Game crashes upon clicking the "zones" view layer

[TheMurderousCricket 5,104]

Hi Everyone,

I am looking for some help, due to an unusual crash which happens in only one of my cities (so far) upon entering the view menu and choosing the "zones" view layer. 

I launched a city which I haven't opened in a while and failed to do so, twice.

I went for the standard procedure of taking out some of the plugins folder, believing there might be a conflict with a building that already exists in the city. I recently added some plugins so I thought that it might be the root of the problem. However, it eventually turned out that the city can be loaded with all plugin folders and run normally which almost certainly means that there is no conflict.

However, after opening the view layers menu and clicking the "zones" option, the game instantly crashed.

I've been able to reproduce this behavior several times and I'm fairly sure that this causes the crash. I don't understand what might be causing this though.

In two other cities which I tested, clicking the "zones" view did not cause the crash. In the one discussed - every single time.

Do you Guys have any ideas what might be causing this bizzare trouble? I attach the latest logfile from the crash if it helps at all.

 

SimCity Exception Report 2025.12.11 00.24.52.txt

[Null 45 3,113]

3 hours ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

Do you Guys have any ideas what might be causing this bizzare trouble?

The only thing that log tells me is that the crash occurs inside OS code that SC4 is calling. The MDMP file would contain slightly more information than the text file, especially for crashes that involve OS code or plugin DLLs. But since we don't have the debugging symbols for the Windows version of SC4, it is very hard to say what the game may be doing when a crash occurs.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,104]

So you're saying that there is really no way to diagnose it?  It's bad news really. I am having great difficulties with that city.

I did some more testing in the meantime. The city seems to open on a whim - sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't... What is even worse, I was unable to save it - the game just freezes and I even had to log out to return to desktop (I waited a good deal of time, but it was unnaturally long). 

I then used a backup version of this city from June. Although it opened correctly and could be saved, some of the custom R building models vanished and were not visible, safe for the ground textures underneath them.

I pasted the backup city save file into my current folder and launched the city again, only to see it crash again after a short time. Some of the custom building models were not visible again.

I'm starting to believe that the city file or tile is corrupt somehow. It's just a guess but I remember that I might have changed the building style of the disappeared buildings before June, without resaving the affected city... This could probably explain why some custom houses are invisible despite Plugin folders being all in place (they appear correctly in other cities). But again - it's just a guess from what I remembered doing.

[Null 45 3,113]

1 hour ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

So you're saying that there is really no way to diagnose it?

I don't think so. The call stack makes it look like a crash caused by memory corruption, which could potentially be related to some kind of save game corruption. The only SC4 code in that call stack is a call to an OS function for freeing memory, which crashes due to it being corrupt.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,104]

Too bad. I wish we had tools to read these files...

So meanwhile I took pictures of my city in order to rebuild it from scratch. Rather small one, so I decided to nuke it and start over. I couldn't even obliterate the town!  The game crashed on the "Busy wiping out city" screen.

After that, back in SC4, I was greeted with a perfectly flat and green city tile (not a trace of water bodies or elevations).

Finally, after all this, I decided to import a copy of this city which I stored in another repository, within the "Regions" folder.

That seems to work for now... I was able to open the city, run it, change a few things and then save it several times as a means of test.

I also noticed, that all of the vanished buildings in this copy appear as they should. No BAT is missing or borked. This seems to support the theory that the save was corrupt in some way, especially given the BATs that vanished despite there being no change in the plugins.

 

[TheMurderousCricket 5,104]

I'm getting nervous and really worried anytime something like this happens. I had another crash of this type just today when I got CTD while trying to load another city. I then tried to stress-test it but did not experience problems to the same magnitude as with the one I decribed in my initial post. It was just a single CTD on a loading screen. I could work in it without it kicking me out to desktop at random. Zone view toggled on and off just fine, saves worked. But it really got me worried again.

To be fair, within the city, there were a few signs of trouble that I witnessed previously. There were again some empty footprints which, upon using bulldoze tool, turned out to contain some sort of invisible structure. Perhaps the save is/was also corrupt, but not to such a critical degree like in the first example? I wonder if resaving it straightened things out...

The only plausible reason why this can be happening is that previously I indeed edited some of the buildings for building styles after which I removed them fom the region directory to a completely external folder for use with different regions. So far, two old cities (which were not opened in a long time) were affected, so it makes me think that they could have been saved before the contents were removed, hence probable corruption?

Anyway, ever since the first problem of this sort, I'm now doing frequent backups of my entire region every two weeks or so... It's really a very unpleasant issue.

[Lab Rat 16]

Automated Notice Message

All posts after 1 March, 2026 @ 01:37 GMT were lost in the site crash.

We've added this message thread divider in every topic across all forums for what were then active threads. (We decided active is if the most recent extant post (from the backup) was on or after 1 January, 2026.)

This divider serves as notice that the conversation was interrupted. Answers and further discussion which used to be here have been lost. Keep this in mind when replying. Our hope is to rebuild what is missing.