Image quality, Super Duper Hugs, and writing.

[strangetomato]

Has anyone else noticed their images degrading in quality when they upload them to scrapbook now? For example, the image below seems like it gets sharpened considerably when I upload it, and you can see those lines in the background much more and the hair seems redder (it was taken with the in-game camera). I'm just curious to see if anyone else is experiencing this.

Ron Story, who lives in the House of Fallen Trees in Downtown Elsewhere, is now a teen. And cute. ^_^

I've also noticed I have the menu option for "DEBUG - Super Duper Hug" in the game when I play it right now. I'm reading this thread and see that it is/was hack related. I haven't added back many hacks yet (just MATY stuff and the no red lines mod as of last playing), so I'm assuming this happened when I removed a hack? Anyway, I'm following the advice linked above and I hope that fixes it.

I've also been thinking of setting a bit of a sim story writing goal for myself in the spirit of NaNoWriMo. I don't think I'll declare it publicly, since life can be hectic and my simming time follows my other priorities (in order of parenting, sleep, eating/washing myself, laundry, and maybe cleaning the house) but I have something in mind. We'll see how it goes. ;)

Comments

[pbanda.livejournal.com]

Dolphin's "control this sim" mod fixed the super duper hug problem for me. I installed it for the sole purpose of fixing the problem, then ended up loving the mod! It's very useful. I highly recommend it. :)

[strange-tomato.livejournal.com]

Ah! Thanks for that. I'll check it out.

[so-goshable.livejournal.com]

I second this! You have to go back through every lot, but it works. I got the bug after removing Merola's mirror to control visiting sims.

[strange-tomato.livejournal.com]

So every lot has to be dealt with individually? That seems like a pain. The mod linked to above ("LBFRemovesocial" file) works if it is just sitting in your downloads folder, so maybe keeping it in there for a while will take care of it without having to do much? I hope so.

It's nice to have more than one option for removing it, all the same. If one doesn't work out, I can always try the other. So far, the LBFRemovesocial seems to be effective for me.

[so-goshable.livejournal.com]

I played a long time before catching it, and I had that mirror in nearly every lot, so I had to go back through all the affected lots to correct it. This was back in 2006, so I'm not sure if there was another workaround back then. Tedious, but it worked. The second time, I got it from a downloaded lot, and I caught it right off the bat.

[smjoshsims.livejournal.com]

The in game camera is just awful in general, but I'm far too lazy to ever screencap again, so alas.

I'm like the only person alive still using photobucket, huh?

[strange-tomato.livejournal.com]

Yes, the fact that this is the in-game camera isn't helping the quality here at all, but I'm convinced it's wasn't usually quite this bad. If it was, I'm a little amazed we were okay with it for storytelling. It was a different time, though. "Back in my day..." LOL!

No, others still do. Meetme2theriver does, and there are others I can't think of offhand. If I didn't have Semagic, I'd likely be going back to it, too. The lj scrapbook is crap if you have to upload manually.

[aledstrange.livejournal.com]

I just checked with my scrapbook uploading two different images (one directly from ingame, one with fraps edited) and then compered them with the originals, but both look exactly the same for me. (even comparing them in layers with PS). Is this happening all the time or just now? Maybe was temporal or just a glitch of a moment?

As for the hug glitch, hope you can fix it. It's very annoying, but yes, it can happen by taking out some mods. (For what I understand it's with some social mods. It happened in my game after trying out a kiss-in-cheek mod once)

[simtopi]

I can attest that it does happen by removing social mods. I inadvertently discovered this when I removed my entire download folder to clear the CC out of a lot that I wanted to upload, and that included removing ACR. The glitch will stay in a lot that I'd upload. And the same thing can happen if you download a lot where the player who created it had a social mod like ACR and you don't. At least this is what I've gathered.

pbanda is right, putting in that hack will fix it. Once you noticed it's gone, you can remove the hack again if you don't want it. Preparing a lot for upload is a different story as you have to be careful to test for it along the way.

I don't believe it explodes your game but it can be really annoying and can tank sims relationships pretty fast. Hope you get rid of it! >_<

Also I love the idea of setting writing goals. I was thinking of that last night actually, except I may instead try my hand at drabbling to get my writing excercises in. Good luck if you decide to do it!

[strange-tomato.livejournal.com]

I'm fairly certain it was the removal of ACR for me, too. I didn't have that in the downloads folder when I first loaded up that neighborhood again. The hack mentioned in the thread above also fixes it. I am now Super Duper Hug free! :)

I'll probably restore from backup again once I'm done play testing and updating my hacks, just to be safe. Who knows what other little errors I'm causing. This game can be borked so easily, especially when you mod it to within an inch of its life. Ha!

I've never attempted to upload a lot for others to use, mostly because I assume it will be riddled with hacks and crap like that. To date, nobody has requested anything I've made over (not really much a builder, so...), so I haven't had to worry about it trying to figure it out.

Drabbling is great for that. I still have unfilled prompts from my drabble post, so I've been thinking about those as well. Best of luck to you and your writing goals! :)

[strange-tomato.livejournal.com]

Okay, well that's good to know. Maybe it's just me, but I'm convinced they look different when I'm viewing them in my browser instead of, say, in Photoshop or the Windows image viewer. It's not the first time I've noticed it. Weird.

I added in that hack mentioned in the thread above and it seems that the mere presence of that hack when you load the game seems to nuke the Super Duper Hug. It worked for me. And I'm pretty sure it was caused by starting to play without having ACR installed again. It wasn't very careful of me to do that. haha! I'll probably be going back to my backup on that hood again, just to be sure. I'm mostly just play testing with it now, seeing which cc and hacks I still need and such.

Thanks for the input on the image thing. :) I really appreciate it. I hope I figure out what's wrong on my end soon.

[skellington7d.livejournal.com]

I haven't noticed a difference in quality (though I detest the changes that LJ made to scrapbook and wouldn't put it past them to ruin it more *grumblegrumble*) Since the in-game camera doesn't take them at 100% quality, maybe that would make them more susceptible to degradation upon upload? Have you tried it with a screencap using another program?

[strange-tomato.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that. I'm sure you have a good eye for such things, so that's good to know. I don't know if it's possible that my browser is doing it? It really seems like images get crunchier and sharper when I view them in my web browser. I have no idea if that even makes sense. More experimentation is needed. Using the in-game camera makes it more obvious, for the reasons you've mentioned.

On the subject of screencapping, I need to look into maybe switching to a new program for that. I've always used Irfanview, but for some reason that isn't taking caps in Sims 2 for me right now.

[skellington7d.livejournal.com]

Have you recently upgraded to Windows 7? I had that problem with Gadwin when I upgraded. There are some fixes for it that didn't work for me, but what ended up working was playing in windowed mode and setting the program to capture the client window.

[strange-tomato.livejournal.com]

Yes, my new PC runs Windows 7. I'll look into checking the Irfanview site for fixes for that. Thanks!

I considered trying windowed mode, as I don't normally use it, but I don't even see that option in the in-game menus. I just googled it and there was some mention of typing in "-w" at the end of the .exe file. I would've figured there was a simpler in-game way to do it. Both Sims 1 and Sims 3 seem to have it in the menus.

[skellington7d.livejournal.com]

Yep, you have to type that in the target shortcut. (weird that it's not in the settings) I was reluctant to try that but it turns out my game loads much faster windowed! (and it's easier to multitask :P)

[strange-tomato.livejournal.com]

I tend to be reluctant about messing with things like that, too, but this seems simple enough. :) I'm going to try it.

My game runs so much faster now, anyway. It loads in a minute or two and Bodyshop within a minute. It's great. Lots don't take 5 minutes to load anymore, and I used to just load the game or Bodyshop and walk away to do something else for a while. XD Even faster would be a dream.

[madame-ugly.livejournal.com]

*snicker* I like the "maybe cleaning the house" part. That's always last on my list, too!

[strange-tomato.livejournal.com]

A lady has to have her priorities in order, right? If I'm being honest, some of that often comes AFTER simming and internet time.