Testing Zoom Crash Issue

[postal1984 0]

Ive been reading this thread the last couple days because i also developed the zoom problem... i think i might have solved the problem but im going to test it some more in the morning...

when i installed plugins i kept the .rar or zip files in the plugins folder...first i deleted all the rar files

then i went to sound settings and turned sound/music off

and i went to graphics settings and turned everything to low

everything seems to work fine so far, no zoom crashes yet...when before EVERY time i zoomed it would crash

im going to go through graphic settings and try them on medium and see if it works tomorrow morning

i have a feeling that it was the sound causing the problem, i read a few replies talking about sound and onboard sound is what i have..because i tried reinstalling it before without any plugins and i got the same problem...i used to play the game fine months ago without any crashes and this problem just kind of popped up

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I don't crash, but on the other hand, my sound hasn't been working for ages.  I have an on-board AC97 sound board.

Sounds like you might be on the right track.  (No pun intended).

[Melody 0]

HELP! I just reinstalled SC4 after a year of not playing. I downloaded the updates from SC4 website, I have not installed anything other than that. When I log onto game and pick a city to try and start to build I crash to desktop everytime, whether I zoom in and out or just stay still. Can anyone please help me with this?

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Hi, melody.  Welcome to Simtropolis.

You really should not have put this here as it is a very specialized thread.  Could you please start a new topic on this?

Please include in the topic, as well as your problems statement (you could copy and paste it) the information on your playing environment:

What version of SC are you running?  SC4, RH, or Deluxe?

What machine do you have with respect to:

• CPU
• Unused Disk Space (storage)

• RAM (memory)
• Virtual Memory (Page file parameters, (initial, maximum))
• Graphics card and driver level
• Sound card and driver level
• DirectX version
• Operating System and Service Pack Number

This is a common problem and any of the above may be the cause, singly or in combination.

[Cleavus 0]

Thanks to all for the various bits of advice. I have BTD as most and this is most definately when I zoom. (although this NEVER used to happen!

Theres a bit mentioned at s4.com about a line in the "graphic rules.sgr" file that might help some people.

reference at http://simcity.ea.com/help/faq.php

I am also wondering whether we have all had something downloaded to us in the last couple of Microsoft auto updates!

This has only been happreing to me since my PC seemed to be recieving quite a few updates - like over a 3 day period.

I strongly urge people use Doublekiller though - I am still wading through the dupes.

My question is though - I have all my buildings in seperate folders in the plugin dir, but what if a lot shares a .dat file with another lot in a separate folder? ie StHelen'sProps.dat is used by lot "20 Fenchurch" and "St Helen's_JS". So do you put StHelen'sProps

in the root directory of S4/Plugins, or just in ONE of the the two folders, or in both? - hence a doulbe up!

Can a lot still function if its .dat file isnt in that folder?

Also we all agree all "essential files" must be in the root of Plugins, does that go for ALL .dat files, or just ___props.dat? - I'm confused!!! - what goes where????

So many questions as all Kiwis have, but Cheers all and what a great forum, I am not alone......

[Cleavus 0]

Thanks to all for the various bits of advice. I have BTD as most and this is most definately when I zoom. (although this NEVER used to happen!

Theres a bit mentioned at s4.com about a line in the "graphic rules.sgr" file that might help some people.

reference at http://simcity.ea.com/help/faq.php

I am also wondering whether we have all had something downloaded to us in the last couple of Microsoft auto updates!

This has only been happreing to me since my PC seemed to be recieving quite a few updates - like over a 3 day period.

I strongly urge people use Doublekiller though - I am still wading through the dupes.

My question is though - I have all my buildings in seperate folders in the plugin dir, but what if a lot shares a .dat file with another lot in a separate folder? ie StHelen'sProps.dat is used by lot "20 Fenchurch" and "St Helen's_JS". So do you put StHelen'sProps

in the root directory of S4/Plugins, or just in ONE of the the two folders, or in both? - hence a doulbe up!

Can a lot still function if its .dat file isnt in that folder?

Also we all agree all "essential files" must be in the root of Plugins, does that go for ALL .dat files, or just ___props.dat? - I'm confused!!! - what goes where????

So many questions as all Kiwis have, but Cheers all and what a great forum, I am not alone......

[Cleavus 0]

Thanks to all for the various bits of advice. I have BTD as most and this is most definately when I zoom. (although this NEVER used to happen!

Theres a bit mentioned at s4.com about a line in the "graphic rules.sgr" file that might help some people.

reference at http://simcity.ea.com/help/faq.php

I am also wondering whether we have all had something downloaded to us in the last couple of Microsoft auto updates!

This has only been happreing to me since my PC seemed to be recieving quite a few updates - like over a 3 day period.

I strongly urge people use Doublekiller though - I am still wading through the dupes.

My question is though - I have all my buildings in seperate folders in the plugin dir, but what if a lot shares a .dat file with another lot in a separate folder? ie StHelen'sProps.dat is used by lot "20 Fenchurch" and "St Helen's_JS". So do you put StHelen'sProps

in the root directory of S4/Plugins, or just in ONE of the the two folders, or in both? - hence a doulbe up!

Can a lot still function if its .dat file isnt in that folder?

Also we all agree all "essential files" must be in the root of Plugins, does that go for ALL .dat files, or just ___props.dat? - I'm confused!!! - what goes where????

So many questions as all Kiwis have, but Cheers all and what a great forum, I am not alone......

[Gray Fox 0]

I am currently running the European version of Sim City 4 (no Rush Hour and not Deluxe version) with no modified files and the update and I am experiencing this crash as well. Its mostly disconcerting due to how random it is for me. It can occur as soon as within 10 minutes of working on a city or over an hour. I have an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ with 1GB ram and a evga Geforce 7600 GT KO videocard so I am sure its not a performance issue. It really is sad that this game has been out for so long but EA will not take the time to address this problem.

Anyway I'll be watching and good luck guys.

Edit:  Oh yeah forgot to mention, I have had this crash not only when zooming but you'll love this, when clicking the floppy icon to save my progress.  =P

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

The game really does not understand dual processors at all, and can get confused because of the way multi-tasking was written.  Use the task manager to set the program  affinity to a single processor when you get to the initial black screen.  (CTRL+ALT+DEL, do it, then close task manager and click on the game in the taskbar).

[____----____ 37]

Originally posted by: postal1984 Ive been reading this thread the last couple days because i also developed the zoom problem... i think i might have solved the problem but im going to test it some more in the morning...

when i installed plugins i kept the .rar or zip files in the plugins folder...first i deleted all the rar files

then i went to sound settings and turned sound/music off

and i went to graphics settings and turned everything to low

everything seems to work fine so far, no zoom crashes yet...when before EVERY time i zoomed it would crash

im going to go through graphic settings and try them on medium and see if it works tomorrow morning

i have a feeling that it was the sound causing the problem, i read a few replies talking about sound and onboard sound is what i have..because i tried reinstalling it before without any plugins and i got the same problem...i used to play the game fine months ago without any crashes and this problem just kind of popped up

quote>

 

i think u may be onto something here with the sound idea i played all last year

with many plugins without sound and never had any kinda issue, however recently

i have been using a different computer with sound and developed these zoom crashes

on occaision so i will try with it off and report back

AK

[rwtd_barbie 0]

I set shadows and city detail to low which reduced the BTD crashes significantly.

[infinitum19 0]

I have almost all the STEX downloads, noticed crashing even if the game is still loading. I unload everything in the plugins then pasted back in batches. And I found the culprit. Its the diagonal mod something (Forgot it already). This somehow reduced the instance of crashing. Then I followed the earlier threads by downloading the doublekiller and whoa it found many duplicates. Then the game played well with a minimized instance of crashing.

[rwtd_barbie 0]

Originally posted by: rwtd_barbie I set shadows and city detail to low which reduced the BTD crashes significantly.quote>

 

Update: I used DubleKiller and updated my soundcard drivers. That made the game crash worse! I set # of sims showed, special effects and shadows to low, and city detail to medium--now the game doesn't crash at all!

[mightygoose 92]

right me i have just had a tenfold increase in CTD as in in the last 25 hours. the only thing i have added in that 24 hours is a diagonal slope fixer mod... although having said that imay have reached my machines capacity with 2min boot up time and 4.1gb of plugins however these have been streamlined so no readmes or pics or duplicates are left... currently the first zoom out i make crashes, first view rotation crashes and draggable maxis tool crashes and heck changing speed crashes...

[Dark_horse 0]

I run Simcity 4 deluxe v on both of my computers. One is a pent three with 5g hardrive and my other computer is compaq 1500ns with 80gb and 2 g speed. My newer computer to date won't even run sc4, I have tried everything to get it to play and it won't open. My older pent will run everything that I throw at it with the exception of a few mods.

1. simoleon mod, I 've yet to see 25m or a mill in a new city

2.Landmark mod set with jobs...it totaly crashed my computer and sends me packing back to desktop. the only way that they will work a little is if I start them in a new city, puting them in plugins into an old established city does not work as it will crash as soon as it loads. This probably has something to do with the extra jobs an people that will appear out of no where.

Another trick that you can use is when you save and exit do it at the lowest possible setting, meaning zoom in untill you can make out the sim faces. Your ram won't have such a hard time re loading when you try to log back on.

I have a small city with 120k people jammed in it and another with 10k... the one with 10k won't open but my city with 120k will.

The difference is that one is using NExis illegal grow ops that I have moded myself into a variety of farms and parks...As far as I can tell the parks use as much ram as the empire state building in my 120k city.

To date the very worst bat is one called shung hing V2..or something like that. The designers made a great looking building with really poor specs.....it was like plopping a radiation hole in the middle of the game. it didn't matter what I did,the damn thing was a pollutant and is now in a little file called "s**t for future editing".

My advice is to learn a little about editing and modding, Take the best from others and redo the specs to make them more enjoyable to you....just don't upload them as many people here don't feel that copying is flatery but forgery.

I have discovered that cyle dogs tree props are a real drain on resources, although they look great.

The best way to get the most out of downloads are with a new city.....decide what you want to plug in before you play

Make folders for all of your regions and cities, if your computer is like mine you probably have lots of hard drive and not so much ram. It's a whole lot easier on your resources to file everything in a seperate folder....eg...Timbuktu plugins, New City plugins....ec....You may have 20 copies of the same thing but much better than crashing your game every 5 minutes. this way only takes 5 minutes to load into your plugins,I like to cut and paste...works great for me and almost no crashes.

If something does not work put it in the S**t folder and anylize it sc4 tool. Some people who create things don't do a great job at deciding how much garbage or energy something uses. I downloaded a building that killed 120k people in 2 game months..(10 minutes), upon further investigation I found that the creator had the garbage and water pollution set to about 180 and 120 over the entire city, I think that the beubonic plague was probably about 60.

ED

[Dark_horse 0]

I run Simcity 4 deluxe v on both of my computers. One is a pent three with 5g hardrive and my other computer is compaq 1500ns with 80gb and 2 g speed. My newer computer to date won't even run sc4, I have tried everything to get it to play and it won't open. My older pent will run everything that I throw at it with the exception of a few mods.

1. simoleon mod, I 've yet to see 25m or a mill in a new city

2.Landmark mod set with jobs...it totaly crashed my computer and sends me packing back to desktop. the only way that they will work a little is if I start them in a new city, puting them in plugins into an old established city does not work as it will crash as soon as it loads. This probably has something to do with the extra jobs an people that will appear out of no where.

Another trick that you can use is when you save and exit do it at the lowest possible setting, meaning zoom in untill you can make out the sim faces. Your ram won't have such a hard time re loading when you try to log back on.

I have a small city with 120k people jammed in it and another with 10k... the one with 10k won't open but my city with 120k will.

The difference is that one is using NExis illegal grow ops that I have moded myself into a variety of farms and parks...As far as I can tell the parks use as much ram as the empire state building in my 120k city.

To date the very worst bat is one called shung hing V2..or something like that. The designers made a great looking building with really poor specs.....it was like plopping a radiation hole in the middle of the game. it didn't matter what I did,the damn thing was a pollutant and is now in a little file called "s**t for future editing".

My advice is to learn a little about editing and modding, Take the best from others and redo the specs to make them more enjoyable to you....just don't upload them as many people here don't feel that copying is flatery but forgery.

I have discovered that cyle dogs tree props are a real drain on resources, although they look great.

The best way to get the most out of downloads are with a new city.....decide what you want to plug in before you play

Make folders for all of your regions and cities, if your computer is like mine you probably have lots of hard drive and not so much ram. It's a whole lot easier on your resources to file everything in a seperate folder....eg...Timbuktu plugins, New City plugins....ec....You may have 20 copies of the same thing but much better than crashing your game every 5 minutes. this way only takes 5 minutes to load into your plugins,I like to cut and paste...works great for me and almost no crashes.

If something does not work put it in the S**t folder and anylize it sc4 tool. Some people who create things don't do a great job at deciding how much garbage or energy something uses. I downloaded a building that killed 120k people in 2 game months..(10 minutes), upon further investigation I found that the creator had the garbage and water pollution set to about 180 and 120 over the entire city, I think that the beubonic plague was probably about 60.

ED

[willisj 1]

Thanks MatrixDJ and all who have put so much time into this problem. I first noticed it in Jan when I u/g my PC to a 3Ghz P4, 2Gb DDR2 RAM and PCI Express video card. Every time I zoomed in, I lost the lot (should save more often!).

I've gone thru my plugins folder and taken out everything and then re-installed it making sure no duplicates and being a little more careful with what I installed there. So far it seems to be working well.

Although I have nothing technical to contribute to this topic, I just wanted to thank everyone for their efforts and for making it so that I can now play my fav game again.

Great work, great site!!!!!!!!!!

All the best,

will

[danurve 1]

Just finished reading this entire thread -sheesh!

Honestly one of the reasons I spend what I did for upgrades was so this friggin game would play better. I can't realy add more reasons for the crashes, ironicaly I feel a little better knowing it's not just me.

From a 1.4 t-bird ( like most of you with similar set-ups and that didn't crash ) to a 3200 939, got good pc400 1-gig of ram, Epox board, 256 meg agp, tried - oh - 1/2 dozen drivers. Crashes with sound, without sound, usually BTD, a few blue screens. I'm going to try finding the dups but after the upgrade and re-install I was fairly carefull about where stuff went, folders etc. Then run the game in lower video settings. Which in it's own place is a frustrating aproach. Considering again the cost of upgrading only in the end having to use a lesser setting to still play the game.

Btw since the upgrade & reinstall I have been playing a regeion built up with Nam installed. Has anyone tried uninstalling Nam and still experienced these crashes? Or perhaps reinstalling the Nam for a different setting for cause & affect. 

Hi my name is John, and I'm an SC4 crashoholic

[danurve 1]

Darrrrrrrrr
Welp, you all know the story 

edited for update; There is a utility that removes all previous ATI driver files, then I reinstalled 5.8 and with city details on high everything else med-low, back to hardware acceleration it doesn't crash as often.

Hi my name is John, and I'm an SC4 crashoholic

[MiniMark 7]

Hmmm a great idea for a thread. I will have to watch it especially when I see your topic is exactly the problem that i get now and then. Especially from the forsaken mouse weheel

[Neddiggis 1]

I was having this problem on one of my computers but not the other, and they are running identical plugin folders. I found that saving as soon as I got into a city seemed to minimise the amount of times it crashed. Actually, I'm not sure that it's crashed after I started doing that.

[Cougar2004 127]

I have no mods/plugins/etc installed. Just a 100% pure SimCity 4 Deluxe install (with the SC.com required EP1 Update). And i have the zoom crash pretty often. So im not convinced it has anything to do with downloads, conflicts, incompatabilities. I even have only the most basic non-rci buildings in my region. Boring? Maybe. But a good place to start troubleshooting. I'm leaning towards graphics drivers and/or bios settings.... still working those out.

[Cougar2004 127]

Oh I have one other comment... and i dont want to put it in the other message above because its a different discussion of this topic. I just read someone else talking about sound issues may be the cause. Well, I had a SoundBlaster Live without the proper BIOS update therefore resulting in computer freezes 99% of the time (while not playing SimCity). Therefore, I completely disabled the sound driver in the Computer Driver Manager. SimCity played perfectly for the last couple years that way. But I got to want sound, updated my BIOS this year, reinstalled, and now sound works 100% of the time (except maybe its related to SimCity now being unstable, especially during zooms). Just more to consider.

[willisj 1]

BarbyW mentioned about the screen updating time and it jogged my memory about my own crashes. I've deleted & re-installed everything as suggested on these threads (more than once.... GRRRR!) and each time it appeared to work without a crash for varying periods of time. Then, out of the blue a crash to desktop.

I have noticed now however, that I seem to be able to play, without crashes, if I use the zoom buttons and not my scroll wheel on the mouse. Could it possibly be something to do with a driver conflict for the mouse????? My crash problem didn't really begin until I installed my new wheel mouse & drivers (replacing my stock standard 2 button Microsoft mouse) in Feb this year.

I make no pretence at any tech knowledge of SC4 but thought the above might give the real Gurus on here another line of investigation. Hope I am not leading you all up the garden path.

Thanks to all for your hard work on this.

Regards, Will.

[Murdough 0]

I recently got a new montherboard with a new CPU and 1 gig of ram, becuase my old mobo died, anyway.

I run with almost everything on high settings, I have noticed that having city detail on high increases the number of CTD exponentially as there are so many lightposts, trees, people, cars, etc that appear, and remain visible at higher zoom distances. I really don't want to go back to the ugly low city detail and have dull lifeless cities.

I get a lot of crashes when zooming, I haven't really paid attention to how fast I zoom or how much time I give it before trying to move (although being the impatient type that I am I'm sure I don't give it all day ) From now on I will try to pay attention at how I zoom, and write back, I will also try playing with the sound off/on as some have suggested.

One strange thing that happened yesterday was that I clicked my university because they were about to strike, the window came up and everything started slowing down and I noticed it didn't say University in the title bar, but a bunch of gibberish of numbers and letters and equations. Then it just crashed to the desktop after a couple seconds.

[rewright 804]

This is a very helpful thread and has helped eliminate some possible problem areas, but not all.

I ran the game (SC4 with the RH update) on a 1.2g, 256m ram, 128m video machine and loaded any lot, bat, mod I wanted with no crashes. It got a little slow on larger cities but no crashes.

Now I have a new machine: 4g, 1g ram, 512m video and it crashes continually. I've uninstalled the game and reinstalled a new version of Deluxe, removed all old regions, and started slowly adding stuff back into the plug-in folder. It seems as though certain buildings start the crashes, like NDEX Ballard Park for instance.

I am inclined to agree the problem may be the dual core processor. I would like a more detailed  explanation  of how to go about changing the computers settings that some have referred to.

The crashing sure takes away some of the enjoyment of the game.

Thanks to all for the great work in troubleshooting this problem.

[Khiyana 0]

First: Sorry for my bad english and thank you for this wonderful thread!

My Game still crashed BTD when I'm zooming in or out. So I deleted my hole Plugin-Folder and re-download (for my opinion) the most important files, but the game was still unplayable.

I spent some time on testing out, and now this will work fine at my PC: (Core2Duo E6400, Asus Mainboard with onboard sound, 2 GB RAM, Geforce 7600GT):

I had defrag my my harddrive and set the virtual memory on 4GB on C:,

I changed the "Graphics Rules.sgr" like the way on this site: http://simcity.ea.com/help/faq.php

I run the game with just 1 Processor (open the Taskmanager after starting the game, rightclick on the SimCity entry and set it on single processor)

Now my game will run fine with nearly 2 GB in the Plugin folder.

Thank you, people!!

[rewright 804]

Originally posted by: Khiyana First: Sorry for my bad english and thank you for this wonderful thread!

My Game still crashed BTD when I'm zooming in or out. So I deleted my hole Plugin-Folder and re-download (for my opinion) the most important files, but the game was still unplayable.

I spent some time on testing out, and now this will work fine at my PC: (Core2Duo E6400, Asus Mainboard with onboard sound, 2 GB RAM, Geforce 7600GT):

I had defrag my my harddrive and set the virtual memory on 4GB on C:,

I changed the "Graphics Rules.sgr" like the way on this site: http://simcity.ea.com/help/faq.php

I run the game with just 1 Processor (open the Taskmanager after starting the game, rightclick on the SimCity entry and set it on single processor)

Now my game will run fine with nearly 2 GB in the Plugin folder.

Thank you, people!!quote>

I have tried right-click in the Task Manager but did not see anything that clearly indicated "single processor". A little more detail on this would be helpful. Also on "Graphics Rules".

Thanks!!

Dick

[Khiyana 0]

Hm, I have a german windows....I don't know the right phrase. After right-clicking the simcity entry, go to the bottom entry of the menu, it should sounds something like "affilitation". After clicking this point a new window will plop, there you can choose the cpu you want to take for the game.

About the Graphic Rules.sgr: Open it with an editor, search for this entry: "property noPartialBackingStoreCopies true" and change the "true" into "false". (without quotation marks!).

Hope, this will help.

[cameron1991 0]

Ive found that if I set the affinity for SC4 to 1 processor and set the priority to high I cannot get the game to crash in a city with a population of 400k