Game CTD on large city - help wanted

[rozerick 0]

Hi guys -I'm new here, although i've been lurking for a while, and have been around over at the EA forums. However I have a problem that I think you lot would be able to help with. I've already been discussing things with moose, and while he has been more than helpful I thought 2 heads are better than one etc.

To summarise the problems I'm having:

1. In my large city, I am suffering a predictable and precise CTD. It occurs in my city of population ~ 220,000 , and does NOT occur in any of my smaller cities. IT does not occur when scrolling or zooming, or looking at graphs or data views. However, as soon as I attempt to zone some new land, the game will CTD.

2. Moose suggested that it may be something to do with the fact that I am running an unpatched version of Deluxe - This first caused a problem as the .exe file that I was using was a cracked no-cd one, not the original. As a result, the patch would not install...
...or so I thought - having uninstalled, restarted, defragged and reinstalled, the patch still crashes during installation, at 13%top bar, 1% overall completion. This is odd...

3. Moreover , the same crash will still occur on that particular city, whether I am running from the CD itself or from the crack. I had not changed any settings prior to the original instance of teh crack either.

My game is a clean install, and I am not using ANY mods, custom lots, Plugins etc.

My computer is brand new, with the following specs:

Nvidia Nforce 4 ASUS A8N-E MOBO
AMD 3800 x64 'Venice' Processor
Gigabyte Tech NVidia Geforce 7800GT 256MB
2GB Corsair RAM on a single DDR2 stick
160GB Maxtor 7500RPM HDD
8 Channel Onboard sound
600W PSU

It was professionally built, not a custom home made jobby, and the core temp of either the GPU PSU MOBO or CPU has never exceeded 49deg C.

As I said, I have already had some discussion with Moose on this matter over at the EA forums, at
http://simcity.ea.com/bbs/messages.php?threadID=7d2337b1f93f02512f1afd710ef780af&directoryID=263&startRow=1&openItemID=item.263

Please ask for any more information and I will try to answer as best I can.
Thanks in advance, Rory

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

That really is a difficult problem, and I think I am at the end of my expertise without hands on. I'll leave you to the gentle mercies of the hardware guys. Hopefully, you will hear from Sam Flash.

Guess who one of the moderators of this list is?

[Tolomar 5]

start with Greyviel's up and running startup tutorial. Follow it (Skip the Transit options and go straight for the latest version NAM, You NEED the Official downloads and patchs to play the game properly...they fix so many things


play that as is ...no other custom stuff....see how that goes....try each city type

not really sure where to begin after that....strange always at 220k...exactly  220,000 ? or just anywhere after 220k

I've never exprience this or heard of this before ?????

[rozerick 0]

Thanks for replying guys :-)

@ Moose - Thanks for all your help over at EA forums as well, and you certainly had a good bash at it, so thanks again.

@ Tolomar - Thanks for the suggestion of Greyvails tutorial -one question though.. where can I find it? I also wont have a chance to do much over the next few days as it's the end of my uni semester, and then I'll be away from my comp 4 a month at home (can only take my laptop with me, plus if I have  SC with m I'll NEVER do any revision...)

As for the crash it happened in my city that was around 220K population, but was doing an up and down cycle between 200 and 240K

At least that's what I thought... I've now found that since the reinstall I'ts happening on every city that I've tried so far, although they have all been in the same region. Don't know if it'll happen in a new city or region yet, will attempt to test that soon. So the crash can now be said to occur at any population, and it happens as soon as I try to place/zone anything (roads, rails, RCI zones, Landmarks, Civic... anything) but if i'm just viewing scrolling or zooming it's fine. Any more help anyone?

[rozerick 0]

OK this crash now seems to be getting more and more random - when I first experienced it, it was only while zoning in a single city. I thought that it might just be that city  -then it happened somewhere else. Thought It might be that region - then it happened in a new region. Thought it was just while zoning.. now it seems to occur at any time.

WHY WONT IT LET ME PLAY SIM CITY

On a side note, the patch still won't install either, which I now think would at least solve some of my problems.

Please help with either issue, or I may have to go on a rampant disaster spree... think of all those poor simizens...

[DPMorse 2]

You may have a hardware issue, such as a bad ram stick or something is overheating.

Have you checked the CPU and video card temps at the time of the crashes?
Can you swap out the memory?

Ah, I just saw that you mentioned the temps...

Still, it could be hardware - a ram stick or even the power supply. The wattage is fine, but the unit itself could be marginally faulty.

[rozerick 0]

Definitely not either - Comp runs absolutely fine on any other application I care to try, including video editiing, DVD playback, HL2, etc - all of which would show a problem as well if it was a bad RAM stick.
Plus the comp is brand spanking new, so there bloody well shouldnt be a problem with the RAM lol.

As I said tho I think installing the patch would help, but it simply wont let em - this is the SKU2 update from Deluxe to 1.168(? -whatever the latest is) and it only gets to 1% completion before I get an application failure notification....

Any help on the patching issue would be most helpful atm i think.

[DPMorse 2]

Are you trying to patch directly from the EA site, or did you download the file before running it?

I always had trouble trying to do it from the site, so I download the file.
And once I had to redownload the file because of some error - forget now what the error was, but it would not install. The second download worked fine.

[rozerick 0]

I've tried both from the site, and have downloaded twice, and on neither download has it got past 1%. From the site it simply sticks at "your download has been prepared and is now installing. Please wait"

[locolobo85 0]

It sounds like you may be back to square one.

If this were my situation, I'd remove ALL traces of SC4 from my system. Save files and all. Maybe backup the save files off the computer just incase they were not part of the problem. Reboot, defrag+scan, reboot once into safe mode and run cleanmgr /sageset:50 (checking all but the last two) from the Run prompt (Win key + R), reboot once again and start all over with a clean install followed by an immediate patch install. Reboot yet again and keep my fingers crossed as I began all over again hoping for the best.  If my problems were solved,I'd just suck it up and start my cities and regions over again from scratch and hope that this time throught the problem doesn't come back.

That's just my 2 cents. That's were I would start. It may not help the situation at all but I'd know I was starting fresh with SC4 before getting into the system. As for me, I had to get much deeper into my system to stabilize and run SC4 on a P4 2.4c 512/800, 1G, ATi 128 M R9550, Abit AI-7 system using onboard sound. But my problems were most likely the ATi video card that has produced headaches for many a Simtropolite.

ps:  note the space in cleanmgr(space)/sageset:50

[rozerick 0]

Thanks for the replies guys - however the patch issue seems to just have been (2) bad downloads. Just downloaded it again and it patched successfully. Now to see whether the issue is fixed...

@ locolobo - I also had an ATi issue with sim city 4 on my laptop (128MB mobility 9600) which caused a similar problem. It was oneof the resasons I chose an NVidia for my new comp... ah well.

[DPMorse 2]

Glad to hear it.

Good Luck.

[rozerick 0]

Righty - well no crashing now so far as I can tell...

Oh you just KNOW there's gonna be something else now

...now it would seem taht reward buildings are no longer working - eg I have one city now on 5.5K pop, but still no Large elementary scl, and the same town still hasnt been offered mayors house, despite Mrating of 30something... any ideas?

EDIT: Ignore problem - game works fine including rewards on comp and game restart - now all I have to do is wait till the NAM's back up. YAY

[greyveil 37]

You should be able to download the NAM at the link below, hope this helps........

STNAM

[locolobo85 0]

Here's to some headache free city building.   I'm glad it was a simple fix.