Actually, I used to create graphics for TV in around 2007, and we generally did make stuff in low/crappy resolution, because once you converted it to TV format it would be fuzzy anyway due to the way old TV screens rendered things. This was before even 720p was standard, remember! "HD" was in its infancy for the home market.

It also took a REEEEEEEALLY long time to process video back then. Computers simply weren't as powerful as they are today. There is no sense shooting a TV commercial in really crisp high definition when it would mean sacrificing processing time and smoothness (higher graphic settings= more stutter) when nobody is going to see the difference anyway because only about 2% of people have a high definition capable TV and you have to pay extra for high definition channels.

The trailers I've seen have been downscaled to a small size for the internet, which didn't offer a lot of bandwidth when online video first appeared. They also suffer from transcoding because YouTube has changed its storage formats over time. A good TV had resolution you can see on DVDs, not early internet uploads that have degraded over time.

I do remember occasionally receiving TV shows at half the resolution with every pixel doubled (similar to those internet videos, but without the compression noise and color bleeding), and couldn't tell on an basic 21'' TV, until I got a capture card for the computer. Common TVs also cropped off a wide frame of the already small screen area into overscan.

Anti-aliasing helps at any picture size. A TV wants the picture somewhat smoother in the vertical direction to avoid individual lines flickering.

Witch-vampires (= heretics) are awesome. They can conveniently summon their victims with a spell anytime and just eat them. (I have a mod that forces vampires to drink blood to fill their hunger.)

I'm on a bit of a modern urban city building kick lately for some reason... not complaining, since some of the things I'm working on have been WIPs for a really long time (another skyscraper apartment block, and my Central Park lots), but I'm puzzled why it's suddenly "the thing" for me to work on.

That’s just how creativity works. Your backbrain’s been working away on it, and when it reached the point of needing to make something in the exterior world, it let you know.

I've been experiencing bad crashing and pink flashing, that's why I've stopped playing for some months before being inspired again to get into the game. I THINK I fixed it yesterday through some tutorials I followed, I did some playtesting on Plumbtales' Bluewater Village, which was crashing before I tried these tutorials. I've been busy at work so I haven't had time to do more testing, but I'm hopeful!! I really want to get back into the game, build lots, continue my projects and start a BACC... It's a pity The Sims 2 needs so many fixes.

@Khal Ulti What tutorials? If you are so inclined

What fixed The Sims 2 on my laptop was reapplying the DXVK fix that makes old videogames run on modern computers, plus lowering texture memory to 1000 on the Graphics Rules file: it was more than 4000 and I guess that was probably the cause, because apparently DXVK is incompatible with values of texture memory higher than 2000.
The tutorial I followed is here, it's a Google Doc: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...6XjQMltapwfMh0i

I needed custom tables, so I was shocked to find stuff from 2014 in the front page here at MTS in the dining tables section! There really isn't much in here, so I had to go digging elsewhere, which led me to *shudders* TSR... Honestly, TSR isn't even half bad, there is some decent content lost in there. If only their user experience wasn't actual hell it could be much better. 15 seconds for each download (and you can't tab out), multiple recolours or items of the same set spread out clogging the downloads page, only one picture per download, this is legit insanity.

Finishing up a couple more buildings for Cascadia, I'm realizing that I'm running out of ways to include Gotham flavor in the right parts of this city... Now I'm desperately trying to think of cool locations that could do with a bit of Batman-esque neo-Gothic design that I have left to build.

Just watched a video about converting clothes from sims 4 to sims 2 and while I was confident at the beginning I lost my enthusiasm more and more throughout the video. I don't think I will be able to ever do this.

It's been around 2 years since I created my custom neighborhood, and I love it so much I haven't been able to play other neighborhoods for long because I always want to leave and go back to my custom hood. I've created several other hoods and though none of them has caught my attention for longer than a week, I do keep those saves in case I'll ever want to go back to them.

Anyway! I've been itching to start my own version of "Strangeview", where everyone from Pleasantview and Strangetown live together in the same main hood. This means recreating these characters and finding a good terrain that fits it, but I'm really excited about this (even if I end up going back to my custom hood after a week of playing it)

I hear that American fighter jets have shot down a balloon-like unidentified flying object over Michigan. It had strings hanging down from it. Could the object have looked like this?

The creators of Sims 2 were definitely Pink Floyd fans- we have Algie the pig, and Battersea Power Station!

Is there a mod that removes the flying pig from the water tower? I recently discovered that there is crashed pig balloon on the FreeTime train table.

"isometric" is a word I knew when I was at school, but had long since forgotten.

Andrew says he's not surprised. He maintains that teens like himself know far more in total than adults and elders like me. We remember a few things that we find useful in life and in work, but we forget the rest of stuff we learned at school. Andrew says, "OK, I concede that my physics teacher knows more about physics than me. (I even know that that last bit isn't grammatical English -- and remember that my mother tongue is Simlish, not English.) But my friends and I have to know enough about all the subjects to pass our exams -- including all the stuff that my physics teacher has forgotten. I'm sure I know more in total than he does. We teens are the true Knowledge Sims.

"Discuss."

[Maybe this belongs more logically in the Random Thoughts thread, but it was that word "isometric" that set off our train of thought. - AG]
[I originally posted this in the in the "Look at This Awesome Thing I Found!" thread, but, following my own logic, I've moved it here. - AG]

Fires caused by lightning in wet trees are unrealistic, as it was raining alcohol. I was unlucky to get a fire, the rain immediately ended and didn't extiguish the fire. It almost burned my door down, and gave memories to walkbyes. I forgot to put the silly lightning rod until now. When the fire does extinguish, the is perfectly fine.

Unfortunately where I live, fires caused by lightning during a thunderstorm are an annual concern... I would LOVE it if you were right and it was unrealistic, but sadly, if the environment's dry enough before the storm, a lightning strike can absolutely start a fire, briefly-wet tree or no.

Maybe they should be more rare then, or not be extinguished almost immediately. If a short duration of rain is enough to stop the fire, then the same rain would also have prevented it from occuring in the first place.

Lightning set a tree on fire in my complex, in Tshwane, Gauteng, South Africa, just last week. The janitor put it out with the hosepipe and water! But, yes, when we get rain storms, trees do catch fire while it is raining.

I never know what to do with a simple lot idea that comes to me out of nowhere and gets completed in the space of a single weekend... like, most of my projects take at LEAST a couple months, so it can't possibly be finished, can it? But at the same time part of the idea of this lot is in its simplicity, so I can't really do much with it or I'll lose that...

I didn't like that on my current playthrough everyone's names in downtown were different. That is very confusing. So I renamed every person to the correct names or sometimes gave them double names when I clearly remember what they were called before. With so many staff members, maxis could have asked everyone to create just 1 or 2 characters with a complete set of properties, face, name, career, personality, hobby and clothing categories to fill up the neighborhood instead of the lifeless random.

But now, when I have an object crashes, I can't tell who is responsible when I'm getting a report about User 123 - Aurora or something like that. Why are they even "users" at all, lol.

If you rename them through SimPE then the error reports will show the old name; to fix this you could rename them using a mod such as the FFS Debugger (batbox).

Yes, the Baby Name dialog would rename the object. But it was more convenient to rename downtownies sequentially, with the original neighborhood as reference.

I just had a realization and I might need someone to confirm it for me

I have the mod in my game that stops it from creating apartment neighbors, so if your playables aren't occupying the apartments, they remain vacant. However, a while ago, I created some townies for my hood and I downloaded the mod that makes normal townies be the neighbors in apartments instead of the social groups ones; but when I tried it in-game, the townies never showed up. I thought something had gone wrong and I just never tried again.

Recently, though, after watching some videos, I realized that maybe the mod that stops the game from spawning the social class townies maybe stops the vacant rooms to be filled at all? And that's why my townies aren't occupying them? I want to try this soon but I haven't been playing much these days because I'm busy with work :/