Problem with biggest region when ported over to new computer

[hiddentemple 18]

Hello all,

I recently got a new Windows 10 computer, and it works great. After fretting for almost a week trying to get SC4 to work on it. Eventually, I had to buy the game digitally (through GOG.com). I also ported over all the data from my external hard drive (regions, plugins, etc.) and put it in its proper place (within the new folder I created for the digital version, since the CD won't be able to work with Windows 10). Here is where the problem lies.

My biggest region, apparently, did not fully survive the porting-over process, and so my map has a few holes in it. Is there any way that this problem can be resolved easily, without having to seriously compromise or break the game itself?

Any help is appreciated.

-- Sparkle Fire --

 

[rsc204 21,817]

Do you still have the original backups from the old machine? Do they function? Assuming you do, then nothing is lost.

Quote

 

"If two or more copies of the same city exist in the Region folder upon starting SimCity 4, the game uses only one version and the other city copies are either deleted or automatically moved to the Downloads folder.

SimCity 4 determines which file to use by sorting the city file names alphabetically and taking the first entry.

If you have copies of cities in your region folder, e.g. "City - TEST 1.sc4" "City - TEST 2.sc4", then only "City - TEST 1.sc4" will be kept, and "City - TEST 2.sc4"either get deleted or will be moved to the Downloads folder"

 

So perhaps check the downloads folder and very carefully replace duplicates with the correct files.

If that doesn't work, and you don't have the original files available, then you may be stuck. There is simply no way to edit save files without breaking them.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Some of the funny green colours you got indicate that this region may have been created by either SC4Mapper or SC4Terraformer.  If so, you should install those programs before you try this again because there may be libraries you need.

You might try another import under another region name that you know is unique (just create a new region folder then copy all the files to it).  Don't forget to change the region's initialization names with an editor before you try starting up this region.

How are you doing the port?  If it was me, I'd be coming off an external HDD.

[rsc204 21,817]

45 minutes ago, A Nonny Moose said:

Some of the funny green colours you got indicate that this region may have been created by either SC4Mapper or SC4Terraformer.  If so, you should install those programs before you try this again because there may be libraries you need.

More likely the save file doesn't have a copy of the region view image. Since the terrain is still there. I don't think you need to worry about the libraries unless you intend to run the specific applications. The data should be in a format SC4 can read when exported from them.

[hiddentemple 18]

I've tried several ways of remedying the problem

Smoothing over differences and updating all the data from my external hard drive while tossing older save versions didn't work.

Completely getting rid of the affected region and ONLY dealing with the updated data didn't work either.

I re-installed the game, and not even THAT worked.

and now SC4 mapper doesn't even recognize the original version of my region.

I'm almost at the end of my rope here.

[hiddentemple 18]

I think I know what's happening... the version from my external hard drive ("Full Version"), once it's moved over to the Regions folder on my new computer, the game must be corrupting some of the data in the region itself, therefore causing the big, gaping holes.

The first image is a screenshot of the region folder, completely intact from the older computer, on my external hard drive.

In the second image, I copied EVERYTHING over to the SC4/Regions folder on my computer.

[hiddentemple 18]

Won't even recognize the new name (that I'd given to the region before the port-over), and yet nothing changes.

This image -- my third -- was taken after I ran the game. The problem persists, and some of the cities have either been deleted or moved somewhere. This is becoming incredibly annoying, and it's getting on my nerves.

[hiddentemple 18]

Just tried porting it over again. DIDN'T WORK.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I ask again, by what method are you doing this port? 

I have moved regions from NTFS to ext4 and had no trouble at all.  There must be something in the mechanics of all this.  For example, if you are using a thumb drive, do you clean it off before you try to move your region(s) to it?  I would strongly suggest initializing any read/write media before attempting such a thing.  If you are using a thumb drive, is it big enough?

Since you are doing a Windows to Windows move, have you considered compressing the folders into a standard windows archive, moving the archive, then decompressing it?  The smaller amount of data you have to move the less likelihood of a hiccup.

Oh, and if there are cables involved in this transfer, are they shielded?

What is happening is starting to sound like hardware trouble at some level.

[hiddentemple 18]

3 minutes ago, A Nonny Moose said:

I ask again, by what method are you doing this port?

The original data is on my external hard drive, and I am copying everything over to the SC4/Regions folder on my new computer. The copying process works just fine, however, when I start the game, some portions of the data that I copied over beforehand are either corrupted, deleted, or something else.

 

6 minutes ago, A Nonny Moose said:

Since you are doing a Windows to Windows move, have you considered compressing the folders into a standard windows archive, moving the archive, then decompressing it?  The smaller amount of data you have to move the less likelihood of a hiccup.

Such as a ZIP folder? Haven't tried anything like that yet.

 

7 minutes ago, A Nonny Moose said:

Oh, and if there are cables involved in this transfer, are they shielded?

I have a special USB cable that goes with the external hard drive.

[rsc204 21,817]

One common mistake, you can't simply copy the files contained within a regions folder. You must always copy the  entire folder for a given region. Plenty of configuration files and other important data can be missed otherwise.

If you are using an external hard drive but have access to another one or a USB stick, use that instead. It's possible the hard drive is corrupting data, that would be an early sign of HDD failure if it worked with another device.

The simplest solution is to network the two PCs and copy the files over the network. Assuming you are using a router or both computers have WiFi, an AdHoc connection between the two can be made and the files copied over.

[hiddentemple 18]

Is it possible to upload the region to someplace like Google Drive or OneDrive, or must it be physical?

[rsc204 21,817]

That should work fine.

If you still aren't having any luck, if you create a link for sharing and send it to me, I can try to take a look at the files to see if that illuminates the problem.

[hiddentemple 18]

I'm uploading everything of the folder that's causing the trouble (in the state that it's in at the moment). Here it is: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0BzyK6Qo0FzbTd0pNTmdnSENKM0E

Alternatively, I could take screenshots of the region in question with all the details added. If you need anything else, just let me know.

[rsc204 21,817]

Did you set the file to be shared by anyone with the link, all I get is an error.

Just to be sure, the best thing to give me is not the folder on the new computer. Just zip (or whatever) the folder in its entirety that's on the old machine where it was working.

[hiddentemple 18]

I just changed it. Does it work now

[rsc204 21,817]

Seems to be. It's a big region, it might take a while for me to download it. I'm not on the fastest connection.

[hiddentemple 18]

Like I said, I've got snapshots of everything -- I even highlighted the files that disappear after the game starts.

[rsc204 21,817]

You potentially have two problems here.

This is a list of files that are duplicates, so SC4 automatically moves them when you open the region:

67 in total, that's potentially 67 tiles where the city file SC4 creates is not the correct one.

The good news is that in region view, the only cities without the proper view are un-rendered cities with what seems to be no development upon them.

I'm confident everything you need is there to get this region back again, but you do need to consider your file management practises. Firstly the only files needed for your region are the .sc4 files which each should correspond to a city in the region. Secondly you also need the Region.ini and Config.bmp files. Everything else is junk, I don't know why all the images are in there, but I highly recommend you strip them out.

Now, when you come across a city that's misbehaving, it should have been moved to the Downloads folder as shown above. Simply try to work out which files correspond (you really need to do this one at a time, it sucks, but that's they only safe way). Remove the corresponding file in the regions folder, I've just added one named LAMetro (no spaces) after the region.ini settings. Then replace it with the file that was moved to the downloads folder. Eventually by a process of trial and error you should get back all the files containing data this way.

Just in case it happens to be your lucky day, I've uploaded the region, I'll PM you a link to that in due course. Perhaps, simply placing this in your regions folder will work as-as, but as I said, it would have to be your lucky day.

There is only so much I can check here, because I don't have (nor do I want) your plugins folder. But on the surface the region is fine, I'm convinced as such you've not lost or corrupted anything.

[Tropod 144]

As rsc204  has said above, the folder has duplicate files. I've loaded this as a Region & as you can see (below), images overlap but also there are duplicate City GUIDs. So I'm not surprised the game has issues when you go to load the region. Unless you sift through these files manually, the game will most likely permanently screw up your region. Make sure you keep backup.

 

[rsc204 21,817]

Ah, I didn't think to check it with SC4Reader... but actually having the GUIDs would potentially make working out which cities are duplicates of which much easier.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Here is an operating system trick you may not have tried.  Since you have access to the HDD holding the original regions, try creating a short-cut and placing it in your new game in place of the Regions folder.  The name of the short-cut must be exactly Regions.lnk.

You can create this by accessing the source disk, moving to the SimCity 4 folder, then right-click on the Regions folder.  I'm out of touch with Windows options, but there should be a "make a link" or "make a short-cut" option.  Select this.  This makes a pointer to your Regions folder with the correct name (or it should).

Now, on your new machine, rename your Regions folder to something harmless like "oldRegions".  Then copy the link into your SimCity 4 folder on the new machine.  The file system will make the game think that the regions on the other disk are actually in your game (in effect, they are).

If you get the same corrupt results, then I am sorry to suggest that the corruption has happened on the old machine.

<rant>  May the fleas of a thousand camels infest the armpits of the idiots at Microsoft who created the impression that a *.zip file is a folder.  It is a file in every sense of the world, and just because it contains other files doesn't make it a folder in the NTFS sense.  </rant>

[rsc204 21,817]

The problem isn't corruption, it's duplication of files, a brief overview of the problem I copy/pasted in this post above. As for how they got there...

[Sabretooth78 808]

2 hours ago, A Nonny Moose said:

Now, on your new machine, rename your Regions folder to something harmless like "oldRegions".  Then copy the link into your SimCity 4 folder on the new machine.  The file system will make the game think that the regions on the other disk are actually in your game (in effect, they are).

In exploring some folder setup schemes to make my WINE and VM-based SC4 installations run out of the same user folder (aka "My Documents/SC4"), I learned that this doesn't seem to work with regions and *.sc4 files.  Maybe a Windows-standard garden variety shortcut works better, but I doubt it.  For the experiment in question, I was trying to run the game out of my standard OS user folders, which reside on an SSD.  Not needing the voluminous region files residing there, I tried moving them to the HDD.  Linking to the folder didn't work, nor did leaving the regions folder in place along with each region's root folder and individually linking each file within (with config.bmp and region.ini either present or linked).  The game will load, but you'll get the blank/flat region view and empty menus.

Not knowing how Windows 10 works and if it has a hard-linking facility; there may be 3rd party utilities available.  For WINE (on OS X) I'm able to use Symbolic Linker (can't post a link because my work computer won't let me browse it; OS X standard aliases might work just as well - I rarely use them) and for my Windows XP VM I used the utility available here (http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/linkshellextension.html).  Both call the same folder residing in a "Games" folder on my HDD (along with user files from other various Windows games) and then within that the plugins folder are shortcuts to a manageable number of datpacked files in a separate folder on the SSD to take advantage of quicker reads.  Updates to the datpacks are simple - just don't change the file name.  You would think this same behavior would work the same for *.sc4 files but apparently not, in my experience.

(Note that plugins can be symlinked and work properly, but not with any nesting.  i.e. each symlink needs to be in the root /MyD/SC4/Plugins/ folder.  Therefore a good organization scheme tuned for load order is critical both before and after datpacking.)

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Truly strange, because I have run multiple user-id’s on the same machine with the SC4 folders linked on a separate HDD so that I could use the same set of short cuts with different versions of Ubuntu for testing purposes.  No problems with gvfs.

You may find that symbolic links do not work on all operating systems the same way.  I always use hard links unless there is a reason to not do so.  I have absolutely no feel of OS/X other than it is UNIX-like and should work the same way.  Linking in a file system is one of the most basic functions, and if hard links are used, they should always work.  If you have a choice of link, use a hard link.

[hiddentemple 18]

22 hours ago, rsc204 said:

I'm confident everything you need is there to get this region back again, but you do need to consider your file management practises. Firstly the only files needed for your region are the .sc4 files which each should correspond to a city in the region. Secondly you also need the Region.ini and Config.bmp files. Everything else is junk, I don't know why all the images are in there, but I highly recommend you strip them out.

Now, when you come across a city that's misbehaving, it should have been moved to the Downloads folder as shown above. Simply try to work out which files correspond (you really need to do this one at a time, it sucks, but that's they only safe way). Remove the corresponding file in the regions folder, I've just added one named LAMetro (no spaces) after the region.ini settings. Then replace it with the file that was moved to the downloads folder. Eventually by a process of trial and error you should get back all the files containing data this way.

This took care of the biggest part of the problem. As far as the situation in the first and second pictures, is there any way that it can be resolved?

[rsc204 21,817]

Could you clarify, I think you mean there are three cities that appear to be undeveloped?

Perhaps those tiles exist still elsewhere, what with the whole duplicates problem. Still looking at the size/development of your region, if everything else is going fine, it could be a lot worse.

Can you still open this region on the old machine? If so, go into the three affected tiles and save them, then exit. Quit the game, go to the regions folder and sort the files by date (newest). The three newly saved tiles should be very obvious. Remove the equivalent files from the new computer and replace them with those from the old one. That should work, but of course backup the region as you have it now before fiddling about.

[hiddentemple 18]

Thanks a lot! Everything works perfectly now!

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Glad you were able to straighten this out.  Any idea as to why there was corruption earlier?

[rsc204 21,817]

That's good news :). Lesson for others to follow, make sure you have backups. No matter how bad things get, you can always recover from them, but only IF they exist.