Linux and where does the money go?

[brianc1327 161]

My computer boots to Linux (ubuntu 14.04) and Windows (XP).  Recently I put WINE windows emulator on it.  I had a few technical problems there, but got them worked out.

To install SC4, I had to install an application called "origin" (gives access to EA games).  When I try to start it from the Origin app, I get an error message.  It, however, works fine when I start it by directly clicking on the SC4 icon, so I am not very worried about diagnosing or fixing the problem with the origin app.

SC4 works as well, or perhaps even better under WINE in Linux than it works in windows.  I think this is because I have 8G of memory, but since the windows installation is a 32-bit version, it only recognizes 4G of it.  I also have a dual-core processor, but XP home only recognizes one of them.  

I read that sometimes SC4 has problems with dual-core processors, but since WINE is an emulator that "fools" SC4 into thinking it is running on windows rather than Linux, it also might fool it into thinking it is running on just a single-core processor.

I don't know if mods, like NAM, work in WINE, perhaps I will have to try that sometime.

In the sample region, Maxisland, I am trying to build the region using neighbor deals where some of my cities have the industry of the region and others have the residential/commercial. I am calling my cities with the industrial zones "city of industry X (X=1,2,3...up to however high I need to go)."  Perhaps should have called them "Smog City X" or "NIMBY City X" since I am also putting the NIMBY structures like power plants and landfill zones in them and then selling those services to the residential/commercial cities.

The first city I built up was the "Big City tutorial".  I "fixed" the city actually by blowing it up and starting anew.  The city's zones and roads were so sloppily designed that the only real way to fix it was by starting anew.

In the small squares above it (I am assuming that every copy of SC4 comes with a sample "Maxis land" and that it is the same in every copy) I built a "city of industry" to provide the manufacturing jobs, landfill, and power to my city.

When I finished building my "city of industry," I rebuilt the "Big City Tutorial" using my new neighborhood design.

After all that babbling here is my question.  When I finished the "city of industry," and started fixing the "Big city tutorial," there was $273,279 in the treasury of my "city of industry." After I blew up the "Big city tutorial" and rebuilt it (~50-100 "game years"), there was still $273, 279 in the treasury.  Shouldn't there be $273,279 + <however much was paid from the neighbor deals> in city of industries treasury.

Brian Christiansen

[Whte_rbt 1,431]

Unfortunatley Brian the game doesn't cycle time for a tile that isn't loaded. You'd need to open the Industry City and let it run for the same amount of time to see the money appear on a month by month basis.

Hope this helps.

[brianc1327 161]

That makes sense, but it does bring up an interesting conundrum.  

Suppose you have 2 grids and on the first one you open it up, name it "city A", and build a power plant and a power connection to the next grid, then save and exit to region.

Then you open the the other grid, name it "city B", and initiate a power deal to buy 1000 mwh/month (the initial deal), I don't think you have to have a zone that needs power to be able to initiate a deal, but if you do, you would need to build a small neighborhood, and save and exit to region.

Then you go back to city A and play it for say 100 game years, all the while selling 1000 mwh/month to city B.  Then in year 100 you totally blow up city A and save to region.

Then you open city B and play it.  Does it still receive 1000 mwh/month for 100 game years from...somewhere?...even though the saved state of city A is that there is currently nothing there?

If it is the case that city B receives power for 100 years, then the game had to "keep records" of what city A did (produce power and take money from city B and how much), at least in terms of the power deal so city B can receive the power it purchased in those 100 game years.

If it is not the case that city B receives the power that it purchased, then where exactly did it go.

Even if you don't have a convoluted situation like this, suppose you put a power plant in city A whose sole job is to supply power to city B, then you run city B for a while, where exactly is the power being produced if the simulation for city A is not running?

Brian Christiansen

 

[rsc204 21,806]

9 hours ago, brianc1327 said:

SC4 works as well, or perhaps even better under WINE in Linux than it works in windows.  I think this is because I have 8G of memory, but since the windows installation is a 32-bit version, it only recognizes 4G of it.  I also have a dual-core processor, but XP home only recognizes one of them.  

I'm sorry, but native Windows applications run better under Windows. The usual "your millage may vary" adage must be applied.

Most peoples problems with SC4 are one of running modern hardware with a 13 year old game. Whilst PC's in theory support backwards compatibility, it's within certain limitations. Any serious gamer will know how much work it takes to force many old games to actually work.

It should also be noted that SC4 is a 32-Bit application, so it can never use anything like 4GB memory to begin with, regardless of the OS in use. Not to mention XP (in 32-bit guise) can only recognise 3GB RAM, virtualised or otherwise.

XP may only report one processor or core, but that doesn't mean it will make two cores work like they are one. What you are seeing is that only one of your cores is actually being used. In fact, should you want to use that second core, you may be unable too. It doesn't help that XP as an OS isn't optimised for multicore processors either.

Quote

I read that sometimes SC4 has problems with dual-core processors, but since WINE is an emulator that "fools" SC4 into thinking it is running on windows rather than Linux, it also might fool it into thinking it is running on just a single-core processor.

SC4 was simply never coded to work with multiple cores/cpus. In fact Windows XP itself can't properly take advantage of modern multi-core CPUs either. All you have to do is disable this for the application, it then runs without error. Once more, neither system offers any tangible benefit over the other, since neither can utilise more than one core.

[brianc1327 161]

19 minutes ago, rsc204 said:

I'm sorry, but native Windows applications run better under Windows. The usual "your millage may vary" adage must be applied.

 

That may be true, but in this specific instance, SC4 seems to run better under WINE/LINUX than it does under windows XP.  I have not done any testing to verify this however.

21 minutes ago, rsc204 said:

It should also be noted that SC4 is a 32-Bit application, so it can never use anything like 4GB memory to begin with, regardless of the OS in use. Not to mention XP (in 32-bit guise) can only recognise 3GB RAM, virtualised or otherwise.

I did not say that SC4 is using all 4G of memory, just that since LINUX, and thus WINE is using 8G of memory and a both processors, it provides a faster virtual machine than the "real machine" XP provides, even though it is the same equipment.

25 minutes ago, rsc204 said:

Any serious gamer will know how much work it takes to force many old games to actually work.

I am not a serious gamer, with SC4 being by far the most graphically demanding game I play.  I do not know anything about making old games in general work on new equipment, but I do know what happened in this specific case.  

And in this specific instance I did not have to mess around with the LINUX command to start SC4, or anything else, I just installed it and click on the SC4 icon on the desktop to play it, and that (at least so far) runs as well or better on WINE/LINUX than directly on XP

36 minutes ago, rsc204 said:

SC4 was simply never coded to work with multiple cores/cpus. In fact Windows XP itself can't properly take advantage of modern multi-core CPUs either.

Neither SC4 or XP is using the dual-core processor, but WINE/LINUX is, and thus WINE/LINUX is more effectively using the available hardware which provides a faster virtual machine for the software to run on.

Brian Christiansen

[Whte_rbt 1,431]

The game itself will keep track of the services offered by a city tile (Garbage disposal, Power and water sales), without running the tile. This means that a city that is set up to provide power and water to a neighbour tile can do so but it still doesn't run that tile to factor in the cash that it is supposedly getting from its neighbour. The only way to have this balance out is to run the power-generator city itself for the same amount of time.

We would all love it if you could run the entire region as one but the game was just never designed to do so.

[rsc204 21,806]

1 hour ago, brianc1327 said:

I did not say that SC4 is using all 4G of memory, just that since LINUX, and thus WINE is using 8G of memory and a both processors, it provides a faster virtual machine than the "real machine" XP provides, even though it is the same equipment.

SC4 still can not access both processors or cores. Wine can't make SC4 see one core that actually works as two combining their efforts, CPUs don't work that way.

Even if the underlying system is more efficient, it's unlikely SC4 would have any more RAM available to use than it would otherwise in Windows. Unless Windows was particularly taxed by background applications. XP runs fine on systems with less than 1GB RAM. 2GB available to SC4 should be plenty for most people.

1 hour ago, brianc1327 said:

Neither SC4 or XP is using the dual-core processor, but WINE/LINUX is, and thus WINE/LINUX is more effectively using the available hardware which provides a faster virtual machine for the software to run on.

Linux is, Wine may be too, but SC4 simply cannot. It's a perfectly fine solution to use Linux/Wine to play SC4, I don't have a problem with that.

But there are some fundamentally flawed statements in your logic as to why it's working better.

For example, whilst a 2 core1.4Ghz chip sounds like it would be equally fast processing as a single core 2.8Ghz chip, in practise it never works this way. CPU cores don't just have one input queue, where everything goes to be distributed evenly. In order for any application to utilise multi-core properly, it must be designed to distribute the computational load of the application. Your OS must also be able to process everything between the application and CPU, in such a way that the workload is distributed as effectively as possible.

So whilst SC4 may be running better for you, which is great. SC4 is still the limiting factor, in terms of performance. For most users with compatible setups in Windows, Wine isn't likely to transform their experience. It sounds to me like any performance benefits you've gained would more likely be a result of poor compatibility with XP. In any case, I'm glad this worked for you, but there isn't some magic that only Wine can do at work here.
 

[APSMS 1,892]

Your observation led to the oft-mentioned tactic of making a small city tile filled with services like water, power and garbage, then setting up neighbor deals throughout the region. As long as you never play the region, the power plants will never exceed capacity, the water will never pollute or run out, and your dumps will never fill up, because the game will never even queue the trash produced from even 100 years of neighbor city utilities until you run said producing city for the same amount of time.

[brianc1327 161]

3 hours ago, APSMS said:

Your observation led to the oft-mentioned tactic of making a small city tile filled with services like water, power and garbage, then setting up neighbor deals throughout the region. As long as you never play the region, the power plants will never exceed capacity, the water will never pollute or run out, and your dumps will never fill up, because the game will never even queue the trash produced from even 100 years of neighbor city utilities until you run said producing city for the same amount of time.

That is what I am doing, or at least trying to do, and I have actually run my "City of Industry" very little, it is at most at year 3.

How much memory SC4 itself uses is irrelevant, at least to the question at hand.  How much memory space it has to run in is also irrelevant, at least to the question at hand.

The relevant question is which is the better, faster, more efficient machine, the "real" one provided by a 14-year old operating system (XP) or the "virtual" one provided by WINE/Ubuntu 14.04, an operating system that is at most 2 or 3 years old.  I think the "virtual" one is faster since it is running an OS that makes much more efficient use of the hardware available.

Having more memory  available makes the underlying linux system faster/more efficient, it does not make it provide more memory in the virtual machine, and I don't think I ever said that it did. 

Brian Christiansen

 

[NCGAIO 562]

Asking for permission to OP ... as pictures are worth a thousand words so many times already repeated here.

As for XP professional SP2-MULTICORE

in doubt just consult - - >  WindowsXP-KB896256-x86-ENU.exe package

now on the SC4

command line copied the deceased official website SC4.

Quote

 

-CPUCount: X - (Where X is the number of CPU's on the system) Specifies how many CPUs to take advantage of When there is more than one CPU on the present system. By default, the app takes advantage of all CPUs present on multiprocessor systems. However, some system drivers (sound in particular) are known to have problems When run in a multi-CPU environment.Thus it might be useful to specify -CPUCount: 1 in order to Prevent crashes with These faulty drivers.

 

( note: DDSOUND  )

SC4 executed on XP SP2-professional DX9c

Scheduling and use of threads on Windows  

Pushing the Limits of Windows: Processes and Threads

or simpler in title - Hardware Threads and Software Threads

I hope it helps definitely.