SC4 Multiple citities got hit by the infamous prop pox

[simmytu 605]

Well, today it hit me folks, the prop pox and unfortunately it's more than just one city

Yesterday everything was working just as fine but when I started the game up today I noticed something weird about the buildings, some of them are missing their props, like trees and such. So I checked the game settings, everything was set to max, so I did a reset and set everything to the correct values, but that didn't have an effect.
The second thing that I've tried is restarting the game. Same result, props were missing. All right, just a couple of streets were missing their props, no big deal right? Demolished them and voilà, they have their props back.
Till I visited the city next door and by saying it was plagued is an understatement... Well this definitely struck me by surprise, but hey I've got a backup! Until I loaded 3 days old backups of the plugin and the region folder I'm currently working on and behold, same prop pox in affecting, atleast two, of my large tile set cities.

https://i.imgur.com/lh0Rt68.png

The two white arrows indicate the current two large tile set cities that were infected by the prop pox.

https://i.imgur.com/N7ivqpp.png

As you can see, even the backup got fluked by the prop pox.

 

My current theory is that I the game installation got damaged in some way or the another, maybe due to the installation of the new terrain textures (and yes I've deleted the old one).
Although I'm not that convinced by it because it has been 3 days since the installation of Columbus terrain mod (not blaming the creator, I've just lost the gamble, in this case the game's stability).

Does anyone else have a suggestion what would cause such bug to appear or a way to fix it?

[rsc204 21,808]

If it is prop pox, even if you have backups, likely the affected tiles are toast, sorry .

You really need to check the size of the save files Network Subfile, this is the only way to be sure. Information on this is all on the dedicated thread on SC4D.

Note, installing a new terrain does not cause prop pox.

[simmytu 605]

16 hours ago, rsc204 said:

If it is prop pox, even if you have backups, likely the affected tiles are toast, sorry .

You really need to check the size of the save files Network Subfile, this is the only way to be sure. Information on this is all on the dedicated thread on SC4D.

Note, installing a new terrain does not cause prop pox.

Alright, thanks for the link, it did confirm a lot about how this could've happen and now I know how to avoid this in the future 

I've tried the back-ups once again and this time I left the plugin folder alone and oh look my cities are showing up correctly this time...

Ignore the plane above

Side note: Apparently the prop pox occurred a while ago and I haven't noticed it till it infected several other cities, which meant that I had to use several weeks old backup for the city (the one with the tallest white arrow and where the harbour/ industry picture came from).

The only thing I'm missing is about half of the city detailing work that I've done in the past few days, oh well. It's not that bad to be honest.

The second thing to mention is that the game files were about 26,682 Mb and 49,122 Mb respectively and they were indeed dropping each time I saved one of the infected cities.

[HayleyRenaNemeth 465]

The dock you have there at the bottom has been known to cause prop pox for some reason. for what ever reason the Docks made by Pegasus are known to cause Prop Pox. 

[rsc204 21,808]

11 hours ago, AprilAero said:

The dock you have there at the bottom has been known to cause prop pox for some reason. for what ever reason the Docks made by Pegasus are known to cause Prop Pox. 

That's not entirely correct. The docks (CDK3) are not the problem. It's the BDK or Beach Development Kit that has been singled out as the problem file. But moreover, it is believed that any mod that changes something called an RTK value, without giving the prop in question a new ID can cause this issue.

The real issue here is that this isn't the typical form of file corruption, where something happens then the file is unreadable or broken in some way. Instead, the files become corrupted in such a way that they degrade gradually. The theory is this:

• SC4 save files are basically a dump of the memory. Part of this is a listing of all the props in use in a given city.
• The save files for SC4 need to switch the way they save this data when they get really large, this is the Network Subfile part.
• At the point this "change" occurs, it can then corrupt the save, in such a way that some of the information (prop related) gets truncated.
• Every subsequent save further truncates the list of props. Hence props start to go missing. The problem only gets worse with further saves.

Once the switch happens, even if you didn't notice at first, from that point any save files, including backups are basically broken. However, if the conditions for the problem ever existed at any point, even the un-broken saves can theoretically be doomed. The only way to find out is to see what happens.

As such, this problem is about as catastrophic as you can get. Fixing the trigger, having saved a city with the potential problem, will not prevent the symptoms from appearing in future. That's not to say it will happen, just that once the conditions have been in place, the possibility of problems are always going to exist.