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The Sims Pet Stories

From PCGamingWiki, the wiki about fixing PC games
Revision as of 20:53, 22 November 2022 by Plok (talk | contribs) (→‎API)
The Sims Pet Stories
The Sims Pet Stories cover
Developers
Maxis
macOS (OS X) Aspyr Media
Publishers
Electronic Arts
OS X Aspyr Media
Engines
The Sims 2 Engine
Release dates
Windows June 19, 2007
macOS (OS X) September 10, 2007
Reception
Metacritic 67
Taxonomy
Monetization One-time game purchase
Modes Singleplayer
Perspectives Bird's-eye view
Genres Life sim
Series The Sims Stories
The Sims Pet Stories on HowLongToBeat
The Sims Pet Stories on IGDB
The Sims Pet Stories guide on StrategyWiki
The Sims Pet Stories on MobyGames
The Sims Pet Stories on Wikipedia
The Sims Stories
Subseries of The Sims
The Sims Life Stories 2007
The Sims Pet Stories 2007
The Sims Castaway Stories 2008

Warnings

The macOS (OS X) version of this game does not work on macOS Catalina (version 10.15) or later due to the removal of support for 32-bit-only apps.

Key points

Runs well on low-end hardware, especially laptops and integrated graphic cards.
This game uses a slightly modified version of the The Sims 2: Bon Voyage engine and most fixes and some mods for it also work here.

General information

Official Website (OS X)
Answer HQ for The Sims series at EA.com
Answer HQ for The Sims series at EA.com (OS X)

Availability

Source DRM Notes Keys OS
Retail
Disc check (requires the CD/DVD in the drive to play)
CD key
SecuROM 7 DRM
Windows
macOS (OS X)
Mac App Store (unavailable)
Icon overlay.png
macOS (OS X)
Origin (unavailable)
Origin
Windows
The Mac App Store includes native 4K support, bug fixes and improved performance.

Game data

Configuration file(s) location

System Location
Windows <path-to-game>\TSData\Res\Config[Note 1]
macOS (OS X)

Save game data location

System Location
Windows %USERPROFILE%\Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims™ Pet Stories\
macOS (OS X)
The final folder may have a localized name depending on which language you installed the game

Video

Graphics feature State Notes
Widescreen resolution
By default you can select up to 1280x720.For more widescreen resolutions see Widescreen resolution.
Multi-monitor
Ultra-widescreen
See Widescreen resolution.
4K Ultra HD
See Widescreen resolution.
Field of view (FOV)
See Field of view (FOV).
Windowed
Borderless fullscreen windowed
See the glossary page for potential workarounds.
Anisotropic filtering (AF)
See the glossary page for potential workarounds.
Anti-aliasing (AA)
Smooth Edges slider.Not work on moderns PC see Anti-aliasing (AA).
Vertical sync (Vsync)
See the glossary page for potential workarounds.
60 FPS and 120+ FPS
High dynamic range display (HDR)
See the glossary page for potential alternatives.

Widescreen resolution

The game's maximum default resolution is 1600x1200. For higher resolutions you need to edit the following file:

Electronic Arts\The Sims Castaway Stories\TSData\Res\Config\Graphics Rules.sgr

Set maxResWidth and maxResHeight to your display's native width and height, or copy/paste the following:

option ScreenModeResolution
setting $Low
uintProp maxResWidth 2560
uintProp maxResHeight 1600
uintProp defaultResWidth 800
uintProp defaultResHeight 600

setting $Medium
uintProp maxResWidth 2560
uintProp maxResHeight 1600
uintProp defaultResWidth 1024
uintProp defaultResHeight 768

setting $High
uintProp maxResWidth 2560
uintProp maxResHeight 1600
uintProp defaultResWidth 1024
uintProp defaultResHeight 768
end

Field of view (FOV)

Each of the game's cameras can have their FOV set independently using the fov parameter in their Camera Settings files, which are contained in %USERPROFILE%\Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims™ Castaway Stories\Cameras\

Anti-aliasing (AA)

If your "Edge Smoothing" slider is greyed out in-game, then it's likely that the game cannot determine how much VRAM your GPU has and is defaulting to its failsafe of 32 MB.
Raise amount of fallback value[citation needed]
  1. Navigate to the configuration file location.
  2. Open Graphics Rules.sgr.
  3. Find the following section:
    if (not $useSoftwareRasterizer)
       # failed to obtain device texture memory size, force to 32 MB
       if ($textureMemory = 0)
          seti textureMemory       32
       endif
    and change seti textureMemory to the value of your GPU's VRAM in megabytes.

Notes

This makes game use your VRAM amount as fallback value. Do not put value higher than actual VRAM amount is!
Alternative Fix
  1. Navigate to the configuration file location.
  2. Open Graphics Rules.sgr.
  3. Search for enumerateMultisampleLevels
       boolProp enumerateMultisampleLevels false
    
    and wherever it says false next to it, correct it with true. There are multiple lines with the enumerateMultisampleLevels so keep changing to true until there are no more results.

Vertical sync (Vsync)

Toggling Vsync can cause the game to hang.[citation needed]

Vsync can only be toggled using the Cheat Console (Ctrl+ Shift+C) and using either the 'vsync off' or 'vsync on' command.

Input

Keyboard and mouse State Notes
Remapping
See the glossary page for potential workarounds.
Mouse acceleration
Mouse sensitivity
Mouse input in menus
Mouse Y-axis inversion
Controller
Controller support
Controller types

Audio

Audio feature State Notes
Separate volume controls
Voices, Sound Effects, Music, Ambient and Audio Quality sliders
Surround sound
4.0 and 5.1
Subtitles
No intelligible dialog. All in-game dialog uses the fictional Simlish language.
Closed captions
Mute on focus lost
Game 'forgets' it does not have the focus when leaving loading screens
Royalty free audio

Localizations

Language UI Audio Sub Notes
English
Speech is fictional language called Simlish.
Speech is subtitled with generic icons.
Brazilian Portuguese
Czech
Danish
French
Finnish
German
Hungarian
Norwegian
Polish
Russian
Spanish
Swedish

Issues fixed

Black Square Under Sim

Download Sim Shadow Fix
  1. Go here and download the file that suits your preferences (0.2 shadows are more opaque, 0.4 more transparent and 0.3 are in between).
  2. Extract the .package file inside the zip file you downloaded to %USERPROFILE%\Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims™ Pet Stories\Downloads\
If you're using an Intel HD Graphics card, the author recommends downloading the xReallyNotMisty versions of the fix.
If the Downloads folder is missing, create it.
If your installation is in an language other than English, the The Sims™ Pet Stories folder will probably have the localized name instead.

Game stuck in 800x600 resolution

Occurs because the game fails to detect the video card correctly.
Edit Graphics Rules.sgr
  1. Go to <path-to-game>\Fun with Pets\SP9\TSData\Res\Config.
  2. If you don't have a Fun with Pets directory, the Mansion and Garden Stuff directory should have your game files if you're playing Ultimate Collection.
  3. Open Graphics Rules.sgr with a text editor.
  4. Search for:
    option ScreenModeResolution
    setting $Low
    uintProp maxResWidth      800
    uintProp maxResHeight     600
    uintProp defaultResWidth  800
    uintProp defaultResHeight 600
    
  5. Replace
  6. option ScreenModeResolution
    setting $Low
    uintProp maxResWidth      1280
    uintProp maxResHeight     1024
    uintProp defaultResWidth  800
    uintProp defaultResHeight 600
    
  7. Save and close.
By default you can select up widescreen resolution to 1280x720.To force more widescreen resolutions change the values for the desired resolution.See Widescreen resolution.

Other information

API

Technical specs Supported Notes
Direct3D 9.0c
Shader Model support 2.0
ExecutablePPC 32-bit 64-bit Notes
Windows
macOS (OS X)
32-bit only.[1]

System requirements

Windows
Minimum Recommended
Operating system (OS) XP
Processor (CPU) 1.8 GHz
System memory (RAM) 256 MB
Hard disk drive (HDD) 2.7 GB
Video card (GPU) Mobility Radeon 7500/ATI Radeon 7500
Nvidia GeForce 2 Series/GeForce Go Series
GeForce FX Series/Nvidia Quadro Series
32 MB of VRAM
DirectX 9 compatible
Other 8x CD-ROM Drive
macOS (OS X)
Minimum[2]
Operating system (OS) 10.9.5
Processor (CPU) Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz
System memory (RAM) 4 GB
Hard disk drive (HDD) 3 GB
Video card (GPU) Nvidia GeForce 8800 series
AMD Radeon HD 3870
Intel HD Graphics 3000
256 MB of VRAM

Notes

  1. When running this game without elevated privileges (Run as administrator option), write operations against a location below %PROGRAMFILES%, %PROGRAMDATA%, or %WINDIR% might be redirected to %LOCALAPPDATA%\VirtualStore on Windows Vista and later (more details).

References