Loading a city

[paulmc 393]

Hello fellow mayors, I was thinking, I guess a game like simcity 4 has thounsands of players around the world, but sadly not all of us have the privilege of load our cities fast, in my case due excess of plugins. But the issue is not how to load cities faster, but what you do while you are "waiting the damn city to load" ... I have a guitar, so i play some songs while the time passes, because it's lost time, so need to do something to use it.

[TekindusT 3,809]

I tend to read a book or the newspaper; maybe I solve the paper crosswords if I had read it before... Turning on the radio or the TV also helps a lot.

[clarkjordan12345 108]

Make a cup of tea, have dinner, read a book, go shopping, go on holiday, climb Mt Everest, create world peace, go to Pluto and back and solve the mystery of the universe. All in that order xD nah, ko, I watch TV

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

I very carefully control my plugins, and don't leave a lot of deadwood laying around in my plugins folder.  There are several programs around to help you do this, but I do it manually.  I don't load any plugin I don't need for my current city, and I don't have very many anyway.  The WOW I WANT TO HAVE THAT factor doesn't affect me.

My cities load pretty quickly.  Besides, it is not the city that loads the plugins, it is the program start up.  My game starts in about six seconds (yes, I timed it using Linux date commands).  This time is from a CTD to Region mode.  There is something to be said about running a program from a console.  I can get back in with two keystrokes.

If you find your plugins offend you, cut them off.  You probably don't use most of them all the time, so move them out of your plugin folder unless you really need them.  This is one of the reasons I don't use the datpacker.  I use files2dat to pack my plugins into one file each.  Careful program management will help you solve this problem, and you need to pay attention.

If I had to wait very long for a load, I have multiple desktops, (a feature of my Xorg desktop system), so I can always go do something else, like read and answer e-mail.  Sometimes, when I am curious about something happening on my machine I run the system monitor in a separate desktop  to see what the program is doing.  With simcity 4 it is usually using about 70% of each of my two CPUs.

Of course, the other thing about me is that I am an operating system programmer, and have been since around 1962.

[Arvendragon 1]

I... think. Think about life, philosophy, how much Calculus I have left waiting for me, what I want for dinner, my various English essays, you know. Stuff.

[Cupcake Carly 12]

I sometimes sit and wish I was someone like moose up there so it wouldn't load so long in the first place. (Pm with some simple hints yes? :'D)

[JeeKTan 4]

I usually switch to my web browser when my city is loading.

[kolnikov inc 1]

why don't you play in windowed mode, so you can surf the internet in the mean time......actually, my game is loading right now as i'm typing this..

..also try going into you plugin folder and cutting out any pictures and read-mes, they take up a lot of space.....my folder went from 1.9 mb to 1.3 mb and the game runs alot faster...

[Arvendragon 1]

Wait, the pictures and readmes in Plugins actually affect the game too?

And how do you have 1.3 MB? Mine is 1.3 GB... T.T

[paulmc 393]

I like my plugins, and I don't just want to have them but I surely need them in my project of region. I already have cut the useless ones, and a bunch still remains . Each player style with your plugins folder. My game don't take more than about 4 minutes to load and a city about 4 to 5, depending on its size and level of development. I was just wondering what kind of cool ,funny, and who knows, weird stuff, people do while the loading is running. I liked the answers so far, I hope to see another interesting answers .

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

I have a file system tool that tells all.  My plugins folder is 200.2 MB of which about thirty per cent is the NAM.

The disk usage analyzer will specify the disk load of any folder.

I haven't cleaned up my plugins, so a lot of the junk the NAM installer puts in there hasn't been moved out.  I don't normally keep anything in my plugins except active files, namely .dat, .SC4LOT, .SC4DESC, .SC4MODEL, .dll.  Everything else would either be elsewhere or in the bit bucket.

Here is a screen shot from DUA.

[paulmc 393]

Nice system Moose, you have really few plugins. To me the diversity of plugins adds more fun and possibilities to the game, since I don

[unorthodox 0]

Sorry guys but what program do you recommend me to order all the plugins? I have many many of dat. files made by my own in the Lot Editor, even though every file is as light as a feather it gets messy cause there're too many (and I can't get rid of cause I'm randomly using them).

Thanks!!!

[EyeofMobius 27]

While I wait for the load I am sometimes found raiding the cookie jar but usually read whatever non-fiction book I have placed beside my computer for just such purposes since loading sc4 takes all of my processing power.

As far as organizing my plugins folder I am using SC4 Tools from the Working Man website (here). It requires a few extra programs to use all the features but it makes them much more civilian freindly and has a feature to auto clean your plugins.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Originally posted by: unorthodox

Sorry guys but what program do you recommend me to order all the plugins? I have many many of dat. files made by my own in the Lot Editor, even though every file is as light as a feather it gets messy cause there're too many (and I can't get rid of cause I'm randomly using them).

Thanks!!!quote>

Eye join with our mathematical friend, and suggest DocRohrlac's tools.  He is quite a good tools provider, and I don't think you need to get involved with some of the ilive-type tools I use.  You might want ot have a look at files2dat which can consolidate plugin files into a single .dat selectively.

@eyeofmobius:  That program is part of the general distribution with UBUNTU 10.10

Friends, I reflected on all you have said about loading cities, and timed my biggest city loading today.  It took 11 seconds.

I don't have the biggest monster of a system that some of you have.  It is modest dual core Athlon II with a 7200 rpm ATA disk (500GB).

Could it be loading troubles with Windows systems is mostly attributed to mutli-extent files?  After any save, your city will be fragmented if you added anything to it.  How often you run defragmentation, grasshoppers?

[Yuu Caa Sim 55]

@A Nonny Moose: That Disk Usage Analyzer looks pretty cool. I didn't know Linux had that built in. Do you know if any of the other distros have something like this? Can it check allocation in specific folders only? How fast does it run? (Sorry for all the questions)

For us people on Windows, we get to use i.disk (or maybe there's another program), which is more or less the same thing. Takes about 8 minutes to run, and always scans the entire hard drive. Here's a shot of my plugins directory:

By yunxiang at 2009-04-25

From April 2009. I keep most dependencies and game changing mods like automata and the NAM in the Program Files Folder. As can be seen, most of my space (and thus loading time) is being taken up by growable downloads. However, not all of it gets used at a time (especially since there are some redundencies and conflicts). I use the SC4 Startup Manager to choose which plugins are used in every game session.

Usually when I'm loading the game (~3 minutes), I take out my cell phone and browse the news, or watch Youtube, or maybe play another game. Loading cities is faster (maybe a minute for a large tile half built), so I just wait, or get something to drink. Playing a guitar while waiting for the game to load sounds pretty cool.

I remember loading the game once without any plugins. It went by really fast, maybe 30 seconds to start the game, and 10 to load an empty large tile!

[kolnikov inc 1]

@Arvendragon ...im sorry instead of 'MB' i meant "GB' ..my mistake...but anyway, to answer your question im pretty sure the game processes all files in the 'plugins' folder, including pictures and read-mes...even though it doesnt use them, it still affects load times...im just assuming though.

heres a picture.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

@yunxiang:  The Disk Usage Analyzer probably is available for any Linux/UNIX system running the fuse file system.  I don't think there is anything special about it, it does not appear to be release specific since I've used it for some time.  I expect than any extn disk format is acceptable to it.  I've never tried it on a FAT32 partition, but seeing as how fuse can even write on them, it might just work.

Since all this is open source, an enterprising programmer could recompile it for windows.  You'd have to fix any api calls.

When I was still a windows user, I had a tool that would tell me the amount of fragmentation  on each disk, and how many fragments per file in the aggregate.  Didn't matter, I ran a defrag program weekly, and sometimes more often if I played SC4 heavily.