I thought about posting this on the pixelation thread, but I don't know if it's the same thing. I've had minor banding and some pixelation on clothes for a while, though not as bad as some of the pics I've seen. My sims, however, almost always have skin as smooth as silk. I spend a lot of time on pause, super zoomed in, just admiring them.

Overnight, my game went from my sims being smooth-skinned and stunning to blotchy and sick-looking. The skins even look slightly blotchy and pixelated in CAS, especially their cheeks. It looks EXACTLY as if I put in a new default skin and didn't clear the cache properly. One of my legacy sims is dark-skinned and she has pinkish and greenish splotches all over. And they all "look" different, almost like the CC default skin isn't showing up. It's baaaaad.

It's not like I've never had slight speckles (or whatever) in the cheeks (especially in certain lighting) but this is nothing like that. This is all over and it's huge patches.

All other graphics look good as usual. I updated windows (and whatever else gets updated by windows) a little over 2 weeks ago but it's been a while since I updated my graphics driver. I haven't added new mods or cc recently, no settings changed, and it's happening across multiple save games.

I'm going to try a graphic driver update (or 3, I'm always reluctant to get the very newest), although, since the last windows updates were so long ago, you'd think that it wouldn't take 100 hours of gameplay to show a problem. This was OVERNIGHT and no changes in the last couple of weeks.

I'm going to try to get pictures in a bit, I can't look at any more of my poor sims right now. I've been testing some things, but there is so much I don't know about tech stuff; is there anything specific I should be looking for or trying? And sorry for the whinging.

Were there any more minor Windows updates right before the change? You can see them in the Reliability Monitor. Hit Windows key-R and enter "perfmon /rel" without quotes, and you'll see a chart of updates and errors, with a column for each day.

Thank you for telling me about the Reliability Monitor! I didn't see anything with Windows except security updates but I found a LOT of other crap with Armoury Crate (dozens of attempts at uninstalls and installs, some sort of update loop, causing the program to repeatedly crash behind the scenes) and I fought with it all day to try to manually uninstall. I ended up having to do a system restore (which sucked all the meta.data files from my sims saves!). I really hate Asus so much of the time.

Anyways! Even though Armoury Crate's broken update happened the day before my game got the crud, it didn't seem to have anything to do with it. I didn't THINK it would, but on the Asus website there were numerous reports of the looping update causing crashing and a host of other issues so I had a tiny sliver of hope.

I also updated my Nvidia driver by a couple of increments to the most recent "stable" driver, but no change. I might try one of the newest ones, just to see what happens, idk. I guess I can always revert back if it causes problems.

I'm going to try to post a few pics. On a really sunny day, with a good lighting mod, with the sims out in the sunshine, pale-skinned sims don't look GOOD but not the absolute worst they can look. Darker-skinned sims don't fare well at all. Maybe it is the same Windows/Nvidia issue everybody is talking about and it was like a sleeper cell, waiting a couple of weeks to hit. My poor, poor pretties.

That does sound like what a lot of us have seen. I have no idea why your game was spared for so long; this started about 16 months ago. I don't know why the effects wouldn't appear right after the relevant update either, unless you hadn't restarted your computer for a while.

And yeah, Asus software is crap. The hardware is great, but the software... I've seen enough to know that if I were to buy an Asus computer, the first thing I'd do is wipe it, as in, reinstall Windows.

In case you want comparsion shots, here are a few I took last year. There are three images because I was experimenting with different settings and comparing to macOS too; you'll notice it's mostly the same.

Victoris Andrews, ~9 am:



Beau Andrews:



Gunther Goth:



(The top image above is in the 32-bit Mac version, which only supports up to a 1280x800 resolution.)

I wish I had something to offer, but I haven't seen any workarounds yet. By the way, what graphics card do you have? There's been some debate over whether this is as much of an issue with AMD cards as with Nvidia.

Mine is Nvidia RTX 2060. One of my sons has an AMD card (not sure which one) on his gaming desktop, so I plan on trying it later to see if there's a difference. I'm going to have a hard time not forcing a trade the AMD fixes my sims.

I wonder why this problem has so many different symptoms (and such different levels of severity). Like, I have zero banding on my sims skin, just the blotchy stuff, and in good lighting their BODY skin is flawless, completely smooth still (or at least arms and legs, they were in one-piece swimwear). So for the most part, just the faces are messed up.

I did a full backup of my game on April 1 so I put that folder back in and the problem persists. I also tried a brand new game with a different default; the faces look better than this and but the bodies have large, square blocks (like pixelation, but large scale, even in CAS). Same weird bodies with some of my non-defaults.

I suppose I could try different skins and see if I can find one I can live with. The freckled skins (or adding a lot of custom freckles) seem to hide it pretty well. I guess I could make a new, fully freckled game to transition me through this depressing new development.

What did you do? Do you just play with it like that? Do you get used to it after a while?

I don't have any cc skins installed, or any cc at all for that matter. One thing that's been pointed out is that other textures at least, e.g. walls, look much better if someone uses uncompressed textures. Here's an interesting post about it:

https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discus ... t_17636333

Point is, if your cc skins don't use the same compression as base game textures, maybe they're not as affected. I think faces are rendered differently, but I don't know enough about in-game textures to speculate further than that. I know a couple players have mitigated the effects to some extent with HQ mods, but even if your 2060 can handle the extra load, which it can, the game engine is going to struggle with the increased load, so it's really only a good workaround for taking pretty screenshots, not long-running saves.

I played from 2010 to 2017 on a Mac with an Nvidia GT 330M, so my original standards were not high. Even playing the Mac version on my new laptop in 2017, at the forcibly reduced resolution, was a revelation. And I had pixelated shadows in both macOS and in Windows once I Bootcamped. So this is less of a revolutionary change for me than a new expression of the same problem.

I'd say I got used to it, but I don't really care so much in the first place. It would be nice to have a fix, sure. But love Sims 3 because of the sims' personalities and the open world, not because it's beautiful, even if it still can be in certain situations. When a sim or object looks bad, I just kind of don't look at it so much.

I was very late to The Sims 3 (but well before all the graphics weirdness), so everything looked pretty good for me from the get-go, even on a non-gaming laptop. I had no complaints at all. But I started seeing pictures of how beautiful TS3 could look with a good graphics card, and I had to get one right away, so I could admire my sims and their world in all of its glory. I don't even take pics or anything, I just like to move my camera around town, watching the sunsets, enjoying the scenery, zooming in so I can smile at my sims' little faces. Sooooo I'll be having to reassess my priorities. xD

It's just that it's new and completely out-of-the-blue and it feels like a huge step backwards, so it's hard to wrap my head around. But I had a really good run, being able to play a beautiful-looking, smooth-running game for so long, when there are so many people who have trouble getting it to even run at all. And about the HQ mod, I definitely wouldn't want to sacrifice performance for appearance.

Thanks so much for advising me on this (and helping me put it in perspective!).

I didn't mean to suggest that the graphics changes aren't or shouldn't be a big deal, and I still hope someone will come up with a workaround. But they're not game-breaking for me, more like the icing on top of the cake used to be premium bakery quality and is now the stuff you get in a plastic container. The cake is still the cake though.

Anyway, I'd love to know what you see on your son's computer, whenever you get a chance to test.

indignantgirl, Just dropped in to say welcome to the club. It's a sucky club that none of us want to be in but as puzzlezaddict said, hopefully there will be a fix some day. The blotchy pixilated color banded faces were the first thing I noticed when it happened to me (in December 2019). I well remember the horror of Mortimer's pixilated cheeks and Cassandra's color banded neck. Another simmer appropriately calls it 'pixil vomit.' Anyway, I'm very sorry. I truly feel your pain. Reshade helps but it also takes away some of the detail.