HELP! My dear city of Hikousen crashes every time I load it, starting today!

[chomusclavus 0]

Yesterday, I was playing on the city of Hikousen, a metropolis of 600,000+ people on the extreme lower-right-hand corner of the region. I redid many parts of the city by removing extra streets and re-designing residential and commercial areas into big blocks, with parks in the center. Even did one industrial patch too.

After installing a new subway system, and putting in plenty of Ninja Boulevard Stations, everything in the city appeared to end on a good note.

 

Now this morning, I woke up and tried to load Hikousen again, but the whole game would crash onto the desktop after a few seconds. I've tried many things, even restarting the computer, and saving Hikousen right when it loads, but to no avail. After pressing the Game Saved! OK button, it would still crash.

 

Again, it was just fine the night before, and when I load Keihikouki and Ogetsu, the only other cities in the region, they stay loaded; the game doesn't crash there, only in Hikousen.

 

Now, how do I fix the city? What should I do to make Hikousen playable again?

 

ADDENDUM: If anyone was going to say otherwise, it had nothing to do with the Ninja Boulevard Station downloaded building. I placed one in Ogetsu, saved it, exited the game, and reentered it. Ogetsu ran fine.

 

System Specs:

 

Pentium 4 with HyperThreading technology at 3.19 GHz

1.00 GB of RAM

Hard Drive File System: NTFS

Maximum Hard Drive Space: 143 GB

Free Hard Drive Space: 104 GB

 

Virtual Memory:

Paging File for Selected Drive

Drive: C:

Space available: 108229 MB

(selected radio button) Custom Size:

Initial size (MB): 1536

Maximum size (MB): 3072

(unselected radio button) system managed size

(unselected radio button) No paging file

 

Total paging file size for all drives

Minimum Allowed: 2 MB

Recommended: 1533 MB

Currently allocated: 1536 MB

 

Video Card: Plug and Play Monitor on RADEON X600 256MB HyperMemory

 

 

So, what could be the problem? Should I increase the Currently Allocated Virtual Memory?

[tungston 19]

chomusclavus:  This has the symtoms of a common crash.  If you have used SWAP, it could be the cause.  It seems there is something [plugin] that is causing a conflict anyway.

[chomusclavus 0]

What is SWAP?

By the way, I've tested the other cities by adding all the downloaded buildings onto them, ran them, saved them, reloaded the game, and ran them again. Those cities still ran fine so it couldn't have anything to do with the downloaded buildings.

 

Hikousen may be a BIG city (with over 614,000 people), and in case the size of the city caused it to crash upon load-up, I increased the virtual memory cache file (or however that's named) to 2500 megs, with the maximum at 4096. Did I not increase it high enough, or did that not have anything to do with the problem at hand?

 

And by the way Tungston, what's the solution? I don't want to delete the city I've had for months, so how do I fix it without deleting it?

[tungston 19]

Date: 12/24/2005 3:34:00 PM Author: chomusclavus

What is 'SWAP'?

By the way, I've tested the other cities by adding all the downloaded buildings onto them, ran them, saved them, reloaded the game, and ran them again. Those cities still ran fine so it couldn't have anything to do with the downloaded buildings.

Hikousen may be a BIG city (with over 614,000 people), and in case the size of the city caused it to crash upon load-up, I increased the virtual memory 'cache file' (or however that's named) to 2500 megs, with the maximum at 4096. Did I not increase it high enough, or did that not have anything to do with the problem at hand?

quote>

SWAP, is SimsWing Airport Pack, but that was just a guess, something I have seen often with your symtoms.

 

I don't think the city is too big, with 1GB of physical memory. But then, population is not everything that adds to the file size.  Check the file size, I have a city file that is 63MB, it takes a long time [relative] to load and save, but doesn't crash [then].

 

 4096MB is the max you can set virtual memory to.

 

Another thing to consider is what you have used, and then removed.  I had an episode with a tree mod I used, and then removed.  The trees didn't show but if I plopped a lot where they where, it crashed the game instantly.

[chomusclavus 0]

Nah, there weren't any mods I put in and taken out. All of the downloaded buildings are still there. However, I made edits to the prices of the Akin's Air Purification Plant and Ninja Boulevard Station, but they still work in the other cities.

Also, I don't have SWAP, and my city crashes right when it loads, not when I plop something on where I removed a mod. So since it's none of those, what else could it be and how do I make that city playable again?

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Does your city crash immediately or does it run for a few seconds after the screen is drawn? If there is anything for your crash in the Exception Reports folder, please post the first ten lines only.

[chomusclavus 0]

I get to see the part of the city that I saved at last, but no more than 5 seconds later does it just crash to the desktop. I don't see a pop-up showing any Exception Reports. However, if crash logs are saved somewhere, where can I find it.

[whitebloodcell 0]

Although I can't really help, all I can say is i hope you get an answer to this. It just happened to me on a city i've spent the past day on. (literally like 13hours) Though with mine I dont even get to see it before it crashes.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Date: 12/24/2005 6:37:05 PM
Author: chomusclavus
I get to see the part of the city that I saved at last, but no more than 5 seconds later does it just crash to the desktop. I don't see a pop-up showing any 'Exception Reports'. However, if crash logs are saved somewhere, where can I find it.

quote>
My documents\simcity 4\Excewption Reports

If you have an ACCESS VIOLATION you are either going over the top of your memory or trying to access a read-only library for writing or trying to access the kernel. This is usually a virtual memory is too small problem.

[haropro 0]

wow! this quyestion couldnt have come at a better time for me. i too spent a whole day designing a city, only i have only an airport in that city. I do haver the SWAP airport. to get my game from crashing to the desktop when loadin the city, i guyess i have to delete the SWAP from myu pluygins folder? this really suycks because i loaded it a couple of times before and this didn't happen. i hope it will pass. i dont really feel like building a whole new airport again!(using Joerg's of course if this is a permanent and ongoing problem) HELP WOULD BE GREATLY APPRECIATED!

[tungston 19]

There is a SWAP support page, it is simple to find.  Search for swap.

[chomusclavus 0]

I found the exception log. However, it doesn't support the .mdmp suffix. What do I do so I can attach and upload it?

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Along with the mini-dump, there is a text file of the same name. Try opening it in notepad.

[Seven4 0]

I had the same problem a week ago. Mine was whenever I placed anything on the spot where I had deleted a mod. Hope you can fix your problem.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

This needs greater clarification. How do you have a mod in a city?

[Elegnaim 0]

This case might be because the city's too big, though. To test it, I loaded one of the larger pre-built cities that came with... Rush Hour? vanilla SC4? Anyway, yeah, takes forever to load, and crashes. I think it was the Big City thing in Timbuktu, BTW.

Anyway, this scares me. My cities will eventually get larger. And I have *GOOD SPECS*. 512 megs ram, a... 4 gig pagefile, erm... probably a 3 ghz pentium 4, ATI Radeon X660, I believe. Perhaps we should look into a method of addressing this issue.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Date: 1/10/2006 7:01:27 PM
Author: Elegnaim
This case might be because the city's too big, though. To test it, I loaded one of the larger pre-built cities that came with... Rush Hour? vanilla SC4? Anyway, yeah, takes forever to load, and crashes. I think it was the Big City thing in Timbuktu, BTW.


Anyway, this scares me. My cities will eventually get larger. And I have *GOOD SPECS*. 512 megs ram, a... 4 gig pagefile, erm... probably a 3 ghz pentium 4, ATI Radeon X660, I believe. Perhaps we should look into a method of addressing this issue.

quote>

If you are getting crashes and the mini dump read Access violation it usually means you ran out of memory or had too much paging and timed out.

One of the most important things is to defragment your disk regularly. SC4 city files are quite big and are often multiple extent. All it takes is one disk hicup and your page table in memory is smushed with the result that you get something like a branch to location 0000 0000 which is illegal.

Many people are finding 512MB a little small. On my tight budget, I could only get to 768MB but this fixed a lot of performance problems. If you can up your memory to 1024MB (1GB) you would be better off.

Something to remember here is that all your plugins get loaded into memory as the game initializes and they stay there, used or not.

One of the greatest weaknesses in Microsoft operating systems is that they can't seem to write a paging system worth the powder to melt the machine. Maybe they have just chosen the wrong hardware platform or, have got it wrong the the mighty HAL (Harware Abstration Layer).

[pepsi71ocean 2]

All of my cities crash when i try and load them this is what your are looking fore.

 

Exception time: 01/11/2006, at 22:53:39.
Exception code: 0xC0000005 (-1073741819) ACCESS_VIOLATION.
Current thread ID: 2516 (0x000009d4).
Version information:
Application/module path: F:\Maxis\Phoenix Homeland\SimCity 4 Deluxe\Apps\SimCity 4.exe
Application/module version name: SimCity 4
Application/module version: 1.1.610.0
System version: Windows NT 5.1
System memory: 512 Megabytes total, 72 Megabytes free.

Exception module:  F:\Maxis\Phoenix Homeland\SimCity 4 Deluxe\Apps\SimCity 4.exe.
Exception address: 0x00766e1b. Section:Offset: 0x01:0x0035fe1b.