Too many plugins ?

[patrick_lfc 0]

Do I have too many plugins ?

After spending downloading plugins from a newly-discovered BATs website (capitalsim.net), my plugins folder now got to 4.4GB (probably downloaded 1-1.5GB worth of plugins today). I run SimCity 4 on a 2017 Macbook Air with :

- 1.8 GHz Inter Core i5 processor

- 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

- Intel HD Graphics 6000 1536 MB

After starting the game for the first time hoping to add some of these new BATs to my cities, the region menu was blank, with every single menu in the game blank as well (no texts at all). It also crashed a few seconds later as well. I have moved some plugins outside of the folder and restarted the game, which works fine now. My question is; is my computer not able to process so many plugins in the game with its capacities OR is the game corrupted by a file in one of those BATs, to which the solution would be to install them one by one til I figure the culprit (I have to admit I have less than 2GB available as storage available, but I don't know if this can affect the gameplay or not).

Any help is very much appreciated.

PS: Also wanted to do a shoutout to every BATter and modder out there, you have turned this game into a +20 year long adventure and it is impossible to get bored thanks to your many uploads for this game!

 

[rsc204 21,867]

So it's worth being aware of the information here, though I stress right now it's certainly not your immediate problem:

https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/759219-mac-64-bit-sc4-custom-content-patches-no-more-ctds/

Note that there are files that can cause the game to CTD during the load of a city or when trying to place an affected lot. Since you have not yet gotten this far, there is something else going on here and either it's a system resources problem or another unique Mac problem.

The Mac game has a strict limit for the number of files/folders that can exist within Plugins (not the the size of the data), before the game becomes unstable, at extremes it could very well prevent the UI text correctly loading and cause other weirdness. But for Mac users it's pretty much mandatory to DATPack your Plugins if you are playing with mods, which can be done using JDatPacker on a Mac.

Quote

JDatPacker is a tool for consolidating folders of SimCity 4 plugins. This can speed up the game's performance, and on macOS, this helps alleviate issues with the Aspyr port's known "number of files limit", wherein exceeding a certain number of files/folders within the game's Plugins directory can cause the game to crash.

Anyhow DAT-Packing is step one, but with so many Plugins, it almost seems inevitable you will run into the first issue I mentioned at this juncture. But for the time-being, it's about getting a functioning region screen, if you can do that with all 4GB Plugins, then your computer can probably handle it. Note uniquely the Mac version is 64-bit, so can theoretically address more RAM, whilst under Windows is has an absolute limit of 4GB and I've known PC users with 10GB upwards of mods loading fine, albeit very slowly and with a knock on effect on in-game performance.

Of course your computer has to be able to keep up, I can tell you the following as a guide of sorts:

• A 2012 Mini with a HD4000 and slower (older) i5 / 8GB handles the game real well.
• Whilst upgrading from 8 to 16GB hasn't been for nothing, for example I see my Mac no longer compresses memory, if I'm honest it doesn't really make things run any quicker.

A lack of HDD space isn't ideal, what is that 2GB as a percentage of the disk?, generally it's recommended to have as much HDD space reserved for Virtual Memory as you have physical RAM. That said, if you've enough RAM this won't actually ever be a problem for you, but if your system is using it all and needs to dip into Virtual Memory, that could be a problem. However, I'm uncertain how MacOS handles this, it could be the 2GB you see, includes a reserved space for VM. But you might want to try and archive some data to an external disk to free up some space. Certainly temporarily moving some large files just to check if it helps is worth a try.