frequency of crashes

[sachizm 65]

Hi

I've been playing custom content simcity for over a year. I'm well used to the strange gremlins simcity comes out with. I'd like to share mine with you, they are similar to some of the things I've been reading on here. I wanna see if my freeze/crash frequency is what should be expected or I can get some tips to better my system. I got bored of one massive region I was doing and decided I want to change climates for the new one and have encountered lots of problems. Lucky I took lots of pics of my last area so I can do a CJ with it.

My laptop is a samsung i5 with 1gb ram. I have the latest version for simcity from what I can see. I have heaaaaps of plug ins. Lots of skyscrapers and train bits. Once apon a time they were organised but then I kept downloading........over 4gb's

Also my last region was huge, with every tile large. Then huge mountains running into bays with high rises hugging the coastlines. So pretty full on.

When playing a big city part with lots of skyscrapers and infrastructure the game would play for around 10 - 20 minutes before I'd have some graphical problem. It would go black or just freeze. I would use the window command key to tab out of the game, to say a internet page or desktop. Then when I clicked on the simcity tab again it would generally open OK, maybe with some wierd shuttering when I moved around the city. This would happen maybe a couple times, then when I tabbed simcity back up again the graphics would go weird. Like everything bellow water level and some buildings would go black. Only at one zoom level though, so if I zoomed up or down the graphics were OK, of course the zoom level that was stuffed would be the one that I build at so I'd do as much extra building at a high zoom before I'd give in, save game, close program and reopen.

On top of that I'd have irregular CTD's every so often, got used to it and saved lots. Heres a pic to give you an idea what I was playing

Having changed the water/rock/terrain I'm getting all kinds of wierd things that I'm slowly working through. First there was all police stations causing CTD's. I uninstalled all of them and downloaded again but just had to trash the city I was working on and it is OK now. The next thing thats crashing is the tree mod. The tropical trees I'm using, if I brush style A over style B it causes a CTD. It took me a while to isolate this. I'm probably going to have to trash my town once again and not use tree B. Here's a pic to show the climate I'm going for on this one

So do you think I'm getting an average amount of crashes or too much because I may not be configured well? Should I go through all my plug ins? It will be a long and torturous process. I'd like to do some mass deletes but am afraid of losing dependencies. Any thoughts and advice would be much appreciated

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Your crash rate seems normal.

Are you getting much action on your hard disk when you are playing? With all those plugins and not a great amount of real memory you have a good chance of paging to get stuff when your city it very large. Most of the plugins get condensed into a set of tables with the game text, but these days that's pageable, and will slow you down a little if it happens. The game is written to be totally memory resident.

One avoidance procedure I use is to save frequently. The in-game save keyboard short cut is CTRL+s. Using frequent saves seems to reset whatever glitch causes vicarious CTDs.

If you are running multiple cores, you might add the -CPUCount:1 option to your command line. Remember that all options have to have a space in front of them.

So, good luck and have fun.

[THE_Muko 0]

hi i have the same problems my game craches after 10 - 20 mins play time to altho my plugin folder is only about 1.4gb old and new stuff. ill try the -CPUCount:1 and se if it helps and ofcors i save the game often so i dont luse to much of wath ive buildt if the game crach. i hope that it will be fixed some day

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Unfortunately, the cause of this is in an inaccessible part of the code where we are not allowed to go by our agreement with EA (no reverse engineering). As a result, don't expect a fix. Just save often.