Ideas for Improving SimCity 4's Performance

[bluedragon012 22]

Hey all, First I want to thank you all for helping me last month with getting a new modded playthrough of SimCity 4 going. following Indiana Joe's guide has added a wealth of content that I couldn't even dream of having back about 4 years ago.
 

 

However there is one big thing I've noticed, is the performance of simcity4.. It isn't what you call the best, at times.

I'm aware that, in order to prevent crashing you have to use only one core on multi core systems.. and thus.. that's the limiting factor. As time goes on and cpus change and add even more cores, this game will be harder and harder to run.

A little about my system:
Amd Ryzen7 5800x, 32gb ram, nvidia gtx1060.

A little about me:
-Somewhat technically savvy but coding is something nearly foreign tome. I understand how its done, but I could not do it to save my life. So I may not be fully aware of all the work others have done over the years. I'm also wanting to do a live stream of this game when I finish adding all the building and stuff from that guide.

 

I'm thinking its time to discuss what to do about that.

I'll go first:

The first is a "simple" fix:

Somehow trick SimCity 4 into thinking that  there is only one core.

- Is there a way to make a virtual machine do this? (Initial search results on Google don't provide definitive answers.) if that is something that can be done, Then we could get this game running nice and smooth with modern performance to back it up.

The second is a "Harder" option.

- Go the rout Open Roller Coaster Tycoon 2  did and basically rebuild the game, but still require a legally owned copy and its game files to run.

I'm very much aware that this is probably not the option most peeps want to do. How much do we know about the backend of SimCity 4? How open is the current code of the game? Would EA shut it down if tired?

RCT2 was built in assembly, so I think the project creator knew assembly and formed a way to extract that and read it? I'm not sure, but my point is there a way to do that to this game?

The third option:

- A community effort to get in contact with EA or the original developers of SimCity 4 and see if a 64bit version with modern processor support could be made?

This is probably not going to work unless a lot of folk chip in support somehow, and even then, EA may see no benefit to it even if they re released as a enhanced version for a quick cash grab.

 

I just don't want to see one of my favorite city builders go the way of many other old games: only able to run on systems of the era. All the content made for it gone to waste on sites like this. Its wild in 2 years, this game will be 20 years old!

 

Do you all have other ideas? Are there already tricks like this out there? Did a miss a forum post that is basically this topic?

[Whte_rbt 1,431]

Option 1 would have additional issues brought up from the VM, such as limited graphics memory. There can also be issues with cursor doubling and whatnot. Option 2 has been discussed  in depth before. On several occasions. The most recent attempt at option 3  was by @OrSpeeder concerning trying to get the rights to fix the multiprocessor bug, but there's been no report back yet.

We all wish they would let us fix it, but I get the feeling that EA doesn't want to invest any effort into this game, as they would see it as an admission that the SC games they have made recently are utter failures.

That, or they don't want to give up IP rights on 18 year old software that they still charge $20 for.

[bluedragon012 22]

10 hours ago, Whte_rbt said:

Option 1 would have additional issues brought up from the VM, such as limited graphics memory. There can also be issues with cursor doubling and whatnot.

I sadly don't have the videos in question. But over on Linus Tech tips I swore they made gpu pass through thing? (Eliminating the worry about graphics memory). I'll do some homework on it from other IT peeps I know and more googling.  As for the cursor thing, If you have multi monitor, you can full screen the Virtual Machine on one monitor perhaps? My ubuntu on a VM doesn't seem to have this issue.

 I'm considering testing but Id have to find a method for the VM to think its one big'ol single core processor. 
 

Quote

Option 2 has been discussed  in depth before. On several occasions.

That's good to hear! What's holding a team back from this? Fear of EA lawyers? not being worth the time investment? A need for being paid but opening a legal can of worms with EA?

 

10 hours ago, Whte_rbt said:

The most recent attempt at option 3  was by @OrSpeeder concerning trying to get the rights to fix the multiprocessor bug, but there's been no report back yet.

(Joke proposal): We all collectively twitter bomb/ review bomb with a copy and paste the request to fix the bug and put at the bottom "EA WE ARE TRYING TO FIX YOUR GAME FOR FREE WHICH WILL LEAD TO MORE SALES! DONT YOU WANT MORE MONEY!?" 

Serious proposal: We do the above politely. 

[Whte_rbt 1,431]

The GPU passthru option I have explored previously. To get the passthu working properly I had to be using VM Workstation Player and then use an older card that still has driver support for direct X7 thru to 9.0c. This trick doesn't work using a newer card as the support for direct X7 has been somewhat overwritten by recent developments (DX10-12). Setting the VM to single core is easily do-able, you just need to change the 'virtual CPU' slider in the Player setup menu to '1'. This will restrict the OS that can be installed upon it as more modern OS's usually require dual core as a minimum these days.

As to option 2, while its been discussed before (hell, I remember having this chat with Nonny), the pool of talent required has never really come together on this site. The closest anyone has come is probably @simmaster07, who was put in the enviable position of being sold a largely unencrypted version of the game by Aspyr for his Mac. After this emerged as news he was hit by EA with some fairly hefty Non-Disclosure legalism. EA's response to this situation is mainly what killed off any hope of building an open source clone.

 The recent discussion of option 3 (here: bottom half of the thread) did bring up the possibility of getting Paul Pedriana or Bob Summerwill to make the pitch to EA for us (They  were members of the original dev team), but updates have been somewhat thin on the ground since that conversation.

[Whte_rbt 1,431]

Addition info for Option 1: I believe that an ESXi/vSphere type installation would also give the capacity you are looking for, but will take much more configuration as its intended for commercial/industrial system deployments. I have studied all this stuff again recently as part of my college course, if you need help getting the initial setup configured let me know.

[Whte_rbt 1,431]

Apologies for the multiple posts, here's some visual guidance for the number of vCPU's:

Oracle VM Virtualbox:

VM Workstation Player:

[bluedragon012 22]

16 hours ago, Whte_rbt said:

Apologies for the multiple posts, here's some visual guidance for the number of vCPU's:

ohhh... this looks good. And thanks for replying. I'll look into it closlier when I got some extra time. 
Perhaps this will kick off some peeps that lurk/ just pass by via google searches here to try some stuff as well.

[simmaster07 1,220]

Oh hey, sorry I'm just seeing this now.

On 6/7/2021 at 3:12 AM, Whte_rbt said:

As to option 2, while its been discussed before (hell, I remember having this chat with Nonny), the pool of talent required has never really come together on this site. The closest anyone has come is probably @simmaster07, who was put in the enviable position of being sold a largely unencrypted version of the game by Aspyr for his Mac. After this emerged as news he was hit by EA with some fairly hefty Non-Disclosure legalism. EA's response to this situation is mainly what killed off any hope of building an open source clone.

Unencrypted probably isn't the best way of putting it. The Mac version of the game did (and I think still does, at least on Steam) embed the names of functions in the game, so you could see that some part of the machine code is labeled "cSC4City::SetCityName" and work out the details. The Windows version doesn't, so it takes orders of magnitude more effort to modify the code. And even then it's not as good as having the source code in hand.

I haven't gotten an NDA from EA Games - at least not yet, and hopefully not ever. The problem is that the community is extremely touchy about anything approaching a violation of the game's EULA, and EA's reputation doesn't help that, so openly rallying people to reverse engineer the game and documenting the process would rock the boat too much.

There's also a practical reason not to go the OpenRCT route: if you can replace EA's copies of SimCity 4 with a reverse-engineered version of the game, you might cut into whatever residual sales EA still gets from it. This is when you really risk attracting the ire of their lawyers, and it's extremely difficult to do that kind of work without breaking the law. I prefer sticking to DLL mods and quality-of-life improvements because (1) they're a win-win: SC4 players get more enjoyment out of the game, EA gets bugfixes at no cost, and I get to learn some tricks; and (2) they're easier to defend legally if it comes to that.

There is one glimmer of hope though: last year, EA released the source code for Command & Conquer based on the strength of its modding community, even decades after its release. It wouldn't hurt to ask nicely if we could help SC4 out the same way. The trouble is that a lot of the old guard at Maxis are gone now, so I don't know who in Redwood we could even ask.

[ironjaw 54]

On 8/17/2021 at 10:05 AM, simmaster07 said:

 

There is one glimmer of hope though: last year, EA released the source code for Command & Conquer based on the strength of its modding community, even decades after its release. It wouldn't hurt to ask nicely if we could help SC4 out the same way. The trouble is that a lot of the old guard at Maxis are gone now, so I don't know who in Redwood we could even ask.

THAT! is amazing news about C&C. I remember playing it for countless hours. Such a hit back in the late nineties. It could be a good idea to pitch an opensource SC4 through social media. I'm assuming rights might have been sold for a game nearing 20 years. I think IP rights last no longer than  15 years, (or somewhere like that, thinking pharmaceutical companies have direct competitors (generic firms) that make copies of generic medicines, unless the patent or IP can be extended with new technology. The law is set in a way towards innovation more than protection, I mean you do get baseline protection but only up to X amount of years, so you could ask for the source code to be distributed as abandonware, freely) so the same rules would apply to EA and Maxis, and the software is no longer sold by EA so you're not eating into their revenues as its an older defunct software. I do believe fear is not rational and a 20 year old title rights can be secured easily if the right patent attorney with negotiating software is sought for advise. The only thing they can protect is the copyright of SimCity as a registered trademark.

[TogaMasterJohn 706]

It should be noted that the source code to the original SimCity (1989) was released to the public some years ago. It was released under the name "Micropolis" - which was going to be the original name for the game.

I don't know if we'll ever see the source code to SimCity 4 get released anytime soon (though one can dream and try). It's "too new" and it still is a profitable older title (although you'd have to have the game's assets to play the game once you compile it, so there's potential for more money to be made by EA).

We'd probably have a better chance at a source code release of SimCity 2000, though. I personally would love to see that one. (I could see it now... Micropolis 2000? Micropolis 2?)

Micropolis for Unix:  https://github.com/osgcc/SimCity

[Turnstyled 486]

I have the CPU as you, @bluedragon012, A Ryzen 7 5800X. I also have a 2080 Super and 64 GB of RAM. I have a lot going on at startup and a lot of USB devices plugged in. I want to keep it that way. The problem there is, though, that with SimCity 4 running, I'd get 100% CPU utilization on CPU 0. Task Manager shows me that Human Interface Device Service, also known as hidserv.exe, and Windows Management Instrumentation are taking up a lot of CPU utilization.

When I opened one of my old cities in SimCity 4 on my new Windows 11 installation, I'd get mouse stutter because CPU 0 was being completely utilized.

I decided to set the CPU affinity of SimCity 4 to one of the cores that wasn't showing much utilization. I saw that Core 6 was one of those cores. I edited my shortcut target to C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c start "SimCity 4.exe" /affinity 6 "E:\GOG\SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition\Apps\SimCity 4.exe" -CPUPriority:high -w -Intro:Off -CustomResolution:enabled -r3840x2160x32 -d:DirectX -Cursors:fullcolor -UserDir:"E:\SC4Folder\"

As you can see, I'm not using the CPUCount:1 option that is often recommended to use for SimCity 4. Setting CPU affinity doesn't work when using that option. -UserDir"E:\SC4Folder\" is pointing to my SimCity 4 user directory that is on one of my solid state drives.

You can in the screenshot below that I took with one of my cities open that Core 6 and Core 0 are not being completely utilized. Thus, I no longer have that stutter from CPU 0 being completely utilized.

If you'd like a tutorial on how to set CPU affinity for an application, you can find one here: https://www.eightforums.com/threads/cpu-affinity-shortcut-for-a-program-create-in-windows.40339/

I hope this helps! I should note that I'm using dxwrapper to run the game in 4K. On these forums, there are discussions about using wrappers to play SimCity 4 in higher resolutions

I plan to upgrade to a Ryzen 9 5950X at some point because the Ryzen 5000 series is the end of the road for the AM4 socket.

Edit: My CPU is overclocked to 4.7 GHz on all cores, but the reason that it's being reported as 4.66 GHz has to do with the fact that I have Virtualization-Based Security enabled so that I can run Windows Sandbox and Microsoft Edge Application Guard. This past week, Virtualization-Based Security has been making the journalistic rounds because it is enabled by default on Windows 11 on OEM systems. It can cause a performance loss of up to 25% in games.

[CorinaMarie 29,664]

55 minutes ago, Turnstyled said:

C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c start "SimCity 4.exe" /affinity 6 "E:\GOG\SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition\Apps\SimCity 4.exe" -CPUPriority:high -w -Intro:Off -CustomResolution:enabled -r3840x2160x32 -d:DirectX -Cursors:fullcolor -UserDir:"E:\SC4Folder\"

^ My bold added.

With your techy knowledge maybe you know for sure if it's really true that -CPUPriority:high in the target line doesn't actually do anything.

I launch my game by putting the target pointing to a batch file that contains: Start "" /AboveNormal /wait "C:\GOG Games\SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition\Apps\SimCity 4.exe" -CPUCount:1 -w -intro:off -CustomResolution:enabled -r1280x1024x32 When I compared in Task Manager this does actually change the priority whereas the one in the shortcut parameters did not.

(The /wait is because I also have a second batch file called after quitting the game that backs up any city tiles which have changed to incrementally named folders.)

 

[Turnstyled 486]

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

With your techy knowledge maybe you know for sure if it's really true that -CPUPriority:high in the target line doesn't actually do anything.

Thank you so much! I don't know anything about that. I never checked to see if the priority was high. I'll start using your method of setting the priority!

[CorinaMarie 29,664]

13 minutes ago, Turnstyled said:

I'll start using your method of setting the priority!

Yay!

/High is another option ofc, but be sure to never ever set it to /Realtime as that will preempt things like keyboard and mouse response.

[Turnstyled 486]

8 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

Yay!

/High is another option ofc, but be sure to never ever set it to /Realtime as that will preempt things like keyboard and mouse response.

Oh, wow. I'll make sure not to do that!