What was the "unreleased soundtrack" in the original post? The video no longer seems to be accessible.

@gazania I know this is an old comment of yours, but... here's a "bene."

Now we can put an end to the history of the "Server fire" when developing the Sims 2. It was not.

https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/di...omment_15138534

This hair was lost and apparently from The Sims Online, but from the looks of it was going to be in TS2 as well. If you're willing to brave to see posts from slightly whiny, very annoying and talkative younger me, there's more on the search for it here from a few years ago... (http://modthesims.info/t/542482) It's been seen all over this thread. It's black in some images, and others has a pink streak.

SCREENSHOTS OF THE HAIR:


It's a pity, really. I still do really like that hair. I doodled an image of it (attached) from what I think it looks like from the few screenshots of it. I'd whip up a mesh of it and recreate it but I can barely do a clothing recolor, let alone go that far into creating.



My point is - it's such a pity all of the little things we've lost like that hair. Even the small stuff. Walls, flooring, even just objects like extra couches perhaps. Any content lost at all is a tragedy in my eyes. The game we have is absolutely amazing, especially for its time era, don't get me wrong, I'm just sad we didn't get to try everything they made for it, y'know? Like how the Fortune Aspiration was replaced with Fame. Maybe they had movie things planned from the looks of the one trailer?

Yeah, I think we've had enough Maxis developers disprove this rumour to finally put it to bed. There might have been a fire. It didn't affect the game's development one bit.

The game only changed as much as it did because...that's what tends to happen during development.

Yeah, nothing was lost. This is a big company, they keep a lot of backups. They just changed their vision of the game (in some ways) mid-development. There are shader files in the game which date back to '02.
It's exactly the same engine. I'm very glad with the UI and Model/clothing changes. The clothes and hairs in the beta are really low quality, also the UI looks like it's from TS1 but upgraded.

A couple of things that the beta did better was lighting (in the later stages of the beta), reflection, and the shininess of objects.
Other than that everything is better in retail, although I don't know why took Riverside out of the retail version, it looked good.

Also there are some objects missing, like the shiny stove which looked fine.

The lamp breaking looked like an cool idea, a typical thing for a teenager to break, I imagine they had more of these realism things in mind at first.

True. It is impossible to recreate the game from scratch in the middle of its development time. The series already has an example of what will happen if you try to do so. TS4.

In the gaming industry, there were cases when games were recreated from scratch. All of them ended sadly.

If the fire really happened, then ts2 would be so empty, uninteresting, incomplete as ts4. And opinions about the game would be the same as for ts4 now.

But it's good that it did not happen. And we have a game that is played even now. And it seems to me that the game will become even more popular in the future.

TS2 is still the most fun to play for me despite in the somewhat lacking CAS, like body shapes etc. But I don't see myself playing a lot with really muscular people etc.
If you have the right amount of mods TS2 does really look decent, and to me it has the most detailed objects in the whole franchise.

For example, someone created a electrical box mod... yeah, power outages, unstable phone line, dying candles etc. +100 for realism there :D

My game atm:
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edit(more shots :D):
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Great graphics! What did you use to get this result?

Weird, I don't think I have ever heard the server fire destroying everything, just some things, that's a much smaller claim and much more realistic. At this point, the memory of the game developers doesn't amount to much, most people have no idea how unreliable human memory is and it's hard to convince some people of that, but we tend to completely forget things, add things we hear or read to our memory without actually witnessing it ourselves and confabulate memories and that's completely unconscious! Someone might have been asked in 2005 if it was true that all the servers burned up and reacted with a "that's ridiculous!" and years later been asked if it was true that there was some server damage because of a fire and the brain just pushes a "that's ridiculous!" memory forward, a combination of the original memory and the recollection of the reaction to the earlier question (resulting in a 'I remember that the notion of a server fire is ridiculous'). Of course, that's just speculation and it also works the other way around: someone might remember a small fire that never happened because of all the rumors.
Of course, whatever fire isn't a good excuse for missing or incomplete content, but it's not like we missed anything in the end (how many people have just the basegame?) and we still got a very enjoyable game. At the very least we can confidently say that it's not the reason Bella isn't in Pleasantview. :P

When someone released the Half-Life Alpha online there were some people who actually went and got deathmatch servers working!

Well, I think if they would have released TS2 at the original planned date, it would look like the pictures released in Jan/Feb 2014. But they delayed it and called the changes within those months "The final touches".
To be honest I'm not sure if I would have liked the beta build as much as I like the BG we got, like, yeah.. the lighting, reflection, shininess etc etc looked way better! But the Beta UI really looked odd and old.

Though the animations themselves seemed more "adult" like, but it isn't as smooth people say it is, that is the beta I'm talking about.
Since you can clearly see the animations "popping" when they transition.

Overall they went for a more "adult" like game in the first place I think, if you look at the talk animations etc. Seemed more serious, but I think, in the end we got a more balanced version between realism and fun (a game).

Also, I don't think we lost that much in gameplay and objects etc. Yes, we did lose a lot of hair styles, but if you are true honest to yourself you know they really look dated in comparison with the ones we got from the retail version.

Why did they removed the reflections, rain etc? Performance.
I actually had the original rain in my game, with the reflections, and other beta-like adjustments and the FPS wasn't pretty.
I should also note that I'm running a GTX 970.

I'm still trying to implement the original shaders, lighting etc in my game since I really like that, also I have some old removed floors which actually look really good.
Don't know why they removed that.

Also I think the reason that they deleted the old neighborhoods is because of all the "final touches", The neighborhood might have looked pretty with the beta but not with retail.
Same goes for hairstyles... objects.. etc. So that seems logical to create a complete new neighborhood with the objects from the final version, otherwise they would have needed to edit all the existing houses, sims with updated stuff.

http://prntscr.com/ivg9yu
This picture is easy for me to replicate, I do like the "short distance" these light casts, but if you look to the right lamp, the intensity is a bit too much.

Didn't the rain drastically lower performance because they tried to use individual particles of it? Might be another game I'm thinking of, though.

Yikes, that's a pretty bad way to do it.

I wouldn't say 'insanely skilled' myself (ever heard of fast inverse square root?), but there's definitely worse-made games. The Sims 3, for example, is one of the worst optimized games I've ever seen.

Maybe developers removed these reflection effects, rain, not only because of the performance of computers, but also to improve the appearance of the characters?

Yes. It perhaps didn't fit in with the style they were going for in the end. I do find the floor reflection distracting sometimes.

it's really annoying to look at the Youtube comments and see how many people still believe the office fire crap...

I laughed so hard at that spinning walking animation, and the 'family kiss.'

Dev's having fun 😂

Scraping the idle animations? If so then that's not true, in the BG they still have a lot of idle animations

Another screenshot of the beta, with improved shadows. It's a pity that it did not reach the release.

https://images.sftcdn.net/images/t_...-screenshot.jpg

Although Half Life 2 had similar shadows. But this game was considered the best in the graphics of gaming magazines.

http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/s...pg?t=1515390717

And TS2 also had an excellent graphics. And was considered the best in detailing objects and in the animation of character. I agree with this because, it seems to me that even Half Life 2 has a slightly worse detailed object and building.

The good old days, when Sims could compete with other AAA games. And to be better than them in many graphic aspects...

What's the name of the game where the soldiers,the SWAT or whoever they are were shooting at those alien spider things? That seems like the game that I would be interested in playing. Although the graphics maybe a little outdated by modern standards it seems like the kind of game that would run perfectly on my laptop which is an Intel i5 with 8gbs of ram installed.

Half-Life 2. Amazing game. Runs really well on relatively older machines, as well. I'd recommend the first Half-Life over it, though.

If you're interested in HL2, I would highly recommend grabbing the Orange Box instead. It includes the game, both episodes, and the first Portal. (Team Fortress 2, as well, but that's free-to-play nowadays.)

Cool I'm interested in checking it out now but old games these games are hard to find. There are a bunch of great old games that I didn't have a chance to play when I was little like Ratchet and Clank,Sly Cooper, and the list goes on and on. I'm almost ashamed to confess that I haven't played and finished Zelda Ocarina Of Time until recently last year along with Majora's Mask. I was such a Crash Bandicoot and Spyro fanatic back in the day that I didn't give other games a chance that much but if I have an opportunity to go back in time and change I would happily do it all again.