Question: Lights won't turn on? (Solved!!)

[MrsFlynn]

Hubby and I were playing a test game last night in Sunset Valley, and noticed the lights weren't coming on even when we told the sim person to turn the lights on. Hubby tried the trick of turning on the Black Lights, but it did not work. We played a few sim days, just to see if the lights would reset themselves and they didn't.

Questions: Has this happened to you in any of your games? If so, is there a trick to getting the lights to work properly, without having to delete and replace all the lights in the house?

MrsFlynn

[MoMoll]

I've had the same problem in houses I didn't build and moved into. I replaced the lights. Now, with mods, I reset the lot.

[MrsFlynn]

I'm happy to hear it's not just us having the problem.  It's been happening in both houses we've built, and houses around town.

Using mods to reset the lot? I feel kind of silly asking, but how do you do that?

MrsFlynn

[Flynn Arrowstarr]

MrsFlynn and I did some testing tonight and we discovered how to fix the problem without replacing the lights.

We tried resetting the lot with MasterController but it didn't help. So, we tried one other thing: resetting the color of the light:

• Click any light on the lot.
• Click Color.
• Pick any color from the wheel menu.

The lights will now show correctly.

Why this happens in the first place? Not sure, but it seems to have started with houses created before the patch that included the improved graphics engine -- 1.26 for Pets? In any case what I'm thinking is that the lights on the older lots are somehow set to color code 0,0,0 (black) and/ or the light's intensity is set to 0. In my test house, I checked the light's color and it was set to White (255,255,255). I then checked the Intensity and it was set to 0. Ah ha!

So, it looks like when the graphics engine was updated there was a bug in the routine to calculate the intensity of the lights for houses created before the patch. Houses already placed in towns and in the Library seem to update correctly, but houses imported in from Sim3Pack file seem to have the light bug.

Hope this helps everyone having this problem.

Flynn and MrsFlynn

[MoMoll]

Glad you got it sorted out.

[MrsFlynn]

Thank you, yes I'm very happy to have solved the problem. I was dreading having to go through some of our houses to replace the lights.

MrsFlynn