Just to add to your data, I am currently running the new 13" macbook pro (just released a few months ago) with the basegame and ambitions. I have hairs from many different creators, none show up no matter what I do. I delete my cache files and try only having some hairs in at a time, but that has no effect. It seems completely random, because the hairs were there when I first played with ambitions.

I also previously played for long stretches on one of the very first white macbooks, and then an updated one that came out right when snow leopard did. Hair issues happened with both of those computers as well (just basegame installed) but seemed to be fixed by deleting the cache.

If all the folks that are having these issues are on brand new macbooks and macbook pros running the NVIDIA GEForce 320M or 330M graphics cards... we may have found our problem.

That would make sense if EA were either unaware of the new cards (which is highly possible), or ARE aware and *trying* to patch the game to work with them.
Those graphics cards aren't supported... so you're pretty lucky if you can even just run the game!

From what I've read, the new NVIDIA cards offer better compatibility with DirectX games... and considering the old signed assembly bypass method used a DirectX library file, but that is now 'built in' to the game.... (which follows my theory with those extra resources in certain hair files PB)
then the problem is an incompatibility between something in the graphic card drivers and the game, particularly certain items.

I would say you folks with the new Macbooks and Macbook pros are in for a buggy time of it... and perhaps if you still have an older macbook or imac around you should use that for simming instead.

(Note: all of the new iMacs come with cards that ARE supported - which would explain why this problem seems to be confined to the macbooks!)

Graphics cards cannot stop cc from showing up. That doesn't make any sense at all. Sorry.

Also might note that the OP had problems on an older Macbook as well as the newer ones..my best guess is they're not being installed properly or may be a compatibility problem/problem with the hairs themselves.

Is it actually ALL hairs and ONLY hairs? Is other custom content working? Is any custom hair working? Exactly which hairs are you trying to install?

Graphics drivers can.
As can the 'signed assembly bypass' which is based in the DirectX/Direct3D libraries.

And Callistra, we've already asked these questions, and can not particularly isolate any one hair publisher.

Since the time when they introduced those advanced rendering features into the Mac version with one of the patches (1.3, I think) many Mac users have been suffering from this.
In my game it is ALL hairs that are not modified TS3 hairs (i.e. female to male conversions of TS3 hairs work fine) and it doesn't matter whether they are in package or sims3pack format.
But it is NOT ONLY hairs: Some clothing items (e.g. LadyFrontbum's Open Shirt for males here on MTS) have the same habit of disappearing (in this case the shirt will remain visible while the chest and arms become invisible) as do several accessories like earrings plus DBCAB's anatomically correct default bottom replacements (which is worse than Ken dolls because then there will be a hole and I can see through the afflicted sim).
The problem was solved with patch level 1.8 and returned with 1.10 and has remained up till now.
These meshes work sometimes but very rarely. The only thing that I observed was that whenever I did a reinstall I could be sure that they worked for the first few game sessions but as soon as they disappeared for the first time the chances for them reappearing again decreased rapidly. It is as if the game keeps forgetting that there was something additional to render. And it makes no difference whether I use the old framework or the new one introduced with the Ambitions patch.

BTW, I play TS3 on a late 2008 MBP with GeForce 9600 and a 2.8 GHz CPU under 10.5.8.

I can confirm some of the observations in the above post: the infamous "OS X CC hair problem" started to first come up with 1.3, a patch that introduced several changes in graphics under OS X (and dramatically reduced performance for many users as a side effect). I can't personally tell when it was fixed but I can confirm it doesn't seem to be an issue in 1.8.25. I mainly used 1.0/1.1, 1.2.7 and 1.8.25 until recently (and haven't used any Bodyshop CC since upgrading to 1.12) and I never had any issues with hair, so the info that those versions don't have the issue is consistent with my experience, even though I don't play the game much at all. I'm on a late 2007 MBP with an 8600M GT, OS X 10.5.7 and 10.5.8 (since January this year).

From the official changelog for 1.3 (2009-07-27):
The changelog for 1.8/2.3 (2009-12-15) does not mention any changes to graphics under OS X specifically.


Thank you for mentioning the issue with LFB's shirt; I posted in that thread to make her aware of your report. For issues that can be isolated to a particular piece of CC I'd recommend to always post in the upload threads to let the creator know – that's what we have them for, they're not meant just for "thanksthisisgreat" posts.


LoofahFlufferduff: I would like to ask you to familiarise yourself with the history of this problem before posting any more "theories". Jumping to conclusions, seemingly based on a handful of posts from the last couple of days, does nothing to help figure out a problem that has been around for almost one year. Thank you.

I am TRYING to find a link between occurences, to find out what exactly the problem is.

And FYI - The NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics card has DirectX 10.1 and Shader 4.0.

A look in your wine reg should tell you that your game is running pixel and vertex shader levels of 3.0 under d3dgl. Also the GLSL entry may be of interest.

But hey, if i'm not wanted, I won't hang around.

Would you please calm down again? This thread has given me hopes again that this issue might be resolved after more than one year.
I've read countless threads on this topic since then and I just came out of my lurking position because I got the feeling that this here was heading into the right direction. If it is of any help to you, Loofah, you can credit yourself with this.

Hi again. I went to loofahs site and learned all about getting Dashboard to work! I ran it and found a few conflicting packages and removed them from my game. But it has not made any difference. I still can't get any .packages that have to do with hair, skins, beards, Delphy's breast sliders, Jonahs sliders, earrings, bracelets, nails, to show up. Most of my clothes ARE there and any cc hair that I put in as Sims3Packs are showing up, plus all the packages that are not Cas items. My MacBook is 15 inch 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB 1067 MHz DDR3, Graphics Cards are NVIDIA GeForce 9400M and NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT I have The Base game, WA, Hels, and Ambitions installed.

By "any cc hair that I put in as Sims3Packs", do you mean you tested the same hair twice, once as package and once as sims3pack? Or were those different hairs that just happened to be different formats?

I think I should also mention that most of my cc hair was working okay until the latest update. Also all my sliders and other Cas items were also showing up okay as well. Does this help at all with the idea that the graphic cards might not be the culprit? You know, if everything was showing up before. However I do have blue lots now, if I try to go into the games I made before the update, and of course none of the sims look like they are supposed to look.
Loofah, please don't go away. I find that you are extremely helpful with many things Mac and your contributions are very much appreciated by this Mac dummie. X



By "any cc hair that I put in as Sims3Packs", do you mean you tested the same hair twice, once as package and once as sims3pack? Or were those different hairs that just happened to be different formats?

The Sims3Pack hairs were from TSR and they are different hairs from the .package files. I didn't test them as packages.



Actually, I can live with the few cc hairs that I have managed to get into the game. What I can't live without are the breast sliders and nice skins. Its so weird that the the eyeliners and lipsticks, blushers and brows show up fine, but no robokitty replacement beards or jewellery and accessories. I really, really want my breast sliders and skins ! Has anyone else having trouble with the sliders or is it just the hairs for everyone else?

rosidbon, please don't triple post .. there's an edit button you can use when you want to add something.

Sorry about that. Do I have to keep on writing my answers in the first box that I made? You deleted my answer to your question about the Sims3Pack hair. Did you read it? Would you like me to re-answer?

So, this is even stranger than I thought, if almost nothing works for you, rosidbon. Because in my game both jonha's sliders and robokitty's beards work. I don't know about the others because I don't have them. Some accessories like the semi-layerable earrings set show up in game but not in CAS. This is something that I almost completely forgot about, that CAS behaviour is different from game behaviour, as you can see from the images of LFB's shirt attached below.

As regards the sims3pack question: I had one hair that the creator had first as a package file and is now offering them as sims3pack on TSR. They both showed exactly the same behaviour, i.e. they went poof.

So, is it possible that this IS a driver issue? But do we all have different drivers and how can I check these? I find it odd that machines that are almost identical in build should exhibit such a varying behaviour.


As regards your blue lots, rosidbon. Are you suffering from actual blue lot syndrome (meaning you can't play that lot at all) or does your lot come back when you enter buy mode, take up something and place it back, and go back into live mode?

But now for those who cannot imagine what bald-hair syndrome looks like when it afflicts clothing, here are the pictures.

rosidbon: I didn't delete anything, I only merged your posts into one (look at the small note at the bottom of the post that says "Merged posts 123456" and so on). I've seen your answer as well, thank you.

babele44, re. what's causing the issue: we do seem to have "different drivers" (OS X doesn't have a concept of "drivers" that you could install separately, it's all handled by Apple) in the sense of wildly varying system versions – when people started to report this issue last summer, the current OS was 10.5.7 and now it is 10.6.4, with countless individual updates on top of that.

When only CC is affected and none of EA's own content, to me that would mean it's most likely to do with how the content is made … some sort of tool or technique that (some) CC creators use but EA don't, and that doesn't play nicely with (some) versions of the OS X game (for some people). Problem is, EA aren't documenting their changes (beyond the changelogs which are extremely vague); they have no interest in fixing it on their side since their stuff isn't affected; and because almost all TS3 tools are for Windows, CAS creators and OS X users are more or less mutually exclusive groups – typically, CAS creators know nothing about OS X and OS X users know nothing about CAS parts. This makes it really difficult to get any qualified opinions, let alone solutions.

I have been going through everything again and have noticed that the Resource cfg. file I have looks like this-

Priority 500

PackedFile DCCache/*.dbc

PackedFile Packages/*.package

PackedFile Packages/*/*.package

PackedFile Packages/*/*/*.package

PackedFile Packages/*/*/*/*.package

PackedFile Packages/*/*/*/*/*.package

The pics I have seen that others are saying is the correct Resource cfg. file does not have the first line with the DDCache/* dbc

Can anyone tell me which one is the correct one please?

That is the right Resourge.cfg for a post-1.12 game, yes. The important difference is just that it says "Packages" (or "DCCache") as the path, not "Mods/Packages" anymore. The DCCache entry is optional – you only need it when you actually have a DCCache folder, but if you don't then it's not gonna hurt anything that this entry is there.

So no one has a fix to this problem yet? Do you think we will get to see our custom hair in the future...? Im getting very annoyed by this problem, almost so much that i have stopped playing my game until my custom hair works like once every few days...

NVIDIA GeForce 9600M???

Interesting. It sounds to me like there are 2 sets of cards that are the problem here - but they are actually remarkably similar, and could potentially be the same driver (i'm not exactly sure), but they are both NVIDIA. The NVIDIA GeForce GT 320M is based on the GeForce 9600M. (The GeForce GT 320M and the GeForce 320M are different cards, but I'm fairly sure they have the same drivers).

I would really be interested to see if your 'config' files are what they should be.
If it is ok with plasticbox... can I ask anyone who can figure out how to follow these little instructions to post their info for me??
Ok.
What I want you to do, is do the 'ctrl-click' on your current Sims 3 app (make sure it is your current one - which may be INSIDE your base game one, in the 'add-ons' folder) image to open package contents.
Go to Contents -> Resources ->Preferences, and open the file named 'config' with textedit.
Find the section with the heading [d3dgl] and copy-paste the whole section into your post.

Next, go to your System Profiler, (About this Mac -> More info...) and click on the 'Graphics and Displays' heading, and copy-paste all the info that shows up in the viewing pane.

I am interested to see something.

Well, here you go:


[d3dgl]
"AnisotropicTextureFiltering" = "Y"
"VertexShaders" = "Y"
"PixelShaders" = "Y"
"PixelShadersLevel" = "3.0"
"ClipSpaceFix" = "Y"
"FragmentOffset" = "Auto"
"FixedProgram" = "Y"
"RectangleTextures" = "Auto"
"DynamicVBO" = "Y"
"IndexVBO" = "Y"
"FBO" = "Y"
"GLSL" = "M"
"VertexShadersLevel" = "3.0"
"FloatTextures" = "Y"
"OcclusionQueries" = "Y"
;"Provides full compliance with native vertex shaders 'mova' command (Yes/No)
"ForceMOVACompliance" = "Y"
"FBOBackBuffer" = "Y"
"sRGBInPixelShader" = "2"
"DepthTextures" = "Y"



NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT: (I had to translate this, so the exact wording way be wrong)

Chipset-model: NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT
Type: Display
Bus: PCIe
PCIe-Lane-Width: x16
VRAM (total): 512 MB
Manufacturer: NVIDIA (0x10de)
Device-ID: 0x0647
Version-ID: 0x00a1
ROM-Version: 3437
gMux-Version: 1.7.3
Displays:
Colour-LCD:
resolution: 1440 x 900
colour depth: 32-Bit Farbe
Core Image: Hardware-supported
main monitor: yes
synchronisation: off
switched on: yes
Quartz Extreme: supported
integrated: yes
External display:
Status: no display connected

well, at least now I know that the config file is set by the game and not the computer Thanks.

I said somewhere that the new nVIDIA drivers have a GLSL bug. GLSL is the shader language for OpenGL, and WINE (in this case, Cider) runs D3D/DirectX via OpenGL.
Basically, I think, there has to be an intermediary driver built between the D3D program and the Graphics Processing Unit. Transgaming has built that into the Cider shell. If your card is listed as 'supported' then, they know that they can get it to work for you. If not, you will probably have issues, because they can't get it to work without bugs for that available card yet. (It IS helpful that they only have to work with a certain amount of cards because of Apple's ridiculous EFI and hardware monopoly - without hacking, OS X can only go on Apple systems, so they only have to allow for the cards that Apple has released, which is a LOT less than all of the available models for PCs!)

As far as I can tell, I think PB is right, and that it is the custom content creation programs and their shader set-ups that are not compatible or are a bit buggy with these new nVIDIA drivers and the GLSL implementation in Cider.
Considering there are only two main programs, and four main methods (I think) for meshing, it might be worth figuring out if the problem is isolated to one meshing program, or is a common issue.

Pay close attention on the publisher sites to see if they include information about which programs they used - whether it is TSRW or S3OC for cloning, and Blender or Milkshape for meshing.

With no other changes, going into options and setting it to show Sims in high detail made every single hair come back. The thumbnails are not all showing yet (in CAS) but a cache rebuild should take care of that. I have all my hair back. (I should clarify this is hair for my Sims. If only getting my own hair back was so easy! Yayyyyy!!!



SQ

p.s.: I hope this puts the kibosh on these debates about faulty drivers, NVIDIA support, etc., etc. I have a garden-variety MacBook with a 9400M card like other respondents, and a simple change of preferences within the game brought all the hair back. That would indicate it is some sort of game glitch, and has absolutely nothing to do with the card.

This has never worked for me, after a while sims became bald again and clothing items invisible. But I will try it again and see whether it works or not. I won't hold my breath, though. I fear Loofah's right and it is due to third-party development tools as this is also the current conclusion in the relevant threads over at EA'S official Sims for Mac forum. (Although you might remember that there was a time when one of the patches fixed this - for everybody)

and the patch that fixed it, fixed it because it updated driver support for the shaders that the meshing progs were using.

As long as Transgaming is aware of the problem, they should be able to fix it in our next patch...
(Note: This would be a Transgaming issue, not an EA issue.)

-----

OH, and the 9400M card is very very different to the GT 9600M or 320M or GT 330M cards that the other respondents here have.

I don't think there is a single switch, button or setting that hasn't been tried out since this problem started – this is not a new phenomenon, and there are countless threads already where all sorts of voodoo are being discussed (search this site, look around on the offical site, and I bet it's been discussed ad nauseam on other sites too). This is why I was asking above, and I'll ask again: Please research before you post. It helps no-one to come up with a new "theory" (oh, it's this card! That creator! That particular setting!) every couple of days based on what two or three people have posted in this thread, or what seems to be working in your game for five minutes of gameplay. Search first to see whether the same solution or theory hasn't already been posted last September and debunked a few days later.

EA have already stated last July that the issue was introduced with patch 1.3, it was fixed with 1.8.25 and borked again after that. So the only known working solution at the moment, provided you have a full backup of your 1.8.25 game, is to roll back to that one.

I also think one should have in mind that this is a help forum … it's entirely possible that this only affects some users, but people with no issues have no reason to visit a help forum in the first place. So if what you want is compare notes to see whether or not it might be confined to particular circumstances, the EA forums might be a better place for that (they have a general "Mac forum", not specifically for game help .. although I don't think people with perfectly working games are very likely to use that either).


(seamanq, please don't double post – use the edit button underneath your posts. Thanks.)