NewSO Update 536876

DirectX no longer fails to load content

**Switching the launcher to DirectX no longer ends in a “Content could not be loaded” error.** The game’s DirectX visual effects were still in a format the current graphics runtime refuses to read, so the game stopped before it ever reached the loading screen. They have all been rebuilt.

Installs that were stuck on the old effects now clean themselves up. Some builds shipped a leftover copy of those files in a second folder, and the game preferred that copy over the good one – which meant updating did not fix anything for the players who had it. The game now ignores that folder and deletes it on startup, so the fix reaches everyone on the next update without a reinstall.

The “All That Glitters” Studio Mini Trailer now appears in Buy mode. The movie-set trailer shipped with the game files but was never listed in the catalog, so the only way onto a lot was an admin placing one. It is now in the catalog for §28,000.

The “Your Three Sims” hint is now “Your Six Sims”. The account limit was raised to six a while back, but the help text on the Sim selection and Create A Sim screens still told you three.

The “Selecting a City” hint is now a tribute to the cities we lost. The old text was written for a game with a dozen cities you had to choose between, where your friends had to compare notes before making their Sims. It now says what actually happened to them, and why NewSO deliberately keeps everybody in one city.

**Picking DirectX in the launcher’s graphics dropdown now actually starts the game in DirectX**, instead of silently launching OpenGL no matter what you chose.

“Save Lot” failed on every fresh install. The save writes two files, and it tried to write the first one into a folder it never created, so the save threw before it got anywhere. The error it showed you – “you may need to run the game as administrator” – was left over from an older version of the game and was never the real problem, which is why running as admin never helped. Thanks to Hella_ for the ticket. Both folders are now created up front, and if a save ever does fail you get the actual reason instead of a guess.

Saved lots never showed up in the sandbox lot list. The game saves your lots into your personal NewSO folder, but the sandbox browser was still looking in the game’s install folder for them, so anything you saved simply vanished. The browser now lists both places, sorts everything alphabetically, and no longer shows the same lot twice.

Loading a damaged save now tells you. Picking a save that could not be read used to fail silently in a confusing way. It now says the file is missing or damaged.

The save prompt tells you where the file is going, and an empty or invalid filename is caught before the save runs rather than after.

“Blaze It” replaces the placeholder text on the bong’s menu and queue icon. The object is a reskin of the old bubble blower, and it never stopped saying so: its pie menu read “Smoke Bong” while the action-queue icon renamed itself to the bubble blower’s leftover Downtown text, complete with an admission price the object has never charged. Thanks to Ashh for the screenshot. Both the menu and the queue tooltip now read “Blaze It”, and joining someone already on it reads “Join the Blaze”.

Hitting the chicken limit left the “Buy Chicken” icon stuck in your queue forever. When a lot already had its maximum number of birds, the nesting box refused the purchase and refunded you – but the way it cancelled the interaction knocked your Sim’s queue out of step with itself, so the cancelled icon stayed parked at the front of the queue and nothing could clear it. Thanks to Tim for the screenshot that made it obvious. The cancel now ends the interaction properly: the icon disappears, your refund still arrives, and the rest of your queue carries on.

The chicken limit message now tells you how many birds you have. Chicks count towards the same four-bird limit as grown chickens, and a bird roosting inside the coop is out of sight, so “a maximum of 4 chickens” looked wrong to anyone who could only count three in the yard. The message now says “a maximum of 4 birds (chickens and chicks together) is allowed per lot. This lot already has 4.”

Buying a chicken from the catalog and buying one from the nesting box now agree. Buy mode counted only grown chickens against the limit while the nesting box counted chicks too, so the same lot could be over the limit one way and under it the other.

**A blank black command window opened next to the game whenever it restarted after installing an update.** It was harmless – it just sat there empty for the rest of your session – but it looked broken, and it never showed up when you started the game normally from the launcher. The startup program that hands off to the game was flagged as a command-line tool, so Windows gave it a window of its own whenever the updater was the one starting it. It is now flagged as a normal windowed program, and the restart after a patch is silent like every other launch.

**A “Salvage” option was showing up in the pie menu when you clicked a sim on your own property.** Residents, service NPCs and visiting players all had it, and only the owner of the lot ever saw it. It was never meant to be there – Salvage is the option for getting rid of an unwanted object, and it was appearing on people because the game had started treating anyone standing on your lot as something you owned. Clicking another sim now gives you the social menu and nothing else.
Salvage on your own furniture and objects works exactly as before.

Taking a bath in the Tub – Shower – Unleashed now fills hygiene all the way to the service lot’s overfill limit, instead of stopping short at 100.