Ubersims,

One more dissapointement. The 71.84 driver gives much higher graphic performances, but I still can't see the bumpmapped textures.

I sent an e-mail to EA support as well. Maybe they will answer me ?

The very last fing I'm going to try is to add the family name in the graphic rules.sgr file as suggested by Semloh.

I also have seen that there is another beta driver available (71.50) but comments are not very good on Nvidia forum so I won't install it for the time beeing.

Let's hope we can solve this one way or another.

Did you get the graphic rules.sgr mod to work?

Came across this yesterday and was also annoyed to find that bump mapping wouldn't work with my 6600GT (getting somewhat annoyed with this sort of thing which seems all to common of late with Nvidia and their "The way it's meant to be played" slogan often being anything but true).

Anyway after fiddling with the files and not getting anywhere I was about to give up when I decided to try one last thing, cripple my card :argh:

Ok, ok, it's not as bad as it sounds, here's what I did;

1. Download Rivatuner from http://www.guru3d.com/rivatuner, install and run it.
2. Under 'Driver Settings' on the main page click on the little 'Customize...' button.
3. Select the 'Directdraw and Direct3D settings' icon (second one from left).
4. Select the 'Shaders' tab.
5. For both Pixel and Vertex shaders, select 'force 2.0'.
6. Press ok and select yes to reboot.

You should now have working bump mapping in Sims 2 (You may or may not still need to modify the 'Graphics Rules.sgr' file, I had already done this and haven't tried putting it back to defaults to see if it still works).

I'm guessing EA are defaulting to the highest shader version supported and assuming backwards compatibility since I'm quite certain they could select the specific version in code to achieve these same results. Anyway, for the time being I don't think there's much impact to other games except maybe with a few of the very latest like Half Life 2...

Hope this works for you all, enjoy! :banana:

Don't even know WHY I'm posting this, as it will not come as a shock to anyone, including me. But my card will not render bump maps. My computer's 3 1/2 years old, and I have an AGP 4X with a NVIDIA GeForce2 MX/MX 400. It still runs good, but there's a card that will not render bump maps, in case anyone else has one (SURE.....), and wants bump maps. Man, I need to upgrade... hehehe

Hi!

I don´t know anything about the technical thing and my English is not the best,but I DO know that the bump map test came out negative in my game :argh:

I have:

Geforce TI4200-128mb.Directx9.0c.driver 66.93.

Could it work for me??
I have followed the instruction guide so far.

Worked for me, too. (Geforce 6600 GT / Official ForceWare 71.84 Drivers from today)

We might have the solution for the 6xxx-series here. Thumps up, lad.

My GeForce FX 5200 128MB can use BumpMap now, thanks.

You make my day.

Akros and Cumberdale - I can concur. This worked on my long troublesome graphics card as well. Although, the Graphics Rules.sgr file does have to be modded.

I confirm what Ubersims is saying.

Bumpmapping is now showing in TS2 game with my Leadtek 6600 GT card. The graphic rules.sgs file is patched for me too.

Anyway thanks a lot Akros for the solution, SEmloh for the bumpmapping skins and Ubersims for letting me know about Akros trick !!

I can finally see bumpmapped textures in TS2 .

best news I had for a long time :D

Anyone know if a Nvidia Geforce2 Ultra with drivers 71.84 (Beta) is capable of displaying bump maps? 64MB, by the way.

It may be of interest to note that after installing The Sims 2 University expansion pack I found my video card was not displaying the bump maps as it had previously done in the Sims 2. I looked in my programme files/EA Games/The Sims 2 University/TSData/Res folder and found another set of "config" and "CS Config" folders that required the graphic rules files to be changed as described in the first note of this thread. I used the tester zip provided and found that once again bump mapping had been enabled.

So if you have installed the University expansion pack may I suggest you check and update the files to enable bump mapping again.

Hello! I have a GEForce FX 5500 and i edited the Graphics Rules as directed and it doesnt show.
My system processor is: AMD Athlon XP 2800
DirectX 9.0
Is there anything else i can do to make this work?

Yay! It works now! Thank you MusicalSim, that was all I had to do. Thanks for the lovely tute, Semloh!

heheh dont feel bad I'm another one with the same card -_-; woe is me D:
Heck I havent even updated drivers and i'm a do that now jsut to try to get a bit better performance or what not...

hopefully I can get a better graphics card by my b-day... several months away -_-;

Much love to the 6600GT bandits, works now for me, too!

Thank you akros works great on my PNY GeForce 6600GT. Have been working on this for 3 hours. This should be a sticky. EA needs for fix this with a patch.

I have the NVidia GeForce 5700 LE Optima 128 mb DDR AGP on my Compaq AMD XP 3200+ 2.20 GHz with 1.00 GB of RAM and bump mapping is great for my Sims2 with University expansion pack. The game runs smoothly and looks awesome! I hope this helps someone considering cards.

OH sheesh, forgot to add that this week I updated the driver from the nvidia.com site.

Hi Semloh,

I managed to have bumpmapped textures in my game with my 6600 GT card with your help and akros tricjk with rivaturner.

However I find that the skins look a bit shiny now, especially in the bodyshop, but also in game

Do you know if ther's a way to avoid thsi shiny skin effect ?

Thanks

You are a GOD!

I just got a new laptop with a GeForce 6800 and almost had a heart attack when i found it couldn't use bump mapping.

Thanks for this...it seems it's the best solution for 6xxx cards.

Thanx,
Sash

Hi zarmor,

It's great that there is now a workaround solution to the 6600 problem. Unfortunately I haven't a clue why the skins would look shiny now. Is is just my skin, any bumpmapped clothing/skin or all skins in general? I can only assume this must be a graphics card specific problem and/or a side effect of the rivatuner work around.

I am curious - is the "shinyness" just in areas of bumps or all over? If it is just bumps, perhaps the bump mapping is being rendered with a higher than normal specularity. It would also be interesting to know if other 6600 owners who use the workaround are having the same problem.

If you want to experiment you could try playing around with some of the MATD properties for the skins in my package file. Maybe adjusting 'stdMatSpecCoef' or 'stdMatPower' values will make a difference for you? This is just a wild guess on my part so don't expect too much from it! :D

Thanks for this, I bought an nVidia GeForce FX 5700 LE and I got bump mapping, but I had to rotate him to show the bumps. Is that okay?

Hi Semloh,

The " shiny " or " reflective" effect is quite trong in the Bodyshop. It can be seen on all skins ( not only yours ) and not especially on the bumped areas but everywhere where you can see the skin of any Sim ( legs, arms, nude skins ). It is also noticeable on light clothes ( white or pale colors ) but not on dark clothes. When I do a zoom with TBS to change something, like hair, on a particular head, then the shinyness is almost gone.

In game the effect is not very strong although skins look a little bit more shiny than without the pixel shaders and vertex shaders adjustments.

Where can I adjust the MATD properties as you are suggesting ? I might try that, just to see if it has a positive effect in the Body shop where my sims look kind of wierd and shiny :D

zarmor: Sorry for not replying earlier, I haven't around MTS2 much recently.

I don't think my suggestion about playing with MATD values is relevant if you have this problem on all skins. The MATD entries are only accessible with SimPE and are found in the skin packages.

Sounds to me like this is just a unfortunate side effect of the workaround you are using to display bump maps. :wtf2:

Thanks for your response Semloh,

I can live with it anyway since it isn't really noticeable in game, even if it looks wierd in the bodyshop...