the sims... 2!

my girl beeatrice wanted to fall in love, so I made her another bug girl named mariquita. she's a lady ♀️👠

all was going well for like 3.5 seconds because i had them check each other out and they were very attracted to each other!!

then they immediately started fighting lol

If anyone else would like to join me in petitioning EA to at least try to fix the object limit in Legacy Edition (maybe I'd bother using that version of the game instead, lol), please jump on this thread I've started in their forums and comment.

🙏🏻

(yes, Will, I know you're still poking at the UC code being like "could I fix this...??" but it shouldn't be all on you, lovely)

Here is a short summary of my notes and findings on the Object Limit after struggling with this beast for years.

See @spockthewok's post for the explanation on what this is and what the limit is (32,767 Objects).

By the count on @picknmixsims's Maxis GUIDs spreadsheet, the game has just shy of 14,000 objects in it. I do not believe that all of these contribute to the limit (cos the maths doesn't check out) but just keep that in mind as you're calculating how much room you've got in your folder.

Sims count. If you've got a hood with a tonne of character files (you can find these in Documents / EA Games / The Sims 2 / Neighborhoods / [HOOD] / Characters) you're gonna have less room for CC

Reducing GUIDs can create way more space in your folder. Tutorial I use to do this is here by HugeLunatic - I reduce all CC rugs to 1 GUID, for example.

CAS Content doesn't count

Fences and hood deco don't count

Custom foods count. This can be an unexpected one

Same goes for custom careers, and Uni majors.

To easily check how many OBJDs you've got in your Downloads folder, use HCDU+ by PickNMix. Scan the entire folder for the "OBJD" resource only, go to the info tab, and the program will tell you how many files it scanned.

I don't have all the answers on how some people seem to have more OBJDs in their folders and not hit the limit while others with less do hit it, but that's what I can tell you from much testing and experience.

I also don't know if default replacing Maxis GUIDs still only counts as 1 object, but I'd assume it would.

Good Bad news, everyone!

I have returned from a grueling 48-hour adventure deep within the Maxis mines, and have witnessed unspeakable man-made horrors with my own two eyes — the object limit is very real and there is nothing that can be done to fix it! The end times are upon us!

Okay, I'm being slightly dramatic. It could be fixed fairly easily, but not with a simple patch, and likely not without access to the source code (anyone else tired of hearing that excuse?).

The issue is that the limit isn't localised to purely the Build/Buy menu — it's integral to every aspect of the game that involves objects. Here are just a few examples of the game's functionality that would need modifying to remove the limit:

Sim pathfinding and routing.

Mapping tree tables to objects.

Interacting with objects.

Manipulating objects within lists (reading/writing/deleting them).

Objects being unselectable in the Build/Buy menu was also a result of this limit and I managed to fix it very quickly, but because The Sims 2 is a house of cards with the limit as its foundation, everything started falling apart almost instantly.

"So, what is this limit?", I hear you ask. 32,767. Yes, you read that correctly. The game is only willing to accept object IDs up to a meager value of 32,767. In computing terms, this is the maximum value of a signed 16-bit integer. It can store many more objects than this in a list, which is why you can still see all your 4t2 objects in the catalogue, but it isn't designed to recognise this many IDs and thus can't do anything with them.

Why are integers signing things? Are they famous or something?

'Signed' refers to the fact that these are integers (an integer is just a whole number btw) that can represent both positive and negative values — negative numbers have a negative sign before them, hence the term 'signed'. An unsigned integer is therefore one that can only represent positive values.

While they can both represent the same total of different values, the range of representable positive values differs. Using 16-bit integers as an example:

Unsigned: 0–65,535 Signed: -32,768–32,767

This shows that both can represent 65,536 different values, but the range of positive values for signed integers is half of that of unsigned integers. Object IDs cannot be negative, which means Maxis deliberately chose to use signed integers as a way to cut the ID limit in half.

The cherry on top of all this is that the game is manually converting 32-bit numbers into 16-bit numbers to enforce this limit. This is why I could fix objects not being selectable in the Build/Buy menu easily, as all I had to do was patch out the conversion. Could EA do this across the whole game themselves if they wanted to? I imagine so. But then again, if I had billions of dollars, I probably couldn't be arsed either.

What's an object ID?

An object ID is just a number from 0–32,767 that the game assigns to each new object it places into a list, presumably starting at 0 and incrementing by 1 for the next object. It would appear that CC objects are given IDs first, which is why it was solely Maxis objects becoming unselectable after passing the limit.

Sims and objects are stored in separate lists, but I believe they both contribute to the overall limit. My single piece of evidence for this is that I experimented switching between several hoods and observed that the IDs of objects in the Build/Buy catalogue fluctuated across them. Objects in hoods with subhoods attached had higher IDs than in those without.

What was causing the Build/Buy menu crashes?

The same thing I explained in my original post (the game trying to access null pointers), except the creation of these null pointers was no accident and not the result of something going wrong.

The game merely checks whether the ID for the object it is looking at is above 32,767, and if it is, it deliberately sets the pointer to its address to 0. This would be fine, if it didn't then try and access this nullified pointer immediately afterwards!

I'll cut Maxis some slack here, because surely no one would be crazy enough to want more than 32,767 objects in their game, right guys? How could they ever have predicted such a scenario? (2004 was a simpler time).

Wait, so you were wrong about there not being an object limit? Not so cocky now, are you?

Whoa there, cowboy — hold your horses. If I may direct your attention to this excerpt of an email I sent to @teaaddictyt on the 22nd of April 2026 at 13:42 BST:

As you can see, I was right all along!!!

In my defence though, we thought the crashing was the only thing we had to solve, which is why I missed the completely obvious 16-bit conversion that was occurring within the functions I patched. Unfortunately, I am only human, but I understand if you want to destroy all the spockthewok posters I know you have hanging on your walls...

In light of these new findings, if you want to hear my updated opinion on the existence of the object limit, watch this video.

Is your patch useless?

Yes, but also no. It's not fixing the object limit (I should probably rename it tbh), but it is fixing those annoying crashes caused by it.

At the moment, not having the Build/Buy menu crash when you try and use it is the best we can do. It's up to you which you find more annoying — crashing, or not being able to buy x number of objects in the catalogue. Like the 4GB memory limit, this is going to be an additional constraint we'll have to learn to accept :/

Another alternative would be to join me and the 12 other weirdos who play with no CC, and never have to worry about any of this. No? Oh well, it was worth a try...

Will you ever actually fix the object limit?

If it's even possible without the source code, then not by myself, no.

Because of the number of core areas of the game that would need patching, I don't trust myself not to miss something and have the game explode. Unless someone wants to assemble a modding strike force to try and tackle the issue as a team over several months, I'm not touching it with a 10-foot pole (for your safety and for mine).

Should Maxis go on trial at the Hague for crimes against humanity?

Probably.

Anyway, that's all from me, apologies for the false hope :( One small positive is that I did manage to map out a reasonably large chunk of the game's code while I was frantically searching for solutions, which should make my life easier when looking at your requests. I feel like I need to successfully complete some of them now to make up for this dud!

Will

There's an easier way!

As I work on the recording booth for the Fame Mod, I have been making a lot of custom sounds. I followed two tutorials that do things slightly differently, one by Hexameter and one by Carrigon, and also made a silly mistake (thanks for pointing it out, @picknmixsims). All this combined to lead to a discovery; you don't need a HLS (UNK) or a Track Settings (TRKS) to make your sound package work.

A functioning sound package needs only:

One or more MP3/XA audio resources in group 0x0B8AB3CD. Their instance numbers must match the name you want to use to refer to your sound in an object's Sound ID List (STR# 0x4132).

A single audio INI resource in group 0xADD550A7 (which looks to SimPE like an MP3) that tells the game your package contains sounds to index.

Here is the manual way to do it. This is not a tutorial for beginners. I'm going to assume you know your way around SimPE, when to commit and so on.

genetically correct nina and dina <3

some photoshop tricks under the cut

Hello kittens

I've updated TS2 Extender to fix pink flashing, courtesy of spockthewok, and there are also now a ton of new scripting features allowing for things like interaction injection, UI editing, etc. etc.

There is a website that documents all the new Lua stuff.

Soooo... I didn't intend for two highly requested fixes for The Sims 2 to drop within the space of a week and a half, buuuut...

Here's where you can download an experimental patch to fix the so-called 'object limit'!

https://github.com/spockthewok/TS2ObjectLimitFix

(Ultimate Collection only at the moment, I'm afraid).

The good news is:

Both @lordcrumps and @teaaddictyt have tested it with stupidly large CC folders and report that it works.

There isn't a dissertation the length of Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' you need to read through to understand wtf is going on.

The crashing wasn't caused by some hardcoded object limit at all! (That I know of).

An explanation of the issue for programmers:

And for everyone else:

The code for the Build/Buy menu was missing basic checks to confirm that the data it was trying to do things with was actually valid. No, I'm not joking.

Basically, it appears that all of the objects you can buy in the game are stored in something you can think of as being like a big, long list, which grows in size with the more custom objects you have.

The only purpose of the code that this plugin patches is to sort the items in the list into some kind of order. This is done by assessing if the value of the previous item in the list is larger than that of the item currently being looked at, and swapping their position if this is true (also known as an insertion sort).

In short, the game wasn't asserting that the data it was about to compare for sorting was valid before accessing it, and then promptly blowing up when it tried to do so and discovered it wasn't.

I imagine that the odds of the game making an oopsie and dumping some funky data into the list increases with the number of objects it is having to process - this might be why this issue only presents itself to those using multiple GB of Build/Buy CC. It was much easier to patch the code encountering the bad data within the list than to try and hunt down the mysterious culprit putting the data in there to begin with, so this is all the information I have at the moment unfortunately.

Either way, one of the first things you're taught when learning to code is to ALWAYS check that the data you're operating on has been initialised (i.e. it holds some kind of value). I guess someone at Maxis must have skipped that lecture :D

Is the 255 objects per subcategory limit theory true?

The Downloads folder I was using for testing had ~672 objects in the Deco/Misc subcategory (Maxis objects included). With the patch, I can freely navigate throughout the entire subcategory with zero crashes, so I guess not?

What about the whole OBJD limit thing?

People have varying beliefs of what the limit on OBJDs might be, but HCDU reports my Downloads folder had an OBJD count of 20,787. Again, without the patch the game would crash when switching categories in the Build/Buy catalogue, with the patch, no crashing.

If you want to hear my opinion on whether such a limit exists, watch this video.

Do I even need this patch if I don't use much CC?

As it adds some fairly important crash-prevention checks to part of the Build/Buy menu's functionality, I'd probably recommend using it anyway, just to be safe - we all know how much this game loves to crash!

Aaaah! I'm still getting crashes with the patch!

I'm aware that a few of you CC addicts out there have Downloads folders larger than the total size of everything ever uploaded to the internet, so if you still experience crashing in Build/Buy mode with this patch, please take a look at the mod's GitHub page and send me over the information requested there. Fingers crossed that shouldn't happen, but if it does, I'll try my best to investigate :)

Anyway...

Will

Hi everyone!

First off, I just wanted to say thank you for all of the positive feedback I've received over the past few days — I'm really pleased to see that my mod seems to have been effective for so many of you!

I am aware that my dissertation/thesis is really rather technical, filled with lots of academic/flowery language, and probably quite overwhelming to try and understand if you're lucky enough to have not studied computer science, so I wanted to attempt to break the key parts of it down into the simplest terms possible, to hopefully help answer some of the questions I've seen people have.

What is the pink soup?

The pink/purple strobe lighting we all know and love is 1 of 4 uniquely coloured shaders the game uses to indicate a specific type of error has occurred when trying to display something on-screen. The 3 other colours it uses (you've likely seen at least one of them) are red, blue, and yellow.

These shaders serve two main purposes:

To let you know something has gone wrong in an obvious (albeit obnoxious) manner.

To allow the game to keep running in spite of whatever error has happened (otherwise it would just crash).

Internally, the error that the pink soup represents is known as a "material parsing failure", i.e. the game has failed to understand some piece of material data (textures, rendering properties etc.) about an object it is trying to render.

Part of the process the game goes through before rendering an object to the screen is checking that its data only contains specific characters (numbers, letters, and certain symbols) — an example of when this would fail and trigger the pink soup would be if the game came across a random emoji during these checks.

What does 32-bit/64-bit mean?

A 'bit' is just a single digit of a binary number. All you really need to know is that a 32-bit number is a binary number that is 32 digits (bits) long, with the largest binary number possible being 32 consecutive 1s (1111111…).

I'm not going to bore you to death and show you how to convert binary numbers to decimal, so you'll just have to believe me when I say that 32 consecutive 1s in binary is equivalent to 4,294,967,295 in decimal.

4.2 billion might seem like a pretty high value to be able to represent, but if I said this is roughly equal to 4GB, you might be able to start to see how 32-bit computers/software could be a bit (no pun intended) limited memory-wise. For comparison, the largest decimal value a 64-bit binary number can represent is 18,446,744,073,709,551,615, or just under 18.5 exabytes (EB)!

But what if I wanted to represent the number 5 billion in 32-bit binary? Here's the fun thing — you can't. If you tried, the binary number would 'wrap around'. As in, it would max out at 32 consecutive 1s before resetting back to 0 and continuing to count up until it reached the binary value of 705,032,705 (5,000,000,000 - 4,294,967,295 = 705,032,705).

This is what is meant when we say that The Sims 2 can only use up to 4GB of your computer's memory (RAM) — it is physically unable to access/store data in more than 4,294,967,296 different memory addresses (it's 4,294,967,296 because the range of possible addresses would be 0 to 4,294,967,295).

If you're not sure what I mean when I talk about 'memory addresses', you can think of the concept as being like your home address (your house number, street name, and postal/zip code). It's just the location a piece of data lives at in memory so the game knows where to find it if it needs to use it for something.

Once the game has run out of memory addresses to use to store things, it will crash. The only way this could be fixed would be if EA magically decided to rewrite the game's engine to be 64-bit, thus allowing it to use an exponentially larger number of addresses.

Why does the pink soup happen?

This is where things get interesting. While the game is loading, the material data for the objects in your neighbourhood/lot is stored at individual addresses in your computer's memory so it can be processed.

Part of this processing involves the game taking all of the shader code found in the Materials.package file and linking the relevant shaders to the relevant pieces of material data of an object (e.g. a reflection shader would be linked to the glass part of a mirror object), creating shader 'packages' for the whole object. Again, both these packages and the information that links them to the object are also stored in memory.

As you can probably imagine, if you have a large number of different objects in your hood/lot (particularly more complex/detailed objects with many rendering properties), the amount of free memory the game has to use to keep storing things starts to decrease FAST.

Back in ye olden days of 2004 when The Sims 2 was released, 32-bit was the most commonly used architecture for consumer-grade hardware and software. Despite its known drawbacks, the 4GB memory restriction was not really a huge issue, as the technical limitations of the time meant your parents' PC would likely catch fire and explode long before this level of memory usage could be reached in-game.

Windows XP (the operating system the game was primarily developed for) was also a 32-bit operating system. The way XP handled the 4GB memory limit was simple:

2GB was given to the kernel (the core of the operating system).

2GB was given to applications (i.e. The Sims 2).

This is why it is commonly recommended to apply what is known as a '4GB patch' to the game, as by default, it still thinks it's living in 2004 and is only allowed to use 2GB of memory — the 4GB patch therefore permits the game to use the full 4GB of memory it is able to support.

So, where does the pink soup come in to this?

Basically, there is a piece of logic within the game's code that is used during the process of linking shaders to material data described above. All this logic does is check whether the material data it is being given is stored at a memory address above or below the 2GB mark, presumably some kind of relic of the Windows XP days.

For whatever reason (either due to a bug or intentional design), for data stored above 2GB, the game performs additional checks which will ALWAYS FAIL, and the game will treat this data as being malformed/invalid, refusing to link any shaders to it.

Hopefully, the chain of causality should now be clear:

The capabilities of our hardware has increased dramatically in the past 20+ years.

We've all been applying a 4GB patch to the game to allow it to make use of more of our RAM.

We've also all been installing a load of cool custom content and creating highly decorated hoods/lots because our fancy graphics cards can handle them easily.

All of these objects are causing memory usage to quickly surpass the originally intended 2GB range.

The game is considering any data for the objects stored above this range to be invalid and refusing to do anything with it.

The pink/purple error shader is instead being applied to these objects because the game thinks there is something wrong with their material data.

In conclusion, The Sims 2 is confused and elderly, frequently soiling itself when presented with high-tech information from the far off future of the 2020s that its puny 2004 mind can't possibly comprehend.

What are the differences between v1/v2 of the mod?

Both versions of the mod patch the same piece of logic in the game's code, but with differing approaches.

With v1, the additional (and always failing) checks the game performs on material data stored above the 2GB mark are essentially patched out, meaning they are not executed and shaders will always be correctly linked to them, regardless of their location in memory. This is great, as you should never see any pink soup that would usually be triggered by these failed checks. Consequently however, the game will give you no indication that it is running out of memory, except for when it inevitably crashes once all free memory has been used up.

On the other hand, v2 makes use of these faulty checks. Instead of removing them completely, they are repurposed to warn you of high memory usage, with the game not performing these checks until material data starts being stored above the 3.5GB mark. This means you will still see pink soup, but only once memory usage exceeds 3.5GB. This is intentional, and is meant to be a trade-off between allowing the game to correctly process more data in memory, but also still letting you know that a crash may be imminent some time after the pink soup appears, giving you enough breathing room to save and restart the game before this happens.

To illustrate these differences better, here is roughly what the code is doing in the vanilla game, v1, and v2 of the mod:

Vanilla:

if memory address <= 2GB everything is fine, continue as usual if memory address > 2GB pink soup time!

V1:

if memory address <= 2GB everything is fine, continue as usual if memory address > 2GB everything is fine, continue as usual

V2:

if memory address <= 3.5GB everything is fine, continue as usual if memory address > 3.5GB pink soup time!

Which version should I choose?

There's no correct option, but if you play with a lot of CC or with highly decorated hoods/lots, I would probably recommend starting with v2, only for the so-called 'safety' reasons I outlined above.

I personally use v1 because I play very vanilla, so I know memory usage should never really get that high. If you're like me, or you just don't care about potential crashes and want to be rid of the pink soup, then v1 of the mod is the one for you :)

I know people likely still have many questions, so I've enabled the 'Ask me anything' option on this blog - feel free to use it!

Thanks again,

A Mix magazine article reveals how The Sims relies not on flashy action audio, but on a carefully constructed soundscape of everyday life. From improvised Simlish dialogue to a dynamic mix shaped by the player’s actions, the series hides an unexpectedly complex audio system behind its seemingly simple presentation.

The piece also explores how a very small team built a flexible, emotionally driven sound world — where realism and nuance matter more than spectacle.

Page 41-43

by Blair Jackson

The Mix Magazine 2006 October : Future Publishing : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

More facts below 👇:

On Simlish

“The language of the actual Sims characters is a made-up tongue called Simlish, an emotion-filled language that defies translation.”

“In creating Simlish, the development team experimented with fractured Ukrainian and Tagalog... Inspired by the code talkers of World War II, Wright also suggested Navajo.”

On Audio Perception in The Sims

“‘It’s not fair to say it’s ‘simpler’; it’s different,’ says Kauker...”

“We don’t have one big sound—we don’t have a car, we don’t have guns. But we have everyday life—a toilet flush, a sink, footsteps.”

On the Player’s Role

“In a very real sense, it is the player who determines the game’s audio mix...”

“It’s a user-constructed world, so the track limit varies with what the user builds.”

On Karaoke and Complex Systems

“…karaoke, which I guarantee you is as challenging as doing a good car engine. It’s not easy doing karaoke in Simlish...”

On the Scale of Work

“The Sims 1 had 3,000 to 4,000 voice events; now [with The Sims 2], we’re up 50,000 lines of dialog...”

On the Approach to Voice Acting

“The acting is more improv than scripted.”

Images about The Sims 2 from article:

In a sense, Sims 2 players create their own complex audio mix.

The Sims audio team, from left: Jackie Gratz, Jason Reimer, Jeff Lillard, Thomas Day, Bill Cameron.