Lighting the house Hi, my question towards Sims 2 is how to get light in your home? Windows aren't working like they normally would in the first game. I would highly appreciate it if somebody could answer my question. Thankyou
...but the windows SHOULD work. Actually, they should work exactly as they did in Sims1, except for when it's night time. Otherwise, put lights in your houses yourself. They are under BUY > Lights. Clicking on a light fixture once it's in your house also gives you several options on how the lights operate. EDIT: Did someone move this thread? I could swear it was in a different forum when I last checked.
The windows in my game don't light a room like they did in the sims 1 either. It may be the graphics settings or something. I just buy a bunch of the cheap ceiling lights at first to get a lot of light for them. I think the post has been moved too. You're not imagining things
I agree that the windows don't let in as much light as in the original game. You didn't need lights at all during the day time in the first game. But they're definitely needed now, day or night.
How much light the windows let through depends on 2 things: the quality of your graphics card and which side of the house it is. The light in TS2 is definitely directional. If you have windows on the side of the house which his most struck by light, you can not only get light but it can be so bright that colors get washed out. On the opposite side of the house you'll get less light. And the video card makes a big difference. If you have something like the Intel integrated cards, I doubt you'd get much light at all. And the ability to get light will go up from there. By the time you get to the Radeon 9800 pro (or above) you'll have regular lighting. Check your graphics/performance section in the game (in the miscellaneous section). If they are not at full, then you'll get less light. However, if your card can't handle it, you won't get more light if you up it, just poorer performance.
The windows are actually working. Its just that if your lighting settings are set to medium or low in the graphics options you wont see it. On the low setting everything can look dull and it looks as though there is no lighting in the house. Also if you want to increase the lighting settings I recommend turning the "graphic effects" to low. This helped me a lot, especially when particle effects like bubbles baths and smoke is on screen. The next biggest boost comes from turning reflections off and you will most likely notice the difference on the neighbourhood screen (I personally have them on though) as im not too fussed about having a good frame rate on the neighbourhood screen. I have a 128mb Geforce FX 5200 (not the best card in the world I know) but I managed to get my game running at a playable rate (avergaing around 30fps) and I have everything on high apart from graphical effects. Im running at 1024x768 resolution but have turned off antialiasing and have anisotropic filtering set to the lowest setting in the Nvidia setup not The Sims 2. All this should help you set lighting to high and still have good enough frame rates to play the game with
