Graphics display as "paper" -- and a crash We've installed Sims 2 under XP on a 3.06 Ghz machine with 1 gig ram and Radeon 9700 TX (Dell packaged this with the machine 2 yrs ago or so). Installed latest ATI drivers and also Audigy 2 drivers. We start the game, click on a neighborhood (say Pleasantville), and the neighborhood graphics are displayed with white things that look like paper. They seem to have filenames on them. We see houses, roads, etc., but also things that look like paper. Like instead of a tree there will be a paper thing that is crudely in the shape of a tree, with words on it. One of these paper things (if you move around enough) seems like it's supposed to be a rainbow. Instead we see something with the word rainbow in it. I couldn't find anyone else mention this problem. What is wrong? We can crash it every time by doing this: click on families, type anything for family name, click on "create a sim", click on the next "create a sim" icon, and it crashes. I tried 98/ME emulation mode without any luck.
You seem to be having a similar problem to the one I'm having. I think the paper objects you're seeing with the rainbow on them are the "effects" cubes. Try going to "decorations" on the neighborhood screen, click the handtool, then click on the rainbow object and then press "delete." Do this until you get rid of all of them, and then restart the game. See if they went away. If you read my post above, either "Problems with custom houses in neighborhood" or "EA Tech support is useless" - you might want to try the things that I already tried to fix my problem if you haven't already. My game also crashed once on the Create a Sim page. Don't know how I fixed it. I've also crashed my graphics card once. Did that by taking a "picture" of one of my sims dancing with the maid. I guess she had too many things to do and there was too much stuff going on for my card to handle it. It's amazing how many people are having problems with this game. It's also amazing how different all the problems are. And, it's also amazing how little help there is available from Maxis/EA Games. For now, I think we're all on our own. They're probably using this as a way to get us to buy the University expansion pack. I can see the ad campaign now - "The Sims are going to college! And with this expansion pack, every single one of your technical problems will be solved! Only $60 at your local gaming store!"
