Closing in on CTD causes.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Hey guys, I got a segmentation fault while running today.  This is proof of what I have always suspected that the program takes wild jumps.  When this occurred, I did not get the usual exception report becuse my O/S took the program down immediately.  I am now going to run with the segmentation debugger which will eventually, the next time it happens, give me a stack trace and some other good stuff.

You could say that we got a Christmas present.

I am starting to think that the program somehow messes up its tables and some vector gets clobbered.  In this case it tried for a non-existent page table.  All it sould take would be to zero out a branch address, and the whole program gets killed by the Linux kernel.

More info:  In another crash I hit a null pointer.  The sequence of events is this:

Null pointer dereft causes an entry to the Standard Error Handler (MS's), which tells the program that it has had it, the program raises an L"6" error which usually causes your your exception report output, then raises an L"7" which is probably a panic shutdown.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Hi folks,

    I need to collect more information on these crashes.  I've been noting what I am doing in the game when it happens.  Sometimes it is out of the blue when I am just watching the animation, but most often it seems to occur when I am doing little cleanup chores with the road network.

Not counting crashes caused by puzzle pieces, has anyone noticed exactly what you are doing when you crash?

[Grumbs64 27]

99.9942% of my CTD's disappeared when I set the CPU affinity to 1 CPU (like 70-80% of modern computers mine is a multi-core). The only CTD's I get now are caused by puzzle piece contact implosions.

The CTD's before I set the CPU affinity were almost always caused by changing zoom levels or scrolling too fast.

[Paulobergonci 673]

my game always crash when i zoom in or out and move the camera right after it. It started to happen now, idk why. Any tips?

"99.9942% of my CTD's disappeared when I set the CPU affinity to 1 CPU (like 70-80% of modern computers mine is a multi-core)."

My CPU is a core I3, if that helps.

[Grumbs64 27]

Paulo - use this guide http://simcityforum.com/showthread.php?t=848 and add -CPUCount:1 to the startup command line parameter for SimCity. That fixed 99% of my CTD's from zooming.

[Paulobergonci 673]

Thanks Grumbs! I will try

[iowndiscti 141]

im not all tech geeky like you nonny

summarize this in a short 6- 17 word sentence

[ i think your trying to say that you can solve the CTD problems? ]

[JayStimson 212]

I'm intrigued. I've never had a CTD aside from the TE tile over TE tile issue (puzzle piece contact implosion).

I'm curious too what you expect to actually find as the cause and what you think you can do to "fix" it. I suspect

the problem is in the executable, and even with a dis-assembler to find the right machine instructions, how would

you be able to fix the code ?

[Harddisk25 7]

Mine crashes when I pause the game to add rewards, tune up the road network or adding more lots then click x1, x2 or x3 speed it freeze’s for a couple of seconds then crashes to the desktop.

My Computer Specs are: 4GB DDR3, 1TB HDD, 2.70GHz E5400 Intel -Dual Core Over Clocked and 1GB DDR3 of Shared Graphics Card

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

I'm intrigued. I've never had a CTD aside from the TE tile over TE tile issue (puzzle piece contact implosion).

I'm curious too what you expect to actually find as the cause and what you think you can do to "fix" it. I suspect

the problem is in the executable, and even with a dis-assembler to find the right machine instructions, how would

you be able to fix the code ?

it's illegal for an outsider to fix the code, but if one handed the code on a platter to EA, maybe they might do something. I always believe in the faint hope clause. Besides, I'm retired, so I have a lot of time to think about this.

Thanks everyone.

By the way, I never had CTD's other than the TE ones when I was running XP. I made a test on the affinity thing, and found no difference. Right now, I think it is my platform not being complete. I am on Linux with wine 1.3.14, which is more stable than the last beta.