Testing Zoom Crash Issue

[MatrixDJ 5]

Hello All and welcome to my testing thread!

The purpose of this thread is to gather and give information about the zoom crash issue. My hope is to narrow this issue down far enough to solve it. I feel that it would be a great contrabution to the community and give it another notch to show how great it is. I really hope this helps everybody in the long run!

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Here is the history with this issue within my experience. I have had SC4 since the day that it came out and the same as RH. I was always able to play the game just fine until my city got to a certain size, which is a different topic. I never truly discovered ST till about a year ago and started downloading and donating to the community.

As of recently, I hadn't been playing the game so much because it kept crashing even with a small region size of about 20,000 Sims. I then read a thread about this person having a crash only when they either zoomed in on something or zoomed out. I was able to discover after that point that I was indeed having the same problem! I did a little bit of research and emailed both ATI and EA about this and got back a bunch of garbage so I decided to troubleshoot it myself.

I backed up my plug-ins folders and completely re-installed SC4:RH, applied the patches and updates from simcity.com and played the game with the following installed:

• Expanded UI Mod

• game_coding_errors_fix v2.1

• Industry Quadrupler

• Services Doubler

• All Maxis made BATs and LOTs

• My Las Vegas Map (which can be found on STEX)

• Madison Simcity High School

• Newman Inc Hospital

• Clean Incinerator

• Orbital Power Receiver

• Water pump with 500000w a month

• City Hall Package

• Less Abandonment

• Network Add-on Mod (NAM v05.09.30

• Opera House Fix

• Transport Map Mod

• White Sand Beach

• All props and textures from before

And the game ran great! This led me to believe that it was a specific BAT, LOT, or a Prop/Texture conflict.

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Just for your information so you have all of it, all of my props and textures are in the same folder unless specified in the documentation of them to be installed in the 'Program Files' location. I have gone through, installing in batches, sixty-one BATs and LOTs from the STEX. All thus far seem good and okay to handle however, I did have a crash recently and am investigating it out further right now! Here are the specs of my system:

Intel D865GBF Motherboard @ 800MHZ FSB

Intel Pentium 4 3.0Ghz with HT

2GB DDR PC3200 RAM

Sapphire Radeon 256MB Video Card

Sound Blaster X-Fi

Western Digital 7200RPM 120GB

If you'd like to help me with this and you are having the same problem PM me and I will let you know what you can do to help! Please don't hesitate to ask questions either! There is no such thing as a dumb question, just unanswered ones. Do not post here if you are here to criticize SC4 programming or what we are doing here... it won't help!

Finally, there is an attached file of all the plug-ins that I have installed and thus far, seem to be okay (with the exception of my last crash, which I'm still testing) I will update this file on a regular basis so check back and download the new file in this post!

More to come...

Edit by N_O_Body: Pinned as discussed. Anyone with information please add to this thread

SC4_Plugins_Apr06.zip

[tchaos713 5]

I will be watching this thread very closely, although most of my crashes seem to have to do with puzzle pieces mysteriously touching transit enabled lots...oops...

[MatrixDJ 5]

tchaos713 - Thank you for your support!

I am currently revamping my entire ...My Documents\Simcity4\Plugins\PropsTextures folder to ensure that there are absolutly no duplicates between the MEGA packs and individual prop and texture files. I have an intuition that this may be causing some conflicts in the game. Does anybody know if this is true? Also, does anybody know if the dat files for props and textures should be in the My Documents or Program Files folder?

Further, I am considering creating a windows based application that would detect duplicates between the MEGA packs and individual files if this turns out to be true. But that is later...

I am also experiencing a few crashes right now too... and it was not crashing until I started getting a decent amount of Sims in my city...

Will post these results by Thursday...

Edit:  Combined the two text files into one Excel spreadsheet.  This file can be found at the bottom of the first comment in a zip file.  Enjoy!

[tchaos713 5]

dedgren turned me on to this great tool. Doublekiller, available here, can scan your plugins folder and root out any doubles of files that you might have. I found 21MB of extra files, some of which I am sure were causing conflicts.

[DPMorse 2]

That is an excellent little program.

The thing I am wondering about is if I should delete the duplicate model and description files. Do the lots that are in separate subdirectories need their own copy to function correctly?

[MatrixDJ 5]

Originally posted by: DPMorse

That is an excellent little program.

The thing I am wondering about is if I should delete the duplicate model and description files. Do the lots that are in separate subdirectories need their own copy to function correctly?quote>

DPMorse - You should not have any duplicates at all. When you have duplicate model and description files, it litterally creates a second building!

dedgren - Thank you for the Great Tip I actually found a couple of duplicates! This really helps me out a lot! Thank you!

To reiterate what I am doing at this point... I am redoing my entire collection of props and textures. I have deleted all of them out of the single folder and reinstalled them according to the dependacies of the BATs and LOTs that I have. I also downloaded all of the MEGA packs of props and textures! In addition, I read through each of the descriptions of each and made sure to delete the ones that the instructions indicated! More to come thursday night... If you'd like to see what props and textures I have installed, see my previous post and download the text file. I updated it with the finds from the Double Killer application! Kudos to dedgren for the find!

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Thanks for the tool. I'll give it a try.

[MatrixDJ 5]

Hello again all,

Sorry about the delay posting an update! I got held up in some unfortunate personal matters I also noticed that this topic is now being rated and I would like to take this time to thank you for your support!

As of today, the plug-ins into SC4:RH have not changed so the two text files are up-to-date. I have also discovered that after installing the MEGA packs for some props and textures SC4:RH runs a lot better. It is handling a 240,000 Sims city better than I have ever seen with this amount of plug-ins.

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Tip: When downloading props and textures, keep a record of what you have. This means with the MEGA packs AND individual files, write down or type into a file of what they include this way you will know for sure that you have all the dependencies that are required! Also, do as the instructions say provided by the developer (especially MEGA packs) of the prop or texture and delete any necessary files as they can complicate things and possibly cause issues!

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I am going to continue now with installing buildings into SC4:RH and start determining what files may be causing problems in SC4:RH and will update on my progress either Sunday or Monday depending on how things go.

Finally, I am also starting to observe the exception reports generated by SC4:RH when a crash occurs. I will also update on these at a later date but as a preview, I am noticing a lot of similarities in the stack calls and the instruction data. Maybe somebody could help me determine what these memory addresses mean or are related to in the code!?

Talk to ya soon!

[beatle 24]

Hi MatrixDJ,

I had a similar problem to your zoom crashing issue.  I had not played Simcity 4 for quite some time but recently I started to play again.  I noticed everytime I zoomed in or out in a city,  simcity 4 would crash, giving me a blue screen of death..  Does your computer give you a blue screen of death or does the game  crash to your desktop?

I thought the plugins and downloads were the cause of the problem as well.  I removed the pluggins and downloads and reinstalled the game but that still did not work!  After many hours of troubleshooting I found out that a sound card driver (cmuda.sys?) was the problem.  Windows automatically installed this new driver for me... Yeah I know, weird.  All I had to do was uninstall the latest version of the driver and it fixed the game.

Do you recall if you installed any new drivers lately for your sound card or video card? 

I hope this helps you out..  I will try to give you as much information as possible if you need it.

[Tidalpool 0]

 DoubleKiller is a great tool.  Everyone should have it,  It finds duplicate files very fast as well as easy to use.

[SamFlash 0]

MatrixDJ - Are you sure about deleting duplicate Description and Model files?  I know that you can delete duplicate Lot and DAT files safely but I was under the impression that every lot needed it's own Model and Description file. 

[Alkaola 18]

after a long while of waiting i finally bought a new pc....

but ofcourse ( like my old pc) this pc CAN'T play sc without fuc*king crashes ( *hates maxis and ea for never fixing it* )

so well .... no crashes for two weeks but after today crash after crash.........
i played a new city and just when i zoomed in it just crashed...
I deleted the city ( i thought my city could be corrupt) and now after building a few buildings exactly the same crash problem is popping up...

the question : why i never happened before in other maps, why it DOES crash now.
what have i done?

I downloaded several plugins ( glenni's trainstation, and simgoober's frightstation and more)  ... and today simcity is like old days unplayable cos of the damn crashes....

Again i got disappointed ... my hope is almost gone

[MatrixDJ 5]

Beattle - Thank you for your support on this thread! It makes me feel encouraged to keep going! I am doing it for the Simtropolis community and to further its development! To answer your question, SC4:RH crashes to the desktop, it has never blue screened on me. Funny story though, back a few years ago, I was in school full time and used my USB flash drive a lot and left it plugged in to the computer. I was playing SC4 and it just reset the computer, no blue screen or nothing. I tried again, again and again. Finally, I unplugged it and took it to school the next day and it was fried! Basically it shorted my entire system! Thank god it did not do any damage to my computer and I had the files backed up! Ha! Anyways, my sound card and video card are up to date and I find it unlikely to be the problem but I will for sure keep it in mind when I can find out what these memory addresses are pointing to in exception reports! Thank you for the input! Very Helpful!

SamFlash - I understand what you are saying and I am would have to say delete it. No I am not positive on this but my theory is this: Since SC4 looks at literally everything in your plug-ins folder as a group not individual files, it will see that both files are pointing to the same file name. The only reason I am not sure on this is because they may be different files... Meaning file size, creation date, etc... Is this on your system? If so, would you be willing to try testing to see if it impacts anything by moving one of the duplicates out somewhere besides your plug-ins folder? I hope by chance that they are both either landmark or plopable files for your ease in this! Please post your findings if you decide to do this. Great Question by the way!!!

Alkaola - Your problem is exactly what I am investigating here. If you wouldn't mind, could you take a look at your exception files and look for similarities in them especially the stack dump section of the file! I would really appreciate your feedback on this! Please PM me the results and I am building up to that point after I get all of my plug-ins tested! One thing you can do for yourself is run the double killer application and check for duplicate files. Completely redo your prop and texture downloads just as I have done. Keep a file with what you have and what is included in the MEGA packs. This is truly a help when wondering what files you already have for newer lots and bats! Good stuff! Keep me up to date!

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Now for an update!

Sorry for any grammar errors I have been playing SC4:RH and drinking wine... You get the idea! I have updated the BAT and LOT plugins and Props and Textures files. I have added many BATs and LOTs, I still have many to go through and there seem to be no problems with the existing BATs and LOTs that I can see thus far. I will keep testing the latest additions for a little while longer however! Further, my main city is a little over 300,000 Sims and still running very smooth, I am actually impressed. I have started to expand into the region with some residential. I am mostly focusing on transportation right now and will be for a while now.

If anyone can get anything out of this post, please do what I did with my plug-ins folder! It helped so much! It is described in a previous post.

Keep in mind that if you have any information about this, please let me know. I really need to know what the memory addresses are pointing to in the exception reports. I may start a new thread in the main forum if somebody does not answer soon.

If any of you have any ideas of how I can improve this thread, please let me know! I feel like this post is kind of dry and useless other than responding to people's comments and questions. Please by all means give me some feedback!

More to co

[Alkaola 18]

Alrite, i've investigated it very closely....

So i installed many new props etc...

Well it seems ( on this moment) the crashproblem was caused by the map i played my city on.... just when loading the map and zooming one time in or out it crashed...

When i loaded a medium size city with many farms  a few blocks from the 'crashcity' i zoomed in and out a hundred times on full graphics, and it didn't crash once!!

I'm going to built another city and check out if there are more ' corrupt' cities that cause those crashes, and/or other reasons of the damn crashproblem.

Conclusion (on this moment) :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

When playing a region (custom made in my case) there is a chance that there may be corrupt cities in it that are crashing more often or always when zooming or doing anything else.

Decimating the city isn't a solution (in my case). Let's go on with invastegations to solve this problem.

EDIT1: I played another map and after building a few minutes exactly the same happened... just when zooming in the textures aren't drawing fast enough and after zooming in a few seconds pass and i get dumped to the fu*cking desktop again...

i'm going to remove props and plugins and hoping it will fix the problem

EDIT2: FINAL CONCLUSION::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

I finally found my crash problem.

What did it making crashing my game everytime again? The answer is : PROPS

It took 2 hours to remove all widespread props from CSX and the BSC 

Why i had to remove those? Well i downloaded mega prop packs and i extracted them in my folders without removing the props that was asked to remove.

So it conflicted.... finally i put the BSC and CSX maps out of my plugins ... no crash anymore.. i removed the scattered props and downloaded all MEGA Props and from that moment the game didn't crash one time anymore....

Alk.

[MatrixDJ 5]

Alkaola - Congrats on your find!    I am quite confadent to say that having all these props and textures in order will helf SC4 run faster too!  Also, I hope that you are keeping track of what you have in the MEGA packs and with individual files so you truely can easily keep track of what you have!  See the above comments and Props and Textures.txt file for an example.  This might be more easily done in Excel or even Access if you have the experience with it!  Best of luck with your new found knowledge!

[Alkaola 18]

If you want me to research other things just call me up... i want to solve this problem too ... many of us have these crashproblems

there has to be a way to get rid of it

thanks again MatrixDJ

[SamFlash 0]

Originally posted by: MatrixDJ SamFlash - I understand what you are saying and I am would have to say delete it. No I am not positive on this but my theory is this: Since SC4 looks at literally everything in your plug-ins folder as a group not individual files, it will see that both files are pointing to the same file name. The only reason I am not sure on this is because they may be different files... Meaning file size, creation date, etc... Is this on your system? If so, would you be willing to try testing to see if it impacts anything by moving one of the duplicates out somewhere besides your plug-ins folder? I hope by chance that they are both either landmark or plopable files for your ease in this! Please post your findings if you decide to do this. Great Question by the way!!!

 

After some testing and verifying the results with the creator of some of the lots I use this is the results.  Lots will share dat files but will not usually share description and model files.  Each lot, both growable and plopppable, needs their own description and model files so don't delete any of them.  Out of 60 lots I tested only one worked in both versions off of one set of description and model files.

[Tidalpool 0]

Alkaola,

Thank you very much for your sound advice and good detective work.  I too was having crashing problems for about the past 3 days, and was wondering where to begin to figure out the culprit.

When I read your note I thought I have used DoubleKiller and have gotten rid of the duplicate files, I decided to run the software by using different parameters and low and behold found more duplicates that were in my plug ins  and yes they were props from CSX and the BSC.  So thank you for sharing that is what is so great about this site "most everyone wanting the best game play for everyone".  Thanks again Alaola.

Tidalpool 

[BarbyW 40]

Just as a side note on the CSX\BSC prop duplicates, when BSC and CSX did the MEGA packs they were screened for duplicates and any were removed in the merging process.  I have just done a DoubleKiller check on my props and textures and had no duplicates... but then I removed the files I was told to before installing the MEGA prop packs.

[MatrixDJ 5]

Hello again all,

I have updated the both of the text files for your viewing.  However, the files that were added today 4/3/06 have not been tested.  Also I am going to be compiling these into a single file, prolly an excel spreadsheet for ease of use, viewing and searching.  I am about half way done with this project in determining which of my files is bad!  I have one potential problem file that I have not mentioned because I am not sure whether it is or not.  

From today till I can get all of my files tested updates are going to be few and far between.  I will still log on everyday and check things out on SimTropolis and keep an I on my email for updates in the thread though.  So in that matter, don't hesitate to ask questions, make comments or offer advice!  Everything helpful is more than welcome here!!!

I am still waiting on an answer to my question... Does anybody know anything about reading the exception reports and/or have any information about them?  How can I find out what the memory addresses are pointing to?  Please!  Someone help me with this!!!  I know it is an odd question but I think knowing this information is vital to SimTropolis community.  Knowing this information will help everyone solve there issues and know exactly what they pertain to!

Anyway, have a great day and keep those comments, questions and advice comming!  It is all absolutly awesome thus far!!!

~MatrixDJ

[Alkaola 18]

Originally posted by: Tidalpool Alkaola,

Thank you very much for your sound advice and good detective work.  I too was having crashing problems for about the past 3 days, and was wondering where to begin to figure out the culprit.

When I read your note I thought I have used DoubleKiller and have gotten rid of the duplicate files, I decided to run the software by using different parameters and low and behold found more duplicates that were in my plug ins  and yes they were props from CSX and the BSC.  So thank you for sharing that is what is so great about this site "most everyone wanting the best game play for everyone".  Thanks again Alaola.

Tidalpool 

quote>

 

Your very welcome Tidalpool, I'm just so glad i've helped people out ....

since my prop clean up i didn't expierenced any crashes !!

[BarbyW 40]

I noticed that in the Ptops and Textures file you seem to thave all these in plugins:BSC_Park_Textures_AngledBrick

BSC_Park_Textures_BrownBrickLarge

BSC_Park_Textures_BrownDirt

BSC_Park_Textures_GreyPavers

BSC_Park_Textures_GreyRock

BSC_Park_Textures_RedBrickSmal

BSC_Park_Textures_SandPavers

Only one of these or the default should be in plugins at any one time.

Also any Essentials files should be in the root of plugins not in a sub folder and you seem to be missing the last update of the BSC_Essentials file. Without it some rewards will not work.

[MatrixDJ 5]

Thanks for that catch BarbyW!!! I missed that in the installation instructions.  It is great to have a respected member of BSC aboard on my project here.  Thank you!!!

I have updated the Props and Textures file following BarbyW's find on the BSC park textures.  I should be uploading an excel spreadsheet tomorrow with all of the files in one file rather than using two!!!  I hope it will help

~MatrixDJ

[capo 0]

Like you, I also suffered a lot of game crashes and indeed I lead back the problem to the props/dependencies. I completely deleted my game and installed the 2 updates alone and started working from there. Now Im testing each new building I downloaded in a mega city. I have found that many buildings that are uploaded on the stex can crash the game unfortunately. Some buildings seem to be 'coded wrong' or something. An example is the immediate crash after selecting VdA's Anne Frank House. When I deleted all VdA's Amsterdam buildings, I didnt have any problems any more. VdA is run without dependencies I believe..so it must be the building screwing up the game. 2bad tho, I like his work..I also noticed that some buildings include the props you need when you install. An example is Kingston Market by Simgoober. The installer automaticly installs the Gascooker 4 props.dat file, while that file is no longer needed with the uploaded MEGA packs. If you dont manually delete that auto-installed dat file, the game will crash.If you want, I can help you test certain buildings.

I also have a list of buildings wich I consider to be safe in my game. And my game used to crash whenever I reached a population of 10k. Let me know if you would appreciate my tested buildings please

[MatrixDJ 5]

Capo - Any help here would be appreciated more than you know!!!  Please just upload and show it as an attachment to a reply!  Thank you for your support and knowledge, it will prove to be an asset.  As far as testing lots, I'll have to get back to you on that one but please don't hesitate to dish out what information you have.

Once again, thank you!!!

~MatrixDJ

[Tidalpool 0]

Not sure if this is the place to ask, however it might have something to do with crashes. Is there a hierarchy to how folders should or shouldn’t be inside of the plugins folder? For instance I will put stuff that I download into:     plugins/2^nd quarter 06/Name of zipfile from Simtropolis/      
Will this create problems and make things sluggish? How is everyone else keeping their files organized and reladilable and available to keep up to date?

[MatrixDJ 5]

Tidalpool - Don't quote me on this because I may be wrong but subfolders in either of your plugin folders does not make a difference to SC4.  SC4 loads all of the plugins to memory regardless of where they are in the folder.  This allows you to organize you folder so that you know what you got easier.

As promised, later today I will be posting an Excel Spreadsheet with the two text files combined in to it for ease of use, check back later and I will edit this comment with instructions.

~MatrixDJ

EDIT:  I posted the Spreadsheet in a zip file at the bottom of the first comment in this thread.  Let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions! 

[BarbyW 40]

One of the problems with the props is that new members are arriving all the time and download something like the Kingston Market - by gascooker BTW - and the prop pack is also installed whether you have the MEGA pack or not. I would urge all newer members to READ the Readmes and make sure that they do not have duplicates in plugins.

I have just checked the VanderAap Anne Frank House from the STEX and it seems fine to me but it may be that problems are being caused by downloads from the official site as I know that was posted there. I haven't downloaded anything from simcity.com for a long time as I do not trust it and there is too much plagiarism there as well.

[capo 0]

@ Martix DJ: Allright, I'll create a doc with all the buildings I use that I consider to be safe + textures/props later today. Real busy right now, I just wanted to see your reply

@BarbyW: I got the building from the stex. Perhaps it was another building that caused the crash and it was coincendental (sorry for spelling) that it happened when I selected a VanderAap building. I do know that in the past when my game crashed every 5 minutes or so, crashes would especially happen when you pick a building with a radius. Would you happen to know why that is? Do radius doublers perhaps crash the game? I remember using them in the past. 

I agree with you on that everybody should read the Read me file (thats how I found the installed gascooker prop pack), but unfortunately the Read Me is abused by many uploaders. For every 10 Read Me's I read, I find 6 of them to be completely useless...I can understand why some people will skip it. I must say that BSC read me's are pretty much always excellent, and thanks for those MEGA packs you all uploaded, you helped hundreds of people with that if not more..

[BarbyW 40]

@capo: there have been crashes with poorly modded civic buildings. Usually where they have been set way outside normal parameters. I don't think it is the Radius Doubler that will do that on its own but it may react badly to one of the badly modded buildings.