How often does your game crash?

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Lately I've been playing for hours without crashing, but since I switch tiles frequently to support my regional play, this may be the reason.  There are lots of saves involved.  My actual playing limit without a save seems to be about an hour.  However there could be many reasons since I am on Linux running with a wine beta.  I just trained myself to save a lot, and run without problems.

[funkdrspot 0]

I had non stop CTD and I used every trick in the book. Turns out it was an audio issue. Disabled audio for the game and no more crashes.

[eindbaas 0]

Running pretty stable, id say one ctd per 6 hours. Unless i work with Transit Enabled stuff, then its a mather of chance and i save a lot during building.

I have about 3Gb of datpacked mods running on a i7 920, on all cores.

[T Wrecks 10,209]

So I am not the only one? Guess it's no self-inflicted problem due to my own meddling with plugins files then! (I do like to customise custom stuff...) German version here, too. Maybe something went wrong with the translation of Cycledogg's prop pack?

 

Actually, I have the English version of the game, that's why I specifically mentioned the German prop. My assumption was that it came with one of the SFBT plugins I had installed shortly before that (Street tree mod, about 4 building lots), but I'm not sure. The crash happens from time to time, but not always, so it's hard to reproduce if I want it. It might be related to growth or season changes, who knows. Sorry to be not of much help here, but I never got to the ground of this. It simply doesn't happen often enough to force me to rigorous action, but it is often enough to be noticeable.

Ah yes, the Street Tree Mod is the most probable candidate here - it contains some altenative versions of Cycledogg's trees. (The original trees were centered according to their outline, the ones for the street tree mod were properly centered on their trunks so they wouldn't seam to grow out of the concrete.) This may still be of some help. In any case, I hope that a tree override will get rid of the problem.

 

@swordmaster: May I ask how big is your plugins folder? My old PC is an Athlon64 with 1.5 or 2 gigs of RAM (I don't even remember, lol), and it copes remarkably well with a plugins folder that's somewhere between 0.8 and 1 GB, IIRC.

[Camlon 50]

It has crashed occasionally, but not very often. It is very annoying when it happens because I forget to save and lose hours of progress. 

[Bdub01 201]

It has crashed occasionally, but not very often. It is very annoying when it happens because I forget to save and lose hours of progress. 

 

Try to train yourself to save every 15-20 minutes or switch to other cities on the region as well...

[.anonyman 28]

I ran the game completely UN-modded for years and it never, ever crashed on my old laptop. When I installed the vanilla game onto a laptop with 2 processors it crashed all the time. Now that I've patched and modded it, the game runs great, but my cities and regions aren't that big (~150k).

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I have three active regions plus the tutorial plus my sandbox.  The disk space total is 255.8 MB.  The three active cities are 90.7, 79.7, and 52.7 MB.  One of my most active cities takes up 7.9 MB with a population of about 150 K Sims.

 

  What has the physical disk size of the region have to do with anything?

[Turjan 1,048]

 

 

So I am not the only one? Guess it's no self-inflicted problem due to my own meddling with plugins files then! (I do like to customise custom stuff...) German version here, too. Maybe something went wrong with the translation of Cycledogg's prop pack?

 

Actually, I have the English version of the game, that's why I specifically mentioned the German prop. My assumption was that it came with one of the SFBT plugins I had installed shortly before that (Street tree mod, about 4 building lots), but I'm not sure. The crash happens from time to time, but not always, so it's hard to reproduce if I want it. It might be related to growth or season changes, who knows. Sorry to be not of much help here, but I never got to the ground of this. It simply doesn't happen often enough to force me to rigorous action, but it is often enough to be noticeable.

Ah yes, the Street Tree Mod is the most probable candidate here - it contains some altenative versions of Cycledogg's trees. (The original trees were centered according to their outline, the ones for the street tree mod were properly centered on their trunks so they wouldn't seam to grow out of the concrete.) This may still be of some help. In any case, I hope that a tree override will get rid of the problem.

 

 

I just wanted to follow up on this, as I can now pinpoint a case that always crashes. In this case, it's a tree that grows on spa's Knightsbridge lot:

 

 

Specifically, it's the Knightsbridge yellow 2x3 lot here, and the culprits are the two large deciduous trees in the backyard. If the query cursor hits them, the game freezes. Sometimes I can still see the query contents, which is "Kalifornische Weisseiche - halbjahreszeitlich".  I don't think spa used a German version of Cygledogg's trees, so this must come from a German mod that overrides the original trees in lots. These trees are extensively used in the SFBT street tree mod, which is why I made the connection originally. I should probably learn how to use a lot editor in order to see what spa really used.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Just a quick note:  Suddenly, my game has been giving up the ghost at unexpected times even with a fixed version of the NAM.  I think the game gets very fragile when the number of Sims gets close to 300,000.  I found what might be a fix for my wine environment but won't know until the next time I play.  The executive layer was having conniptions over mscvrt.dll, so I downloaded the latest one I could find.  This note probably only applies to wine users on version wine-1.5.28 which I got this morning.

[JWL 52]

Just wanted to let everyone here know that I'm running with more than 7 gigs of mods (yes, you read that right - 7+ Gigabytes), Windows 7, GTX 660Ti (470 before ran just as smooth), and an i7-960 and the only time I ever experience crashes are when I accidentally hover a puzzle piece over a TE lot or other self-inflicted CTD. So if you're wondering - yes, it is possible to get this game running stably on modern systems and with a ridiculous amount of plugins. The game does start to slow down a lot on busy large tiles, but setting shadows to low counteracts that (until I want to take screenshots ).

[City Planner 121]

4.5GB of plugins and it's solid as a rock for me.

 

The thing that worked for me was this command line: (oops, sorry I'm on the wrong laptop, this one doesn't yet have SC4 installed) will try to ome back tomorrow when I get on my other computer if I remember.

[Superbacon 380]

If you're rockin' the NAM 31 right now, your game can be more prone to crashing. It is for me. Specifically draggable FARR stretches and FLEX curves make it more vulnerable. But that's only really when I'm saving and exiting to region. My game doesn't really crash during gameplay all that often since I got the SC4 Launcher and set it to run with one core. Fortunately crashes rarely happen in the middle of actual saves. 1 in 25, maybe. Depending on the amount of certain mods in the city.

Some other mods I have I've recently discovered will make the game more prone to crashing as well. So I avoid using them.

 

Cities on large tiles of a certain size and beyond would also crash more often.  And take longer to load.

 

Really though I'm getting better at figuring out what crashes the game at what doesn't. 

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Had to do a rebuild my plugins yesterday and slimmed it down to under 900 MB.  Removed all the trash files, and dropped a few obsolete items that have been replaced by NAM V31.  Did a selective install of the NAM sans RHW and GLR which I don't currently need.

 

Game no longer crashes as often.  I probably had a conflict or two, but I really spent 12 hours rebuilding my plugins from scratch and reinstalled the game to boot.  My installation now looks like a Windows 7 install, even if I am on Linux.  Had to update my start script.

[Androgeos 73]

The last crash I had was when I plopped a Toll Booth on the edge of a map. That was about two years ago. My previous crash before that was about five years back, caused most likely by a messed up patch attempt (used a non-US patch on a US game disguised as an Asia-Pacific game).

[johndoh4 13]

Just be glad you never had to run SC4 in Windows ME, the memory leak was horrendous! Nowadays, once in a while it will crash...which is a little annoying; I can't really be sure though if it has anything to do with the mods, Win7 (it obviously wasn't designed for Vista/Win7), or if it's just the game itself?

 

Edit: I forgot to mention that the game will crash in certain situations where you ask it to do something it wasn't designed to do. If I remember right, the game used to crash when I had a toll booth within two tiles of a one-way road underpass where the ramps are on only one side of the interchange (going in one direction only), and then re-built a section of the one-way road which enabled the automatic on-ramp construction/suggestion thingamajig. The game doesn't know what to do in this circumstance because it can't place the ramp because of the toll booth being in the way, so it just crashes to the desktop; and that's why I don't do this anymore! I never tried to see if this would work with any other freeway interchanges, but I suppose it is possible.

 

It also used to have a weird bug when I used to run the game under WineHQ. Some buildings would turn black, and more and more would progressively turn black until nearly the entire map was that way. If you saved the game after that happened, it would show up with the blacked out buildings on the region map! However, if you ran the game in Windows again where the bug didn't exist, and re-save it, the city tile would appear normal again.

[Wiecher 192]

My game only crashes when I do something wrong, like accidentally moving network puzzle pieces into a traffic enabled building.

Also, when I have some conflicting plugins, the game crashes upon loading a city (or when exiting to region when I started a blank city tile). I have not yet been able to enjoy the new NAM because of this.

[Androgeos 73]

Just be glad you never had to run SC4 in Windows ME, the memory leak was horrendous!

 

Oh, that would explain why it kept crashing every 30 minutes when I first installed it back then. I installed it on the HP that ran ME as well as the IBM that ran XP. It ran terribly on both, but worse on ME due to all the crashing. On the IBM, it was fantastically slow because it only had 248 MB RAM back then. The slowdowns more or less disappeared after I added more RAM, although it still rendered stuff a little slowly due to the Intelgrated graphics.

[Metalpuritan 160]

I usually do not have any problems.  Recently however...Yes I posted earlier in this thread with no issues at all but there was something I had never done before.  I had never tried to make an entire large tile a suburban area.  

 

It seems, since I have Mattb325's residentials and also Jmyers residentials and they are very prop heavy, even the trees are props, that I may now have issues rendering the many millions of props, not sure, it might have been the NAM crashing me when I was trying to save my game.  But when I have an entire large map full of houses when i would go to save my game it would crash.  I reduced my window size and resolution and that seemed to have made it better.  I obliterated this city since unfortunately.  I recently acquired the 4GB .exe patcher and would like to test it again with that in place.  Also they are fixing the NAM at the same time.

 

Do to the amount of changes that are taking place I may never be able to troubleshoot this issue of mine.  If it goes away, cool, if it stays I will blame the Mattb325 and Jmyers low density residentials.

 

I seriously doubt that my crashing issue is due to the amount of plugins I have, though the number is considerable.

 

Using those two sets of low density residentials along with the streetside mod I am lucky to even see a house for all the props.  I had this city up to 120,000 population with nothing but low density suburban houses of all three wealths.  I have never had my game act the way it did, and I have a pretty decent machine.  MILLIONS of props, for real, I  did not sit here and count them all but I know it was up there, trees, fences, out buildings, trees, cars, bushes, trees, backyard junk, front yard junk, trees, and sims, I guess I should mention endless textures too of all colors and designs.  It was pretty crazy, zooming out I would have to wait like 3-5 seconds(or longer) for all the props to reappear, it would do it in sections starting from the inside and working it's way out rendering everything.

 

I played with the automata a little bit too, eventually turned it off altogether, it seemed to help a bit, but only a bit.  I can deal with the render lag in situations like that, what I cannot deal with is the crashing when trying to save my game.  I am hoping that something, either the new NAM 31.1 or the 4GB patch did something to help it.  If not then I might have to thin out my suburban residentials some, I don't want to but if I cannot save my game they have to go, I mean, I have to be able to save my game.  That is the bottom line, I must be able to save the game.

 

Anyway, I am working on it, one way or the other.  I may end up mysteriously fixing it by accident, I got T.Wrecks' Industrial Revolution Mod to work with CAM somehow, that was a total accident, a pleasant one, but an accident nonetheless.

[Turjan 1,048]

@Metalpuritan: Did you try out the Datpacker for the big city? The many props that have to be rendered on screen is one thing, but the many files that have to be handled by Windows and the game is another one. My game doesn't have a problem with rendering a large tile full of trees, for example, but hundreds of different plugins is another matter. Also, switching to and from zones view is much faster when using the Datpacker.

[paeng 2,510]

Well, I got nothing much to add - all the reasons and non-reasons have been stated in this thread... I'm happy to say that I hardly have any crashes except due to carelessness like hovering on TE'ed or puzzle pieces... also got a fairly modern w7/64 machine.

 

One rare issue I have involves my mouse, or rather the mouse wheel - if I use the wheel to zoom in or out, I may get a CTD in 1 out of about a 100 or so tries, so fairly seldom.

[Dudely 10]

While a LOT of stuff can cause a CTD, the game has poor garbage collection and memory management in general (it seems to be especially bad with model/texure stuff). So that's why things like turning off the audio and switching tiles every once in a while work to reduce CTDs; anything that has the effect of reducing memory use or memory management will reduce the numbers of CTDs.

 

One note, however: pressing ctrl-s to save your game is exactly like switching tiles- it empties the game's cache and severly reduces the chance the game will crash in the immediate future. Doing this is also much faster than switching!

[punkrockgoth1988 1]

I had a problem last night when I decided I wanted to see about alleviating the traffic issues that my latest and greatest city started to have lately. The shortcut in my start menu loaded slowly and at the point of loading the actual city, it would stop responding. Luckily I had the sense to try the shortcut in my programs menu.

[mongobcsd 4]

I feel lucky....I'm running sc4 on an old Dell XPS 410 with an upgraded 9500gt card with Windows XP Media edition. Game used to crash a lot after only a few minutes in a larger city. It doesn't crash now at all if I hit ctl+alt+del in a region and set affinity to 1.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

You can set the affinity by applying the command line option -CPUcount:1 in your short cut target box.  Be sure to leave one space after the pathname final quote.  XP by the way, seems to be the best version of Windoze to run this game.

[Ltw 401]

I'm running Simcity 4 on Windows XP with a Pentium 4 computer. The game crashed a lot before. Since then I've installed Direct X 9 and SC4 Launcher (I know, I could do the same thing with the command-line but I found this easier ). I've set the settings in that way that it would render from Direct X and I set the CPU-count on 1. I've also packed all my plugins with SC4 Dat-packer. That saved me 400MB and a lot of loading-time. Now it doesn't crash at all, only when I place some puzzle-pieces the wrong way which is a well known cause.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

For the first time in ages, I had a crash today when I was joining an ordinary road intersection to a diagonal road.  Wasn't repeatable, and after that I played for two and a half hours without a hitch (taking occasional in-game saves, as usual).