Issues w/ Larger Cities?

[Jazzmaster 716]

Just out of curiosity, and I know I'm not the only one, but I'd like to know; at one point do people start experiencing bugs in their city growth? I'm usually up to 100,000 or so and it all deteriorates from there. Not sure if it has to deal with the amount of buildings, the population, the animatioons, or what it is, but it seems to be a universally known fact: larger cities in SimCity 4 are always unstable.

I can play for hours on end, saving every now and then or before/after using puzzle pieces, and not have a single crash. But there's one city in particular that will freeze and crash over the dumbest things, including moving the camera too fast. A little ridiculous, don't ya think?

Too long; didn't read: I have all sorts of problems in larger cities but never smaller ones. Not in terms of city tile size, but population size.

[z1 566]

There's no intrinsic reason why larger cities should be buggier than smaller ones. I have many cities with populations around two million, and they all run just fine.

If you have one city in particular that seems to crash more than others, it's quite possible that the city file has become corrupted.

[Jack³ 291]

When my cities get up to about 70,000 then the fastforward barely works and residential zones don't build up. It also lags a lot when scrolling.

[Jazzmaster 716]

It's not so much an issue with the game running too slow so much as it is it will randomly CTD when doing something like saving (of all the ironic things) or even just taking a snapshot. :| I hope it really isn't corrupted and unfixable, at the very least it is still playable and the most recent version is backed up so I won't have to worry about losing everything..

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I think we have to realize that this legacy program was written in the windows 95/98 time-frame without any consideration of virtual memory or very large plugin suites. In those days, a program really couldn't have very much memory, and it wasn't expected that such huge cities would be possible.

The programmers did better than they could have guessed, but the haste to market did damage the program by not allowing a thorough quality assurance cycle. Programs should not be released with published patches immediately available. What does that tell you about the greed of the marketing people, or the poor financial situation of Maxis at the time? Is it any wonder they were ripe for a take-over by EA? Techies do not make good business men.

When I was running this program on Windows XP in a rather old box of tricks, I never had a random CTD. Now I have a lot of them but:

1. I have a dual core machine that is many times faster than that old box and more memory than some main frames I have used.
2. I am running with a beta release of wine under Linux, which limits the number of frame buffers allowed for the game to two. The game wants more than that, and this causes crashes and corruption of the frames in hardware rendering mode.

Anyone with a modern machine is running a much larger environment than was ever anticipated for this program that should have died a natural death five years ago. We manage to keep it pooping along because there is no suitable replacement, even after all this time. I think we are pushing the envelope with this program, and we are pushing it hard. So we will have to tolerate the random CTD's until such time as we can put our hot little hands on the source code, if ever. That day may never come.

Meanwhile, we will try to find and kill each external cause of CTD's. I have found that whatever happens internally, if you do frequent in-game saves (CTRL+s), it seems to reset the tendency to crash.

I am going to purchase Cities XL 2012 when it comes out, because I'd like to have something that is different and new. That doesn't mean I won't play SimCity 4 any more. However, my installation disks are unreadable and I am going to have to purchase a new copy soon. If anything happens to my Rush Hour play disk, I am sunk. I'll probably buy a copy on-line.

And so my friends and colleagues, let us keep on with our art, and hope that we can find a set of fixes eventually.

[Jazzmaster 716]

You are probably right on that, as it is the suspicion I've had all along.

My older computer ran on XP with an AMD Athlon 64 processor. The machine was five or six years old today (we don't have it anymore). If anything, SimCity 4 would be too much for the computer, never the other way around. It exhibited, dare I say, stable lag.

Fast forward to this past summer, and all sorts of problems come up. The main issue seemed to be with the quad core environment above all else, fixed with the simple -CPUCount:1 command line. Everything was fixed, except for this one city. I hesitate to say it's corrupted, although it has randomly crashed so it's possible; it never had problems on my older computer.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

You are probably right on that, as it is the suspicion I've had all along.

My older computer ran on XP with an AMD Athlon 64 processor. The machine was five or six years old today (we don't have it anymore). If anything, SimCity 4 would be too much for the computer, never the other way around. It exhibited, dare I say, stable lag.

Fast forward to this past summer, and all sorts of problems come up. The main issue seemed to be with the quad core environment above all else, fixed with the simple -CPUCount:1 command line. Everything was fixed, except for this one city. I hesitate to say it's corrupted, although it has randomly crashed so it's possible; it never had problems on my older computer.

Try running that city in low great (Turtle). There may be just so much going on that the program needs time to catch up.

[Jazzmaster 716]

You are probably right on that, as it is the suspicion I've had all along.

My older computer ran on XP with an AMD Athlon 64 processor. The machine was five or six years old today (we don't have it anymore). If anything, SimCity 4 would be too much for the computer, never the other way around. It exhibited, dare I say, stable lag.

Fast forward to this past summer, and all sorts of problems come up. The main issue seemed to be with the quad core environment above all else, fixed with the simple -CPUCount:1 command line. Everything was fixed, except for this one city. I hesitate to say it's corrupted, although it has randomly crashed so it's possible; it never had problems on my older computer.

Try running that city in low great (Turtle). There may be just so much going on that the program needs time to catch up.

That'd be an interesting thing to try, if not for the fact that my game were on pause most of the time. Actually, my game almost never crashes when I set it to cheetah mode while growing my residential lots to fill up areas I just zoned (I take time to bulldoze them into the neighborhood looks how I'd like it to, then make them 'historical').

[PBGV103 729]

As people have said before, the only way to overcome lag and other issues in the game is by moving to 64bit and multithreading. Everyone here tends to be afraid of even mentioning that for fear of prosecution by EA, when in reality they can only take legal action if you distribute the exe. That means someone would need to spend years playing with the exe file or get EA to give them the source code so they can make changes. Then they'd need to post a "how to" article so everyone else with the game can make the same changes they did. It would honestly take a team of people to make that happen and no one I know has the resources or motivation to make it happen.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

The only people with the resources to update the decor of the game is EA. It is unlikely they would do that without a firm business plan that returned the investment plus a healhy margin. This would, in effect, mean producing a SimCity 2014 which would probably be so different it would be hard to say if anyone would want it.

Doing a 64-bit compile is trivial.

Adding multi-threading means a general overhaul of the game kernel.

[z1 566]

It's not so much an issue with the game running too slow so much as it is it will randomly CTD when doing something like saving (of all the ironic things)...

Crashing during a save is something that can indicate that your transportation networks are getting too complex for the game. For example, playing with vanilla SC4 Deluxe, I had a city where I kept adding more and more subway lines to reduce the congestion. Eventually, there were many more subway lines than roads. By this time, the game was crashing about every other time I did a save of that city. Then I discovered the NAM. I installed one of the higher capacity traffic simulators of the time, and I gradually started tearing out most of the subway lines. As I did so, the frequency of the crashes dropped, until they disappeared completely. This city is now 100% stable, although the subway lines still outnumber the roads slightly.

[Jazzmaster 716]

So, are you saying that I should change my traffic simulator? I do love to experiment a LOT with all the current NAM components in my game because it looks so darn cool (lol)....

I'm using the Z_Ultra plugin, now

[z1 566]

So, are you saying that I should change my traffic simulator?

No; this problem is unaffected by the traffic simulator settings. Using a different traffic simulator from the standard Maxis one merely allowed me to decrease the complexity of my subway network. The Ultra version of the simulator has got the greatest capacity, but it may allow you to build networks that are complex enough to make your city unstable, specifically when saving it. Using a lower capacity traffic simulator wouldn't have any effect on this problem at all; the problem appears to be related to the conversion of the in-memory representation of the networks to the structures used for storage in the city's data file at the time of saving.

And of course, that was just my experience. There may very well be other problems with the game that cause it to crash during a save as well.

  Edited September 12, 2011 by z1  

[Jazzmaster 716]

So, are you saying that I should change my traffic simulator?

No; this problem is unaffected by the traffic simulator settings. Using a different traffic simulator from the standard Maxis one merely allowed me to decrease the complexity of my subway network. The Ultra version of the simulator has got the greatest capacity, but it may allow you to build networks that are complex enough to make your city unstable, specifically when saving it. Using a lower capacity traffic simulator wouldn't have any effect on this problem at all; the problem appears to be related to the conversion of the in-memory representation of the networks to the structures used for storage in the city's data file at the time of saving.

And of course, that was just my experience. There may very well be other problems with the game that cause it to crash during a save as well.

As one as it doesn't corrupt the file, I guess. In my limited computing experience, I'd expect any program that crashes during a save to corrupt the file it is saving 99% of the time.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Hmmm. More grist for my CTD mill. Up to now, the idea of the city being too complex to save didn't occur to me. I haven't encountered that situation I think, but it is interesting that something may have overflowed in the data base format.

[Ronwe 3]

This is an interesting conversation, about older machines vs newer ones.... I remember having a problem saving with a large city myself years ago, when I was playing with a completely unmodified SC4 Deluxe version (not even patched!) on my old Dell Desktop built circa ~ 2002. That one had 256k Ram, and a 2.4 gig processor at the time (I upgraded the Ram shortly thereafter) and ran Win XP. I had a city that was approaching 1 million, and was also becoming a traffic nightmare. (I was using one way roads and a 4x4 grid, with lots of subway and bus lines) It did start slowing down considerably as it grew, but I never had any crashes or failures of anykind until one time I tried to save it. It seemed to freeze up, so I tried alt-tabing, then opening and closing the CD tray (which almost always got be back to the desktop), then ctl. alt. del., which got me a black screen with the box [Centropolis.SC4 saved (OK) ] The whole machine was locked up and I had to kill the entire machine and reboot, hoping that the city was actually saved like it said...

It was... kind of... but I guess it was corrupted, and crashed just about everytime I played it after only a few minutes. I ended up having the trash it and start over. My guess was at the time that it simply ran out of memory (A problem I'd always have with that machine... yeah yeah, I know, I was cheap and skimped on memory when bought it).

Now that I'm playing again, I'm starting to have the same amount of lag, and I worry about the size of my cities. My current laptop may have 20 times the memory of my old PC, but it's also using Win 7 with a quad core CPU... which doesn't take that well to older programs. I'm starting to dread loading up my larger cities, and looking for ways I can improve the performance and reliability of SC4...

[Jazzmaster 716]

Perhaps with the release of the new NAM dawning the horizon, the game will become more stable. Though, I don't really count on that. Honestly, it's not their problem to deal with, I do know for a fact the NAM components are better guarded against hovering a puzzle piece over a TE'd lot; I've done it without crashing, actually. But as far as the complexity goes...well, if anything, the NAM and its components are getting even MORE complex...

[Jazzmaster 716]

Performing a somewhat meaningless bump, but I've been toying with the idea that a missing plugin could be causing the problem. Like I said this is the only city that crashes, but besides that plugin dialogue box (warning: you are missing blah blah plugin pack 095095848085408 or whatever), I see no abnormalities with it. Anyone else think that's possible?

[De Ja Vu 117]

If you have a newer PC then you should ctrl+alt+del while ingame, go to processes > right click on sim city 4 > Set Affinity and uncheck all "CPUs" except the last one...I have a 4 core CPU so I have 4 boxes ticked and when I enter the game I just uncheck CPU 0, CPU 1, CPU 2 and I rarely crash...inf fact I think I never crashed ever since I started doing that...as some people mentioned you usually crash when you move your mouse rapidly or zoom in/out...memeroy problem...people forget that this is a 8 year old game...and in those 8 years we (or at least I) have filled our plugins with GBs of downloads which only make the game slower xD...

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

If you have a newer PC then you should ctrl+alt+del while ingame, go to processes > right click on sim city 4 > Set Affinity and uncheck all "CPUs" except the last one...I have a 4 core CPU so I have 4 boxes ticked and when I enter the game I just uncheck CPU 0, CPU 1, CPU 2 and I rarely crash...inf fact I think I never crashed ever since I started doing that...as some people mentioned you usually crash when you move your mouse rapidly or zoom in/out...memeroy problem...people forget that this is a 8 year old game...and in those 8 years we (or at least I) have filled our plugins with GBs of downloads which only make the game slower xD...

If this works for you, add the option -CPUCount:1 to your short cut's command line. Don't forget the leading space before the hypen.

[Jazzmaster 716]

If you have a newer PC then you should ctrl+alt+del while ingame, go to processes > right click on sim city 4 > Set Affinity and uncheck all "CPUs" except the last one...I have a 4 core CPU so I have 4 boxes ticked and when I enter the game I just uncheck CPU 0, CPU 1, CPU 2 and I rarely crash...inf fact I think I never crashed ever since I started doing that...as some people mentioned you usually crash when you move your mouse rapidly or zoom in/out...memeroy problem...people forget that this is a 8 year old game...and in those 8 years we (or at least I) have filled our plugins with GBs of downloads which only make the game slower xD...

My command line has been like this for months:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Maxis\SimCity 4 Deluxe\Apps\SimCity 4.exe" -w -CustomResolution:enabled -r1600x900x32 -intro:Off -CPUCount:1 -EH:Off

It's usually pretty stable. I do notice when it crashes from rapid zooms and pan overs, or using the scroll wheel a lot; or anything else that is my fault. It's just when I try to plop a building or something and it'll randomly crash...*shrug*. I guess I'll just live with it, at least until something else is perhaps figured out.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Use the in-game save (CTRL+s) frequently, especially after you have done something you particularly want to keep.

[Jazzmaster 716]

Use the in-game save (CTRL+s) frequently, especially after you have done something you particularly want to keep.

I sure will. Seems to always be the answer, although sometimes I can't help but get caught up in what I'm doing and forget to stop and save, lol.

[Jazzmaster 716]

I hate to shamelessly bump, but even after taking the extremest amount of caution, the game still likes to crash when I try to save it. I have no idea why it would, besides the missing plugin, which is damned near impossible to identify when there's no brown boxes in sight. I'm toying with the idea of backing up my city somewhere, and then deleting huge chunks of it and saving in between deletions to see if I can narrow down the so-called missing plugin, and see if that fixes anything. I highly doubt it, but anything is worth it.

EDIT: I went back in, replaced a signal controlled 4-way AVE intersection with a roundabout, hit CTRL+S, and it crashed. This is driving me absolutely insane. How do I post the exception report? There might be something in there...

EDIT (again): Problems seem to be narrowed down to the things discussed here. Scrolling too fast, transit networks too complex. The former I will own up to, since I got a little spoiled with my lesser developed cities actually allowing me to scroll around and do all kinds of things without the city crashing. The latter is absolutely unacceptable, and for shame to EA for their horrible time-lines ruining such a great game like this. Oh, well.

  Edited October 5, 2011 by Yoshiisland  

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I hate to shamelessly bump, but even after taking the extremest amount of caution, the game still likes to crash when I try to save it. I have no idea why it would, besides the missing plugin, which is damned near impossible to identify when there's no brown boxes in sight. I'm toying with the idea of backing up my city somewhere, and then deleting huge chunks of it and saving in between deletions to see if I can narrow down the so-called missing plugin, and see if that fixes anything. I highly doubt it, but anything is worth it.

EDIT: I went back in, replaced a signal controlled 4-way AVE intersection with a roundabout, hit CTRL+S, and it crashed. This is driving me absolutely insane. How do I post the exception report? There might be something in there...

EDIT (again): Problems seem to be narrowed down to the things discussed here. Scrolling too fast, transit networks too complex. The former I will own up to, since I got a little spoiled with my lesser developed cities actually allowing me to scroll around and do all kinds of things without the city crashing. The latter is absolutely unacceptable, and for shame to EA for their horrible time-lines ruining such a great game like this. Oh, well.

Yoshi, instead of zooming with the wheel, use the number keys 1-6. Saves overloading the command queue. And if you're running in high gear, shift down to second. Gives the program time to catch up.

  Edited October 5, 2011 by A Nonny Moose  

[Jazzmaster 716]

I hate to shamelessly bump, but even after taking the extremest amount of caution, the game still likes to crash when I try to save it. I have no idea why it would, besides the missing plugin, which is damned near impossible to identify when there's no brown boxes in sight. I'm toying with the idea of backing up my city somewhere, and then deleting huge chunks of it and saving in between deletions to see if I can narrow down the so-called missing plugin, and see if that fixes anything. I highly doubt it, but anything is worth it.

EDIT: I went back in, replaced a signal controlled 4-way AVE intersection with a roundabout, hit CTRL+S, and it crashed. This is driving me absolutely insane. How do I post the exception report? There might be something in there...

EDIT (again): Problems seem to be narrowed down to the things discussed here. Scrolling too fast, transit networks too complex. The former I will own up to, since I got a little spoiled with my lesser developed cities actually allowing me to scroll around and do all kinds of things without the city crashing. The latter is absolutely unacceptable, and for shame to EA for their horrible time-lines ruining such a great game like this. Oh, well.

Yoshi, instead of zooming with the wheel, use the number keys 1-6. Saves overloading the command queue. And if you're running in high gear, shift down to second. Gives the program time to catch up.

Well, I ended up backing up this city to another location on my drive and just obliterating it in the region. I want to see if things will be better and if the file is truly corrupt, plus it gives me an incentive to go back and improve upon things I didn't like. Since all has been well with every single city tile but this one, I guess we'll see what happens. If it doesn't truly improve, then the lesson was learned and the city will be constructed better so I won't complain...minus mumbling curses under my breath at EA, haha.

I work almost exclusively in zoom 5, but when I do zoom in/out, I actually use the +/- buttons in the game's own dashboard. I should probably start keyboarding zooms like I do everything else, though.

  Edited October 5, 2011 by Yoshiisland  

[Loney 22]

I noticed that forcing SC4 to one core improved its performance barely. My laptop has a slow i7 quad-core processor with Turbo Boost, though the problem is that Windows doesn't like to turn off unneeded cores and prefers to spread out threads as much as possible, thus preventing Turbo Boost from kicking in.

If I could conveniently disable two of the cores (and undo the core-disabling when I'm done playing SC4), I could force Turbo Boost to kick in.

  Edited October 8, 2011 by Loney  

[Jazzmaster 716]

It doesn't really improve performance as much as it improves stability, I believe. Placing the entire load on one core isn't something I'm keen on; the fans blow a bit hard whenever I play SC4 on this notebook.

[Loney 22]

It doesn't really improve performance as much as it improves stability, I believe. Placing the entire load on one core isn't something I'm keen on; the fans blow a bit hard whenever I play SC4 on this notebook.

SC4 can only use one core. My laptop has an i7 720qm, each core is clocked at 1.6 GHz.

Disabling two of the cores can force the OS to clock the cores to around or over 2 GHz.

I'm not concerned about heat as the most I ever got with SC4 and TF2 running at the same time was high 70 C.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

It doesn't really improve performance as much as it improves stability, I believe. Placing the entire load on one core isn't something I'm keen on; the fans blow a bit hard whenever I play SC4 on this notebook.

SC4 can only use one core. My laptop has an i7 720qm, each core is clocked at 1.6 GHz.

Disabling two of the cores can force the OS to clock the cores to around or over 2 GHz.

I'm not concerned about heat as the most I ever got with SC4 and TF2 running at the same time was high 70 C.

Because SC4 is a legacy program written before multi-processors it can only use one core. In a multi-core situation, this shouldn't make any difference. The remaining cores can go on about their business running background and support tasks without interference. If the "Turbo boost" option tries to multi-thread SC4, I would expect the program to crash since it has no way to rendezvous threads, and simply isn't coded that way. Sometimes the hardware guys get the bit in their teeth. Hardware people should not try to second guess application programmers.

Do not use a technique of any kind to reduce the running cores in your system. It is a waste.

On my system I can run the system monitor with the game running and watch the game switch from core to core quite happily. However, it never runs on more than one core at a time.

  Edited October 8, 2011 by A Nonny Moose