dont you just love how SC4 crashes if you make an awesome city?

[Sharaz 0]

so last night, i recovered from 8k in the bank, to 280k in the bank. as soon as i took my sigh of relief for not going bankrupt...

*poof!*

game crashes. and i hadnt saved in god knows how long. im reluctant (at this moment) and not looking forward to restarting the game to see how much i lost.

anyway, i cant believe the game doesnt have a feature to autosave every X minutes.

what i need now, is a little dos promt program that ill run just before i start the game, that will make a copy of the save file to another location, every 300 seconds. after that it would just keep running, and every 300 seconds, repeat. and it would do this until i ctrl-c and end it (after ive closed the game).

but i wish i knew how to do such a thing. anyone here have any basic programming skill?

[gggg 9]

first...Wellcome to ST

now... The idia of makeing a mod that'l save every x minots was descossed before.....

but I think that you re the first one that actioly gave any derection of work.... nice job.....

[Bones1 96]

How hard is it to hit <ctrl>-S every once in awhile? Build a bit, and save the game.

I haven't had a crash in weeks, but I still save the game every 15 or 30 minutes, just in case.

[Sharaz 0]

no, im not trying to lay blame off of me. i did definatly forget to save. but... sometimes you just forget!

ill keep the crtl-s in mind and try to remember (but a little script to make backups every few minutes would sure be nice).

besides, MS Word saves every 5 minutes... why cant SC4? lol

[psteverific 8]

I hear you, man, I hear you!
My game is real crashy... especially when I zoom in or out over a heavily developed area.
The thing that gets me is that when ever I've just finished building a new neighbourhood and am just about to save, a little voice in my head gently wispers  zoom out and see what it looks like first...and if I'm not paying attention, sometimes I listen to that voice!

[DJGspinNhitz 7]

I hate that really, you get into this rythem of doing what ever and forget to save and poof it is gone. I hate that, it always seems to do that when I forget to save and never when I do...mmmm, evil I think, it is a planned conspiricy built into the game.....okay maybe not! But I know CIV3 saves itself, so does EE and most other games I play this one requires a sticky note above the screen saying GOT SAVE?? I must say though I ALWAYS SAVE before I play with the NAM pieces, especially the GLR.

GQ

[tungston 19]

Sharze:  You may already know that you don't lose anymore than your last save.  The previously saved file is still intact.

[hym 358]

Date: 10/19/2005 10:07:40 AM Author:Sharaz so last night, i recovered from 8k in the bank, to 280k in the bank.&nbsp; as soon as i took my sigh of relief for not going bankrupt... *poof!* game crashes.&nbsp; and i hadnt saved in god knows how long.&nbsp; im reluctant (at this moment) and not looking forward to restarting the game to see how much i lost. anyway, i cant believe the game doesnt have a feature to autosave every X minutes. what i need now, is a little dos promt program that ill run just before i start the game, that will make a copy of the save file to another location, every 300 seconds.&nbsp; after that it would just keep running, and every 300 seconds, repeat.&nbsp; and it would do this until i ctrl-c and end it (after ive closed the game). but i wish i knew how to do such a thing.&nbsp; anyone here have any basic programming skill?

quote>

I don't know what version of Windows you are running (I assume XP).  If you are using XP, then a DOS applet probably won't work.  XP is sketchy at best when it comes to running DOS programs.  When the next version of Windows (Vista) comes out, it won't support DOS at all and will probably attempt to prevent use of DOS software on the computer.

 

BTW, making a mod which auto-saves the game will probably not happen because that would likely involve altering the .exe file which is prohibited by EA.

[Bones1 96]

Date: 10/19/2005 12:22:00 PM Author: Sharaz

besides, MS Word saves every 5 minutes... why cant SC4?&nbsp; lol

 

 

Yeah, but have you ever worked on a really big file in Word? It becomes extremely annoying when it saves, and everything freezes up for a few seconds.

 

Imagine how annoying that would be in Simcity 4, working on a big city. It can sometimes take 20 seconds or more to save! I'd much rather just save when I'm not in the middle of making a road or zoning or whatever.

 

If Simcity could detect when there is a lull in mouse movement or keyboard usage, and do the autosave only during those quiet periods, then it might be okay. Or even better, do the save in the background, but that might be difficult to implement or require double the RAM to do a snapshot.

 

The current system is fine the way it is. <ctrl>-S is easy.

[SamFlash 0]

Date: 10/19/2005 12:38:05 PM Author: psteverific

I hear you, man, I hear you! My game is real crashy... especially when I zoom in or out over a heavily developed area. The thing that gets me is that when ever I've just finished building a new neighbourhood and am just about to save, a little voice in my head gently wispers&nbsp; 'zoom out and see what it looks like first'...and if I'm not paying attention, sometimes I listen to that voice!

quote>

You've got to stop listening to those voices in your head.  They'll get you into trouble everytime.  Repeat after me:  Save, then zoom. Save, then zoom. Save, then zoom.  Now you can go back to your regular programming. 

[1dera3 29]

I know what this feels like all too well. I fell you just have to live with it, but how can you? I must say the autosave feature would be nice but like Bones1 said, it should only be done when the game is idle. Anyway, what I do is after I finish building something major, like a whole new R/C/I district or building an airport, I save. And I also save when I go away from the computer, like going to the restoom or eating a meal. But it is pretty angering that the reason it crashes is because one programmer forgot 1 little character in the EXE...


You can also edit your virtual memory... but that might cause even more crashes. Good luck!

[Bones1 96]

If the game is crashing for you that often when you zoom, then you probably need a better computer. It can't be much fun to play if it crashes that much.

[1dera3 29]

My computer isn't top-notch, but it (usually...) doesn't crash when zooming. You can also try running SC4 in a window. I do that and it seems more responsive. (You can do that by adding -w -r1024x768 to the shortcut properties [unless you're on a Mac, then I'm cluless ] or whatever window resolution you want; the smaller the better)

[vester_DK 477]

Well SC4 stop crashing so often after I upgrade computer,...

I bought a new one: Pentium 4, 3GHz, 2MB L2-Cache, 1GB RAM ....

[Nardo69 51]

Actually I don't know if I would use the autosave function even though I lost quite some nice developement due to crashes, electrictity cut and so on.
If I do Ctrl+S I am waiting hours until the save is finished.

Nardo

[normac 1]

I have little programming skill but an idea for anyone that want's to take a stab at it:

In Visual Basic you could probably use the SendKey or another API function to send the keys ctrl-s to the game every X number of seconds. It would be a little add on applet that might work. I don't have VB myself or I would try it.

[BackRoads 0]

Is it normal on a brand new system with 512 RAM to take up to 20 minutes to save my large, 700,000 population city? It almost makes it not worth playing to have to wait that long every couple minutes.

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

Date: 10/19/2005 9:13:02 PM
Author: BackRoads
Is it normal on a brand new system with 512 RAM to take up to 20 minutes to save my large, 700,000 population city? It almost makes it not worth playing to have to wait that long every couple minutes.

quote>

Probably, considering your small memory. The issue is the file system and the huge number of extents you get when you save a game.

One of the ways to cut down your save time is to defragment your system when other things are going on. For example, Diskkeeper has a set it and forget it option that runs whenever your screen saver is active. This means that if you are on the phone, some defragmentation is done until you can get back to your machine.

You should defragment your disks regularly, once a week. With 512MB you are rather thin on the ground. I have 768MB of which 128MB is taken by my integrated graphics card, so I really only have 640MB. Before I got the extra 256MB, I was in your fix. This seems to have be alleviated by the extra memory. If you can afford it, and it will fit, I would add 512MB to your machine for an even 1GB. You'll find this is much nicer.

You should also make sure you have enough swap space. With 512MB I would set the minimum virtual memory to 1536MB and the maximum to 2048MB.

[vipes 0]

Auto save would be a great idea!  I think maxis should make that in their next patch so that you could turn auto save on in the options.  Or even at least make an advisor pop up and remind you to save your city, with the option to save or save later placed on the dialog. 

 

Mayor!  It looks like you should save your city soon or a crash to your beautiful sunny desktop might occur and whole parts of your city will be destroyed and you wont even be able to see it!  I hope you'll take my advice and press Save!  Please!  It's for the good of your sims!

 

 

or something along those lines...

 

I think the advisor would probably use less resources and be less of a drag when your draging highways and then all of a sudden everything slows to a crawl because its autosaving.

[hdorriker 190]

Oh yes, SC4 crashing. I've gone through much of that myself.

One thing you should do is first of all, upgrade your RAM to at least 1 GB. You should do this anyway, because having 1 GB of RAM makes such a MASSIVE performance improvement. I mean, freaking huge. I ran a PIII at 1.2 Ghz for a long time, with 1 GB of RAM it outperformed Pentium 4s with less RAM of twice or more the Ghz on nearly everything except in-game performance. (they were about equal there). So memory is VERY important.

Another thing I might suggest, Don't run SimCity4 (or 3000) on PIII systems of 1.1-1.4 Ghz, because they will encounter a devastating tualatin freeze where you lose everything without warning, and your computer freezes up in ways you might not imagine possible.

The best processor for running this game in my opinion is an AMD AthlonXP 1900 (1.6 GHz) or higher.

[catweazle_touchwood 1]

Date: 10/19/2005 11:23:09 PM Author: vipes

'Mayor!&nbsp; It looks like you should save your city soon or a crash to your beautiful sunny desktop might occur and whole parts of your city will be destroyed and you wont even be able to see it!&nbsp; I hope you'll take my advice and press Save!&nbsp; Please!&nbsp; It's for the good of your sims!'

or something along those lines...

I think the advisor would probably use less resources and be less of a drag when your draging highways and then all of a sudden everything slows to a crawl because its autosaving.

quote>

 

Although I haven't got any crashes since ages, it would be a very nice idea to solve it in this way. I'm not a programmer, but adding a line from an advisor shouldn't be that difficult.

 

 

[ace41690 0]

ya know i think the problem with the crashing has to do with memory. For example i used to run sc4 on a p4 2.8ghz 512 machine. if you look at the task manager while playing the game there was always pretty much no memory available. Thus the game crashed constantly. I now have a laptop thats older, a pentium 4 m (NOT pentium M) at 1.8, but it has 640 megs of ram instead of 512. And honestly it runs the game smoother than the p4 2.8 and it is still yet to crash even while playing cities with 250000 people. I think that sc4 seems to depend much more on the amount of memory rather than the processor or even the graphics card!(laptop has 32mb graphics card, desktop had 128mb)

[andreharv 1,197]

Well a big problem is the NAM which, is the cause and solution to almost of this game's problems (in my case).  Its a problem because if pieces are put in the wrong places or dragged in a bad place, the game dies.  That's why I think an autosave would be a good idea.  There is only significant problem...Imagine you are cruising along and then all of a sudden powerplant blows up.  Something really bad happens and you try to fix it and the game saves.  Then you are stuck with the mess compliments of the autosave.  In other words, there are times when it is not worth while to save the game.

[turp 1]

Let me start by saying that having 1gb of ram helps because it most certainly does not the game still crashes from time to time i have a p4 3.0 1gb ddr2 memory a 128 ati video card and my game still crashes its for sure all of this downloads that you add to your game.
I just save my game from time to time then when it crashes you don't lose as much. But even with the crashes you still gotta love the game

[NoMercyx2k3 1]

my game seems to crash whenever i use BAT items such as the light rail or elvated rail over road. So i reluctantly shy away from using those items.

[SteeleCanyonRat 0]

3.0 1 gig of ram 6800 gt. Game crashed before I got any plug-ins, before I even knew Simtropolis was here. Seems to only do it when I zoom out though.......

[JaxCoJazz 3]

My game only crashes when a fatal error occurs.  I save.  It works for me.

[choco1 4]

The exact same thing happened to me last night, after about ah hour of work on my city my game crashed, which was annoying because I was working on Green Depra, and I had to re-start a major development. An autosave would be cool, but I usually save every so often, but I just forgot!

[Pixelrage 34]

this just happened to me for the first time. I created a new region, and am using the Large block. I layed out all of the road and rail, and now it will crash whenever I rotate the map or move around....now Im pissed (since I can't play the game at all anymore)...I'm planning on upping my PC to 2 gigs of ram, I hope this fixes it....

[Pixelrage 34]

I saw this on the SC official site. All of their FAQ stuff about why does my game crash was already covered in this thread:

------------------

Game Crash
The crash with MySim is related to the bonus CD. If you have installed the bonus CD and have moved a MySim into your city, crashes are likely. We will have a patch available soon that fixes this issue. Deleting the file called Plugin_007_AirForceBase.dat from the Plugins directory found in Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 4\Plugins is a quick way to avoid the crash.

------------------

 

what's the bonus CD, are they referring to RH?