I just created a new Pirate Kingdom and my Pirate Queen and some of the non player sims have dirt spots on their faces. I don't mind the spots on the riff raff or non player sims but it irritates me that it's on the queen. I tried having her take a bath and washing her face in one of the wash bowls. It didn't come off. What causes this dirt and how do I get rid of it?

Dirt?
Is it perhaps your choice of blush? or a make up bug. I've never had the make-up bug so I don't know if the blush is affected.
I can't recall off-hand if you can give the females freckles, I know they're attached to the 5 o'clock shadow slider for males though.
Try editing her in CAS and see if it's something from there that's affecting her look.

I don't think it's a make up bug as even the random townie Sims have it, some of them have many. When my new pirate queen went to talk to the builder Sim, he laughed at her and wiped at the spot on her nose and then rubbed his nose and now he has a spot too! I've searched on the web for dirt spot or face spot and can't find anything yet. This hasn't come up before today when I installed the P&N expansion. I will go in and see if she's wearing any make up. Thanks for the suggestion.

OK, I went and checked. She is not wearing any make up. I changed her hair too just in case that was the problem.

And you're not using a mod or accessory that might do this? I don't recall seeing dirt spots before. Do you have a screenshot?
It could be some kind of graphical glitch. Have you seen the same thing in other kingdoms?
On my old computer if I left edge smoothing too high for too long they'd eventually get dull yellow marks on their skin and clothes. It was my graphics card at fault, but was fixable by turning edge smoothing down a notch or off.

No, I'm not using any mods at all. There are now other symptoms. Before I installed the P&N expansion yesterday, I always used a low screen resolution when I played so that my game responsiveness would be quicker. In spite of the fact that in game play it was low quality, whenever I went into Create A Sim or Build Mode ALL of the Sims, their clothes, objects, materials, fabrics etc. were sharply rendered and high quality. Each outfit, each little square of wood sample sharp and rich. Now when I go into CAS or Build, the Sims, their clothes and all the the wood and fabric samples are blurry. The detail is gone. The little pictures of the furniture look sharp but everything else is blurred. I do have the wretched Catalyst Control Center and I have it set to use the application preferences. I did remove P&N and then went back into my game to see what would happen and the CAS and build modes went back to being sharp and clear. I then downloaded P&N again. And it all went back to blurry in CAS and build. I deleted my kingdom with the spotty sims and then went into CAS and deleted the sims. I wish I hadn't as now I have no way of showing you what they looked like. They just had black blotches on their faces. Small, maybe about the size of a sim thumb print. On the left eyebrow, the left side of the nose and some of them had them on their temples and cheeks as well. Thanks for trying to help me, it was all working so well!

Did you ever figure it out RoryAusten? It seems you re still playing so you must have found a solution. WEould you share what fixed your trouble with us? Pahlease? LOL This situation reminds me of an event I suffered similarly except no skin blemishes, it was in the coloration and blurriness of wall patterns, and screen images in-game, which ended in showing itself to be the fault of some bad or wrong graphics card settings I had made hoping to apply better or speedier game play, at a cost of image perfection....and some Mickeynotsosoft CPU updates specifically designed for my 8-core AMD FX 8150 Processor, as I run W7, and Billy Boy Gates didn't configure this OS for an 8-core, so it docks some of the cores instead of allowing them to run with the rest of the cores, which is nonsense and ridiculous to me. Just like DEP, how I hate DEP! LOL The updates were terrible, I don't know what they updated as nothing was better as a result of installing them, but worse, so bad I went to almost crying, but after the uninstall of the two updates, and a reboot of my computer, and then my game, it improved, but what improved the visual aspect of my game to its former greatness, was installing a new CPU, however that itself was not what I found to be the actual solution, but in fact was the thermal paste between the CPU and its socket in my computer. The CPU given with my PC was bone dry when I went to install a new CPU, which will cause ones processor to overheat, so in turn I came to realize even more how cheap some PC manufacturer's are when selling their wares. My PC not even a year old as of now, should not have been as dry of thermal paste on the CPU, but it was, so in fact things were overheating in my PC and therefore causing graphics images to suffer. Resetting my graphics card back to its previous ones helped just a tiny bit, as they were not changed in a dramatic way, but just minor adjustments.
There is many more components in a PC that can be responsible for graphics rendering, and performance than one's GPU, or video card. There is Adobe Flash, Java, .NET Framework, and more, even one's sound card driver...yes, absolutely. If a sound card driver is faulty or out of date, the effects can and do have a visual effect, and in the negative.

I am so glad you are a Medieval Fan, and dedicated to the game. The more the better...if we all came out of hiding, there might be a future update for The Sims Medieval Pirates and Nobles. Yes I am crazy but I also know for a fact, that some game manufacturer's have waited up to 10 years to make sequels to very beloved games. So patient I shall work to be while I hope very desperately, that it is still possible Maxis will, and EA Games slumps into some toilet of former cr@ppy game publisher's heckhole to never return...how about you? What do you feel? LOL TC Dear, Xeny

[QUOTE=Xeny]Did you ever figure it out RoryAusten?

Xeny, I never did figure out the why. When I made that queen she looked fine in CAS. When I did the first steps quest I noticed the spot. The weirdest thing is that the builder saw the spot, pointed at it, chuckled, reached out and touched it, then touched the side of his nose and gave himself a matching spot. I thought I was hallucinating! Then as the quest progressed, more sims with the same spot appeared in the castle. It was as though they were all joining in the new fad for having a dirt spot on the sides of their noses.
Since I couldn't fix the problem, I ended up deleting the kingdom and starting over. I had only built the castle so it was no big deal.

As for another EP, I would love it! This is my favorite Sims game. Nothing else compares. I continue to play and am now using mods and Chickie Teeta's Forsaken elf themes to jazz things up a bit. So many people have given up but I refuse. There are still many, many achievements that I haven't completed and several ambitions in P&N yet to be done. Because of your posts I've been making closer observations of the sims behavior. I have a tendency to be very controlling so I forced myself to set the free will at the highest level and am now letting them do whatever they want for a bit during each quest and just watching to see what happens. Yesterday, I saw a sim that was only a floating head. !!

Because of you and Chickie, I decided to see if I could make my own Handsomest Sim In The World. After going through many incarnations, I think my King Arthur could give your King a run for his money in the looks department.

So here I am, continuing to play and still enjoying the game immensely. This is the only place I've found where I can find people who still play and I'm very grateful for it. Hopefully, EA will realize that there are lots of Medieval fans still interested in an EP and finally reward us for our patience. Oh, by the way, do you happen to know what Enable free-form placement does in furnish mode? It says to use the Alt key while holding or moving and object. I tried this many times and it seems to do nothing.

Rory

The floating head normally indicates a missing mesh.

I'd love to see your King Arthur.

As for the placement thing. I don't recall seeing this option in furnish mode, but it sounds like the function you can get from enabling testing cheats and then holding down alt while you move an object. It should ignore the grid completely, so instead of being confined to and snapping to the next available grid slot it allows you to move the object around with precision in all directions, including angling the item, allowing you to center things etc that you wouldn't be able to within the confines of the grid.

Thanks Chickie, I'm going to experiment with the placement thing and see if I can get it to work. The option is in the game manual that came with my original disc. It's listed under Key Commands, Furnish Mode.
As for my king, I'm happy to share a picture with you. Shall I put it in the pictures thread? I don't want to do something wrong by posting it here.

To both Rory and Chickie,

You know what this reminds me of? Remember the discussion we had about my blacksmith Qyall Quartz, my doc, Blade Bungle, and my bard, Fable Storie having teamed up together to avenge Qyall when he was booed outrageously by NPC's for defending the woman from the cruel behavior of the leader of Tredony, and how to booing spread from one sim to another perhaps though gossip? The Grim Reaper showing up in the list of sims to serve drinks to in the tavern while committing mass sim murder with Reaper's Scythe?

Obviously Rory has had a similar event happen with her sims, just a different scenario. I think this is definitely something to build upon along with Grim Reefer if he is still interested in that mod you and he were working on concerning gossip? Gee Chickie, you and he might be able to come to some kind of breakthrough concerning modding yes, but more so concerning a great many of Medieval gamers' dreams of an expansion to our games, or maybe an expansion to particular quests at the least! You see where I am headed with this? Hmmm, I've got some ideas, but not the talent or the knowledge in defining or working to the modding level you and Grim have, or Simmodder, well, any of y'all, so it is my hope y'all can decifer my muddled words and make sense of them when I can't. I am more than happy to let you be the genius here, LOL, while I applaud from a large sea away.

As to a sim who could match my Xylan in looks let me tell you I have my doubts. A LOT of them! I must see this pic you have Rory, and examine it fairly. I often wish though that we Watcher's could get right in there and mold parts of our sims with our hands as if we were making lov....as if we were playing with playdoe, or sculpting like Picasso....I am more of the playdoe kind of artist. But I got lucky with Xylan, or else love guided my mouse the day I made him.

Just a note about your sims when you make them Rory, make copied and wrap them tight in WinRAR or another very good archive program, as if you ever needed to reinstall Medieval again with a different computer or a reinstall of your OS, or simply due to over age, you might encounter some trouble in adding your previous sims to your newer game, perhaps because the game might view the files as corrupt, and if they game won't accept the older sim, say bye bye to the sim. This happened with my boy wizard Xerxex, but thank goodness I had quite a few copies of him, but now sometimes I use a female Scry Poof, but she isn't as much fun, so I also have two similar wizards to Xerxex named Dante Doom, and Jael Thorn, but they will never be Xerxex Xoux. No matter how I tried, I could not duplicate Xerxex from scratch to my satisfaction. So I tell you make copies of your favorites, for if you encounter such as I did, and if you feel as close to your sims as I do mine and Chickie seems to hers, if you lose them, it will hurt, like you have lost a friend. So protect your babies! LOL

The best to you both, Xeny

Xeny and Chickie,

As soon as I take some good pics of Arthur I will post them in the picture thread. Right now, I'm having trouble with his hair, so I need to send him to the salon.

Thanks for the advice about saving copies of my favorite Sims, it's good advice and I didn't think about making zip files of them. I will try it out this evening.

Rory

Don't save them to the bin with custom meshes. If for some reason, further down the line you don't have the required mesh anymore, CAS will go in to a never ending loop when it tries to load the sim. If you're zipping them up as back up make sure they're all in standard game outfits and hair

Chickie, I put a pic of my king in the pictures thread, I hope I did it right and it shows up.