These are the patch notes from the news section of each game on Steam. Considering the amount of crash-related fixes I thought some individuals might find it interesting. Would you want to see more patch notes posted in this community? Let me know.

If you are still running into issues with The Sims 2 I would recommend checking out The Sims 2 Starter Pack on GitHub. Up until the release of the legacy collection edition it was the recommended way to play the game across various Sims 2 communities. I imagine several fixes may still translate over to this new version.

The same individual also has a version for the original Sims. The GitHub page can be found here but I haven’t seen it as widely recommended. If you have or do try it please respond below or post to the community about your experience.

The Sims

Fixed Issues:

  • Alt+Tab or Alt+Enter can sometimes cause a crash

  • Alt+Enter can sometimes cause the Windows title bar to be hidden

  • Alt+Enter can sometimes not toggle between full screen and windowed modes

  • On some systems, The Sims can appear to launch and then immediately exit (no splash screen displayed)

  • The Sims should now launch in most situations

  • In some cases where there is an underlying graphics issue, The Sims will display a message

  • Some players are unable to click on various parts of the neighborhood map

  • The travel screen, when traveling between neighborhoods/worlds, can sometimes appear garbled or glitched

  • The Sims might crash if you are not on the default neighborhood, interact with another Sim, and then save

  • When using Alt+Enter to cycle window and zoom sizes, the HUD could be clipped. At this zoom level, The Sims will now instead clip from the top of the screen.

  • In some situations in windowed mode the title bar might not be visible

  • The Family friends counter could sometimes not be visible

  • A memory issue could lead to various unexpected behaviors after playing for a period of time (random crashes, sluggish performance, missing objects, etc)

  • The mood level arrows and mood bars had visual artifacts in some cases

  • The mouse scroll wheel could take a lot of clicks to zoom

  • Some players were encountering a “Vulkan device” error at launch

General Notes:

  • Several players have had problems (e.g. walls, floors, objects not showing up; game not launching; other oddities) that are addressed by updating graphics drivers to the latest versions. Please make sure your drivers are up to date.

  • The Sims game window is of a fixed size that can’t have its basic properties changed after it has launched. Moving the window from a monitor to another with a different, lesser resolution can lead to unexpected results, possibly even crashes. If you want to run The Sims on that second monitor please use the option “-monitor:<num>” to force it to launch on the other monitor. “0” is your primary monitor, a second monitor is “1” and so on. We are investigating adding this as a menu option in the future.

  • In some situations, players have noted that music only plays in Live mode. Please check your computer sound options and make sure that everything is properly configured (e.g. on a 5.1 surround system make sure that your center speaker is functioning).

  • You might be prompted to “Enable the help system” every time you return to a house. This is the game trying to have you complete the tutorial. This will continue to happen until you complete the tutorial.

  • There are some hardware configurations that we are seeing a disproportionate number of errors on and are actively investigating. Systems based on Intel ARC GPUs, Snapdragon laptops with Qualcomm Adreno X1-85 GPU, NVIDIA T600 GPU laptops are being investigated

  • Users that have experienced problems with getting an error indicating a lack of Vulkan compatible devices have reported that in some cases removing “OpenCL™, OpenGL®, and Vulkan® Compatibility Pack” can resolve the issue.

  • When you want to import Sims or Houses, the game could look in the wrong directory to find them. You can now work around this by placing them in “Program Files/Maxis/The Sims/UserData/Import”

  • We are investigating an issue where traveling between worlds can result in crashes in some situations

The Sims 2

Fixed Issues:

  • Alt-Tab or Alt+Enter can sometimes cause a crash

  • Some players on EA App received an error message indicating that certain needed files were corrupt

  • The game would sometimes crash after creating a family

  • The game sometimes launched at a small resolution (800x600) and then scaled that small format to fill the entire monitor

  • In certain situations the game will launch and then immediately show a “DirectX” error, requiring use of the “-w” option to work around the problem

  • Sometimes a Sim (or multiple Sims) would disappear after the player moves to another lot or neighborhood, or after leaving and rejoining the game despite saving

  • Sometimes non-adult Sims (children, pets) would disappear

  • Some interactions that result in a transferable reward (e.g. a dog returns from work) can cause the game to crash

  • Addressed some infinite loading screen issues

  • Addressed some situations related to the error “Some needed files were corrupted during the installation”

  • Addressed some situations where the game could terminate with a pop-up message when creating a family or when entering a pre-made lot

  • The game could get stuck on the color swap tool

  • The Sims’ voices could be of low quality

  • The Sims’ voices could be very quiet

  • The custom skin window couldn’t be closed in some cases

  • The “Graphics Rules.sgr” file was missing a rule that could cause “D3D” error messages

  • During the Alien Abduction cutscene, sometimes audio could drop out and a Sim could reset

  • Sims could be unable to eat cooked food

  • The game could sometimes present a loading screen that could not progress

  • Sims could sometimes disappear

General notes:

  • Several players have had problems that are addressed by updating graphics drivers to the latest versions. Please make sure your drivers are up to date.

  • Remember that the “boolProp testingCheatsEnabled” cheat will cause the game to periodically show various dialogue boxes with debugging information in them. The cheat is working as expected.

  • We are investigating an issue where during certain cinematic events (such as Alien Abduction), the Sim can be reset and the event fails. While we are investigating this, you can work around the issue by making certain there are no other Sims on the lot to observe the event.

  • In some cases, issues that have been addressed might have corrupted game saves before they were addressed (e.g. when Sims could disappear). In these cases you should try starting with a fresh save as the game won’t be able to correct the corruption, and working with corrupted saves can lead to unexpected behavior.

  • While the Alien Abduction scene now works, the scene is still missing the alien baby. We’re working on that. In the meanwhile you will have the alien baby in the game once the scene is done.

  • Some players have tried using Windows shortcut keys to move the full-screen game to another monitor. When in full screen mode the game should not be moved to another monitor or this may cause issues.