The Explanation and Cures to roughly 80% of CTD's!

[milter 0]

SC4Boy: I'm sorry you have misunderstood my stand point a bit...

My point is not particularly to avoid the swap file (I just don't want it) but after reading this line of posts it seems like a lot of people are afraid that their 2G+ RAM systems are going to CTD because the system runs out of memory. I don't think that is the case.

I am still experiencing CTDs but it is really hard to recognize exactly what causes this. I have upgraded with the latest patch, and I feel I have fewer CTD - But I'm not sure.

--- Off topic ---

About the Swap file I think it is important to know what it does. sometimes it can work to your advantage - but in most cases I find that it doesn't. For instance if you have a system with inadequate memory to run a given application+OS the some of the memory will be put in the swap file and not in RAM - more or less regardless of the type of data and how often it is accessed (This is not completly true because windows have some mechanisms to decide what to put in RAM and what to put in the swap file). This means that your application becomes very slow and will kill if not the physical disc, then the file system.

So I find the best way to increase performance in any system is to make sure you have enough RAM for the applications you need and deactivate your swap file. The system will warn you when you are in danger of running out of memory, and you need to close applications or buy more RAM

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[spa 970]

I just wanted to thank Shadow Assassin! Since buying my new computer Sim City hasn't run as smoothly as it did on my old one. Compressing the files helped somewhat as did increasing the page file but only manually setting Sim City 4 to use the other core as Shadow Assassin instructed fixed my frequent ctd when zooming or rotating the view. Thanks a bunch. If anyone else is having trouble with ctd and is on a dual core machine, Shadow's advice is well worth giving a try.

[NetPCDoc 1]

Originally posted by: Bumdark

Cause

^{What the heck's going on? And what the heck is this "Access Violation" you just made me look up?}

There may be many reasons why SC4 CTD's, yet by far the most common and prominent – roughly 80% of CTD's, in fact – are caused by this particular error: Access Violation.

What is "Access_Violation"? Well, I could go into the technical mumbo-jumble... well, actually I couldn't, I don't know all the technical crap. But I do know what it is, what causes it and how to stop the damn thing from ever hquote>

 

Hello Bumdark,

Is it just me - or did your solution get truncated somehow?

-NetPCDoc

No detail is too small to be micromanaged.

[jordache16 0]

I am seeing the same thing, the original post seems to be cutoff right before the "solution".

And for those who may believe CTDs have anything to do with PC specs, I recently purchased an HP 2.2Ghz Quad Core Phenom with 6GB of RAM and I seem to be having CTD problems.

I used to play avidly a few years back when the game came out but it was sucking so much of my free time out me that I decided to give it up for a while. Well now that I am back into it again the first night I popped it in my brand new shiny PC I played for probably over 6 hours straight and had a pretty good city established and all of the sudden without any warning the game exited to the desktop... I am going *****!@?*?!  because I knew I had only saved it twice real early on.

So I quickly learned my lesson there and now save on a regular basis. 

An optional autosave feature would be kind of nice in situations like mine, but I remember playing back in the day I would only save when I was doing good and making money. This was because I remember several occasions when I would have a fairly established city going and all of the sudden I would start to lose money and I couldn't figure out why for the life of me and eventually people would leave and I couldn't reverse the financial sitution and in the long run had to abandoned the city all together. It was critical to not save the game during these "downfalls" that way you could revert back to before the problem started and try to prevent whatever happened from happening.

Anyways back to the original topic, I am running Vista 64bit so I think I will try a few things that others have suggested, such as assigning the simcity4 process to a single core, possibly core 3 or core 4. Also my current city is on the largest tile region and is getting fairly large and  scrolling accross the map has seemed to become a little slow. I have seen in other places that changing the renderer from hardware to software may help with the performance issues so I will try that first...

[loveangel 0]

I used to get constant CTD like everyone else, but I haven't had any for a month or two.

The only thing I can think of is that I defragged my page file and system files (different than what the windows defrag tool does), and installed the new nvidia driver. I did both about two months ago, can't recall any crashes since. For those of you with nvidia cards, maybe give the new (oct 15 '08) driver a try. As for defragging the page/system files, I'm not sure if that actually helps; I had to do it for a different reason. I used PerfectDisc to do it, theres lots of tutorials on those geek news sites. But try the driver thing first.

ps. to the person recommending that we all turn off our page files, you're being a bit misleading. Why would you claim that it "will kill if not the physical disc, then the file system" (*****??). This is just wrong, and there is no benefit to turning it off, even with 4gb of ram.

[Dukat 2]

I know this is an old thread and I know that the solution has been crippled.

Still, if you expirience CTD's, enable the compatibility mode for Win 2000.

My game never crashed randomly while using various hardware.

I admit, I got a folder full of access violations reports, but all those violations were caused by hovering NAM-tiles over traffic-enabled lots. But that is something different.

[pat149 0]

I'm probably in the minority here, but I've never had SC4 crash on me.

Then again, I have 2 GB of RAM--and absolutely nothing in my plugins folder. (I've also only had the game for about 3 months or so; I got it with the Simcity Box pack.)

Just wanted to share my experience. Watch--next time I play it'll blow up my system.

[Snakepit Dave 11]

I think game play with an empty plugin folder is not a problem.  Once you give it plenty of plugins, that's when the fun begins.  I have 2 G of RAM, and a fairly updated dual core system (though sometimes, as noted earlier, the dual core can be problematic) and prior to using data packer I was getting regular CTDs with a 4 gig plugin folder.  I already know that's too much but I love being able to have too much of everything at my disposal.  The "packer" is a real problem solver.  This is a very good post because the CTD problem is real.

[blak 4]

Originally posted by: Bumdark

Cause

^{What the heck's going on? And what the heck is this "Access Violation" you just made me look up?}

There may be many reasons why SC4 CTD's, yet by far the most common and prominent – roughly 80% of CTD's, in fact – are caused by this particular error: Access Violation.

What is "Access_Violation"? Well, I could go into the technical mumbo-jumble... well, actually I couldn't, I don't know all the technical crap. But I do know what it is, what causes it and how to stop the damn thing from ever h [..]quote>

OK... what? I think This post somehow got truncated right before the "Solution"... Weird...

Anyway. I have a ridiculous PC with only 504 MB di RAM but, for some reason, the game crashed only two times, which I consider a "good" thing... for me...

[sdlitvin 0]

My Plugins folder is only 103 MB (of which the NAM is 28 MB); and yet my SC4 still crashes all too often. With a large city (300,000 population), I'm getting crashes now about once every half hour. I'm forced to constantly save the game every few minutes.

Yes, all the Exception Reports say the same thing: ACCESS_VIOLATION.

I don't run SC4 in a window, it takes up the whole screen and I'm not running any other major applications at the time. I can't figure out what's happening.

[Strategist01 0]

Well, i used to have random crashes, but then they stopped, dunno why, but then when i downloaded the trafficfix.dat, and the mod that allows you to view transit buildings in zone view, everytime i zoomed in to level5, it did a CTD! also i couldn't access my cities that i had created before downloading this, when they finished loading, they would CTD . Plus i couldn't put down my bus/subway lots that could go in the road/ one way/ avenue, onto said road,etc. i had to put it next to it for some reason. So don't download those things! Or it could be my computer. And it has really bad specs, i'm too embarrased to show then to you...

[tungston 19]

There are instances when you need a page file, even if it is very small in size. And it will not slow a computer down, that will only happen if you fill all the physical memory and use virtual memory.

It would be rare for SC4 to use more than 1GB of memory, even in the most extreme cases.

[Goit 0]

What was the solution? Did anyone get a chance to read it before?

[Goit 0]

?

[Kahara 0]

It's not the PC specs, SC4 does not need great specs to run.

[tungston 19]

This topic seems to be missing the information that started it, and it's gotten off topic. If you need more specific information, plese start a new topic.