Sudden and sporadic / unpredictable crashing after correcting fullscreen crashes

[xDEFCONx 14]

Hey there, I have been fiddling around with organizing my plugins, optimizing the game, etc. Out of nowhere, my game is now being very stubborn, which never really happened before some things.

My plugins folder is just shy of 6 GB. I recently restructured it and organized the loading order, etc. I have been (before "optimizing" the game) able to play flawlessly without crashes. Saving led to no problems, gameplay was about as smooth as it can get with that many plugins loaded in at once.

However, recently I had an issue of my idiotic city tile thumbnail displaying as a flat tile. It infuriated me enough that I attempted to correct this. I generally play in borderless windowed mode on hardware, but the moment I tried loading it with fullscreen enabled, I was met with instantaneous application crashing. Fullscreen functioned fine in software. I (was) also using an HD terrain mod, so I had to have it in hardware, so it was necessary to correct this and not just play on software.

I went through and first tweaked the Graphics Rules and Video Cards .sgrs from the posted tutorial. I'm currently running with two SLI 1080ti (yes), and I have SC4 using only one w/ application controlled settings (default on the NVIDIA settings).  It didn't correct the problem and the game still crashed (most likely because I do not know the input syntax for a 1080ti beyond the actual device ID and whatnot, and fortunately there's no documentation specifically for my card). I state this because I don't know if this could be contributing to the issue right now because of how beefy this setup is, but I'm stating it for possible consideration. I replaced the altered .sgr's with the vanilla ones after this as well.

And yes, I have been running with the CPUcount:1 flag.

HOWEVER, it did work when I switched SC4 over into compatibility mode (windows xp) fortunately, and somehow still worked even when I disabled compatibility afterward... which is odd.

Whenever I play the game now, I pretty much get met with standard gameplay for about 10 minutes, right up until the game just vanishes before my eyes. As well, saving is now causing crashes (the game is saving successfully, it just decides to die post-save or when attempting to return to the region.) I decided to return to the same settings I had run with prior to the crashing, as I assumed it was fullscreen, but the issue is still present. I'm not doing any sudden camera movements like scroll zooming that are infamous for crashes either.

I won't be surprised if this is because of the sheer bulk size of my plugins folder. However, I find it unusual that I could run the same load size before these shenanigans with full stability, of which I experienced no CTDs in normal gameplay and saving.

Any help would be grand. I've gone through pretty much every resource on the site, and I'm very confused as to what could be the origin of these woes.

I also have some other floating questions, if it's any help:

Could it be the city tile itself that has too much being rendered on it and I'm just now experiencing the side effects of a lot of stuff in one city?

Since I removed the HD terrain pack now, should I just stick to playing on software?

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.

 

[rsc204 21,868]

1 hour ago, xDEFCONx said:

I generally play in borderless windowed mode on hardware, but the moment I tried loading it with fullscreen enabled, I was met with instantaneous application crashing.

Why not simply return to the previously working settings? From everything you've documented, that would appear to be the change that led to the problems. SC4 is an old game and was designed for DirectX 7 and requires DirectX 9.0c legacy support from your hardware/drivers to work successfully in DirectX (hardware) mode. However, as is becoming common amongst users of more modern hardware, driver support for such features seems to be something both ATI and NVidia are phasing out. Note that Fullscreen and Windowed mode use different parts of the drivers to display the game, so it's totally possible that one will work, whilst the other will not.

There is of course a chance that messing around in your Plugins folder has also brought a problem into the mix. As with any computer problem, you need to remove as many variables from the equation as possible. That way you can really begin to know where to focus your efforts to resolve an issue. So as a test, remove all your Plugins completely and try playing in a brand new region/savefile. If the Crashes are then gone, most likely the issue is actually inside the Plugins folder somewhere, or possibly even something missing from it. But given the number of chances you've gone through, before messing with drivers and graphical settings, ideally you should be as certain as you can this is not simply something gone wrong when pruning the Plugins folder.

2 hours ago, xDEFCONx said:

As well, saving is now causing crashes (the game is saving successfully, it just decides to die post-save or when attempting to return to the region.)

It's really advisable never to use Save and Exit to Region or Save and Quit options. SC4's save files are a bit unique, in that it's mostly a dump of what's in RAM copied into a file. The last part of this process is then to take a screenshot. However, as the size and contents (props/buildings etc) of your city grows, this file gets much larger. Should the application try to move to the region view or exiting the game before this process is finished properly, it can corrupt your save files. Once this has happened, every time you exit that city, the game will crash. This can not be fixed, although otherwise the city itself is playable and will continue to work.

The safe option is to always use just "Save", then afterwards Exit without Saving or Quit without Saving as desired. It's also noteworthy in respect of your issues, that such crashes are nothing to do with those that occur randomly during play.

2 hours ago, xDEFCONx said:

Could it be the city tile itself that has too much being rendered on it and I'm just now experiencing the side effects of a lot of stuff in one city?

Honestly, you'd be surprised what SC4 can handle in terms of objects in a city. I am as certain as one can be that's not the issue.

2 hours ago, xDEFCONx said:

Since I removed the HD terrain pack now, should I just stick to playing on software?

Personally, I wouldn't accept that route. Software mode is just terrible in terms of performance and graphical fidelity. It's worked before in DirectX mode, so it can work again, whatever is wrong comes from a change that was made somewhere. So it's more a case of how willing you are to take the time to unravel the problem.

[Handyman 792]

5 hours ago, xDEFCONx said:

I generally play in borderless windowed mode on hardware, but the moment I tried loading it with fullscreen enabled, I was met with instantaneous application crashing.

Did you receive any system/driver updates during this time?

I recently upgraded my operating system and graphics driver and my game would not load properly. After many hours I discovered that I now needed to include the  -f  switch for fullscreen where previously I needed neither the  -w  or  -f  switches.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

7 hours ago, rsc204 said:

It's really advisable never to use Save and Exit to Region or Save and Quit options... The safe option is to always use just "Save", then afterwards Exit without Saving

As soon as you mentioned "my idiotic city tile thumbnail displaying as a flat tile", this is what I thought about, because the two are connected. Everything  you've done since that point to try to solve the flat-earth problem has possibly made new problems. Before you wreck your plugins, you should retrace your "debugging" steps to put things back to what was working.

Then, you can try to get into your flat city, save it again properly (without leaving), and then leave without saving. If successful, then it will no longer be "flat". If not, then you probably need to restore from a back-up.