Game Help:Red Flashing Walls

Red Flashing Game Content

Flashing red game content after installing a Stuff Pack or Expansion Pack

Many users have reported that walls, floors, and foundations flash red, or neighbourhoods flash red or purple, after installing one of the later stuff packs or expansion packs (Glamour Life Stuff, Family Fun Stuff, or Pets first saw this issue). This is due to increased system requirements as new packs are released. This issue is more common with stuff packs, where the requirements are more precise, and less graphics cards are supported, but also happens with expansion packs with lower-end/unsupported graphics cards.

If you install a new pack and you have an unsupported graphics card, you will experience flashing red content.

To find the system requirements for each expansion and stuff pack, you can check here: System Requirements

You can see that the requirements for the expansions and stuff packs are rather different, and fewer cards are supported for stuff packs. Cards that were unsupported in previous expansions but worked okay can also develop flashing red walls with newer expansions, especially Pets.

If you are already experiencing this issue, here are the only known possible fixes:

• Try updating your graphics card drivers, to see if updated drivers help. This generally does not help but having updated drivers is usually a good idea anyway. You can find information on graphics cards and drivers, how to identify what type of card you have, and how to update your drivers on this FAQ.

If you have updated graphics card drivers and that hasn't helped, your only other options are one or the other of the following:

• Purchase and install (or have a competent technician install for you) a supported graphics card. The list of supported graphics cards can be found on the system requirements link provided above. Further advice about graphics cards, especially as they relate to Sims 2, may be found at ModTheSims' Sims2 Help forum.

• If you cannot afford a new graphics card or do not want to get a new one, and updating drivers didn't work, your only other option is to uninstall the pack. However, if you do so, all of your user files (downloads, sims, lots, pictures... the entire contents of the My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/ folder) will be deleted upon uninstall.

Hopefully, you made a backup of your user files, especially your Neighborhoods folder before installing the pack, or if you have to uninstall you will lose all of your sims and lots, and there's no way to get around that. Installing a stuff pack or expansion pack changes your saved games and they are not reverse-compatible if you uninstall.

If you did back up your Neighborhoods folder as you should have before installing, you can back up the rest of your user files if you haven't already by copying the My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/ folder to somewhere else on your computer. Instructions on backing up may be found on this FAQ.

• After backing up, uninstall. When restoring from your backup, do not copy in the Neighborhoods folder as the files within are no longer compatible once you've uninstalled the pack. Everything else should be able to be copied over to restore your user files.

• The guide to playing with onboard or weak graphics will also apply to most users with this problem.

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Contributor Credits

Thanks to HystericalParoxysm for the original article.