Sims 2 technical support

EA announced the news on its support site today , saying the company will no longer provide any new content for The Sims 2 or release any additional technical updates for the game. Of course, if you encounter an issue with the game, EA isn't turning its back to you.

As for the free upgrade to The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection, anyone who owns a digital copy of The Sims 2 will receive the premium pack for free sometime in the next five days. All you need to do is log in to Origin and visit your My Games library to see the free game. The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection, as its name suggests, is an all-encompassing bundle. This shape comes from it's mesh, which is like a 3D wire frame underneath the pretty texture you see in game.

The vertices are the points where all these virtual 'wires' meet and cross over each other, the faces are the surface spaces in between the 'wires'.

If a mesh has a large number of these then your computer has to work harder to display the mesh, it has to make many more calculations to know where every 'wire' is and what it should display where.

Different creators tend to have different ideas on what low counts and high counts are. Many artists will make objects with 10, - even 20, or more polygons, and think this is perfectly reasonable. Other artists will work tirelessly to get their objects down to under faces and vertices because they believe this was the recommended maximum suggested by the developers they're somewhat right, but also somewhat wrong about this as I shall explain below!

EA's original recommendation was to aim for Faces and Vertices per game tile which is why we also put the number of tiles in our object information.

This recommendation was made in based on the typical minimum hardware they expected most Sims 2 players with low end computers to have at the time. Our advisory is set higher than this minimum because that is fairly representative of the objects that come with the game and because it's no longer Typically our objects are of similar complexity to those that come with the game itself. That said, there is no need to worry too much about individual objects. If your game does lag then consider using smaller lot sizes and using fewer objects overall on the lot; it will make more of a difference than obsessing over the poly counts of individual objects.

The important thing to remember about recolors is that you can only use them if you have the base mesh installed in your game. The meshes should always work on their own in most cases. Any installed color options will work just like choosing colors for the game objects using the Design Mode Tool.

On some sites you might find special Repository Objects - these borrow textures from other objects, usually an object that comes with the game, but some creators like to have sets of custom objects which all share a single texture.

This is designed to save hard disk space, but it can cause complications especially for lot builders who like to share houses with custom objects, or for users who can't find the 'master' custom object which contains the texture. You will not find many such objects at Parsimonious and all those that do work this way, always include the master object in the download zip for any 'slave' objects that borrow textures. These errors are rare, but in most cases there is no fix for it without radically redesigning the objects.

Typically it seems to be certain animating textures that generate this fault. The creator of the object may have made a static recolor which uses different settings and so you can use that recolour instead to avoid the problem if you really like the object design, otherwise the only alternative is to chuck the object out.

Oddly the same settings are used by some game objects and it is a perpetual mystery to me why a custom object with those settings will flash pink, but the game object works just fine! It seems to be most prevailant amongst users with very low end graphics cards, I have not updated my affected designs on the basis that sooner or later those graphics cards will go out of use.

A common side-effect of objects being updated is that even though you replace the old file with the new one, the catalog thumbnail in game looks exactly the same - even if the updated object looks really really different. This is because the game catalog only creates the thumbnails when the objects are first loaded rather than every time you start your game to save time. Fortunately there is a way you can force it to create new thumbnails and therefore get correct images for updated objects. The following Sims Wiki Topic includes amongst other things how to refresh your game thumbnails.

It is perfectly safe to delete the contents of your Thumbnails folder. The game will regenerate them and in doing so, will render new versions for any objects which have been replaced and which have different thumbnail settings. The following icons are used in our Furniture section to show that an object has been updated. The listing below describes the fix. The date of the update is shown in the set information. If you downloaded an object a long time ago which has one of these icons download the object again and be sure to replace your existing copy.

For some objects you may need to also delete and re-buy instances placed in your game, but for most, simply replacing the file should be sufficient. When prompted, choose Yes to overwrite your existing copy.

Objects with this icon have been updated to correct a GUID clash. Typically a GUID clash will cause it to over-write a game object temporarily of course! These are pretty rare, but if you ever see an object in our Furniture section with one of these, make sure you get the newest version right away! The object's custom mesh has been updated to reduce the number of polygons - this makes the mesh less complex therefore easier for your computer to render when it is running the game.

The object's custom mesh has been repaired or re-designed to make it look nicer in game. Revealed with an elaborate light show, we can only hope the waypoint will tempt dedicated gamers to go outside. Today's Dying Light 2 stream to show off co-op, console comparisons, and brand new gameplay. Monster Hunter Rise best Palico support type and Palico skills.

If you click on a link and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. Read our editorial policy. The upgrade contains all expansion packs and extras released since the game debuted in Thanks for your continuing passion for The Sims.

The Sims 4 releases September 2 on PC. Lots coming Jan.