What frustrates you about sim city 4

[joshriddle 29]

I hate reading the same messages over and over. Get rid of the pop-ups and add some variety to the game!!!quote>

[Tysons4 68]

and i hate how there is no regional turn off udi... you have turn it off in the city...and how there is no data zones and graphs for region view... i want to see where my garbage, water pollution, traffic, crime and what the levels are of each on a regional scale

[Darth Apple 54]

Crashing... crash to desktop... yeah...

joshriddle: Welcome to Simtropolis!

[Jamaicanrunna 0]

Man do I hate it when Sim City 4 crashes. I think it has to do with memory though.

[joshriddle 29]

Hey thanks blakesterville! Appreciate a happy greeting. And I think it crashes due to either memory, or a bug, or just a hard drive thing. The game status could be sitting on a bad block, or it needs to be defragmented.

[pipelad 6]

i do think CDT is the worst thing, tho in my case is limited to dualcore issues, so i only have to set afinity to 1 of the procesors and the games runs just fine...

i would also vote for the lack of extra info on the region view like tyson4

[joshriddle 29]

It needs better landscape shots, the water looks unrealistic, and the land on top of mountains is just rock. Brown rock. If there was snow on top that would be nice. Also the water, wish it was a darker color

[pipelad 6]

well water and snow can be easily obtained with one of the terrain mods and a costal mod, but yes the default maxis terrain is dull

[Spoti 1]

Far and away the most annoying thing is the crashes - but as was mentioned earlier - often it's attributed to dual-core CPUs and setting afinity to a single core normally fixes it. Though I still have the occasional crash. Otherwise - rock on SC4!

[diamonddog_74 32]

CTD, definitely.

No diagonal bridges, and no diagonal streets at any other angle besides 45 deg. NAM FARR helps, but it doesn't offer enough choices.

How does one make the game think the computer has one CPU? I have a dual core machine. I actually lowered the color depth from 32-bit to 16-bit, and I have not experienced a CTD after that. I have 256 MB video card, so I should be able to play at full blast color, but I've found that it takes a lot longer to redraw the screens if I have it set at 32-bit color depth. The game would crash if I rotated the view angle.

[oldoldie 0]

how about the city tree planting that takes forever to complete square to square?

[Panda_Power 1]

I wish SC4 had as bright a future as Civ 4...which I've been playing more of recently!

Civ 5 will be coming out soon and it's going to be able to use multi-threading (all 8 threads if you have a CPU like an i7) and it's DX11 to make full use of the latest GPUs! I can't wait!

I only wish SC5 with the equivalent specs was on the horizon!

[City2TheMax 3]

Originally posted by: diamonddog_74

How does one make the game think the computer has one CPU? I have a dual core machine. I actually lowered the color depth from 32-bit to 16-bit, and I have not experienced a CTD after that. I have 256 MB video card, so I should be able to play at full blast color, but I've found that it takes a lot longer to redraw the screens if I have it set at 32-bit color depth. The game would crash if I rotated the view angle.quote>

Well to make the game run on one core go to task manager, select "processes", and then when you find SC4.exe right click it, select "set affinity", and then uncheck all cores except for one. I got constant CTDs even though I have a single core processor, until I realized it was hyperthreaded (which means my computer thinks it has the equivalent of 2 cores). So every time I play SC4 I uncheck one of the "cores" and bam! no more CTDs

[piccboi824 1]

Other than game crashes, I hate how in low and medium residential, high wealth sims take over everything, but then when you want the high wealth residential towers, they never want to build.

[Pasta-power 7]

You know what I hate? TRAFFIC POLLUTION!!! Thats the hardest type of pollution to get rid of in sim city 4! I've even looked on the stex for something! BUT STILL NOTHING! >

[joshriddle 29]

Originally posted by: J-man-42

You know what I hate? TRAFFIC POLLUTION!!! Thats the hardest type of pollution to get rid of in sim city 4! I've even looked on the stex for something! BUT STILL NOTHING! >quote>

I hear ya! I have heard of car exhaust, but not so much of it! And the only wau to get rid of it is if you shut the road down, but even then the drivers will look for alternate commute routes and pollute those roads. And I cant shut mine down, I stick to the major raods being commercial, and those avenues going to the highways, the highways form a loop around downtown, and the main road going thorught a large neighborhood is a road, even they, as weird as it seems, get polluted soemtimes, and then the streets branch off the road, into peaceful, quiet neighborhoods. So it like forms a

bunch of lines that are yellow on the map

[pipelad 6]

well the new NAM does kinda let you take care of the car polution, with the traffic simulator configuration tool you can set the amount of contamination cars produce, and lower it by aplying the clean air act in you city, i have done this, modifyed it untill i felt it was more realistic, and BAM! no more exces road contamination.

[Servan 5]

Crashing to desktop. Will check into the processor usage like City2themax suggests.

Loading times. About 5+ minutes for a city of 100k+. This on a system with a clean Win 7 install, 2gb RAM and 256mb graphics card.

The complaint of traffic jams with the NAM simulation of red-lights at intersections.

Abandonment, for whatever reason, it's annoying and ugly.

[tkuelker 2]

The fact when you build a diagonal anything on a slope it gets all bumpy like a million speedbumps.

Also when you build a building on a sloped area and the retaining wall is a giant eyesore.

When you want a certain piece and it doesn't exist.

Otherwise SC4 is awesome!

[buckbeach 8]

Can't tell you where but there is a no abandonment mod that works quite well.   Note you never can plop residential lots because they will always abandon no matter what.

A major thing that gets my goat is not being able to control what grows, and, the none of the No Maxis files works, they will always allow the crummy lots to show up and if you delete them, they will almost always (almost I said) show up again.  The only prevent mod I have found to works is the No Perdina (sic) farms.

[Ryan123220 18]

The single most frustrating thing on Simcity 4 is corrupted cities. Nothing is worse then having a city that you have spent months getting right going corrupt and being lost forever. Has happened many times to me. Got so bad that i stoped playing simcity for the last few months though i still visit Simtropolis daily

[SomeRandomAmerican 5]

Crash to desktop, and an annoying glitch I get where certain plugin lots suddenly lose their base texture, leaving me with a building that is floating.

[ikhwan 33]

worst thing about sc4 to me is we cannot zoom from region. no diagonal bridge.

and no SC5...

[Red Lightning 8]

the thing I hate is how long sc4 takes to load, and definitely chrashes

[aereus 106]

Originally posted by: Servan

Crashing to desktop. Will check into the processor usage like City2themax suggests.

Loading times. About 5+ minutes for a city of 100k+. This on a system with a clean Win 7 install, 2gb RAM and 256mb graphics card.quote>

Sounds like your problem is probably just an older PC, and maybe the video card. I just loaded my city with 86k pop and it only uses 350mb ram. City loads in 8-10 seconds with my quad-core set to use 1 core, 1gb graphics card, and an SSD hard drive. I would recommend 4gb ram using Win7 as well, because a base install uses like 1-1.5gb ram just booting so...

[joshriddle 29]

Originally posted by: aereus

Originally posted by: Servan

Crashing to desktop. Will check into the processor usage like City2themax suggests.

Loading times. About 5+ minutes for a city of 100k+. This on a system with a clean Win 7 install, 2gb RAM and 256mb graphics card.quote>

Sounds like your problem is probably just an older PC, and maybe the video card. I just loaded my city with 86k pop and it only uses 350mb ram. City loads in 8-10 seconds with my quad-core set to use 1 core, 1gb graphics card, and an SSD hard drive. I would recommend 4gb ram using Win7 as well, because a base install uses like 1-1.5gb ram just booting so...

quote>

aereus: Are you sure it's entirely clean? I have a city once with 150000 and it took a matter of 45 seconds to 1 minute to load, still long, but not too long. Are you sure it is entirely clean? And not to mention, SC4 wasn't made to run with Win7. It is compatible, opposite of what my user-manual said, but they really werent made to run too good without the minimal system requirements. That is unless, the update makes it equippable.

servan: that also could be it as well, since they really arent a perfect match, (win7 and SC4), needs really high specs. I am wanting a I5,I may use 2 or 3 of the cores. (really a quad core is like 4 processors, you se to use how many you want),I have this old poopy 1.something or another Ghz Amd Athlon, I think the hard drive of mine is a Ultra DMA, 40 GB. And it does take a while, but it loads up, and not after that longa time

[Simcraft 0]

I'm missing /bump/normal/specular maps and all the other mapping techniques. But Sim City 4 is an old lady, I cant expect more than it offers when its about graphics.

[aereus 106]

joshriddle: What do you mean by entirely clean? It's a mostly residential city of 90k where they commute to jobs in the next region lot. (On a huge region lot) All of the graphics turned to max, playing at 1600x1200.

And I wouldn't recommend running the game on multiple cores -- it really does crash to desktop more often. Although getting a new Core i5/i7 would still be a nice upgrade, since those feature a new "overclocking" feature that will turn down 2 cores and speed up the other 2, which would work really well for putting SC4 affinity restricted to the 1 core.

And of course the manual wouldn't say Win7, because even the SimCity Box was released in 2008 -- before Win7 was released. And SC4 itself of course was released back in 2003, when even Vista was still in early development. Windows shouldn't have any issues with XP programs though. The only time you might find troubles is running stuff designed for like Windows98 or earlier...

Also yes, your PC is very old. UDMA100 or 133 would be a sustained speed of 30-40MB/sec. A modern SATA300 hard drive sustains around 75-100MB/sec depending on the model. An SSD hard drive does sustained read of 250MB/sec. Although I'm not sure where the bottleneck is for loading SC4 -- probably a combination of hard drive and processor.

[Herdervriend 46]

The thing that makes me angry is that, there isn't any game combining Simcity 4 and CXL together. Because I want the options from there with the game method of Simcity 4. Like the curved roads, the extreme 3D, the awesome buildings. But I want still the same kind of demand ordinances like in Simcity 4. Kinda frustrating to not be able to choose which game you play.

Now the list:

- Crashing

- Lags

- Messages that are useless

- No disasters when there are fire trucks

- It gets boring.

[xenomat 0]

Well, i'm relatively new to SC4 and i'm fighting with my first big city right now... So if i do something wrong, feel free to point it out to me.

I constantly have to adjust every freaking budged slider of all schools and hospitals, because otherwise i will not make any money and the workers will strike.

Right now there are around 250k residents, but i have a big problem with growth: There is no development. There are people out of jobs, even when i build the next region full of industry, and the main resident-region full with commercial. it's not moving above 250k... I got so many schools, it's frustrating to manage. Desirability is very good, but still no HT-Industry (does this need water btw?). The demand shows max. need for HT, but there is NO HT DEVELOPING.

Right now i'm just frustrated (and confused) that it seems impossible to build a functioning city.

How can buildings get abandoned or "degraded" when there is so much commercial areas (which are NOT developing into big office buildings...) and industry zones available? Everything is there, but it isn't used by the Sims.

And, that i have to wait until the landfill dissapears, that takes forever. I moved it to the next region, and i am not allowed to delete the old landfill.