Drawing when scrolling

[Adolfff 14]

When you scroll through the city scale and scope are deteriorating graphics.
What does it all mean and how to disable it?

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

This is a VERY old program.  Scrolling causes a multitude of redraw requests and may even crash it.  Unless you have a real need to scroll, try selecting the point of arrival and right click on it.  It is faster and better for this old scout.

If your destination is not on screen, just click in the snapshot (lower left) where you want the view to go.

Redraw requests will also beat your storage system to death accessing any custom content that may be in view as the POV changes.  If you have not compacted your plugins, this will be worse.  I suggest you look at datpacker if you have not, and be careful with it.  Some things (NAM, for example) should not be datpacked.

[Adolfff 14]

It's just a shame.
Fans and admirers improve the compatibility of many old games. List can cause large.
In SimCity 4 huge number of fans but for 10 years no one has tried to improve it?
SimCity 4 so difficult to hacking?

For example fallaut 2 was released in 1998 but has long been fixed all the technical problems of the new rendering. Sfall

 

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

This site, and I believe others as well, has agreed with EA to not reverse engineer this program.  It really is a closed topic.

I am on Linux and have access to all the necessary tools, and I have taken a look at the idea.  Frankly, the code in assembler, at least, is just about as hairy as you can get.  The original source is in Microsoft C++ Version 6.  It is getting hard to find the run-time for this, let alone the compiler or a version of Visual Studio that would run it.  If I had it, I would convert it to g++ (the GNU general compiler).

If you are a computer programmer, remember what a hash the amateurs made in SC 2013.  Will Wright's boys were experts and had been around for a long time.  I learned to program in machine code starting in 1962.  There are few of us around any more, and the LR(k) parser crowd only think they know how to program.  If you can't write good assembler, you are in the wrong business.  Compilers are all very well, but when the program hits the iron, you sometimes have to get in there and scratch in a few lines of machine code.  This is especially true if you are doing work in critical sections.

[Adolfff 14]

Complete nonsense.

21 minutes ago, A Nonny Moose said:

This site, and I believe others as well, has agreed with EA to not reverse engineer this program.  It really is a closed topic.

 

This game is already 12 years old.
Can you explain why the EA does not want to release or re-release a patch that will fix the technical problems?
Why do others have to suffer from technical problems?
This is complete nonsense.
I know only Lua and what I can help a little.

You know what some other forums where someone is trying to create an unofficial patch?

 

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

That code is so complex that even Will Wright said they had programmed themselves into a corner.  EA will never let go of the source as long as there have been any sales in the past five years or so.  It is not in their nature to seek help from the community at large, and in that area they have the precedent of both Microsoft and Apple.

Just think of what the operating systems could be if the sources were public.  Instead of all this secrecy and silly EULA clauses they could use the GPL and get the same kind of cooperation that Linus gets on the Linux Kernel.  There would be one file system for all, one browser, one GUI (customizable, of course), etc. etc. and software at the operating level would be free to all.  Support for corporations could be an expensive option for outfits that didn't want to hire their own programmers.

If you think about it, there is only one computer architecture for PC's now that the Power PC (RISC) has sort of gone away.  The X86 decor is pretty much universal except for the ARM processors for embedded systems like smart phones and guided missiles.  And there is a version of Linux for ARM boxes and a derivative or two which are pretty standard.

So it's all right now.  You can't please everyone, but if you publish the source, they can learn to please themselves.

Getting back to the game, one of the great problems with a published source would be the number of people pissing in the soup.  Take a look at the STEX to see just how much stuff could be added if the source were also available.  LUA is definitely not the way to go.  Interpreters are just too slow.  JIT systems like .NET simplify portability, but are not a complete answer as long as they are tied to proprietary libraries.  Linux mono can run most .NET programs and Linux wine runs most MS *.exe programs, but wine can be very ugly and sometimes it is so hairy to get things right you pretty much have to be an old O/S guy like me to understand why something didn't work.  wine has improved greatly over the last few years but does very poorly with multitasking programs at the moment.

If you had the source and recompiled the game, who would want your version?  You'd have to guarantee all the published custom content would pretty much work.  Not really very hard since most of it is data, but one little slip in the GUI and the whole house of cards would come crashing down.  And remember, you'd have to support three different graphics systems: DX, software, OpenGL.  If I had my druthers it would be OpenGL only.  The others are a waste of code space.

[Adolfff 14]

Thanks for the clarifications.
Yet how can I fix the problem? Wiindows xp nvidea gf9600 512mb. But the Pentium 4 (((
The computer is weak and does not have time to process? Do you have such a problem that the screenshots?
I think the whole thing in the Graphics Rules.sgr but I do not yet understand much.

Established SC4 Launcher. And running through directx.

 

[rsc204 21,805]

I think perhaps your problem is simply having a computer that can't keep up with the game. No amount of coding or "fixes" as you put it are going to make your computer faster. You would experience less problems with a computer from the last 5=10 years instead of an aging P4.

[catty-cb 4,381]

11 hours ago, Adolfff said:

Thanks for the clarifications.
Yet how can I fix the problem? Wiindows xp nvidea gf9600 512mb. But the Pentium 4 ...

My computer is Win7 64-bit single core celeron with 1gb of memory it would have struggled to play a medium size SC4 tile, but the first thing I did after I bought it was to replace the memory with 8gb worth, I haven't had a problem since and I'm pretty happy with the playing speed I get.

[Gregory1 0]

In SC4 have some limit on the involvement of the CPU. This is certainly an assumption.
At the core i7 this situation too.

Buildings appear during scrolling and zoom. And the city more than the worse.

[DecodingInspire 12]

This Game is from 2003 I think.

When you scroll or  zoom in/out the city the graphics must be loaded, It isnt a technical problem you can make it faster the loading of the graphics, you must go to the options you can make it high. it works on my pc but the loading of the city isnt much better only a bit.

MY PC

Athlon XP 2600+

NVIDIA GeForce 5200 FX

Direct X 9.0

RAM: 512MB 2years ago was it 1GB but one of them is corrupted. i dont know why.

[NCGAIO 562]

On 11/12/2015 at 3:45 PM, Adolfff said:

Complete nonsense.

This game is already 12 years old.
Can you explain why the EA does not want to release or re-release a patch that will fix the technical problems?
Why do others have to suffer from technical problems?
This is complete nonsense.
I know only Lua and what I can help a little.

You know what some other forums where someone is trying to create an unofficial patch?

 

Just to explain ...

in the epoch of game's development  the reality of graphs hardware had different moments and many  EA games bet in partnership with a hardware developer Graphical 2d / 3d accelerated.

but the more strong  market (today: nvidia / amd) pushed everything to option 3D acceleration and so until the time of the oficial launch your  code received several techniques to suit what should have been developed to the  reality of 3D pipelines.

these considerations were cited by the engineer ( a real magician ) responsible for making possible the release of the game with this quilt of different ideas and are present in several locations this and other sites about  SC4.

so even if it was open  code (which would be of no use now) it's no use to look into repairs because it is a matter of design ... then it would be easier to write a new one.

In fact SC4 logic  is made over  a complex "spreadsheet" that show your  graphical representation of events based on several different techniques of different "artists" (taking into account the need to launch the product) with a precarious centralization to unify the methods and thus to obtain a more efficient rendering

Then you can approach the game as what was the best possible for the epoch ....and as same like that the game was able to maintain a market for more than twelve years, the product continues to be kept in the list of sales and will be very difficult to come to a liberated EULA.

See PM ... for some tips

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

And, of course, you've seen (or should have) the dismal attempt by EA itself to reboot the genre with "modern" design and programming personnel who, IMHO, couldn't program their way out of a wet paper bag.

With a stochastic simulation of this type, and the demand for modern 3D free camera displays, there is a major obstacle.  If you want to simulate an area of any size with the detail of SC4, you can't have the graphics at any kind of decent frame rate because the basic simulation eats the available processor cycles no matter how many processors are assigned to the job.  The curve is hyperbolic, and once you cross the knee of the curve, the need for CPU cycles becomes infinite.  You get the situation where the simulation is so busy that the minimal needs of the GPU cannot be met.

Effectively, to make this work, you'd have to take over the machine like the application was an operating system, multitask the daylights out of it, and even then, you'd have an awful time getting the simulation to give you enough cycles for graphics.  The critical section work alone would probably cause all sorts of failures and rollbacks.  So far, no PC I've seen can handle this.  It is really a job for a hypercube configuration or a rather large mainframe with asynchronous architecture.

[markussaage 762]

Well,

I have the same "issue" on my 7 year old rig running Windows 7 x64 when I zoom out. My guess is that you get this even when you use even older, more "game-friendly" single-core hardware. That's the way is old game operates. Nothing we can do about it I think. Well I never had a personal problem with that glitch either, because scrolling is just a way to go somewher in the game, isn't it? I reach my destination, wait a few seconds and everything is OK with the graphic again. Patience is the key playing this game, espcially when you use a lot of plugins.

Kind regards!

[NCGAIO 562]

in fact the game is not just for single core as mentioned but struggles to run with the modifications that were introduced after the DirectX 7 together with other windows features after the XP.

Play without sound and without dynamic rendering makes the game be more fluid.
 

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

14 hours ago, NCGAIO said:

in fact the game is not just for single core as mentioned but struggles to run with the modifications that were introduced after the DirectX 7 together with other windows features after the XP.

Play without sound and without dynamic rendering makes the game be more fluid.
 

True.  My testing confirms that I can get two cores running up to 60% before the CTD.