KNOWN ISSUES
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Low Hard Drive Space: If you run out of hard drive space while playing The Sims Life Stories, the game will be unable to store new data, such as saved games, screenshots, and new neighborhoods. In certain cases, when attempting to save the game with no hard drive space, the game will appear to save, even though data has not been stored. Please make sure you have at least 500 MB of free hard drive space when running the game. [Actually, when I play, it already has errors that the game has terminated if I have under 1.70GB left. Then, you can't play the game at all!]

Wheel Mouse Camera Rotation: If you’re unable to rotate the camera by using your mouse wheel, please make sure that you set the scroll wheel button function to autoscroll in your mouse settings.

Installation/Uninstallation: If you experience any problems installing or uninstalling the game, please temporarily close any virus scanning software you have, and try again.

Removing Saved Games on Uninstallation: Choosing to delete saved games when uninstalling will only remove saved games for the current user. Saved games for other users on the computer will remain under their respective folders under C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\Electronic Arts. Due to the large size of saved games, you may wish to remove them manually.



Video Card Issues:


AMD's ATI RADEON[sup](R)[/sup] SERIES

PROBLEM: Sims and objects sometimes appear too bright or all white. Sometimes Sims have patchy lighting.
CARDS: Radeon(R) 9500, 9600, 9700, 9800
This is a known bug in some older drivers. Upgrading to the latest manufacturer's drivers will resolve this.

PROBLEM: Special cinematic events (such as first kiss) are too blurry.
CARDS: Radeon(R) 9000+
This is a known bug in some older drivers (Catalyst 4.5). Upgrading to the latest manufacturer's drivers will resolve this.

PROBLEM: Texture dropout, distorted Sims and objects, strange horizontal lines on Sims and shadows.
CARDS: Radeon(R) 9000
This is a known bug in some older drivers. Upgrading to the latest manufacturer's drivers will resolve this.

PROBLEM: When running in high resolution (1600x1200), lighting effects are corrupted.
CARDS: Radeon, Radeon(R) 7200, Radeon(R) 7500, cards with below 64Mb video memory
This is a known issue and is caused by choosing a higher resolution than The Sims Life Stories can support. Running in a lower resolution should resolve this.

PROBLEM: Neighborhood and water have bright flicker.
CARDS: Radeon, Radeon VE, Radeon 7200, Radeon 7500
This is a known driver bug. However, updating your driver to the latest version may help.

PROBLEM: In Create A Family, creating a baby Sim will result in a bad floor texture.
CARDS: Radeon, Radeon 7500
This is a known bug in some older drivers. Upgrading to the latest manufacturers drivers will resolve this.

PROBLEM: Shoreline flickers in neighborhood view.
CARDS: Radeon 7000 series
This is a known bug in some older drivers (Catalyst 4.3). Upgrading to the latest manufacturer's drivers will resolve this.

FORCED ANTI-ALIASING: The Sims Life Stories will have graphical problems if anti-aliasing is forced on in display properties. To fix this:

* Right click on your windows desktop and select Properties.
* Choose the Settings tab and press the Advanced button.
* Select the 3D tab and make sure SmoothVision is set to Application Preference.
* If not, press the Custom... button and change the anti-aliasing setting to Application Preference.

NVIDIA GeFORCE SERIES

PROBLEM: In certain lighting conditions, Sims will have small flashing triangles.
CARDS: GeForce FX 5600
This is a known driver bug. Turning lighting options from high to medium will resolve this. Updating your driver to the latest version may also help.

PROBLEM: From certain camera angles, Sims may be missing some triangles.
CARDS: GeForce FX 5200
This is a known driver bug. However, updating your driver to the latest version may help.

PROBLEM: The neighborhood and many screens display all grey.
CARDS: GeForce 6800
This is a new video card, and this is a known driver bug with an early version of the driver. Disabling hyperthreading on your machine may help. Updating to the latest driver may help.

PROBLEM: Interface panels and buttons may disappear or turn a solid blue color.
CARDS: GeForce4 series
This is a known bug in some older drivers (before version 6177). Upgrading to the latest manufacturer's drivers will resolve this.

FORCED ANTI-ALIASING: The Sims Life Stories will have graphical problems if anti-aliasing is
forced on in display properties. To fix this:

* Right click on your windows desktop and select Properties.
* Choose the Settings tab and press the Advanced button.
* Select the GeForce tab.
* Select Performance and Quality settings from the left menu.
* Switch Anti-aliasing settings to Application Controlled.

PROBLEM: Game crashes soon after starting.
Some recent NVIDIA drivers have problems when running when Hyperthreading is enabled on your processor. Try updating your driver first. If this doesn't help, turning off Hyperthreading in your BIOS will workaround this issue. If you have no idea what Hyperthreading or BIOS is, it's probably not worth messing around with this stuff. Contact your video card manufacturer for assistance.


UNSUPPORTED VIDEO CARDS

If you have an unsupported video card, The Sims Life Stories will run in software rendering mode. When software rendering mode is active, rendering performance is slower and graphical quality is reduced.

Examples of unsupported video cards are:

ATI Rage Fury
Matrox Millennium G400
Matrox Millennium G550
NVIDIA Riva TNT2
Matrox Parhelia
ST Micro KYRO
S3 DeltaChrome S8
SiS 315
Trident Blade XP
SiS Xabre 400

XGI Volari

* Video Problem tip: If you are seeing graphical problems not described here it is always best to go to your video card or computer manufacturer's website and make sure you have installed the latest drivers for your hardware.