My Personal Questions.

[matias93 7,535]

1 hour ago, rsc204 said:

If your system originally came with Windows 7

In fact, if your computer originally had Windows 7 (or in fact, any Windows) you can reinstall it from scratch if you still have the original Product key, downloading the iso image from the official site. The issue is that those product keys were normally only put on really feeble paper stickers on the computers, so the chances are that on all these years (Windows 7 is just shy of 9 years old and there it goes my ID card to the basement!) the stickers either fell or were erased. With some effort, you can try to recover the key and test it until it works: I did it with my mother's laptop, and yes, it took some hours and a couple of magnifying glasses, but at the end was a great and completely legal solution.

[Tristy100 31]

On 1/25/2018 at 2:47 PM, rsc204 said:

Make sure if you haven't installed the NAM that you have applied a 4GB Patch to your game. This will optimize the RAM that the game can access, which can make a surprising difference in some circumstances. The NAM includes this and will patch your game automatically upon installation.

I do have NAM installed, thanks! Any estimates on what population the game would slow down? I put shadows on Low, and I don't have any issues on regions with over 1mill. I have slight occasional lag with cities of about 370-390k, but I won't really go further than that on a large tile.

[rsc204 21,836]

It's really more of a city-based problem, since none of the calculations that weight things down are performed regionally. But there isn't a set figure, it all depends on your hardware/machine and how the simulator is keeping up. The pathfinder will be re-run every 3-6 months, which is when the game looks once more at all the sims commutes and re-calculates them to reflect any changes. It's during this process that you will notice the game slowing, because the CPU is very busy. However, once the number of sims gets very large, that's when it takes so long to run, it can take a while to finish. But indeed the population really does need to be high to bother a modern CPU. Although one of the other problems is that old code such as SC4s is not well optimised for modern CPUs either, so you don't reap the full benefits of newer hardware.

[Tristy100 31]

Anyone know of VERY LARGE regions? I'm talking larger than The Ring of Fire map, or any continent map like Africa or Australia. I'd like a varied map aswell, with some mountain ranges, or large bodies of water for ferry connections, etc. Thanks! If you don't know of any, but your a map creator, feel free to make one. I know I'm not a minority, lots of people like nice, large, varied maps!

[Toby Ferrian 875]

I don't think maps of that size are even possible, The Ring of Fire already requires a decently powerful computer just to load.

[markussaage 762]

11 hours ago, Tristy100 said:

Anyone know of VERY LARGE regions? I'm talking larger than The Ring of Fire map, or any continent map like Africa or Australia. I'd like a varied map aswell, with some mountain ranges, or large bodies of water for ferry connections, etc. Thanks! If you don't know of any, but your a map creator, feel free to make one. I know I'm not a minority, lots of people like nice, large, varied maps!

I don't know, how large your mentioned The Ring of Fire map is, but did you take a look at this one:

This map is also available in four separate pieces, if the full download too big for you. You'll need the SC4Mapper to install it, you'll find it here:

https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=2880

Kind regards!

[Toby Ferrian 875]

2 hours ago, markussaage said:

I don't know, how large your mentioned The Ring of Fire map is

The Ring of Fire is actually bigger than that.
(Its size has been mentioned earlier in the thread if you missed it)

[matias93 7,535]

In fact, a few months ago @tarkus showed that, with enough ram, ridiculously big regions can be used in a stable way.

The problem with them is other: the regional play in SC4 is coded in the most terrible way, making almost impossible to use big regions effectively.

For example, to make a local demand change in a city tile to balance itself with another city tile, you need to open every tile in between for three to six game months to allow the traffic simulator to readjust itself, and to pray for the game gods to make traffic to go on the desired direction. Is the same with commercial agreements: really difficult to pull off and with enormous dumb risks (like filling an intermediate city with garbage that was meant to go to the opposite extreme of the region).

If you ask me, the best thing you can do with regions right now is to use rather small and square ones, with medium or big tiles and developing a continuous urbanisation, with jobs and utilities distributed on the entire metro area. Until we get a way to change the hardcoded regional play (don't hold your breath), this is the best way to avoid issues.

[rsc204 21,836]

I agree in some part with you @matias93 on the downsides of large regions, but they can be usable, you just need to micromange some things.

The first thing to note, the only computer limitation of large regions is that you have enough resources to load it in the Region View screen. Very large regions take time to load and switch between here. Also the game is very picky about dimensions, you can't have a very tall by narrow region, it must be within pre-defined proportions. That said, after these limits are taken into account, you'll likely find the largest region you can use is plenty. Because frankly, filling that gigantic slice of terrain is going to take a very, very long time. Still, for the hardcore player, probably worth it. You'll find the 4GB patch an absolute requirement for this to work, you probably want at least 8GB of system RAM in your PC and a modern-ish GPU wouldn't hurt so you have enough V-RAM. Although, that last one probably isn't strictly necessary. Having gotten a gargantuan region that loads, what impact does it have when you are playing in a city tile? Absolutely none whatsoever, the game simply doesn't calculate things on a regional level, the interaction between cities is crude and basic, but then it needed to be.

However, it's that regional interaction that will now start to cause you pain and suffering. Eternal commuters are always a potential problem, if you don't avoid it, you'll eventually break demands and have no shortage of continual abandonment. Neighbour Deals are a little clunky, but if you read up on how it works, it's still possible to maintain a single utility tile that manages this for the region. For really big regions though, I'd consider breaking this down and having more than one utility focused city. Placed suitably apart, it will make your life much less frustrating and complicated.

So there are techniques you can use to keep on top of these problems, but I would caution anyone. Think about how much time you want to sink into a region, is this really the best way for you to go? Certainly if you are starting out...

59 minutes ago, matias93 said:

the best thing you can do with regions right now is to use rather small and square ones, with medium or big tiles and developing a continuous urbanisation, with jobs and utilities distributed on the entire metro area

that makes a lot more sense, it really does. So what if you fill your small region, make a new one, perhaps a little bigger. Each new region you make you will learn how to control things better. The other way around usually involves taking on far more than you can handle. Putting in many hours of work, only to scrap the whole thing and start over when you take a wrong turn.

I enjoy playing smaller regions, 3x3 - 4x4 Large tiles in size, with a very small number of mods installed, much more than I do playing the huge ones with lots of mods. Of course my goal is to one day make that "perfect" region, but after a few bad starts, I've had that to one side for some time.

My first properly successful region using the Maxis SF map, was a total mess filled to the brim with as many buildings as I could fit. My second with a custom map, that's when I came across the horror of eternal commuters and why Plopping everything will only lead to failure. Hundreds of hours of unsalvageable work that one. I then revisited SF and made something I was really proud of, lots of custom content, tidy slopes and more besides. Those three regions, along with distractions like modding, about 4-5 years of playtime. But one of them I'm reasonably proud of at least.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

15 hours ago, Tristy100 said:

Anyone know of VERY LARGE regions? I'm talking larger than The Ring of Fire

I don't know if they're larger, but the life-sized Portland OR and SF Bay Area maps both offer varied terrain split by water. If you want more choices, look through the life-sized maps (links) in the NHP catalog.

[Tristy100 31]

1 hour ago, rsc204 said:

my goal is to one day make that "perfect" region

I'm currently working on mine. It's at 1.1mill people and counting. It's not huge, it only spans 8 large city tiles. 3 of these have 20k or less people on them. This is honestly my first attempt at a city. There's a big city portion, (which you can probably tell which is which), and then there's a suburban city to the west. The suburban sector has probably 30k people, and then that one island chain to the west of the Suburbs has ~300 people. I have had zero traffic issues, and only use highways and ferries between connections. I don't believe I have any other transport, but I might have put in bus-stops in part of a tile, but forgot about it. I'm still working on it, yesterday it was only at 1mill, so it's a nice speed of development for me, I'm sure its slow for speed-runners but whatever. This worked for me, and I'm having no lag, even on my city of 380k. (except for when it recalculates traffic every couple months)

[markussaage 762]

8 hours ago, Toby Ferrian said:

The Ring of Fire is actually bigger than that.
(Its size has been mentioned earlier in the thread if you missed it)

Indeed, I did miss it...

[Odainsaker 2,135]

 

On ‎1‎/‎27‎/‎2018 at 6:30 PM, Tristy100 said:

Anyone know of VERY LARGE regions? I'm talking larger than The Ring of Fire map, or any continent map like Africa or Australia.

I think the few larger maps would be the fully assembled versions of the Big Island of Hawaiʻi, Los Angeles, and Luxembourg, all of which were made by drunkapple/dobdriver.  Blunder was working on a new 30x30 large tile map of Portland, OR, but I do not know it this monster of 900 larges tiles is available to download anywhere.

The caveats for these mega-sized maps are that you need a 64-bit system, at least 8GB of RAM, SC4 Mapper or SC4Terraformer to install the map, and the 4GB patch applied to SimCity 4, SC4 Mapper, and SC4Terraformer.  Players had to be cautious when saving or switching from city view to region view, as switching between loading plugins and loading the huge region could be too taxing for the game and bring crashes.  Region scrolling bugs could also occur, where the region was too large either horizontally or vertically for the UI of the game in region view to allow scrolling to and accessing the tiles at the extremes of the region map.

Blunder offered a kind explanation of what can be encountered making maps of such sizes.

SC4Devotion also had a useful discussion on maximum region sizes.  While it reads like larger sizes can theoretically be made, they may be impractical due to the UI region scroll issues.

 

As a map suggestion, I think drunkapple's Auckland, drunkapple's San Francisco, NHP's Boston, and panerai1's Humboldt are beautiful, popular maps.  Vortext stitched together a map for Ærden that is truly gorgeous and fits my personal image of an ideal map, but I do not know if it is available.  Similarly, kingofsimcity also spliced together a map that has all the landscape features I hope for in a region.

 

 

[Tristy100 31]

Quick question, @Odainsaker recommended 8gb ram, so I now upgraded from 3.9 to 7.4 (4 to 8). The RAM isn't new, its just from an old laptop I don't use anymore. I tried to overclock, but apparently I can't on my laptop processor, which is sad because it never really reaches 3GHz, it usually sticks around 2.2~2.6 I have seen it go to 2.9 once, but that was on Beam.ng Drive. (not an easy game to run if you know it )  Since my processor has no issues and performs better than modern i5's, (take that intel) I was worried about my graphics card. I did an online benchmark and it's pretty bad, will this affect SC4 performance? It holds back the rest of my computer. (along with my hard-drive, but it's actually getting better somehow?) Sorry this question is very computer heavy. What does the ram do in SimCity 4 as well? Is it the stuff that stores data like traffic volume, population, jobs, etc? And, most important, is there a 8gb patch?

[matias93 7,535]

First, consider that RAM memory varies on more than just storage capacity: there is also the reading/writing speed, measured on hertz (just as processors, but independently from it); only if both RAM cards are of the same type and speed you can get them to operate on 'double-channel' mode and to get their full speed; any other mix will result on the faster card scaling down to the slower one, to keep both synchronised.

About overclocking on a laptop: that's risky business!! While desktop units can always be cooled with increasingly complicated methods, laptop processors have only their original heatsinks available, and they are designed to cope with normal usage, not the overclocked one. While silicon plates aren't that vulnerable to extra heat, both the lead-tin soldering and your lap are: overclocking could cause soldering to melt away and disconnect essential parts of the motherboard (it happened to me once), and if you use your laptop in your lap, it can cause skin burns.

Now, about what is useful to make SC4 work well; you need:

• a relatively decent processor with a good single-core speed, as the game doesn't support multi-threading, but that's pretty common nowadays. Yours looks good at 2.6 GHz.
• a fairly big amount of RAM if you are like me and use lots of plugins. While the game normally doesn't go over the 4 Gb threshold, the OS and background applications tend to require around of 2 Gb more, and you also need some extra free space for rapid interchange. So 8 Gb is a good point. Try to look for higher speeds that are supported by your motherboard too.
• a retro-compatible graphics processor, be it integrated or discrete. In general, discrete graphics are better, but as their pace of updates and design changes is really fast, you need to ensure first that the drivers are adequate for a 2003 game. Check on benchmark sites if you are looking for specific models. Also, consider that some laptops with PCI-E ports can use external graphic cards if you have the money and the DIY spirit to do that. Integrated graphics are most commonly very retro-compatible, but their benchmarks aren't that cool, at least until the last few years, when things have improved more than a bit.
• and lastly, the single most important thing to reduce waiting times and to produce a feeling of responsiveness: a really fast storage medium, preferably an SSD disk. You don't need a particularly big one, as you will only load about 5-10 Gb of plugins for this game. Please remember that SSD disks (just as USB sticks and SD cards) have a limit of rewritings until causing reading and writing errors, and that they get their speed from their ability to read and write sectors without an specific order. So you will get the most of an SSD disk if you use it to store files that will be written few times and read many times (SC4 plugins are an excellent example). For the same reason, don't defrag an SSD disk.

[Tristy100 31]

HELP!!

SimCity 4 won't do stuffz.

          I right-click on the short-cut, and run as administrator. It starts up, but then idles at a black screen for awhile. No music is playing, but the cursor is on the screen. I can't x-out, and have to restart my pc everytime, anyone know the solution? It started after I did a RAM upgrade. My specs are currently (to my knowledge):

AMD A10-8700P 6th gen, 4cpu cores, 6gpu cores. 1.8ghz~3.2ghz. (averages 2.5 to 3.0, 1.8 when idling, as it is a laptop).

AMD Radeon R6 (something, its pretty bad for modern games, but then again i play soft body physics and cities skylines so its fine for this i guess).

I have no idea what motherboard or anything, I have a 1920x1080 screen, but it has "virtual resolution" so it can run 4k somehow, don't ask me, ask AMD, came with my cpu.

RAM is two different brands, one running at 1333mhz, and the other at 1335mhz, not sure if I'm dual-channeling, I don't honestly care. Total is 8gb, 7.4gb is usable for programs.

Check a look at my current status while watching a youtube video and some tabs open on firefox.

I didn't uninstall or install it again, as it was working fine before, so I don't know what happened.

 

[rsc204 21,836]

17 hours ago, Tristy100 said:

It started after I did a RAM upgrade.

So what happens if you remove the additional DIMMs?

Although this suggests perhaps the two sets of RAM modules are not compatible with each other, that's a bit odd. Because if that were the case, normally you could expect the entire system to become unstable. But before getting too into that, you should confirm that reverting the upgrade restores things to working again.

[Tristy100 31]

12 hours ago, rsc204 said:

So what happens if you remove the additional DIMMs?

Although this suggests perhaps the two sets of RAM modules are not compatible with each other, that's a bit odd. Because if that were the case, normally you could expect the entire system to become unstable. But before getting too into that, you should confirm that reverting the upgrade restores things to working again.

I fixed it by simply running Windows Troubleshooter, haha. I guess I need to use that more often, thanks though! I know it wouldn't be incompatible, as I have swapped it around other laptops as well. I was wondering though, what does the average resident income measure? Is it per-capita or household? I have a small suburb medium plot of 18k people, and last I checked the average income was up to 90k. Is this good? If its per capita its great, but if its household its still nice. Just try to explain household income for me, thanks.

[Tristy100 31]

I need advice Attached are photos of a more dense suburb, most likely 10~20 miles from downtown, and the other is a coastal suburb probably 40~50 miles from downtown. Any tips on how to make it look more realistic, or any tricks with NAM roads? Thanks!

[CorinaMarie 29,773]

3 hours ago, Tristy100 said:

Any tips on how to make it look more realistic

It already looks good to me.  

The only suggestions I'd have is to use a slope mod and toggle Grids off for screenshots. I believe the NHP Ennedi Slope Mod (v1.0) is the most popular and it's the one I use. There are a few choices in that and you need to pick only one. (I use the Mount620.) For the grid toggle on/off it's the G key.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

2 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

use a slope mod

Ennedi barely scratches the surface. I am tempted to write a lengthy article about some of the parameters that Ennedi ignores (they're very influential!).

Advice: As Corina said, get the slope mod and choose the option closest to your style of play. But don't stop there. Open the mod's file in iLives 1.54 and explore the various parameters therein. Experiment with them. There is no "perfect". Each is a spice one should sprinkle to taste.

If you want to know more, then we should start a separate (possibly pinned) thread for slope mods and the many settings within. To each his/her own...

[CorinaMarie 29,773]

46 minutes ago, jeffryfisher said:

I am tempted to write a lengthy article about some of the parameters that Ennedi ignores (they're very influential!).

That could be interesting. Would it contain more than @rsc204's Slope Mods: A Brief Guide ?

[Tristy100 31]

6 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

NHP Ennedi Slope Mod (v1.0)

I installed it just now to experiment, tried it on all 3 settings. It's truly awful, and I'll stick without one. It makes it harder for me to do anything relating to zoning and roads on slopes. Thanks for the suggestions though. Does anyone have some advice considering my road layouts?

[rsc204 21,836]

Bear in mind that the whole premise of a slope mod is that it will make building roads harder, because you are in-effect placing more restrictions on such things. Corina linked to a tutorial I made in this regard, I'd recommend taking a look, it will show you what you can achieve with a slope mod. Bear in mind too, that Ennedi's is pretty restrictive, but some mods are much more forgiving, so I prefer the BRF mod myself. But as usual with SC4, there are many different options for everything.

11 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

That could be interesting. Would it contain more than @rsc204's Slope Mods: A Brief Guide ?

Most likely, i don't go into the settings inside the mods themselves. I think for all but the most advanced users, installing a mod is probably sufficient to get the result they are after. Not to mention, messing too much with these settings can cause all sorts of problems, not for the faint of heart IMO.

8 hours ago, Tristy100 said:

Does anyone have some advice considering my road layouts?

The thing is, as with most of the game, these things are quite personal. Whatever works for you is the answer, there is no right and wrong way, provided sims can find their way around.

The most striking problem is the way the highway bumps and dips all over the place, but the solution for that is a combination of a slope mod and lots of terraforming. This is quite involved, if you aren't hugely bothered about making things realistic, you may prefer not to bother.

The next thing that stands out is just how many highways you are using. 2 parallel highways on the right side, growing to 2 on the left of this screenshot is excessive. But again, this may not be a problem, it's just unlikely in the real world. If your goals are simply to make the game work and have something that looks vaguely attractive without using huge amounts of mods, then you've probably succeeded here. The problem is, long term if you take that route, you'll end up making copy/paste cities and that may start to become boring. On the flip side, making intricately detailed cities with lots of mods is a lot more time consuming, which to some is also a turn off. It is really all dependant on what you want to do and what makes the experience enjoyable. That's the beauty of this sort of game, there is no "winning", it's about creatively finding your own solutions to making a working city.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

18 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

Would it contain more than @rsc204's Slope Mods: A Brief Guide ?

Aha, thanks for the reminder... Yes it would, as I commented in that thread. I'm bookmarking it and will resurrect the thread when I am ready to write a slope-editor's walkthrough all of the network-drawing parameters (at least those I think I understand).

In the mean time, I strongly recommend that everyone who's ever used (or cursed at) a slope mod should open one for editing. There's much much more there -- such as how many smoothing iterations to perform and how far to reach during each pass.

Our modern CPUs can handle so much more than SC4's default settings, so you can get your PC to do more for you by boosting both the iterations and the reach in order to get smoother roads with less effort (and less cursing).

[Tristy100 31]

8 hours ago, jeffryfisher said:

In the mean time, I strongly recommend that everyone who's ever used (or cursed at) a slope mod should open one for editing.

I would, except I have NO idea how to. I'm not tech-savvy. It's a true miracle  I could make those suburbs. I've been practicing more of the main artery and vein technique, where your highways are the main arteries, the avenues are secondary arteries, roads are the veins, and the streets are the secondary veins that branch off randomly. I haven't put it into plan yet, but I am coming up with concepts for it. The attached photo is an example of where I want to go in my designs. I have a TINY ITSY addiction to suburbs, especially hailing from Metro Detroit (where there's over 4.3 million suburban people compared to 700k in Detroit!)

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

14 hours ago, Tristy100 said:

I've been practicing more of the main artery and vein technique

That's also called "dendritic" (referring to tree-like). It's a technique used to constrain the default (stupid) traffic sim. If you installed the NAM, then you can allow your neighborhoods to have multiple outlets (connect some veins to more than one artery) without fear that traffic will short-circuit.

[Tristy100 31]

Can someone link me to a mod that ignores sloping issues and stuff? Ever since I got that Ennedi Slope Mod, I haven't been able to place any roads that aren't almost on a complete flat and it's pissing me off. Thanks.

[matias93 7,535]

48 minutes ago, Tristy100 said:

Can someone link me to a mod that ignores sloping issues and stuff? Ever since I got that Ennedi Slope Mod, I haven't been able to place any roads that aren't almost on a complete flat and it's pissing me off. Thanks.

The BRF mod is a much more forgiving one, as is shown on MGB's tutorial on slope mods:

As you can see on the image, different networks have different slope tolerances, and differently from Ennedi's mods, this ones have no restrictions on the angle's change.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

17 hours ago, Tristy100 said:

since I got that Ennedi Slope Mod, I haven't been able to place any roads that aren't almost on a complete flat

The Ennedi mod has three files (three levels of restriction), but you should put only one of them into your plugins.

I recommend ENN_SlopeMod_Mount620.dat because it is least restrictive. If you put all three, then the last alphabetically (smooth) would supersede the others and leave you frustrated.

Even better is downloading iLives Reader 1.54 and learning how to open the slope mod. There are many settings for each network; these mods barely scratch the surface. In particular, you can ease placement by increasing the number of smoothing steps and enlarging their reach.