Corrupt graphics

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

While running RH, The graphics went really wierd with all kinds of primary colors.  I did a save and quit to region, and the save included the corrupt graphics on the region map.  Here is a snap.

Suspecting something had been stepped on, I did a system restart and called up the city.  The problem was removed by the reset.  Comments?

To put this in perspective, the red circle line is 4px wide.

[joshriddle 29]

I think it may have been the renderer was set to the wrong setting, or your graphics card is screwing up. Usually graphic glitches like this happen and I can always trace them back to those two.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

The renderer is set to hardware.  I have an NVIDIA chip set.

This only happens after the game has been running long enough to produce a large number of graphic objects.

When I reboot, the shutdown screen becomes transparent and I can see the terminal output in the background sometimes.  This, to me, indicates that the O/S has been stepped on.  I very much suspect memory closure problems since this is not a reproducable situation and goes away after a restart.

[joshriddle 29]

Mine would be set to hardware and the graphics look like a horror movie/nightmare. So that is probably why.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

It all depends on your GPU.  Mine has worked fine with SC4RH for over six years.  No reason for it to fail now unless it failed utterly.

[joshriddle 29]

Mines a GeForce 8400 GT by Nvidia and I have only had it for about half a year now. And it is a relatively new monitor with LCD, flat screen HD, like one of those Hi-Def televisions, so mine wouldn't be having that problem unless some other setting or something was wrong, or if Nividia makes lousy chipsets for their video cards.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

OK.  This will probably solve your problem but not mine.  You need to turn off anti-aliasing and any other "features" your GPU may have.  The best way to do this, if you can, is to set it to 'application selected' or equivalent.

SC4 is a legacy program written before any of those features came out on a GPU.  They cannot deal with these things, and all it does is cause a mess.  Sound familiar?

I still think my problem is that something is stepping on my graphics memory or frame buffers in core, and the result causes a wild jump into somewhere in the system kernel, which seems to be unprotected at that time.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Further test results with my big city:

In one case, it went nuts immediately, so I quit.  I had to reboot my machine twice to clear the problem.

So, I used the wine command line method to call the program and everything started beautifully, except I was recording everything that wine and the program may have said on a file.  I am beginning to feel like Schroedinger's cat.  Nothing, but nothing I did could provoke the problem.  I built a city-wide monorail.  I fixed up various traffic problems, lot problems.  zoned some new lots, you name it, I did it.  I even bridged my monrail across an inlet in front of a car/passenger ferry.  Nada.

The log file is 9 MB, so it will take me a while.  wine really doesn't like this program, but it runs it anyway.  Now that's software!

I still think I have seen this before, and have agreement with another player who had the problem some time ago.  It seems to come and go with the phases of the moon associated with the sun-spot cycle.  Did you know that SimCity 4 keeps a startup log in the /apps folder every time you run.  Must be for someone's benefit.  I copied it, too.

If anyone has seen this, and knows what to do about it, please let me know.

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Update: Sunday, July 25 2010 04:15 PM

After a long climb up the wine learning curve, I found it.  For some reason, when wine built the registry, it failed to detect my (very old, obsolete) graphics chip.  The result was that everything went to default.  I had to set the registry (wine has one) value for my chip's memory to the correct value.  Game seems to run fine now with a big tile about 2/3 full of stuff.

Case dismissed.