City previously loaded, now crashes when attempting to load

[glorified_toaster 3]

I have a city I've been playing for about half a year that recently stopped loading (crashes the game when I try).  Other cities in the same region still load.  This has happened once before in another region, where one city within the region suddenly causes the game to crash upon loading.  I'm admittedly a sloppy player, having downloaded plugins in an uncoordinated, piecemeal way over the years.  Since the problem arose, I've looked for different fixes prior to consulting this forum (it isn't prop pox, it doesn't seem to be corrected by any patches/updates I've found, nor by lowering graphic settings and reloading, and I removed the most recent set of plug-ins...some Mattb325 buildings/props...but this didn't allow it to open).  

I don't know the hardware software side too well, but for what it is worth: I'm running this on Windows 8. 

Any suggestions are appreciated.  I would love to overcome this problem and not worry about losing work/cities.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

Do you have ports from both BSC and PEG? Did you remove any mods just before the lockup (e.g. a tree controller for trees your city still has)?

[glorified_toaster 3]

I didn't remove any mods just before this particular tile started crashing.  I looked it up and i do have plugins from both BSC and PEG.  BSC I only have a few "essentials" prop packs.  From PEG, I have some landscape props (trees etc) and a few buildings

[twalsh102 1,601]

In general, when any of my cities crashed upon attempting to load, it was one of two things:  either a lot exemplar could not find a referenced building exemplar (it may be missing, or unreachable due to path length), or an exemplar has unreadable foreign characters in the exemplar name.  A third possibility would be a corrupt savegame file.

I would first try starting the city with an empty Plugins folder.  Yes, you will get lots of errors, but if the city opens (eventually), you will know the savegame file isn't corrupt, and the problem is with some custom content.

Unfortunately, the only other way I can think of to find the offending custom content would be to test by halves!

[glorified_toaster 3]

Thank you for the tips!  I will try this out and see if it helps diagnosis.

[twalsh102 1,601]

Just thought of something that may help narrow things down:  When you end your game session, do you choose Save and Quit, or do you do a Save Game, and then Quit without Saving (two separate operations)?  There is a well-known bug whereby if you choose Save and Exit to Region, or Save and Quit, there is a tremendous chance this will corrupt your Save-game file (not every time, but quite often).

However, since you have other cities that aren't experiencing problems, either your extremely lucky, or you're aware of this bug, and maybe only did it with this city by accident.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

@glorified_toaster

Another possibility is if you had the bugged Airport Shuttle Lot. There's a thread on that I could find if so. It had a minor mistake in it such that if you'd plopped it and then later bulldozed it, the city tile became corrupted.

[glorified_toaster 3]

I didn't know of the save and quit bug until I started reading up trying to figure out the crash issue, so that is definitely a possibility.  The airport shuttle bug is news to me, and I do have that in the city in question, and I did recently delete and move it in order to put a museum where it was.  Come to think of it, the one other time this crash-when-loading-city issue came up (about a year ago in a different region) it was after moving the shuttle elsewhere (if I'm remembering right).

Was there ever a fix determined for the airport shuttle?

Thankyou for all the help..you guys are great

[Propfam 2,288]

57 minutes ago, glorified_toaster said:

I didn't know of the save and quit bug until I started reading up trying to figure out the crash issue, so that is definitely a possibility.  The airport shuttle bug is news to me, and I do have that in the city in question, and I did recently delete and move it in order to put a museum where it was.  Come to think of it, the one other time this crash-when-loading-city issue came up (about a year ago in a different region) it was after moving the shuttle elsewhere (if I'm remembering right).

Was there ever a fix determined for the airport shuttle?

Thankyou for all the help..you guys are great

I got some info from the LEX

Spoiler

Quite often, the advisors annoyed me with their requests to build an airport in my city for boosting the local economy. Now there are excellent airport sets around, and there are the "BSC Functional Airports" that also offer various airport shuttle lots. While I thought this is a great idea to avoid building an actual airport in every city, the whole set is rather large, and I was looking for a small and simple solution.

So I went ahead and designed a bus station myself, using Khiyana's modern bus stop props, then had a closer look at the Airport Controller, and modded it, so it would accept my airport shuttle lot as functional airport. The capacity might look a bit high, but I picked a value that should serve cities up to 500,000 residents. If you need more, simply plop another airport shuttle lot, as they hardly need any space, and look great in any busy part of your city.

Caution! Crash alert!

This lot is NOT compatible with any other functional airports, such as the BSC Functional Airports. For all players who are using functional airports in their cities, I created an identical bus terminal lot, which pretty much has the same values, and which works like a regular bus station.

If you want to use this download, please bulldoze all other functional airports (apart from the Maxis ones) in your cities and remove the files from your plugin folder. In addition, you need to bulldoze my airport shuttle lot in any of your cities before you uninstall it again. Otherwise, the game will crash instantly when you try to load your cities, and the files will be permanently damaged.

This airport shuttle lot is only intended for players who don't want to use another functional airport set. The bus terminal lot can be used without further caution, though.

And in the comment section

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

In the Lot Configuration exemplar, change the LotConfigPropertyZoneTypes from Ploppable (0x0F) to Airport (0x0B) to fix the city corruption when bulldozing bug.

Thanks.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

1 hour ago, glorified_toaster said:

Was there ever a fix determined for the airport shuttle?

Yes indeed. I solved it.

Hang on while I find the thread. I attached a fixed version of it to a post.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

Ok, found it. It's this post:

The key part is to backup your region first, then remove the original mod, install my mod, and go into each city which has that lot plopped and bulldoze it. Save. Then exit the city tile. The bug with the original is it created the airport sub-file information when plopped, but because of having the 0xFF instead of 0x08 in the Lot Configuration file it didn't know to remove said airport sub-file info when bulldozing. Since the only change in my fixed version is that one data variable it sees that when bulldozing the old lots and it removes the other extra data. There are more details in the linked post (and the entire thread) if you are curious.

Edit: Wait. It looks like I never attached the file anywhere.

Edit Too: Ok, now it's attached to that post.