Choppy gameplay

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Sorry if the explanation is getting a little technical, but to explain this in Basic English would be more writing than either of us wants to slug through. Waiting fill fill as you progress in your mathematical experience. This is an illustration that can be found in analytic geometry which is a high-school subject (or was, when I was there in 1955). It is a little hard to see it any other way because it can be so succinct.

A one liner would be "The busier the program gets, the worse the response will be."

[SimCity4Mayor 0]

Haha! Yes, I sort of already picked that up from that post.

High-schools in Holland aren't what they used to be... I never got this when I went there, plus, I've always had trouble with formula's and all that.

But thanks for explaining it to me.

EDIT:

I've also discovered that scrolling from different angels and in different directions seems so have different effects on lag. For example, I just started a new city, plopped down quite a few of tree-heavy lots (the one's I've edited) and started scrolling viewing northwest. Pretty much any direction was a bit laggy. When I changed my view towards southwest, scrolling to one direction was VERY laggy while the opposite direction was only a bit laggy. Is that normal?

  Edited May 8, 2012 by SimCity4Mayor  

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I've never tried that, but yes it is to be expected. It depends on the number of screen re-draws that are evoked by scrolling. You can probably crash the game by doing this faster than it can go.

[amal81 3]

Just chiming in with my input. Started playing SC4 after nearly 4 years.

I have a corei7 oced to 4.2GHz

GTX 560 Ti 1 GB gpu and 8 Gigs of ram

I can take up my medium cities to about half a million (5,00,000 - 7,50,000) and large cities to about 1.2 million. I have lots of mods included probably more than the game size itself .

I have done extensive testing and can tell you that SFBT street tree mod along with shadows enabled can slow down my game but only when I reach the above mentioned population levels.

[SimCity4Mayor 0]

That's an impresive machine, but I still think it's strange that a game this old can bring my pc to it's knees with just lots of trees, don't you? But I'm glad to know that I'm not the only who has trouble caused by trees.

I wonder if there are more and if so, how many people actually have a slow running game because of trees. I already knew sea gull animations could cause terrible slowdowns, but trees?

I have one large tile city of little over 700k Sims with very limited use of tree lots, for my taste, and the city only occaisionally runs slow. When I'm scrolling fast for example.

While in another city where I haven't got as much Sims, about 150k I believe, and used the tree lots more often it runs quite slow as soon as I start the slightest scroll.

[amal81 3]

That's an impresive machine, but I still think it's strange that a game this old can bring my pc to it's knees with just lots of trees, don't you? But I'm glad to know that I'm not the only who has trouble caused by trees.

I think its because the game is not designed for multi core processors. I also feel that it's the extra trees combined with the shadow generation for all those trees could be the reason for a slow down.

I remember playing this on my C2D 2.1GHz 5 years ago, I avoided developing large cities like a plague. Whenever I tried to do so after about 130,000 or so population the game would come to a grinding halt. Even at Cheetah speed the time would move forward very slowly. ie 1 month game time would take about 10 mins or so. Plus with so many mods installed there were random crashes occurring all the time.

That was one of the reasons why I had given up.

  Edited May 21, 2012 by amal81  

[SimCity4Mayor 0]

The '-CPUCount:1' option should take care of the multi core issue, shouldn't it? And turning shadows on low doesn't seem to do much for the performance of the game on my machine. In my experience it seems to be the trees themselves that cause the problem. Also, running the game at cheetah speed can sometimes have an inverted effect, especially of the game is slow already. But I can run the game at cheetah without any trouble most of the time.

I love creating big cities though and I'm about to give up on that.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Well, I don't have your problem with my tree mod. It is probably because the trees seem to be static. I start to notice degradation at around 175,000 Sims with appropriate support, and have gone from turtle to rhino to speed up response.

I only run in cheetah (overdrive) when I want a specific quick development.

Running in cheetah misses out on a lot of the animation because it goes by too fast. Try running in Rhino. You'll get more out of the game. Running in Turtle also is an exercise in patience and thinking ahead. You can also do household things while waiting, and get other stuff done (like homework). I get my housework done.

With the improvements in the software platform, I now get very few crashes but I still save frequently. It is a leisure time activity and if you don't have the leisure time, don't try to cram this in.

[SimCity4Mayor 0]

Hmmm.... Which tree mod are you using? Just wondering as I'm not using a mod though, just lots. For me it really seems to depend on how many of the lots I use and how many trees are on them. I can quite easily run the 700k city but other cities where I've used the lots more often seem to run sluggish.

And as regards to the game speeds, I use them in exactly the same way you do. The game never crashes out of itself, only when I hover with some of the train puzzle pieces over train stations for example, which I know is a known issue with NAM.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Pegasus MTP Textures volume 2 supplemented by the MTP Facelift mods. What you get is pine trees, and lots of them with a whole set of mayor mode ploppables. I also use the Brigantine water mod.

[SimCity4Mayor 0]

But it doesn't matter how much you use them, they won't slow your game down? Because if so, I might change tree type...

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

But it doesn't matter how much you use them, they won't slow your game down? Because if so, I might change tree type...

Never noticed. But changing tree type is a huge proposition. You have to bulldoze all the other trees before you change over.

[SimCity4Mayor 0]

Hmm, might not do that then, I guess I just have to live with this. Thanks for your help!

[Bruno the Bear 48]

@Moose do you know how to start the game with more RAM. Right now all it is running is at 1gb out of 8gb all I would like to do is have it use 4gb of RAM instead of 1gb. Please Help

Thanks

Bruno's Grandson

Ps. I'm good with computers

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

@Moose do you know how to start the game with more RAM. Right now all it is running is at 1gb out of 8gb all I would like to do is have it use 4gb of RAM instead of 1gb. Please Help

Thanks

Bruno's Grandson

Ps. I'm good with computers

Well, if you are good with computers, you know that the addressing bandwidth of a 32-bit game is less than 2GB, so you are out of luck. Currently, I have the game running in another desktop and it is taking 641.5 MB with a 2.8GB swap space in the page table. Only 50 MB of my swap space is in use, and I suspect that is by Firefox or some swapped out system daemon. If you have a multi-core CPU, simply set the game to use only one (-CPUCount:1) on the command line in the short cut, and don't worry about memory. This program was written in days of memory misers like me writing the programs.

Meanwhile, all that nice memory can be used by other cores to run other stuff that doesn't need a window, or you can run in windowed mode but be very careful. You have to stick with saves and not drop focus or things go nutz. My system is currently running around a hundred processes but you know how Linux is. Lots and lots of little system daemons.

[Bruno the Bear 48]

@Moose do you know how to start the game with more RAM. Right now all it is running is at 1gb out of 8gb all I would like to do is have it use 4gb of RAM instead of 1gb. Please Help

Thanks

Bruno's Grandson

Ps. I'm good with computers

Well, if you are good with computers, you know that the addressing bandwidth of a 32-bit game is less than 2GB, so you are out of luck. Currently, I have the game running in another desktop and it is taking 641.5 MB with a 2.8GB swap space in the page table. Only 50 MB of my swap space is in use, and I suspect that is by Firefox or some swapped out system daemon. If you have a multi-core CPU, simply set the game to use only one (-CPUCount:1) on the command line in the short cut, and don't worry about memory. This program was written in days of memory misers like me writing the programs.

Meanwhile, all that nice memory can be used by other cores to run other stuff that doesn't need a window, or you can run in windowed mode but be very careful. You have to stick with saves and not drop focus or things go nutz. My system is currently running around a hundred processes but you know how Linux is. Lots and lots of little system daemons.

Thanks for the help.