2 will revert to integrated! So always a good thing to check logs to make sure it's still behaving the way you told it to.

So, good news. Everything seems to be in working order now that I've managed to stop the crashing and manually updated every lot imposter, including even that pesky lot which remained completely invisible before. I'll make a backup and test the waters with the "optimised" setting, then add the hood deco and lots I deleted and hopefully everything will work out fine.

Now, one question that arises: the texture memory in both my laptop and my desktop is still set to 32MB despite both now using the dedicated graphics card again, and I've seen screenshots of people with 4095MB there. What is happening?

You have to edit the Graphics Rules to fix that.

What exactly do I need to change?

There's a guide here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/sims2help/...ics_rules_maker

I have exams the next few days so this will wait, but I'll give it a go probably in the weekend.