Annoying freeze/pause/slowdown

[Duopolis 0]

Okay. I have P4 2.4GHz, 1GB RAM, Nvidia 7800GS 256 RAM. I know it's old configuration, but I've been playing SimCity 4 on this comp since like 2 years, without any problems so I'm sure it's nothing with my specification.

The problem is that whenever I play the game now, the dividers between avenues turns off (flowers change to grass) and the game freezes for about 10-20 seconds, than goes back to normal (along with the dividers). Than it repeats. Same with zonning/de-zonning. Andersen had the same problem, I'll quote his post since my english is not good enough to ecplain this

Originally posted by: Andersen I am having some issues with avenues.

You know those dividers in the middle of all the avenues, well mine keep switching on and off. What I mean by on and off is, the dividers will be filled with standard flower planters for one second then it switches to a plain grass texture with no flower boxes. The annoying part is, everytime it switches, my the game will pause for like 10 seconds so it can load or something. My computer is well capable of loading massive amounts of data, the problem isn't the pausing itself. It's the switching of the Avenue dividers that's causing the slowdown. (Avenues aren't suppose to do that)

I do have the latest version of NAM and all my drivers are updated. There must a conflicting plugin. Maybe someone here knows.quote>

SHABINDIGO had this problem also, though he was expieriencing this issue only in one of his cities.

Originally posted by: SHABINDIGO I'm having the most irritating time with my Simcity lately.  I took a large tile and decided to make it my downtown area for my city/region area.  I set up the roads, bridges, and tunnels, but when I started to zone, the game completely slowed down.  It slowed down to the point that I thought the game had locked up.  I thought that maybe it might have had something to do with the change in wealth levels or something to that efect, but I don't know.  After eventually zoning the map despite the God-awful slowdown, when I unpaused the game to let the zones develop,  the game would freeze up for about 15-20 seconds every time a day would pass on the Sim calendar.  Despite the frustrtation, I proceeded trying to use the tile because it is in the ideal position for a downtown area. When I try to rezone or even dezone, whether the game is paused or not, the game will freeze from 15 to 20 seconds.  I kind of ticks me off because the game has been running fine for me since I started using the DatPacker, and dealing with this tile has been giving me that old familiar pre-DatPacker feeling when I used to play and had to wait 2 minutes for the "Zones" screen view to go off.    This only happens on this one tile. Can anybody help?    quote>

I don't really know what to do. I've never had any problems like that. Help!

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

You may be having pauses due to the paging system doing a lot of disk accesses to get things.  Cures for this:

1.  Set your virtual memory to the maximum (4096MB)
2. Run disk cleanup at least once a week then
3. Defragment your HDD.

This has the effect of reducing overheads in your operating system and your file system's access times.

[johnwibble_uk 0]

I have exactly the same problem and it's only on one of my ctiy tiles. This is a large sized city but the other 2 cities of this large size I have in this region do not suffer from this problem.

The problem only started happening after I loaded the Jume 2007 NAM update. I've loaded the latest 2008 one and this hasn't cured it.

Any advice would be gratefully accepted, but I know for sure that it's not a problem with some other program running or the drive needing defragging.

Edit - my spec is 2GB RAM running XP with a dual core Opteron 185 and an 8800 GTX graphics card. I always set the affinity to core 0 after starting the game otherwise it crashes randomly.

[johnwibble_uk 0]

I forgot to mention that since installing the June 2007 update when I put a normal road underneath an elevated highway it offers to to the ramps for me and if I say "yes" it only does the off ramps both ways, so only 2 ramps are put on in total. I'm using the left hand drive version. This is still the case with the 2008 update.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Looking only at your slowdown program, take a look at your core load size with that city running.  Use the Task Manager and see what the size of the Simcity4.exe and the ~tempxxx files is.  If the sum of these is larger than your RAM size - 256MB (for XP), then you are being paged, and probably heavily.  To fix this, set your virtual memory to 4GB as per the pinned topic above.

Failing that, you must remember that everything for the game is in system memory, and as the tables grow it takes longer for the various task loops to get around.  For example, if you have 500.000 jobs and 1.2 million Sims, that is at least 1.7 million objects to examine for commute time, employment, pathing, and so on, each time the program loops after the task rendizvous.

There is a patch on the AMD site to allow dual AMD processors to run like a core 2 set up.  If you enable this, you can use both processors.

[johnwibble_uk 0]

I do have this AMD patch installed and sadly I still have to set the affintity to 1 core otherwise it crashes. This computer is a dual boot computer so I'll try loading the game on the Vista partition to see what happens there.

The avenues thing is like when they are redrawn by the system when changing from an avenue with no buildings on (just zones) to having some buildings on them,. but it keeps doing it repeatedly and ALL the avenues in the city are flashing at the same time as if it redraws every avenue when something changes anywhere alongside one. For example, if I place a bus stop alongside an avenue, it will change the middle strip to be white and "hang" for 10 secs or so before the bus stop is displayed.  The strange thing is that I do have 2 other cities in this region the same size with as many jobs etc and they behave perfectly well.

[City Planner 121]

I get the nasty jitters in my game too and have the AMD 64 dual core and need to set the affinity to only one core as well other wise the jitters when I scroll or just watching the cars move around the roads is unbearable. The cars move in jerks when using both cores unfortunately. I think I need to find a program that will set the affinity automatically for me since I load and quit SC4 a lot in any one day. I've also gotten SC4 to crash when I don't set the affinity to just one core.

[tungston 19]

Originally posted by: City Planner I get the nasty jitters in my game too and have the AMD 64 dual core and need to set the affinity to only one core as well other wise the jitters when I scroll or just watching the cars move around the roads is unbearable. The cars move in jerks when using both cores unfortunately. I think I need to find a program that will set the affinity automatically for me since I load and quit SC4 a lot in any one day. I've also gotten SC4 to crash when I don't set the affinity to just one core.quote>

 

You might try the AMD Dual Core Optimizer [link], you may not need to limit the processor to one core.

[cmdp123789 710]

The thing is... why does that only happen in one city tile, I mean any of those solutions above worked for me, I'm really sorry, that's why I was asking in other topic about this, I swear, I've a region that is all made up of big city tiles and they all work extremely good, but the problem is affecting only one of them, and my computer everything, Can other solution be posted please?? thanx, this is killing me!

[SC4BOY 21]

Most of those "hiccups" are directly related to your processor being run to its PROCESSING LIMIT given the I/O and video of your hardware.. It will happen in any city and is related to the number of items that the video has to track.. there are MANY things that contribute to this load.. for example high ratios of custom lots with lots of props, etc, ANY "animated" lots.. the more the worse the effect.. ie fountans and other spraying water, flashing and blinking things, things like TURNING LANES with lots of intersections, the population of course, .. in other words there are a TON of things that will vary from city to city.. but the net result is the same.. you're loading your hardware capabilities for your system. And of course every time you change zoom levels or pan your view, you SMASH A LOAD of processing overhead on top of that.. sooooo....

There are a number of solutions that can HELP you address problems like virtual memory, good quality video cards wiith fast on-board memory, fast processor, fast memory access, etc etc.. but SOONER OR LATER you're gonna "hit the wall".. Once you do that there isn't much you can do except scale back the load

[johnwibble_uk 0]

I've had reasonable success running the game without setting the affinity to just one core (remember I have the AMD patch on already) and have hardly had a crash since I've started to switch off my Logitech mouse software before running the game. I'm wondering if this is interfering ?

[johnwibble_uk 0]

Well it looks like I spoke too soon, it still crashes occasionally without having the Logitech software running

When you consider that this game was originally written quite a few years ago, it strikes me that the original game engine must have been written inefficiently as the hardware today is many times more powerful than the most powerful hardware back then and it still struggles. Any software that requires constant defragging of the hard drive should be seen as inefficient as well in my view.

Having said that, I still love this game, but it's annoying when something is as good as this and with a little more planning and forethought could have been so much better.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

^ Well, my friend, consider where the technology has gone since the game came out five years ago.  The reason for the defragging is the crummy file system written by Microsoft who continue to try to reinvent the wheel when all they really need to do is adopt the UNIX file system which does automatic defrag in the background.

The reason you get fragmented files in NTFS with SC4 is that save files are generally ever larger each time.  Further, NTFS doesn't seem to care about allocating contiguous blocks of disk, but just jams stuff into whatever holes it has regardless of file size and just links extents like mad.  This kind of lousy behavior on the part of the file system is not the fault of the application developers.  Do you know how to make a file contiguous under NTFS?  At the time the game was developed, NTFS wasn't really fit for people, and it was developed using FAT16. (Windows '95).

The game also has problems with newer graphics sub-systems.  It doesn't know anything about things like anti-aliasing, and these features have to be set to application selected if you want to use a newer card.

All things being equal, it is surprising that the multi-taking is good enough to run on a core 2 machine, but one of our people runs it on a core 2 quad without trouble.

So don't be overly surprised if this 16-bit game runs funny on newer 64-bit gear.

[johnwibble_uk 0]

My programming started in the days of cpm and I still think the best OS for me was multi-user DOS where many prorams ran concurrently in 256Kb RAM Yes I do realise that Windows is a very wasteful operating system as  Inow have to write in VB or other such languages rather than my good old favourite Cobol or Fortean, but I've never had problems with writing files where it's meant having to defrag every weekk.

Then again I know nothing of how this program was written or the internal workings of it so I can't really comment I'm just still slightly frustrated with very long load and save times and crashes as I still believe this game is bloody brilliant.

Sorry if any of my comments have caused offence, none was meant.

[johnwibble_uk 0]

Actually, thinking about it a bit more, I would have written a "compact and repair" utility similar to the one you get with access databases which might have sorted this problem out without having to keep doing a defrag

[SC4BOY 21]

Another point is that BECAUSE the game was written some time ago, and given that it is rather intense for pc/graphics usage, it IS written to selfishly gobble up any and every bit of resources it can.. its job is in fact almost open ended, so it can in theory use as many resources as is available for any system.. living within these limits is just part of playing the game.. 

And this "gobble all the resources" behavior allows you to enjoy the game absolutely to the max of what your system can do. If you have a low-performance system, you STILL can have fun, you just have to "allocate your resources" and if you have the new candyapple red with racing stripe pc, you can enjoy it still .. just more better.. hehe

. all of this is not only why we hate the game, but why we continue to love it..

[johnwibble_uk 0]

An update to this. The large city which was causing me problems just kept getting slower, so I made the decision to obliterate the city and start again.

The problem is that the avenues and highways all seem offset by one tile. They appear at the edges as if they are connecting properly to the adjacent tiles but the orange arrows that accompany them are 1 tile to the left ever time. I developed the new city for a while but the traffic is only flowing one way on these connections. So I started all over again and it still had them all offset by one tile and when I try on some of the connections to put a new one in where those arrows are appearing it doesn't give me the option of creating a connection.

I'm totally confused now.