Cities Dissapear

[samima 92]

When I am working on a city for more than 20 minutes, the game just shuts off on me, and the city just dissapears when i reboot.

HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Titanicbuff 1,262]

When I am working on a city for more than 20 minutes, the game just shuts off on me, and the city just dissapears when i reboot.

HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Try pressing ctrl-s to auto save- On newer machines run the game as windows XP as well as that- Sim City is unstable on newer machines.

[mrbisonm 1,620]

That sounds like you have a crash problem, meaning that you have downloaded something that interferes with another file, probably a modfile. When a game crashes to the desk, everything you created in the game does not save and automatically you loose everything.

The best thing to do is to find the file that causes all this and then get rid of it. (delete)

Good luck.

mrb

[samima 92]

That sounds like you have a crash problem, meaning that you have downloaded something that interferes with another file, probably a modfile. When a game crashes to the desk, everything you created in the game does not save and automatically you loose everything.

The best thing to do is to find the file that causes all this and then get rid of it. (delete)

Good luck.

mrb

How do i find the file that is causing the poblems?

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

That sounds like you have a crash problem, meaning that you have downloaded something that interferes with another file, probably a modfile. When a game crashes to the desk, everything you created in the game does not save and automatically you loose everything.

The best thing to do is to find the file that causes all this and then get rid of it. (delete)

Good luck.

mrb

How do i find the file that is causing the poblems?

Discipline! Each plugin file has to be tested with all the others that you've got before you consider it permanent. You now have a suite of untrusted plugins, so you should probably perform a binary search to see if you can isolate the "one" causing your problem. This gets more complicated if there is more than one.

First, rename your plugins file to some convenient thing like Plugins.old.

Now, run the game ignoring any brown boxes or curses when the city starts up. If the game runs OK without any plugins, that's a start. If you get a crash, you might have to reinstall and repatch the game.

Make a rough division between your plugins in the Plugins.old file, and move half of them back to the new Plugins folder the game created when you ran the test above. Run the game. If you have no problems, then the Plugins that are currently active are OK. If not, swap the two halves (a little folder renaming will make that easy), and try again. If you now have trouble, there is more than one problem. However, this is just an extension of what you are doing, so for the sake of simplicity let's agree that one of the two tests runs flawlessly.

Your problem child is now located in the half that ran and crashed. Keeping careful track, divide the "bad" half in half again, and put one of the pieces back into plugins. Test again. If this is OK, then the problem is in the other half and behave accordingly.

And so it goes. This is called a binary search and if you have less than 1024 plugins you will make at most nine tries before you have isolated the "one".

Good luck.

It is also possible that you have no conflicts. If this is the case you should be aware that the game often crashes to the desktop on modern hardware. It was written and tested on Windows '95 which is beyond the experience of many players. Get cozy with the in-game save (CTRL+s), use it every time you've done something you would rather not do over. It will save a lot of frustration. My left hand does this almost without volition these days.