Region View Glitch

[FlyHigh 181]

I've had this problem for a while now. In region view there's a strip of terrain east-west that does not render on the border of a city tile. It doesn't show up in satellite or transportation views.

Does anyone have a faintest idea of what it may be?

[CorinaMarie 29,926]

3 hours ago, FlyHigh said:

Does anyone have a faintest idea of what it may be?

Yep. I do.

[FlyHigh 181]

haha I was hoping for a slightly more detailed explanation of the problem, actually

[CorinaMarie 29,926]

21 minutes ago, FlyHigh said:

haha I was hoping for a slightly more detailed explanation of the problem, actually

Oh. You didn't ask that.

I had to Google this myself long before I joined ST. Granpa Moose answered it. I can't do the quote with link back cause it's archived, but here's what he said:

Quote

This is caused by rendering maps at a screen density higher than 1024 x 768.  When rendering, set your screen to this resolution and the problem will go away.  This is a bug, but Maxis didn't anticipate running the renderer at that density, so there is no fix.

You can also set your density down, and try opening one of the regions at this density.  My recollection says you have to open each city in regions with this problem, saving them to fix the thumbnail.

And I believe other posts have stated it's 1200 and above on the width is the threshold. (And opening and saving each affected city while at the lower resolution does fix the region image for that tile.)

[HayleyRenaNemeth 465]

also slightly related , I have recently discovered a way to make the thumbnail update every time. I had issues with the thumbnail not saving and ending up with a blank tile thumbnail. what you do is hold the SHIFT key whilst you press the save button. and then you go to the exit to region without save. It seems to work each time. 

[FlyHigh 181]

1 hour ago, AprilAero said:

also slightly related , I have recently discovered a way to make the thumbnail update every time. I had issues with the thumbnail not saving and ending up with a blank tile thumbnail. what you do is hold the SHIFT key whilst you press the save button. and then you go to the exit to region without save. It seems to work each time. 

I though the thumbs updated everytime with a normal save and they didn't update in quick-saves (crl+s)...

 

3 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

Oh. You didn't ask that.

I had to Google this myself long before I joined ST. Granpa Moose answered it. I can't do the quote with link back cause it's archived, but here's what he said:

And I believe other posts have stated it's 1200 and above on the width is the threshold. (And opening and saving each affected city while at the lower resolution does fix the region image for that tile.)

Oh, so it's just a resolution thing, not an actual problem! Thanks

I say...
Moderator, please lock this thread!

[HayleyRenaNemeth 465]

1 minute ago, FlyHigh said:

I though the thumbs updated everytime with a normal save and they didn't update in quick-saves (crl+s)...

 

Oh, so it's just a resolution thing, not an actual problem! Thanks

I say...
Moderator, please lock this thread!

I never used to have issues with this , but lately I get a blank tile when I use the save and exit to region which I 've learnt on here to never use as there is a chance the city could get corrupted. So that is something I don't do anymore. This is a rather recent thing, I'm thinking it could have to do with the size of the actual region , as in Megabytes, however I am quite sure I have had regions much larger than my current one in the past that I didn't have issues like this. I have no clue why this blank tile issue is happening. 

 

3 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

Oh. You didn't ask that.

I've laughed way too hard at this. 

[rsc204 21,869]

4 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

And I believe other posts have stated it's 1200 and above on the width is the threshold. (And opening and saving each affected city while at the lower resolution does fix the region image for that tile.)

Bear in mind what Nonny was talking about is using the in-game rendering for a height map. If you render a region using a 3rd party application (where the region is all funny colours when you first open it), then this restriction does not apply.

The 1200 & above limitation applies to region view, regardless, in that higher resolutions will cause the view to look weird. I seem to recall though that the game itself may be playable in higher resolutions. Still, even in 2017, I think very few people are using such resolutions on their PCs.

1 hour ago, AprilAero said:

I never used to have issues with this , but lately I get a blank tile when I use the save and exit to region which I 've learnt on here to never use as there is a chance the city could get corrupted.

I think the problem here is to do with how SC4 saves your cities, from the information we have, it's more like a dump of the RAM to your HDD, which is very inefficient. As a result, it places a lot of strain on your computers resources, hence sometimes it fails to correctly update the region image (I think a z1 screenshot essentially). The same thing is behind the potential file corruption, as if it exits the city or game too quick, the save won't properly complete. I suspect this has more to do with the size of the save file, which is directly related to the number of objects in a given city tile, since each instance of an object needs to be added to the save file, along with it's coordinates. Likely the issue never came to light during testing, since Maxis never anticipated the sheer amount of stuff we'd be stuffing into our cities with all the extra computing power we now have.

4 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

Yep. I do.

Is there a Trixie for most helpful post? I suppose you'll have to wait for next years awards .

[HayleyRenaNemeth 465]

2 minutes ago, rsc204 said:

Bear in mind what Nonny was talking about is using the in-game rendering for a height map. If you render a region using a 3rd party application (where the region is all funny colours when you first open it), then this restriction does not apply.

The 1200 & above limitation applies to region view, regardless, in that higher resolutions will cause the view to look weird. I seem to recall though that the game itself may be playable in higher resolutions. Still, even in 2017, I think very few people are using such resolutions on their PCs.

I think the problem here is to do with how SC4 saves your cities, from the information we have, it's more like a dump of the RAM to your HDD, which is very inefficient. As a result, it places a lot of strain on your computers resources, hence sometimes it fails to correctly update the region image (I think a z1 screenshot essentially). The same thing is behind the potential file corruption, as if it exits the city or game too quick, the save won't properly complete. I suspect this has more to do with the size of the save file, which is directly related to the number of objects in a given city tile, since each instance of an object needs to be added to the save file, along with it's coordinates. Likely the issue never came to light during testing, since Maxis never anticipated the sheer amount of stuff we'd be stuffing into our cities with all the extra computing power we now have.

yea when you think back to like 2000 , 2001 , 2002  when the game was in development. I wonder if they ever imagined that 17 , 18 , 15 years from those dates that people would still be playing this game and lots too. They likely could have never imagined the shear impact this one particular SimCity would  have. Its amazing. 

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

I had this exact issue a couple days ago when I tried to see more of my region by selecting a higher screen resolution in SC4's graphics options. I almost posted about it here, but I had a vague recollection of having seen and fixed this blue-stripe problem back when I was playing in 2013, so I hunted for old discussion.

I found threads from 2005-07 (with many echoes since) that mentioned SC4 res as the problem (and that appears to be where A Nonny Moose (anonymous) learned about it). According to follow-up comments, any vertical res > 1199 is supposedly problematic. I didn't see any comments against widths.

As for saving, always save first and then exit without (again) saving. I don't know what shift does when saving; I've never used it.

[rsc204 21,869]

26 minutes ago, AprilAero said:

yea when you think back to like 2000 , 2001 , 2002  when the game was in development. I wonder if they ever imagined that 17 , 18 , 15 years from those dates that people would still be playing this game and lots too. They likely could have never imagined the shear impact this one particular SimCity would  have. Its amazing. 

I guess not, I wonder what percentage of games last 10 years, probably not so many?

As for not anticipating how we use the game today, that's not even something we need to forgive them for. Quite the opposite, they made a game that was designed to do a certain thing, we're the ones who are trying to force it to do so much more. It's a wonder half the things we're doing are possible and a testament to just how well coded the game was in the first place.

[CorinaMarie 29,926]

3 hours ago, FlyHigh said:

I say...
Moderator, please lock this thread!

Do you mind terribly if we don't? Other peeps are adding useful info here.

Edit: Discussed this with @FlyHigh in chat and it's ok to not lock this.

 

2 hours ago, jeffryfisher said:

I didn't see any comments against widths.

I seem to vaguely recall something about an extreme width, but since it didn't apply to me I didn't worry about it.

[HayleyRenaNemeth 465]

1 minute ago, rsc204 said:

I guess not, I wonder what percentage of games last 10 years, probably not so many?

As for not anticipating how we use the game today, that's not even something we need to forgive them for. Quite the opposite, they made a game that was designed to do a certain thing, we're the ones who are trying to force it to do so much more. It's a wonder half the things we're doing are possible and a testament to just how well coded the game was in the first place.

its amazing seeing the evolution of what the NAM team has done over the years. Its amazing what @Tarkus and all the other NAM members have done. Mind blown. I wish there was a tourism expansion pack made for the game. where you would have people travelling on holiday. 

[rsc204 21,869]

3 minutes ago, AprilAero said:

I wish there was a tourism expansion pack made for the game. where you would have people travelling on holiday. 

That's a nice idea, but it probably goes into the category of things we don't really have the ability to add, at least not in terms of the simulation. That said, nothing to stop you making a holiday resort of sorts, almost anything can be done visually at least. About time we had a Butlins or similar for our sims to spend their holidays.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

Quote

I wonder what percentage of games last 10 years, probably not so many?

Very low percent, but so is the proportion of games that are "successful" with sales to begin with.

That said, I am still playing RR Tycoon II, released in 1999, last official patch in 2002. It was before the advent of games with plugins folders (Although there was a map editor so players could design their own maps and their events). I pushed that editor to an extreme by designing a US History map with almost 500 events (about as many as in all 50 prefab maps combined).

The developer company is defunct, and the publisher (which bought the program) can't find the source code, so I had to edit hex codes in the EXE file (in data tables near the tail) in order to patch a few things. There's still a small community still limping along.

[Compdude787 916]

Age of Empires II, a real-time strategy game where the goal is to build an army to kill the bad guys, was released in 1999 and is still going strong. It was re-released in 2013 as the "HD Edition" to add support for widescreen resolutions, among other things. But yeah, it's still going strong, there's still plenty of mods being made for it. This is in spite of the newer Age of Empires III being released quite a few years ago. AoE II is still a great game, and I play it quite often. It does have a city building element to it because you have to build buildings in your town in order to research things, gather resources, and create an army and navy.