Well, it’s hard to describe what’s going on, but it seems like there’s a problem with layering in the free camera mode (which you can enter when pressing tab). Things that should be partially under the ground (like the bottom part of hood plants or rocks, water edges) are visible on it, which looks really weird.

For example, in the first picture the water in the top right corner looks properly, because it was taken in the normal camera mode, but in the second picture, taken in the free camera mode, the water edge looks weird.


Similarly here, the first picture taken in the normal camera mode (I just pressed F10 to hide the UI) looks fine, but the second one taken after pressing tab isn’t, there are plenty of things that look wrong.


It’s best to open the pictures in separate tabs and switch between them, then the differences are the most obvious. Any way to fix it?

This is just my opinion and I'd say expertise..but feel free to laugh at the latter.
Since you have plants and deco that do sink underground, tab mode will show them to you..because they exist. Simple. test my theory in a new hood that you have yet to decorate with plants and everything. Look at the pool for instance. Pools stick out underground..so in tab mode, you see that part.
Tab shows you everything...some things stick out underneath, Tab mode just shows them.

Looks like there's a graphic issue between the two cameras. Maybe it's some external settings in the graphic rules. Have you messed about with any graphics-related mods or tools lately, such as the graphic rules maker, Reshade, or similar? If so, those can potentially be the problem. No idea how ot fix it, though.

It should not do that jagged edge to the sea shore though. I would be looking towards your graphics. Try dusting out first, see if you need updated drivers.

Well I can’t unscrew the laptop here (it would have to be while visiting my mom), but I do have my drivers updated. I actually think it must be game-related, because if I press tab when I don’t have my normal camera zoomed out much, the glitch has a really slight effect. But well, I have edited the camera files so it is possible to zoom out in the normal camera mode much more than in the vanilla game, so maybe the game has an issue with it when in the tab mode.

I wonder Voeille whether it's because you're using uintProp lotSkirtSizeIncrease 120 in your userStartup.

I tried that and found it generated more problems with the graphics than I found I was prepared to put up with (I even got your pink textures at one point). I thnk I must have seen the information about it at the same time as you did and tried it out. It does give another improvement to neighbourhood appearance (slight) but it also seems to cause problems. At least for me. Since I removed it from my userStartup.cheat file, things have settled back to normal.

That’s interesting and definitely worth trying. I suppose that cheat was created for testing purposes so the devs could see as big lotskirt as possible, but the game isn’t supposed to deal with it. Another problem is the lotskirt texture, you know, the one covering the whole hood area in the lot view. It’s distributed evenly (i.e. scaled the same on the whole area), while a single “square of texture” should cover a much larger area in the distant view than it does near the edge of the lot. Hopefully it’s clear what I mean.
And that would explain the problem with flashing pink textures (yes I’ve recently discovered I still get it sometimes), as it never happened in the past. Anyway, I’ll try to play without that cheat active and see if it’s different.

Well I tested it and it’s really the zoom level I start with. The more zoomed out the normal camera is, the more noticeable tab mode glitches are. Maybe I should tinker around with the camera files.

Why not! That's ll give you some more mechanical...