Slow Game Play

[tgbarr 0]

Hi,

I am having a huge problem with starting SC4, and loading cities. It takes app. 20 minutes to load a city of 60,000 residents. I do have about a dozen or so pluggins, and have NAM for traffic. i have compressed the plugins folder and i have turned off other programs while playing SC4. I cant find any programs that can cut down on start times. Any suggestions.

Also i am having an issue with the game running slowly while i am in a city. it takes about 45-50 minutes for a full year (on the game) to run by in rhino mode. Im not sure what to do.

Please help me, its getting impossible to even play the game .

Oh also i am running the game on a Windows XP Premium from 2004.

[tgbarr 0]

& the game is Sim City 4 Deluxe w/ the rush hour expansion pack, it is a used game from game stop .

[nukeu123 307]

from what im reading its your setup, outdated computers tend to run sc4 not preferd speeds free option is lower your gfx settings the somewhat costly way, you may wanna upgrade your gfx card or ram amount and cpu (note: make sure you purchase the right cpu socket type)

take note that mods use more ram than you may think especialy the big ones like nam or cam

  Edited May 10, 2012 by nukeu123  

[ArchangelMichael 51]

If your computer was new in 2004, then it is not the problem. If you are running XP Pro on an older machine, then it might be an issue. However, let's look at this logically: SimCity 4 was put to market in 2003 and, as such, should be expected to run quite smoothly on the hardware that was available around that time. My computer is a single-core Pentium 4 built in the spring of 2003, also running XP Pro, with a little over a gigabyte of custom content in the Plugins folder. I have some trouble with highly-developed large city tiles, but the game runs great most of the time as long as I don't use too many seasonal props (no BSC farms ).

One thing I noticed is that you mentioned having the NAM and that the Plugins folder is compressed. This is a no-no. You can DAT-Pack just about anything, but the NAM should not be compressed. This is because the NAM files and folders are named in just such a way to get everything loaded in the correct order (so never rename NAM files or folders). Compressing all the NAM data into a single file jumbles up all the contents and may be what's causing the sluggishness in your case.

First, put an uncompressed NAM in your Plugins folder and delete the compressed version. Keep the rest of your compressed stuff and try the game this way. If it still does not perform the way you want it to, remove half of your plugins and try again. One of two things will probably occur:

Possibility #1 -- If that solved the problem, then the slow-down was being caused by something in the plugins that were removed -- return one of them to the Plugins folder, start the game, and observe. Keep this up until you find the offender and remove it permanently.

Possibility #2 -- The game still starts slowly. This means that the plugins you removed did not contain anything problematic. Return them to the Plugins folder and now remove the other half, start the game, and observe. This should then lead you to the process of elimination outlined in Possibility #1.

If you still have trouble, try removing all your custom content and see what happens. If the game continues to load slowly even with nothing but Maxis content, check out some of the suggestions in and see if they help.

Good luck!

[tgbarr 0]

Thanks alot . One more questions, are there any patches i need to download for SC$ rush hour pack. The came hasnt been connected to the internet in like 3/4 years. And are there any mods, or patches to speed up game play ?

[ArchangelMichael 51]

There are no mods or patches specifically to speed up game play, but you might need some patches, depending on what version you're running right now. In the <Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 4 Deluxe\Apps> folder, find the file called "SimCity 4.exe" and right-click it. Choose "Properties" from the context menu and click the "Version" tab. If you are running version 1.1.640.0, then you are as up to date as you are going to get (unless you pay for and download the digital version from Steam).

If you are on a version lower than that, you should visit and follow the instructions under the section titled "Nightlights and Updates." Get any other files you need (such as the Lot Editor and bldgprop_vol1.dat & bldgprop_vol2.dat) from this page at sc4devotion.com. If you want to use the BAT, you have to find a way to get gmax installed, which is difficult (because Autodesk no longer supports it) but not impossible.

My only other suggestions would be to use DAT packer selectively -- don't smoosh ALL your plugins together into a single file. It is mostly useful for folks who play with an enormous array of custom content, but every little boost helps for those of us with what is now considered leagcy hardware. Use a version of traffic simulator z -- the research that went into it was very extensive and it actually runs more smoothly than the Maxis default traffic simulator. Defragment your hard drive with MyDefrag using the "System Disk Weekly" option. You don't actually need to defrag every week (this can actually cause more of the wear and tear defragmenting is intended to prevent), but in my opinion, this particular defragmentation script provides the best balance between basic defragging and strict file structure optimization. MyDefrag will do essentially the same thing to your hard drive that Diskeeper and PerfectDisk can do, the only exception being that it won't do it automatically in the background (which really isn't necessary for home users, anyway).

If you do all this and still have trouble, try uninstalling the game, run a registry cleaner (the current installation files or registry entries may have gotten corrupted), reboot, and re-install the game. Aside from that, I'm out of ideas. Let us know how it turns out.

[tgbarr 0]

It turned out great ecspecailly using the MyDefrag program. Thanks alot for all the help, and links.

[jdenm8 362]

The bottlenecking is probably caused by a slow HDD Bus, probably something like SATA or IDE, both are very slow, and a slow HDD with slow seek speeds (5200RPM anybody?). Defragging will fix the problem - temporarially.

If you want to spend some money and permanently fix the problem, look at getting yourself a more modern, faster HDD (SATA3 and at least 7200RPM, basically all new HDDs meet this criteria) and a PCI SATA2 adapter if you can still get them.

  Edited May 13, 2012 by jdenm8  

[oG Peter 2]

You might want to keep your plugins folder uncompressed.

As I have experienced and thus come to the conclusion that before the intro screen the time it takes to load is the sim city game loading all the plugins. Cities themselves shouldn't be loading plugins (otherwise you'd be opening and closing thousands of plugins if you were going around cities)...

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Funny, but I never noticed any disk channel bottlenecking even when I had my game files loaded on an external HDD connected over a USB2 channel. I think a lot of your problem (solved) was indeed the very high propensity of NTFS to checkerboard your disks. You have fixed that with defrag, but keep in mind that you probably get a new extent or two every time you save. If your disk is running less than 30% free space, defragging is very necessary.

Try running disk cleanup some overnight. Also consider moving some more or less static files on to DVD's.

[tgbarr 0]

No, ho would that work exactly ?

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

No, how would that work exactly ?

Well, if you have a lot of large files on your disk (music, movies) in your user space, not the operating system, consider archiving them to a CD or DVD or an external HDD. You can build a file system on the disk, mount the disk and use it as a separate device (D: usually) to access the files at need. You can then release the space from your hard disk, defrag the disk, run disk cleanup to kill off any remaining junk and you should have a faster machine.

The other trick would be to take the control of your swap file away from the operating system, but that's another story.

My disk space is organized as follows:

The main disk is a 500 GB disk divided into three partitions: two for the versions of the operating system I run (Linux) and a 20GB swap space.

The first external HDD (1 TB), which is always on-line over a USB2 port contains my backup files, and other stuff that I think I may need but don't access much. This is currently divided into five primary partitions (not a MFT set up) each of which is automatically brought on-line at boot time.

The second external HDD is a 300 GB drive with some partitions I use for backups of my backups. It is my insurance policy and contains critical stuff. It is normally powered down and off-line. It is connect, though, via another USB2 channel so that I can just power it up to get to it.

A 1TB HDD costs about $200 these days, and that is really a lot of space unless you download many movies.

In a windows environment (NTFS) this may take a little more management because of all the nonsense with disk volumes (C:, D:, etc). In my environment, all the disks that are on-line are treated like one huge tree, and no drive letters need apply. This is controlled by a configuration file at boot time, and once you've built that file you are in a set it and forget it situation.

When the second HDD comes on line, the system mounts its partitions with specific names I can access through my virtual file system and behave as part of the tree.

There really are some advantages in having a desktop machine.

[tgbarr 0]

thanks