Giant Region Tips

[citycowboy 183]

Hi. Yesterday someone asked about making a giant region, and then my wife asked me about giant regions, so I went to paint and made a 360x360 region and shoved it in. that should be 90x90 large tiles. I've built numerous 18x18 large tile regions before, but have never taken on a task this big yet. Is there a computer power related concern? Can patience overcome any lag concerns? Has anyone succesfully built a region of this magnitude? Does anyone have any giant region experiences they'd like to share? The goal is to make two large cities, and see if the trains cooperate to and from eachother. I plan on placing them about 100 miles from eachother, with a few towns in between. Do I need a train station in each tile to get the sims from A to Z or can I make them skip tiles via the train like A-E? This is mostly a huge transportation challenge. There was a guy making NYC did he ever finish that? Is there anything I need to be aware of? What are your thoughts on how I should go about doing this? Thanks.

[philforhockey51 4,203]

I'm not sure, but I'm also very doubtful that you will be able to get it to even load. Transportation will be an issue as the sims commuting might cause problems. A couple of things about it in this thread:

Seems you might need to test out some things before you go for it.  Good Luck

[citycowboy 183]

Naw, it just crashed when I tried to load the mega region. I'm stuck with 18x18. Now I'll wait another hour and a half for the game to reload.

 

[MushyMushy 3,617]

When blunder was talking about his 90x90 region, I saw some discussion about his computer's RAM. Now I'm no SC4 technical expert, but I'm guessing that (based off of that) computer specs may play a part in whether or not the game will render out (and load) a 90x90 region. I don't know what your specs are, but this is just a possible factor worth taking into account.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I am not sure, but I think the renderer will run out of physical memory trying to render something like that even though each tile is rendered individually.  There is a possibility that it tries to get the whole works into the region view in one big space.  I suspect the game can't properly page such a thing given the vintage of the code, and this will ultimately cause an 'out of memory' crash.

Take a look at a single rendered tile (empty) with a modicum of terrain features and you'll see the individual size of the image.  For example, here is the tail (last 20) of the list of files in the Berlin region (default with the game) and you can see there is a wide variation.

-rw-rw-r-- 1 john john  147994 Feb  9  2012 City - New City (76).sc4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 john john  166052 Feb  9  2012 City - New City (77).sc4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 john john  347457 Feb  9  2012 City - New City (78).sc4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 john john  148734 Feb  9  2012 City - New City (79).sc4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 john john  152655 Feb  9  2012 City - New City (7).sc4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 john john  360544 Feb  9  2012 City - New City (80).sc4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 john john  376397 Feb  9  2012 City - New City (81).sc4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 john john  149796 Feb  9  2012 City - New City (82).sc4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 john john  392918 Feb  9  2012 City - New City (83).sc4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 john john  160958 Feb  9  2012 City - New City (84).sc4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 john john  153457 Feb  9  2012 City - New City (85).sc4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 john john  145542 Feb  9  2012 City - New City (8).sc4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 john john  152357 Feb  9  2012 City - New City (9).sc4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 john john  156544 Feb  9  2012 City - New City.sc4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 john john  428553 Feb  9  2012 City - Schonerlinde.sc4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 john john 1126773 Feb  9  2012 City - Spandau.sc4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 john john 2015190 Feb  9  2012 City - Tegel.sc4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 john john  450185 Feb  9  2012 City - Tempelhof.sc4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 john john     824 Feb  9  2012 config.bmp
-rw-rw-r-- 1 john john      87 Feb 23 12:22 region.ini

The big one here appears to be Tegel at 2,015,190 bytes (2 MB approximately).  Now if you had 90 of these, and remembering that this particular tile is developed, you could be looking at 180+ MB to load the entire region into memory.  This is what you get from the default with no user development.  This is a pretty standard region and appears to have around 90 tiles of various sizes.

Considering that memory comes in quanta at the next order of magnitude (GB), it may simply be that the game can't allocate enough space and gets refused by the allocator.  This program is rather wimpy when it comes to recovery from such things.

[citycowboy 183]

Thank you very much for the technical information. I greatly appreciate it. Perhaps someday there will be a Sim City 4: 2 made, and everything will be right with the world.....

[TekindusT 3,809]

For starters you can download some of drunkapple's regions at the STEX. They're gigantic, pre-rendered. You can go rendering one city tile at a time along with your progress. Never had any problems with these kind of regions, as 90% of city tiles show as pre-rendered.