free time, body shop, and misc.

I've got Free Time installed and so far everything's okay, in that it seems to have loaded everything, but I haven't done any real playtesting. I'm playing around in a test 'hood right now, and if nothing is obviously screwy I'll go load my Simself's house in S&S and see how that's working. CC is showing up (including object recolours) and I can spawn an ACR adjuster and inSim items are findable, but I haven't really tested anything further than that, although as usual the custom cameras aren't working right, because they never do the first time. I always have to clear and reload the files for some reason. I'll do that and put custom music back in later.

I was vaguely hoping FT might fix my Body Shop problems with compression, and chose to make my first test with a set of skins. I don't really hate the original skins but I've wanted something with a darker S4 and better defined fingernails and such for a while. Unfortunately it didn't fix it in and of itself.

A while back, though, a commenter here said it was a known problem in the community and someone had come up with a way to change settings, though she couldn't remember exactly what needed to be changed. However the details she gave were enough for me to be able to successfully search for the instructions. Unfortunately, that didn't work, either... However, it seems like it has improved the situation on a quick test of Body Shop. The compression is still happening but it's decidedly rather better. I need to do more extensive testing next time I'm in the mood for CC creation, but I think the upshot of this is I might be able to make better-detail stuff even though I'll still have to do some file manipulation to make it show okay in the game. Of course that means redoing some of the basics I have now but if I can get cleaner versions I think that's probably worth it.

As far as S&S goes, I did finish college and get folks moved into lots, though I held off on building houses because I wanted to wait 'til I had FT in so I could get a handle on how much room hobby items would take up (and see if there were other new items). As I said, I'll work on putting together the college chapter in between playing. Hopefully I can get ahead enough that when I hit college this time around I'll have a buffer.

Oh, yeah. I also updated my video drivers, and so far that's okay, too, though I haven't tested whether videos now show again in Sims. But both EA and ATI say they fixed it, so I'm guessing it probably is.