Meanwhile in Simcity...

The Sims 2's buyable Urbz game that was originally an official download on TheSims2.com has some interesting footage. My notes:

• Animated Urbz logo intro

• The Create an Urb screen resembles the one from the beta trailer, with the Urb in the background wearing the same beta Urb / Kiki Blunt outfit except with Venus Moonflower's hairstyle - And she's actually still in the retail game, she's hiding out of bounds on the screen that's used when you change clothes at a wardrobe instead of a district shop

• The district gameplay footage that follows appears directly related to the Create an Urb footage, since it features Jayde with Scary Mary's hair - Like they actually recorded both parts together rather than splicing random clips

• An earlier design for the Needs & Rep UI, with different icons for the Mood indicator

• Earlier design for the action queue (I think that's what that blue-ish square in the lower right is supposed to be lol)

—

a song track that was supposed to be the 4th track for Diamond Heights' "Pootie's Top 40" Radio Station.

The song was used in trailers/promotional material and older official Urbz Websites (along with a hip-hop track that's actually from The Sims Bustin Out).

A snippet of the song can still be heard in-game as the default ringtone for Urbz from Diamond Heights or if you set your OC Urbs ringtone as that:

The Full version that was supposed to be in the game has 2 different versions. One with simlish vocals sung by unknown singers which slightly differs in instrumentation and length as Willas Version is 3 minutes while the Urbz one is 4 minutes long. This track originates from the early websites:

The song also inconveniently fades out at the end which a lot of songs used to have. But the trailer shows that the song does indeed have an ending that was only shown in that specific 2003/04 trailer and nowhere else lol

And an instrumental version that also differs in length and also slightly with its instrumentation from the original Willa Ford version. According to someone who also uploaded it on YouTube, it was internally called "Celebrity Orange" which may tie back to the composer in the game credited as "Music Orange" though who they are, if they really are the composer, if it's a mistake in crediting or if it's just an artist name for the originals composers, Brian Kierulf and Josh Schwartz is unknown from what I could find.

Also shameless plug but I tried putting the original instrumentals with the Simlish vocals last year as I liked the original instrumentation a bit more tbh

Download on Mod The Sims

a whole lot more @anachrosims walls for the sims two (part two)

*opens calculator* 676 swatches from 20 wall sets converted by a madman (me). downloads and swatch previews under the cut. the folder sizes are inflated by the previews included in them but i promise they're all compressorized as usual. ^^

Original English version of an Urbz song from Gasoline Row

Up until literally 2 weeks ago I thought the band's name was "Love Commander" and the song's name was "Night After Night," because the singular instance of this song existing at all is this one YouTube video that puts the artist name first and the song name second.

Even then, there is pretty much nothing about this band on the internet. The person who uploaded that song also uploaded a handful of other Night After Night songs, but they didn't say where they're from or if they're from the same album, orrrr what.

The band does have a Discogs page, but it doesn't have Love Commander on it, just 2 instances of the band appearing on compilation albums. Although those compilation albums also both featured The Fucking Champs, who are another band that "translated" their music for The Urbz.

The fix itself (along with the thesis for those interested) can be found here:

So his experimental mod for TS2 RPC launcher basically tells the game to stop freaking out and turning stuff pink when shaders' memory usage goes over certain threshold. NOTE: it may get rid of the pink, but the game will still crash if you exceed 4GB limit.

There are two mod options to choose from:

Version 1 is more radical, it completely removes the safety check. You'll (probably) find out the shader's memory limit has been exceeded when your game crashes.

Version 2 is supposed to allow some pink soup at around 3.5 GB memory usage, near the danger zone, so you have time to act - so obviously, this one sounds more sensible.

I'll make them available for download in the next few days!!