spockthewok

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,

Hi!

I have been looking into this for the past couple of weeks and I've started to make some actual progress with it, so I thought I'd give an update :0

The reason Castaway's water look so nice is that it uses the screenspace reflections used by mirrors. Sims 2's oceans use a separate effect called "OceanReflection", but Castaway removed this completely.

I've managed to map this reflection effect to the water in Sims 2 and allowed the game to reflect all of the scenery, as opposed to only the terrain and a few objects, just like Castaway:

(All of these screenshots were taken using Castaway's Materials.package file).

Unfortunately, it's still quite buggy :(

Because mirrors are not expecting to use the same reflections as the ocean in Sims 2, they're kind of broken:

Pond reflections are also borked:

(The pond reflections don't require a pool btw, this was just the best lot to demonstrate the bug).

Castaway completely overhauled the water generation and rendering, so water is composed of 8x8 grids with fancy dynamic waves, rather than being one flat plane as in TS2. It's not really feasible to port this functionality through patching, but I'm going to try and figure out how tf to get these reflection bugs fixed as best I can.

My guess is it's something to do with the reflection cameras/image projection, but I can't see any obvious differences between TS2's and Castaway's code there.

Stay tuned!

Of course! In fact, I'll even provide pictures :)

From what I have observed, the majority of things that define how an object behaves is dependent on the object ID it is assigned. If the game wants to know how many tiles the object takes up, it needs to use the object's ID to find that out; If a Sim wants to know which object is blocking its path, it checks the object's ID (and so on, and so on...).

Because these checks are limited to only looking at IDs up to 32,767, if the game encounters an object with an ID higher than this, the whole system collapses.

Here we can see that the game can't correctly determine the tile footprint of this bed, as its ID is over 32,767:

Likewise, placing the bed on the lot causes Sims to throw object errors in an endless loop because they can't figure out wtf it is or how to interact with it:

If you're lucky enough to try and interact with the bed in between each error, you'll find that you're unable to:

This is why removing the limitation would be extremely difficult, as there are so many moving parts that are reliant on it to work. I've been messing around with patching out the limit here and there, but once I modify one area, another one breaks.

If I use it anyway (to prevent the game from crashing in Buy/Build mode), and I have so many objects that the 32,767 object limit is exceeded, does the game randomly decide which objects become the ones that can’t be “used” during each play session?

In other words, how does the game decide which objects are the “extra” ones that stop functioning? Are they the objects from the folders that load last in the Downloads folder, or are they chosen randomly? Are they always the same objects, or can they be different every time the game is launched?

Hey!

The order the game assigns IDs is definitely not random. That's how I can confirm that it only appears to be OBJDs that increment the ID count, as the assigned ID for an object remained persistent across game restarts.

As for how this order is chosen, I'm not certain, but CC objects seem to be given IDs first as the objects that were breaking in the Build/Buy catalogue were always only Maxis ones. The only way the game 'decides' an object is non-functioning is whether its ID is 32,768 or above, as it is programmed to consider this impossible/invalid. All of the additional OBJDs from CC are simply pushing Maxis objects outside of the range of IDs the game permits.

I'll paste your other ask below for reference to save answering across two posts:

"If I don’t need Maxis objects taking up space from my object limit at all, is there any way to completely disable Maxis objects? Or perhaps disable the OBJDs of the ones I don’t want to use? They also unnecessarily clutter the Buy/Build catalog. And making individual default replacements for each object would be far too time-consuming."

I don't think there's a way to disable Maxis objects outside of deleting them from the objects.package files, but I really wouldn't recommend trying that. Thankfully, it's Maxis objects that seem to be the first to break, so if you really don't need them, you can always download some catalogue hiders that hide whatever objects you're not interested in to ease the clutter.

Hopefully that is helpful!

Hi, I don't think so!

I just ran a test in the debugger and recorded the object ID of the MALM Bedframe from the IKEA stuff pack, first using my minimal Downloads folder as a baseline and then adding in 7 packages that recolour various Maxis objects. The test was performed in Pleasantview using the Oldie household both times.

ID without the recolours: 12,011 ID with the recolours: 12,011

I do want to experiment to find out what the game is actually assigning IDs to - I know everyone goes on about it being OBJDs, but I want to be certain :)

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

UPDATE: Might have already solved it, just testing now!

UPDATE 2: I have fixed the objects being unselectable, but their functionality seems to be broken when placing them...

Whelp, I knew the fix seemed a bit too simple...

To be brief, there appears to be an issue where some objects (seemingly always Maxis ones) become unselectable in the Build/Buy catalogue when using a non-specific amount of CC with the object limit fix.

Having reproduced the bug and observed what's happening in the debugger, I can see that the data for these objects is null, meaning the game has soiled itself (as usual) and failed to properly initialise the data at an earlier point in the code.

This means my patch is technically working as intended, as it's preventing the game from crashing in these instances, but the core problem remains unsolved, which is determining where this null data is coming from and what is failing for it to be created.

I'm not sure how easy it's going to be to figure out and fix, but rest assured, I am currently working on trying to resolve it.

Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause!

Oh well, back to it...

UPDATE: The information in this post is outdated. Please see this post.

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

Oof, that would be the dream, wouldn't it? I imagine if the load times were resolved, the minds of TS2 players around the world would collectively explode with such force that the sound could be heard from the International Space Station :D

Apologies for the cop out answer (as this seems to be my go-to response at the moment), but like the whole 64-bit and crashing thing, I'm not sure what could be done without a rewrite of the engine, putting aside all the usual recommendations of compressing files and removing special characters from filenames etc. Without having really looked into it, I'd guess that the reason the game loads CC so slowly is that it is likely reading files linearly (as in one by one) rather than in parallel, which is the method we'd opt to use today.

As with most of the game's shortcomings, this would be the result of the hardware limitations of the time, particularly considering that consumer CPUs commonly only had a single core. For comparison, my current CPU has eight cores, meaning it can execute eight separate tasks at the same time!

I do note that you specifically mention long loading times on Windows - is this another area where Linux performs noticeably better? I'd be interested to know how much of a difference there is so I can ponder further. The only thing that comes to mind is all the unfortunate extra bloat that Microsoft loves to stuff the OS with, which probably adds a reasonable amount of overhead (who doesn't love Windows Search constantly indexing their files in the background??). Linux is always going to be significantly more lightweight in terms of memory usage in this regard.

I was wondering... are you working on any other projects related to The Sims 2? Would it be possible to create a solution for the crashes?I'm really a noob regarding these topics.

Hey, thank you!

I have one more mod that I'm planning to release on Sunday which fixes one instance of the game crashing, but I'll go into more detail about it when I post the announcement - it's still being tested by myself and a few others to make sure it's not causing any weird side-effects! Other than that, I don't have any immediate plans for further patches, though I have had a few requests for fixes that I'm looking at slowly.

If EA gave me access to The Sims 2's source code I would very happily sit down and fix as many crashing issues as I could, but sadly I can only see that happening if I somehow managed to bluff my way into becoming their CEO. As it stands, it's only possible to see what the game is doing through a program that gives a rough estimate of what the code looks like under the hood, and Maxis deliberately put a lot of effort into making their code as confusing as possible to make the lives of people like me even more difficult :(

Crashes related to the game running out of memory would require the game's engine to be rewritten to be fixed, and again, that's something only EA can do at the moment.

If there's a specific bug that causes crashing for many people then I would definitely be down to investigate it, but as far as I'm aware, most crashes seem to be pretty random and not linked to any particular trigger.

This is an extremely kind offer, but I am not looking to take any money from anyone :D

I currently only have one more patch that I'm aiming to release once I've had enough feedback on it (people might be able to guess which TS2 issue it's for), and the work I did for the pink soup was primarily for academic purposes, so I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable receiving donations for it haha.

It's incredibly corny, but knowing that I've genuinely helped people is rewarding enough!

Thank you though, I do really appreciate the gesture <3

I wasn't able to find it published anywhere besides where you posted it on github, so I just wanted to let you know of a potential spelling mistake I found. On page 52 in section 4.7, it says "...move conservative approach..." where I think it should be "more" instead. Just wanted to let you know in case you can edit it. If this is an overstep so sorry and thank you for your work!

Hi, thank you, and no need to apologise!

There a way more minor errors than that typo you noticed haha, particularly after the mid-point of Chapter 4 - I mean, "the macOS port was first released in 2014"? Who wrote this crap? (I'm paraphrasing, but the macOS version was first released in 2005, I must have been thinking of the Super Collection when I made that blunder).

I mentioned it to someone else, but I didn't figure out the cause of the pink soup until very late in the project, after I'd already written most of my dissertation. I had to go back an rewrite a lot of it in a bit of a rush, while I was also redoing much of the practical work at the same time, and being extremely sleep deprived on top of that :D

Absolutely not a stupid question! :)

But yes, that's basically right - the game was not able to correctly make use of the extra memory the 4GB patch was providing it with. It's like if someone forced you to drink 4 strawberry milkshakes but your stomach only had room for 2, and you threw up a load of pink liquid after starting the 3rd milkshake (that's probably a terrible analogy, it sounded better in my head).

As for the Legacy Collection, the pink soup is definitely less common now, but that was certainly not the case when it was first released (despite EA promising in their patch notes that they'd fixed it).

Apologies to those who were brave enough to read my dissertation (even I go a bit cross-eyed trying to re-read it), but the section on the Legacy Collection is actually rather outdated. My disorganised ADHD brain forgot to check if there had been any updates for my totally legit copy of the game when I got to that part, so the information in my paper is based on the state of the LC from February 2025 (I'm a fraud, I know).

It wasn't until I started work on the plugins over Christmas that I realised this, and I noticed upon further investigation that EA had made some significant changes to the bugged code in one of the updates that were released after Feb. 2025.

I've had a couple of people ask me this haha :) I am aware of it and I would have liked to investigate it as part of my project if I'd been able to isolate the cause of the pink soup sooner, rather than 2-3 weeks before the submission deadline!

I've never played the game on Linux, so I don't have any first-hand experience with the performance/stability improvements many claim to have when using it - as much as I loathe Windows and find it a chore to use, it's still what I use on my main PC for various reasons (I use Artix Linux on my laptop, but that's an old ThinkPad from 2012 which sounds like a jet engine taking off with just Firefox open, so I doubt it could handle TS2 well enough to do any proper testing).

My only (non-educated) guess would be that it's something to do with the compatibility wrappers required to run the game on Linux (Wine/Proton/DXVK). I believe these have better optimised memory management systems (I know DXVK does at least), and are likely being much more stringent with how the game is allocating and freeing its resources, helping it to keep below the 2GB memory usage threshold for longer, which seems to be easily reached on Windows and is triggering the pink soup.

I'm not convinced the game is doing a good enough job when it comes to freeing memory to begin with, so I wouldn't be surprised if this was at least one of the reasons the game seems to work better on Linux.

The old 32-bit Windows functions TS2 relies on actually just get redirected to more recent, 64-bit compatible versions of the same functions when the game tries to use them if playing on Windows, which seems like a pretty hands-off approach to compatibility to me, but I'm sure there's probably some other deeper stuff going on in the background that I'm not aware of.

Microsoft also likes to drop support for legacy features rather than continuing to maintain them (I play a lot of older games that make heavy use of EAX, so I'll never forgive them for canning hardware accelerated audio in Vista), whereas compatibility for old hardware/software seems to be a much bigger priority for the Linux community.

This is going to be a really boring (and perhaps slightly disappointing) answer, but I only really play with the vanilla hoods/Sims!

I basically just rotate between each household's initial scripted story scenarios (the Broke family is always a drag to get done imo), and then see where the game takes me from there!

I'm strangely drawn to vampires for some reason (probably from watching too much Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a kid), so one thing I commonly do is turn Lilith into one. If I'm feeling particularly mean, I'll send Angela down a downward spiral of failure too >:)

The only CC I use is the official store content, with everything else just being minor bug fixes or annoyance removers (such as those constant pillow and water balloon fights aaahhh).

Quick question: I play Sims 2 from the CD's and haven't used RPCLauncher or Ultimate ASI loader before.

Is it possible to install this mod without those programs?

If it isn't possible, which one is the most minimal?

I worked in IT for 30 years, and I would be fascinated to read your thesis if you're open for it. The explanation on Github was really interesting.

Hi!

It's not possible to use the mod without one of those two things, I'm afraid. The mod is an ASI plugin and the game needs some way to load it, which is what both of them do.

As for which is the most minimal, that would be Ultimate ASI Loader, as loading ASI plugins is its only purpose. Sims2RPC can do this too, but it also includes many other bug-fixes and toggleable QOL features, such as fixing the first-born syndrome bug, allowing you to increase the resolution of shadows and lot imposters, and giving you the ability to toggle the 4GB patch on/off on the fly.

And yes, please feel free to read my thesis, that's what it's there for! There are many things I'd probably like to go back and rewrite because I was pretty sleep deprived by about Chapter 4, but it should all be mostly accurate :D