City bug with empty lots

[Guerro1996 38]

hello, guys, I've been concern about a bug I have in part of my cities I've maken. 

some of the zoned areas are looking as in the image below. They look horrible and I don't know what to do to delete that... the thing is that not in all zones this is happening but in some parts of the city. If it was a matter of dependencies or anything like that it would be for all zones in all areas in all my cities but is not, can somebody help me with this? please. The trees, flowers and all details in the houses tilesets are not showing up they look completely empty.

 

[matias93 7,535]

There is a known and fairly catastrophical bug that matches this description, but we should discard all the alternatives first. Let's go with a checklist: 

1. More than the NAM, do you have any mod installed? Particularly some old lot (before 2010 aprox.)?

2. Is the problem happening on a big city tile? It is very unusual that the most severe case happens on anything but a big tile. 

3. Is, as you said, the problem happening on specifical parts of the city? Did the damaged patches grew wth successive savings? The problem doesn't get resolved by changing the 'detail level' on three game's screen configuration?

4. Is there a multitude of sims on the northwestern corner of your city? Is there a car or truck 'trapped' at the bottom of the same corner, apparently underground? 

If the answer to all of that is yes, it would be worthy to use the SC4save application to check if your city tile was affected by the prop pox. 

Check the instructions and install it from here:

https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=15140.msg435023#msg435023

When installed, open the application and look for your region and the affected city tile, then on the right panel open the 'prop' entry and let it load (requires patience). If there appears in red letters ' prop poxed city', then we have a problem and you will be very fortunate if you have a recent backup of your region. 

[rsc204 21,821]

Rather than start with the more complex scenarios, before going any further, open the Graphics Options Menu (F9) and check that city detail is set to high. Using low or med here will remove much detail you'd otherwise see. If the game has defaulted to using low/med settings, you might optimise your game experiance by following this guide to get SC4 to properly recognise your graphics card:

 

[CorinaMarie 29,690]

15 hours ago, rsc204 said:

... check that city detail is set to high. Using low or med here will remove much detail you'd otherwise see.

I'm going to guess that's not the problem cause of this statement:

16 hours ago, Guerro1996 said:

... the thing is that not in all zones this is happening but in some parts of the city.

If it were the graphic detail setting it'd be affecting the entire city. Yes?

[Guerro1996 38]

Thank you all for your answers, and yes. all my city details are set to high, so that's not the problem, what I'm actually doing right now is to replace the cities I have backed up before to get rid of this... 

[CorinaMarie 29,690]

3 minutes ago, Guerro1996 said:

... what I'm actually doing right know is to replace the cities I have backed up before to get rid of this... 

It's great you have backups!

However, may I suggest checking for Prop Pox as @matias93 suggested before you delete the bad cities? I say this cause if they are Poxed it's most likely in your backed up saves as well. Just that the trigger for it hasn't happened in them yet. (The short version is when the city file size gets to a certain point it can no longer compress the file and if the pox is present it messes up the internal pointers to the data. Each successive save after it has appeared borks more pointers and more details disappear.)

[Guerro1996 38]

I did use the sc4save and one of my cities did have that problem but I replaced it too, and I did check it for prop pox and it appears the backed up file doesn't have any prop px.

[Prophet42 1,502]

@Guerro1996 You may also want to head over to SC4Devotion and check out this thread.  The stated cause for Prop Pox in the thread is still debated and not everybody agrees with it.  However, it would be interesting to see if you have the suspected file in your plugin folder.