Mac User, 40K city, CTD on loading city...

[deziner 0]

Hi everyone, new to the forum so forgive a newb for asking a repeat question if I've overlooked an answer somewhere else.

I see a bunch of CTD threads. Wondering if there is anything concrete to CTD when loading a city with a population of around 40K. Mine is between 40 and 41K

I'm playing in the San Fransisco region, NAM 38 installed... everything going great. My city climbed to just over 40K and now it won't load with out crashing to desktop.

I've introduced my son to the game. He's digging it. Playing his own city in a different region. His city loads fine. I'm worried he'll share the same fate as me.

I'd restart a new city but feels pointless if I'm going to be capped at the same population for some reason.

I haven't really used any of the more "exotic" NAM pieces, if there is such a thing. I had recently started using 2-lane highways, split, for 2 lanes each way and was starting to experiment with an overpass but hadn't liked what I made, so deleted. Was wondering if maybe there is something in my city that my version wasn't liking.

Any insight appreciated! Paid for it and it's driving me nuts that I can't play!

[deziner 0]

Just this morning I moved to NAM39 hoping maybe a NAM update may correct this. It did not.

[rsc204 21,866]

If you remove the NAM, does this change things? I get it, that means making a new city which may be doomed, but it's the only way to be sure if NAM is making this happen.

Personally I feel it's very unlikely, whilst the controller (code that makes NAM work) is very large by default from NAM37 onwards, that's really just eating RAM. If you have the 64-bit version of SC4, and sufficient free memory, you are freed from the restrictions Windows users have of just 2GB for SC4. Likewise, it seems you can better utilise modern multi-core CPUs and GPUs, in other words performance can be excellent, with the right hardware.

I have heard others mention this problem, most recently here, but it doesn't appear common enough to call an outright bug. All I can state for certain, I have no such problems (tested cities with 179k sims), and I'm only running on a Mac Mini 2012 (base model with Intel HD4000 GPU) upgraded to 8GB Ram. It occurs to me, I'm using a pre-existing city and DAT Packed plugins, which theoretically could skew the results. If I find time, I'll try some tests to get a new city beyond 40k Pop., but if this were some game limitation/bug, I think we'd be hearing a lot more about it. It might be interesting to see how your Mac compares to the OP of the linked thread, although anecdotally it appears DAT-Packing seems to help, which would indicate a resource issue.

[deziner 0]

Open to removing NAM as an experiment, curious if you can tell me what happens to a city containing NAM pieces if it does open successfully? Items disappear? Roundabout etc...

[CorinaMarie 29,884]

42 minutes ago, deziner said:

Open to removing NAM as an experiment, curious if you can tell me what happens to a city containing NAM pieces if it does open successfully? Items disappear? Roundabout etc...

Yes, many things will disappear and also no longer work correctly.

So, as an experiment, it's ok to remove and look in your city tiles, but I suspect saving them that way would be a bad idea.

[countermoon 46]

I had the same problem: crashing at the 40,000 population. Do you know about dat packing? After I did that, I had only a couple crashes, but for the most part it's fixed. I highly recommend trying this.