Time sometimes flows, most times it does not

[Lexxor 0]

Hi there,

I'm playing Simcity 4 Rush Hour with the sku 2 update downloaded from EA's site. My system is Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit, 4 GB RAM DDR2, HD4890 1GB, Pentium 4 3GHz (yep, it's quite old). I run the game on hardware mode, and all visual settings are on Medium.

I don't know if I could make myself clear on the topic title, but my problem is the following: I'm building a city on a large map, and right now it has about 1 million habitants, 450 thousand commercial jobs and 40 thousand or so industrial jobs, and there's still one fourth of the map available for growth. My International Airport has just been upgraded to medium size, the seaport has been upgraded twice and so on.

It's been hard to make it grow even more, but not because of money, of disasters or whatever. I can't make progress because the time refuses to go forward. No matter whether I put it on speed 1, speed 2 or speed 3, the time remains "frozen", as if the game was on pause. Sometimes it advances a couple of days, and then it freezes again. Right after I load the city to begin playing, however, the game advances 3 or 4 months (on speed 3), but then it stops.

There's no lagging at all, and it happens only when I play a large map - on medium and small sized maps, the game runs just fine.

Is there anything I could do to solve this?

[Luxoflax 3]

Sometimes time will freeze in my game too, usually when I'm trying to build or expand large cities, especially if the map is being moved around.

Once I stop moving the map and let the game sit for a second or two time starts running again.

This happened when I first started playing on windows XP and all the way up to now on Windows 7.

Never considered it a glitch, just a quirk the game had.

[SC4BOY 20]

It also sounds as though you may have things running in the background.. do you? That said, it is true that SC4 is not a "flowing" game.. it is not a continuous stream of the program running.. instead there are a number of programs that pop in and out like the destination algorithms, the "find a path" algorithms, the various population and reward programs, etc.. When these are running it will significantly slow the game's "time" progress. Another thing you can do to minimize this as suggested by lucoflax is to not be scanning around the map constantly.. that takes a lot of computing power... give it plenty of time to "catch up" with its business before you start zooming and scrolling again.

[Lexxor 0]

Originally posted by: SC4BOY

It also sounds as though you may have things running in the background.. do you?quote>

No. I mean, I run Norton 360, but this doesn't really count, does it?

Originally posted by: SC4BOY

That said, it is true that SC4 is not a "flowing" game.. it is not a continuous stream of the program running.. instead there are a number of programs that pop in and out like the destination algorithms, the "find a path" algorithms, the various population and reward programs, etc.. When these are running it will significantly slow the game's "time" progress. Another thing you can do to minimize this as suggested by lucoflax is to not be scanning around the map constantly.. that takes a lot of computing power... give it plenty of time to "catch up" with its business before you start zooming and scrolling again.quote>

That's what I feared. Yep, I usually do what Luxoflax suggests, but sometimes it'll just take too long and it bores me like hell. I just wondered if there was something I could do to get around this, but oh well... :/

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Of course it matters.  Disconnect from the net and kill Norton.  You should have no background processes running at all with cities of that magnitude.  You don't specify your machine, but it should be big enough to handle this game if you have enough RAM and Virtual space.

If you have a lot of plugins, plus your game, and have less than about 4GB of real memory (RAM), you'll probably page part of the program and its tables.  This means a couple of disk accesses every time you move from place to place, and when the game scans the regions that are not in memory.

When was the last time you defragmented your disk?  If you've never done it, you are probably badly checkerboarded, and this will slow things quite a bit.  Open "My Computer", pick the disk you have the game's regions on, right click it to get to the properties panel, and find the defragmentation button.  Do this just before bed.  Press the defragmentation button and go to sleep.  It should be finished by morning.

SimCity 4 causes your disk to be fragmented every time you save, and with a big city you could have hundreds of fragments or extents because of the way the file system works.  By running defragmentation, you get these all together so that the files load all in one swoul foop saving many disk accesses just to read a single file.

You should defragment your machine once a week at least.  The initial time it will take overnight, but after that, it is much shorter.  However watching it run is like watching paint dry, so go for coffee while it runs.  You must not run anything else when this is on!  Hands off the machine until it finishes.  This applies to your virus scanner and the Internet, so disconnect from the net and kill your scanner when you are doing this.  Don't forget to turn them back on later.

There is also the problem of the size and state of your swap (virtual memory) file.  But that is another story you can read in the Omnibus.

[SC4BOY 20]

Originally posted by: Lexxor

...My system is Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit, 4 GB RAM DDR2, HD4890 1GB, Pentium 4 3GHz (yep, it's quite old). I run the game on hardware mode, and all visual settings are on Medium.

quote>

Moose.. you're getting negligent in your old age   .. and that should be a rockin' system for SC4 so I expect there are some background issues OR that you have simply reached the population/city size/effects limits for your particular machine. Given the "power status" of your machine I doubt it is any of the other things mentioned in Moose's speculation, but it never hurts to look at that.. defrag'ing never hurts and is good maintenance practice.. it is less of a performance problem in today's massive hard drives than in the old days when you were trying to wedge everything into rather limited hard drive space.

I have a bad habit of running multi-tab'd browser in the background.. that used to not be much of a problem but with all the flash and java content loaded into pages and ad's now-a-days that has become a big problem in the recent years. And of course if you run a torrent stream that is constantly chewing away at your system .. most torrents use your system resources as a "server" on their networks .. even if you are NOT currently using the stream.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I must admit I had other things on my mind when I posted that, but the facts are that background tasks can easitly eat a machine.  If you discontinue them all, and it is still slow, it is time for a virus scan.

[Lexxor 0]

I defragmented the HD and finished some processes. I don't know what I can finish and what I cannot without messing with my computer, so maybe you could help me here:

http://img526.imageshack.us/i/unbenanntjit.jpg/

I remember creating a 2 million habitant city on a lesser computer some years ago, and I don't recall having such problems. 

[Ant1-b0dy 0]

Lexxor, from that picture you'd need to click "Show processes from all users" to get everything the system is running. I notice you have 52 running at that time, that's nominal for modern computers but you said you have a Pentium 4 3GHz? I'd try to stay under 35 on a processor that old, but that's my preference.

But once you've selected the "Show processes from all users" (Prozesse aller Benutzer anzeigen) You can run through them all with the Process Library (http://www.processlibrary.com). Type in the process and search and it will tell you what it is. If you kill a process by accident, all you must do to get it back is restart.

If you don't want to see them again there is a little more advanced way you can do it by using the utility CCleaner or Window's System Config.

[SC4BOY 20]

I am very jealous of what processes run in my background.. not only because it sucks performance from your pc, but because they are mostly BLOATWARE crap that has no need to run whatsoever.. oftentimes even redundant. I have had as many as 35 or so processes, but normally keep my count well under 30. If it gets over that, I go carefully through what has added it and give careful consideration to if it should be autoloaded; loaded but stopped; not loaded at all.. or occasionally even rooted out like a festering infection..

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

At the moment, I have 51 processes launched of which 95% are either sleeping on time outs or waiting on pipes.  Strangely, there are six processess supporting this browser session, but that's Linux for you.

In Windows, its another matter.  One of the things you should do if your are running slowly is a virus scan.  Then shut down the Internet and kill all your protection software.  You don't need any of it if your system is isolated.  A reboot will probably get it all back when you are finished playing.

[joshriddle 29]

I understand that killing background processes is a good thing when running SC4, but what ones are good to kill? Right now I am running 30 processes. Most of them are random letters. Here are the ones that are most frequently running. Barely any of them I know what they are doing.

Does anyone know what ones to kill? Or do I ill all of them? I know what some of them mean, (e.x, alg.exe)

[SC4BOY 20]

That is easier asked than answered because only you know what you have on your pc. Gone are the days when the answer was simply "kill everything except explorer and system".. If you are actually interested I suggest you use a trusted support site like http://www.processlibrary.com/ or http://www.theeldergeek.com/windows_image_acquisition_(wia).htm. It can take considerable time to run down all the processes.. and not just a little trial and error.

[joshriddle 29]

I looked up my common processes, this is what I got:

igfxsrvc.exe- (Mainly for graphics data and drivers, Do not terminate)

svchost.exe- (Unknown source, potential Malware, recommended to terminate. If there are multiples, end those too)

plugin-container.exe (Firefox Process, terminate when not using Firefox)

msmsgs.exe (Windows Messenger process, can be terminated safely, if you do not use Messenger)

ctfmon.exe (Office XP Process, can be terminated, but it may cause some programs to malfunction)

igfxpers.exe (Common among NVIDIA drivers, not recommended to terminate unless it is causing problems)

hkcmd.exe (Mainly for Intel graphics hotkeys, not recommended to terminate unless hotkeys are disabled.)

igfxtray.exe (Intel graphics process, unknown if it is safe to terminate)

jusched.exe (Bloatware process, checks for JAVA Updates, recommended to terminate, unless you would like to update JAVA)

syntpenh.exe (Synapatics touch device process, should not be termianted unless causing issues)

smss.exe (If there is an smss.exe object outside of C:\Windows\System32, delete it and kill any processes that go by that name. If it is under System32, leave it)

explorer.exe (Windows Explorer, can cause issues such as a missing taskbar if terminated, do not terminate this)

The rest of them are SYSTEM Processes. Terminating any system process can cause instability.