has anyone else had this happen? when my sims are indoors there is a black rectangular box under their feet that moves with them across the floor. never seen this before and dont know what is causing it. havent installed any new CC lately and its all of my characters on many different lots. i have been building a new vacation neighborhood lately but have been working on it for a couplpe of weeks and this box thing just started yesterday. is it maybe a cheat code that i could have used or is there some way to reset things so i get rid of that box? all help will be greatly appreciated!! Thank you!! BTW i have all EP's and SP's, everything is patched and up to date. my system is an alienware aurora r4 with I7 quad-core with 16g of ram and nividia hd 7970 video card.

it appears to be something with the shadows. i turned the in-game shadow option from high to medium and the box is gone, but why is that? i have always had shadows set on high. any ideas anyone??

Sounds like either your graphics card or chip is getting hot or is getting worn out. Do you have a graphics card? Turning the shadows down is reducing the load on your graphics card or chip. The rectangle was it's very poor attempt to show the shadow. If it's a chip it's showing damage from doing things it wasn't designed to do -play a graphic intensive game. I would turn shadows off as well as other graphic settings lower.

This is a known issue with recent driver updates from both nVidia and AMD, affecting some people who run Windows 8 and have their shadows set to high. nVidia are aware of the issue, but for such an old game, I'll be surprised if they actually fix it - the best we can hope for is that they make some other change which coincidentally reverses the issue.

Really, makes me glad I haven't updated my nVidea. Maybe they can roll back?

Yes, rolling back your drivers is an option, but unfortunately I don't know which version you'd need to roll back to.

Lower than 327 for NVidia, I don't know for AMD.

I had same thing when an automatic update to my NVidia GeForceGTX550Ti was installed. Wikki has an extensive list of video cards, and lists my version as excellent. Like so many other things, the game is touch about which versions of things it likes.

If that automatic update was installed by Windows Update, I'd very strongly recommend you turn automatic updates for optional updates off. Windows Update is well-known for messing up computers by automatically installing the wrong versions of drivers.

Yes Nysha, I did turn off the auto feature.

It's not just Windows 8 that is affected, I'm running Windows 7 and having the same problem.
At least for my Radeon HD 7850 I can say that Catalyst 13.4 is working fine, while Catalyst 13.9 and newer give me the black shadows indoors.
I've even bothered to fill out a bug report for AMD's latest beta drivers, however as you said, it remains to be seen whether they actually do something about it.

I agree with Torhstenh.
Today I updated my drivers and now sims have this ugly shadows.

I have windows 7 and Catalyst 13.9

Play with the sims 2 it's more difficult every day.
Unfortunately is an older game

I have these problems too, so my Nvidia driver is now rolledback to an earlier edition. A workaround solution would be to set your shadow option on medium instead of high.

The System administrator (Nysha) rudely dismissed my earlier suggestion in a similar thread on the same subject., My solution, which works perfectly for Origin's 2014 release of the "Ultimate Sim 2 and Pets" is to reduce your game's Shadow setting to "Medium" in Windows 7, 8, & 8.1 and the black square under youd Sims, in that this latest version will disappear at once. How old the original program was is not relative to this 2014 version. Origin has already said there were enhancements made, before its release. The administration should do some research before make such comments.

The problem is not unique to the Ultimate Collection. I updated my graphics card a few years ago and bought a Nvidea - and had the black box. I turned the shadows off in the games option and the black box disappeared. Only now I've learned that you can turn it to medium, after downloading UC - and it works. It is really no big deal and turning the shadows to medium in the game options is an easy thing to do! I use Windows 7 myself.
That was my experience, and I hope it will help others

I have the same problem, except it will not go away even with the shadows off. Please help!

Here's a fix: http://www.modthesims.info/d/569585

If you get black boxes on other things than sims, CC in particular, it's often because the shadows are made wrong. A few of the objects I made earlier (when I just blacked out the shadows instead of removing them) got black boxes underneath, because the texture settings were wrong (DXT instead of ExtRaw8bit).

@pangolyn Please don't dig up 3 year old threads. Make your own or have a search first, this question has been answered many times.