I still can't figure out what causes this bug.

On some families, there's a weird shadow-like appearance. It appears on the neighborhood screen when you click on the house (will do it for the whole family), their appearance on the bar on the side, the appearance down above the age bar, and their head when you click on an object to interact.

After searching on the forums for an answer I found someone had this problem before but the issue never really got answered/resolved. Some people had suggested putting more lighting into a room and using the 'change appearance' option but that doesn't seem to work to fix the error.

Any suggestions?

Did this not get solved by deleting the sim? You could try changing their appearance, does that make any difference?

Deleting the Sims didn't solve this problem. Neither does changing the appearance. The shadow even covers the Sim when changing the appearance. Like in the other thread that I found, the shadow pretty much looks like there's only a tiny light source on the right lighting up the Sim.

I've tinkered with the shadow/lighting options to try and fix this issue but I'm still not quite sure what's causing it. It has no effect on gameplay other than the simple graphics and it doesn't just go away if you change clothes then change appearance to force a reset in the image of the sim above the aging bar.

I'm really stumped as to what's causing this. Some houses don't have this at all and others have about half the family shadow. The family I deleted to reset for the other error is half and half. The parents are fine in appearance, but they've got a shadow toddler and a shadow baby. Even tried resetting the toddler's appearance using the toddler mirror object, but it hasn't solved it. The parents of the family, though, have the shadow face when interacting with an object, but nothing else. Not sure what's causing this.

Any ideas where to even start for this one?

Sounds like a graphics issue, the previous times I've come across this has been on PCs, and the problem was either solved by deleting the sims or by upgrading the graphics drivers. Does it make any difference if you use different skins, or if you change the in game graphics settings? Also, try disabling pixel shading:
boolprop useshaders false
Does that have an impact? If not, try enabling the pixel shaders:
boolprop useshaders true
(assuming they were disabled to start with).

I agree with simsample that it's a graphics issue. I believe I had the same problem, if I understand correctly what you are describing (see attached pics).

It seemed to me to happen when I hadn't saved for a while and my game was overloading. Such as, the game was maxing out, then a toddler would grow up to a child... boom, dark icon. So some Sims in a family were shadowed, others not. Same happened when they went to Uni and I always had the feeling that the game was just overloading.

Changing them with the mirror never did anything. Their icons stayed forever dark. I even had dark icons in buy mode.

The reason I use past tense on this is because when I upgraded my graphics card the problem went away.

When that's happened to me, I have gotten rid of it by quitting the game and starting up again. I always make sure I have nothing else running when I start the game (no other programs, wi-fi connection off, etc.) and that I have game options fairly low, both on the neighborhood screen and the house I'm playing. I have been able to get rid of hte shadow by continuously changing appearance until it is fixed. I have used the §50 mirror and expensive mirrors and custom mirrors. I have also used the InSiminator option to fix appearance.

For what's it worth, I have an iMac G5 PowerPC 1.8Ghz with nVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 and 64MB VRAM. I wish I could change the graphics card and/or update the driver, but that does not seem to be an option.

Also, just curious, to luws, how did you get the screenshots? Are you using a Mac? I know how to take pictures in game, but I can't get a screenshot.

Luws, maybe deleting the thumbnails would help? Perhaps this would force the game to regenerate the files correctly.
AimeeG, you could run the game in windowed mode and use grab to get the screen shots.

Thanks for the idea simsample, I will try that.


You can take a screen shot on a Mac with control-shift-3 key combination. Hold all keys down at the same time.

Used to be control-shift-4 would allow you to drag over a specific area and take a picture of only that area, but for some unknown reason that no longer works for me. But you could try that option too.

That's what I tried, the one with the control-shift-4. I wondered what the other way to do it was and forgot to look it up. So a 3 instead. I will give that a shot. Thanks!


Did the shadows come off yet, adelewen?

Changing the graphics card is not really an option (I have pretty much the same issue as you, AimeeG since I have an iMac G5). The pixel shading, when I turned it off didn't seem to do anything. However when I turned it on.. the floors and walls were all turned bright red. Shadows were still on. I also tried the in-game graphics settings, turned everything to the lowest setting I could and tested it. Shadows were still there.

However...

When I turned back on the graphics settings and turned /on/ the reflections on the mirror, which I had off, I was able to fix the shadow over the toddler (who used the toddler mirror). While this doesn't help for the baby, it fixed the toddler. I'm testing their appearance in the neighborhood screen now.

Unfortunately this did not fix the sim's apperance in the Neighborhood screen. Anyone have any suggestions on how to fix that one?

EDIT: I was wrong. Although that one toddler in the one house was fixed for some crazy reason, as I tried to fix an adult in another household the same thing only made things worse.

Usually that happens to me when I have the lighting set on anything above "low" ( ). I generally just restart the game at that point, because it always loads fine for me.

I've had this exact same problem hundreds of times. I made a neighborhood with all custom content, and that's where it happens most.
I have yet to fix it except for one family in a regular, Maxis-content neighborhood. The sim was a child and I aged her to teen or adult, then back down and she was fine for some reason (using inSIM).

its most likely a graphis issue i'd probally say turn lighting off than restart you comptuer(or mac) as it could be caused by memory leakage and also don't contiunously chage there apperance otherwis e you will use your short term memory up even farster

also can i just say that the geforce fx 5200 is a quite good graphics card i think i had one of them on my old pc (which my little sister has now) and it worke fine for me and it still runs sims fine for her now apart from the came crashing now and then from her playing for 3 hours on the trot so just turn the grapics settings right down then restart then if it goes back to normal you can start turning things back up

-hope that helped
leigh

I have this problem sometimes too, the extra bit of weirdness I have is that the faces only seem to become shadowed at around noon (game time, of course), and then stay that way until either 7 PM when the light changes, or right on through to 7 AM the next day. Waiting for the time to change seems to be the only thing that has any effect. And yeah, trying to change their appearance makes it worse, because if I do so during one of these "dark times" their icon in the menu becomes dark, too. Setting the lighting to low and restarting the game doesn't do anything for me, alas.

(And for the record, I'm on a G5 mac as well. Hum, a pattern!)

Edit: Spoke too soon! Setting the lighting on low made the shadows go away on their heads in the pie menus, but the loading screen was still completely in shadows. Well, it's better than nothing, right?

I just got this problem this evening. I thought it might be a memory leak for me, as I don't restart my MacBook for days or weeks at a time (yay for instant sleep mode with the screen down!), but I restarted my Mac and went back into the game, and y family was still in shadow.

I'm running a 2GhZ dual core with 1.215 Gig of RAM, and never have background programs running (I used to play Sims2 on WinXP, so I'm always cautious about memory hogs on my system now). But I think the main problem must have been me leaving the game running in Pause mode for over an hour when my bf came to see if I was okay (I left work early, though mainly because I was sleepy and my boss said I could leave).

Bleh, I hate ruined Sims2 time, I never get enough of it as it is. ;-;

I'm having more face/shadow issues again. I haven't played in a bit, but recently instead of being shadowed, I'd have them pixelated into multi-colored dots. Basically the same problem, but instead of shadows it's multi-colored and shiny!

Meh. I can usually fix it by changing appearance, but sometimes that will cause the Sim's picture to become invisible, and I haven't found a way to fix the babies with this bug.