In this Steam screenshot, the player is on a lot and is not using any mods whatsoever
With all due respect, this person is using mods. That hairstyle is not vanilla and not even remotely maxis-match textured. On the portrait it seems like the skin and make-up is modded as well, though I might be wrong and I'll stand gracefully corrected if so. The hair is undoubtedly not Maxis-made, however.
This is not to say that pink soup isn't very detrimental for users who like to use mods, I really really hope that EA manages to fix this for all of you. Regardless, I don't think it is smart to conflate modded games with non-modded games for the purpose of honest research. EA will most likely not be able to recreate this issue in a truly unmodded game and therefore consider it to be fixed, when the issue in the Legacy edition specifically (not the UC, or disc versions) still seems to be the amount of higher textures that mods force upon the game. Pink soup is and has always been the games way of dealing with too much texture memory being used without forcibly crashing your game or worse.
Saying that a player is "only" using a terrain texture replacement when some of these are known to have 2K textures can explain why this slips through EA their pink soup testing, as the normal sizes for terrains are 2x smaller, and no company will use unsupported player mods to test their official product.
I admit that the custom hair did go past me when I saw the screenshot, I've edited my post to correct that, so thank you!
While I understand your point of view, and I'm certainly not saying I believe EA should be testing the game with mods in order to debug it, that still doesn't change the fact the issue hasn't been fixed. Hence why this thread as been opened. While I don't doubt the issue might be harder to recreate in an un-modded environment, it is still perfectly possible to trigger it nonetheless in said environment, and the "limit" seems to vary on a per user basis.
(…) the issue in the Legacy edition specifically (not the UC, or disc versions) still seems to be the amount of higher textures that mods force upon the game (…)
Which is simply not true: there was one more example I gave were the user wasn't using any mods and still getting the "pink soup", and I've added another one too.
Besides that, saying that it must be the "amount of higher textures that mods force upon the game" seems a bit of an exaggerated statement. Most mods have textures sizes perfectly in line with the standards that Maxis was working with back in the 2000s for this game, most mods for The Sims 2 were made in that era even. As you yourself stated, it is true that some go higher than that, but a couple few higher textures isn't supposed to make the game turn pink because of it. Maxis themselves used 2K textures, and still the game wasn't triggering the issue as often then, so why should it now?
The point of the re-release was to be able to put the game's up to standards in terms of how they perform. If The Sims 2 can't even manage texture memory (or whatever else the issue might be) in a way that doesn't make it go pink, and then crash (because that's what happens usually too, it's not just the pink soup), then how can it be up-to-standards? As a comparison, The Sims 3 released shortly after and still to this day no one has ever complained of a similar issue, and that game also has some mods with higher textures, is 32-bit, and is admittedly more CPU and GPU demanding.
Anyway, the thread is for reporting the bug which is still happening, even for people playing vanilla.
