[Solved] Error whenever attempting to save city

[jiffy427 83]

Hey y'all,

I used to be huge into SimCity 4 and decided to go ahead and buy it on steam and get back into it. Unfortunately I have run into an issue where everytime I attempt to save my city it shows an error message "ERROR saving city (city file name)". I've exhausted all solutions that I could think of/came across online

-Went through antivirus software ensured that SimCity 4 was exempt

-Removed all plugins

-Ran the program as an administrator

-Switched the number of cores to 1

-Installed the SimCity 4 Launcher

-Uninstalled and then reinstalled SimCity 4

 

None of these have prevented the error and I am unable to play any city as it won't save. If anyone could provide some insight or possible solutions that would be greatly appreciated as I do really love this game and hate that I am currently unable to play it

[CorinaMarie 29,577]

Hiya, @jiffy427.

1. What's your Operating System (OS)?
2. Are the cities you've tried saving old, existing ones, or in the default sample regions, or both?
3. Will you attach the config-log.txt file?

For # 3, that will be named your_computer_name-config-log.txt where the "your_computer_name" part is the name given to your comp during the OS install. It can be found in the installation folder in the same location as SimCity 4.exe.

[jiffy427 83]

2 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

Hiya, @jiffy427.

1. What's your Operating System (OS)?
2. Are the cities you've tried saving old, existing ones, or in the default sample regions, or both?
3. Will you attach the config-log.txt file?

For # 3, that will be named your_computer_name-config-log.txt where the "your_computer_name" part is the name given to your comp during the OS install. It can be found in the installation folder in the same location as SimCity 4.exe.

Thanks for the reply! Sorry for not including this information previously;

1. I am currently running Windows 10

2. I just redownloaded SimCity from steam so the cities are the default sample regions and I have tested it in new cities created in new regions with the same result

3. Attached below! Thank you again!

DESKTOP-NU4PT4I-config-log.txt

[CorinaMarie 29,577]

Looks good in the config-log.txt (other than we might be able to convince the game to treat your video card as fast, but that's not a concern right now).

The other thing I forgot to ask for is the SimCity Exception Report 2020.07.20 09.29.30.txt file if there is one. It'll be in Documents\SimCity 4\Exception Reports and all those numbers will be different than my sample name.

[jiffy427 83]

22 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

Looks good in the config-log.txt (other than we might be able to convince the game to treat your video card as fast, but that's not a concern right now).

The other thing I forgot to ask for is the SimCity Exception Report 2020.07.20 09.29.30.txt file if there is one. It'll be in Documents\SimCity 4\Exception Reports and all those numbers will be different than my sample name.

I think this should be the right file.

SimCity Exception Report 2020.11.14 19.59.31.txt

[CorinaMarie 29,577]

I've peeked in there and it seems to be from long ago:

Exception time: 11/14/2020, at 19:59:32.

Likely this was from your prior install when the game actually crashed to the desktop. Maybe the ERROR when saving now doesn't generate a new report. Btw, that one is from the Origin version of the game. Did you fully uninstall the Origin one before installing the Steam version for the first time?

[jiffy427 83]

10 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

I've peeked in there and it seems to be from long ago:

Exception time: 11/14/2020, at 19:59:32.

Likely this was from your prior install when the game actually crashed to the desktop. Maybe the ERROR when saving now doesn't generate a new report. Btw, that one is from the Origin version of the game. Did you fully uninstall the Origin one before installing the Steam version for the first time?

Hmm did not consider that, I have gone ahead and made sure the origin version of the game was uninstalled and have gone ahead and reinstalled the steam version, however the exemption reports in the documents folder still appears to be for the origin version. Is there somewhere else where the exemption reports may be for the steam version?

[rsc204 21,806]

2 minutes ago, jiffy427 said:

Is there somewhere else where the exemption reports may be for the steam version?

Not really, pretty much all versions of SC4 use the same location for User Content, Documents\SimCity 4\, so anything there will be shared or reusable between different versions.

Honestly, I'm not personally a big fan of digging into exception reports, because they rarely help to pinpoint the root cause of the problem. If you can't save cities, but can load them, that really points to a permissions issue, i.e. Windows or some 3rd party (usually security) software is not allowing the game write access to that location. You should try to take ownership (that's your user account) of the folder SimCity 4 under Documents, including all subfolders/files, that'll probably resolve the issue.

[jiffy427 83]

17 minutes ago, rsc204 said:

Not really, pretty much all versions of SC4 use the same location for User Content, Documents\SimCity 4\, so anything there will be shared or reusable between different versions.

Honestly, I'm not personally a big fan of digging into exception reports, because they rarely help to pinpoint the root cause of the problem. If you can't save cities, but can load them, that really points to a permissions issue, i.e. Windows or some 3rd party (usually security) software is not allowing the game write access to that location. You should try to take ownership (that's your user account) of the folder SimCity 4 under Documents, including all subfolders/files, that'll probably resolve the issue.

Thank you for your response! I went through and changed the ownership however the error is still persisting. I have my user account having full control of all SimCity 4 files. Are there any other possible issues?

[jiffy427 83]

6 minutes ago, jiffy427 said:

Thank you for your response! I went through and changed the ownership however the error is still persisting. I have my user account having full control of all SimCity 4 files. Are there any other possible issues?

I restarted the game and am no longer getting the error saving city, however it is crashing to desktop whenever I open a new one. I was able to get the correct exception report for it now.

SimCity Exception Report 2021.09.21 14.30.11.txt

[rsc204 21,806]

2 minutes ago, jiffy427 said:

however it is crashing to desktop whenever I open a new one.

Do you have the NAM installed? If so, have you correctly patched your game with the 4GB Patch? NAM 37 and newer, generally require this or the game runs out of memory trying to load a city. You can very quickly test this, if you can open a city with the Network Addon Mod folder removed from Plugins (temporarily, just stick it on the desktop or wherever), but it CTDs when the NAM is present, almost certainly that patch (however much it may seem), is not correctly applied.

[CorinaMarie 29,577]

1 hour ago, rsc204 said:

Honestly, I'm not personally a big fan of digging into exception reports, because they rarely help to pinpoint the root cause of the problem.

Generally the only part that is of use is:

Exception code: 0xC0000005 (-1073741819) ACCESS_VIOLATION.

Which completely supports your suggestion there was a permission problem rather than something else.

[rsc204 21,806]

6 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

Which completely supports your suggestion there was a permission problem rather than something else.

 

I'm not saying they are completely unhelpful, but unless you can match the error with the source code somehow, I most often find it's simply quicker to pin-point the cause based on the reported problem. I mean if you can read but not write, there aren't a whole lot of reasons why that might be, since we're far beyond the days of flicking the write protect tab and forgetting we've done it.

[jiffy427 83]

3 hours ago, rsc204 said:

Do you have the NAM installed? If so, have you correctly patched your game with the 4GB Patch? NAM 37 and newer, generally require this or the game runs out of memory trying to load a city. You can very quickly test this, if you can open a city with the Network Addon Mod folder removed from Plugins (temporarily, just stick it on the desktop or wherever), but it CTDs when the NAM is present, almost certainly that patch (however much it may seem), is not correctly applied.

Yup that was it!! I had a wonky script in the steam startup that was having saves go to the wrong folder and had NAM installed incorrectly. Went through it all again and read the instructions a bit more carefully and now it's working beautifully. Thank you all so much this was really helpful and can't wait to get back into it!

[duggie35 1]

Im having same issue, Ive installed NAM 45. Cant save any progress  what so ever. Unclear, about scripts and if I installed NAM incorrectly. I think I did, everything works fine until I exit region and save. "Error Saving City" every time. I also have SC4 Launcher with Autosave enabled, changed permissions. I cant quite wrap my head around this solution that fixed jiffy427's problem as Im not all that tech savy. Will need help walking through steps to figure it out. 

Thank you 

[rsc204 21,806]

So the first thing we need to know is what was happening before you installed NAM 45? For example is this a new install of SC4 and you just happened to install mods before trying SC4. Because there really isn’t anything the NAM does that would affect your ability to either load or save game files.

Am I correct in assuming the game loads fine and that you can play, just not save progress? Which specific methods have you tried to save the game?

I’m fairly certain this is a permissions issue, like how a pass card for an office can define which doors you can enter, your Windows logon dictates both what you as a user and those apps you run can and can’t do. The error you are seeing means that SC4 as an app, does not have write access to the location needed to save data. We can be sure you have read access because otherwise the game couldn’t load a city either. The question is why doesn’t SC4 have write access, by default to the User\Documents\SimCity 4\Regions folder?

I should start by telling you that this is not default Windows behaviour, in other words there should be no such restrictions for a user with Admin rights. Admin rights just means a higher level of access, intended for a user who Administrates or manages the PC. The first account created on a PC must have such rights, but if your PC has more than one account, you need to check you have such access.

Based on my experience around these parts though, the most likely explanation is you’ve installed a 3rd party security app and it is blocking access. You can either whitelist SC4’s app (manually tell the security software SC4 is ‘trusted’, i.e. not to restrict it) or just temporarily disable such software and see if you can save now when playing SC4. It’s not a bad idea to disable the internet connection also if you try the latter.

Making things more complicated, by using a launcher, you have ‘nested’ or ‘inherited’ permissions. Because the App you actually ran is not the actual SC4 one, but the Launcher, which as part of its tasks, then starts the actual SC4 app. Just as a user has certain permissions, so too do both individual apps, as do the folders/files where the save files reside.

You need to see if the game can save properly if the Launcher is not used to run the game. If you can save when running without the launcher, but not when using it, that pretty much means there is a inherited permissions issue here. Again it is possible for third party anti virus/malware or security software to block things only in one of these two scenarios. Which may further complicate matters, but the baseline test here is whether SC4 can Save when ran without anything else potentially interfering in the process. From there you can see which part of the whole is actually causing the problem, by ‘switching one option on at a time’.

[duggie35 1]

First, thanks for replying. I have downloaded SimCity4 originally from disk until I discovered Steam, confident everything including previous versions of NAM is now deleted. I have installed/reinstalled steam version multiple times, with/without launcher and it successfully saves game progress. Now I add NAM 45 to the mix, I have nothing but trouble installing NAM 45 windows/batch (black screen shows all files in installation ,failed). Have better luck installing jar version, which is weird because that's the Mac version, but when I go to play everything works except I cannot save any game progress including auto save.  I have Windows Defender as my antivirus

Below is my computer specs

Windows 10
Processor    Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-7100 CPU @ 3.90GHz   3.90 GHz
Installed RAM    8.00 GB (7.89 GB usable)
Device ID    59375974-C880-44CF-9E08-D4232371614D
Product ID    00326-00813-99655-AAOEM
System type    64-bit operating system, x64-based processor