Mister Giggles

Yes, if you're a programmer and you know how to deal with the wrapper around the .exe. Otherwise, as with many engine bugs, we must suffer with it.

4 months later... I >attempted< to debug the lot. Never found the exact cause of the problem. Yesterday I finally ran it through PIM-X, and whatever PIM-X did fixed the problem. So yeah. When it doubt, PIM-X it. These things may be sent to try us, my friend, but I'll be damned if I don't fight back first. >_>

It's a common bug.

Tis here, good sir.

Hmm... If subway connections are amble, and there's still a lot of abandonment, then the following is likely: You're plum out of jobs for whichever residential occupant type is abandoning. Now this is tricky, since if this is anything other than your first city, the RCI cannot accurately tell you which one is out of jobs. But The Census Repository can! Install it, then read the instructions. But if you want to be lazy, take a look at this image. The information you're looking for is in the "City" and "Drives" columns. The City column shows you the amount of each occupancy type you have in the city. The Drives column shows the innate amount of an occupancy type your city can hold. They do not take into consideration regional demand, only the amounts of jobs and residents the city can optimally hold by itself. What I'm willing to bet, at this stage, is that one of the Residentials is over the Drives number. Or, in a less likely scenario, your city's jobs are being eaten up by a neighbor's (Although ignore the "Commuters from SimNation" number; it displays POSSIBLE commuters, not actual). In that case, start checking your neighbor connections and see who's coming in...

Back long ago, STEX files were loosely categorized (Residential, commercial, civic, fantasy, etc). I miss that. A lot. However, the new version of the STEX allows tagging. This system will allow much easier and quicker searching for desired files than exists at the moment. Currently, it's limited in two ways: 1: Relies solely on the uploader to add the tags. Some people won't add tags at all, defeating the purpose of the system. Others will add redundant information. Example: STEX file name: Mister Giggle's Tower O' Laughs Tags: mister giggle's tower o' laughs The tags do not help anyone find the file, and fails to define what it is. Whereas if the tags were set up like this, it's defined and easier for people to find and scrutinize: Tags: residential fantasy skyscraper The tags in this case indicate that Mister Giggle's Tower O' Laughs is a residential building, has a fantasy design, and is a skyscraper. Granted, "fantasy" and "skyscraper" are somewhat subjective terms, but both of them can be hashed out to mean something that works for the majority of files they're tied to. 2: Old content. And by old, I mean everything that existed before tagging...which is to say 99% of the STEX. Alright, we have the problems. What are the solutions? Well, my proposals: 1: Create a list of tags and what they're meant to be applied to. For instance, skyscraper for very tall buildings, W2W for Wall To Walls, fire station for fire stations, civic for civic buildings, etc. Perhaps some special ones to point out those that have known problems (Immortal lots, growing empty lots, etc). Have this list publically available somewhere so people know what search terms are going to yield results. 2: Give a small group of trusted and active posters the power to add tags to files. These people will be responsible for going through the entire STEX and tagging everything. It'll take months, but let me ask you: How do you eat an elephant? One piece at a time. 3: Disable uploader's ability to add tags. This is to prevent redundant/useless tags from being added which then need to be changed/removed, and keeps the uploader from coming into conflict with taggers in the first place. I believe doing the above will result in a stronger, more friendly STEX where many of the currently obscure classical pieces will be given a chance to shine again. Any concerns, advice, or suggestions? I'd be glad to hear them! Always looking to improve my ideas! Edit: Changed instances of "lot files" to "STEX files", because this system would apply to every file on the STEX.

Taken at a reasonable pace, it wouldn't be overwhelming for people to tag. With the descriptors already added (Impressive!), a lot of the work is done already. What's left are the sub-categorical descriptions (Lowrise, highrise, midrise, fire, water, school, etc...). I'll volunteer, as I said before. I enjoy making people's lives easier, and it's not like I can't spare some time a day to tagging. That made me laugh. Good game, Nonny.

Done. I'm sorry we could not see eye to eye.

Seems to work very well. I've already listed examples of how it fails on the edges. The current approach works well for BROAD application, but the moment someone doesn't include a specific word in the title/description (Skyscraper, financial center) I can't find it unless I get lucky. For example, I like big buildings. Lots of them. There are lots of them on the STEX. Problem: They can't all be found under a single term (In this case "skyscraper"). I have to search half a dozen or more terms (Skyscraper, tower, financial, center, building, plaza, bank, etc...) to find what I desperately crave. Of course, some of these overlap, so a building I so delightfully enjoyed during the skyscraper search will be a dead weight on the financial center search. A great, specific example is Konietzko Fountain. No tags AND fountain is not the first word that comes to mind when you think plazas or parks. Since...plaza and park are generally the first two words that come to mind when you think plazas and parks. >_> Finding it without already knowing it exists is difficult with the current system. This assumes you already understand what you're looking for. When you're just LOOKING at a generic category, like big buildings, searching by dates isn't going to be helpful. The rating system only half-works. Yes, you can set it to display the highest rated files...except that most files on the STEX have a rating over 4.50, completely defeating its purpose. I know this to be true, as I've gone through the whole STEX (Repeatedly) looking for buildings. The YouTube method of thumbs up or thumbs down would work better, but that's a discussion for another time. Keywords work if they're used. Like, again, skyscraper. For the dozens of skyscrapers that don't HAVE this word in the title or description, the keyword doesn't help me find them. Worse, these results are "hard baked" given that the original authors aren't around anymore to change them to some kind of standard. And with so many authors to begin with, a consensus could never be reached on the "right" way to label things. While it is TRUE there would be many more pages with "skyscrapers" in the proposed tagging system, they'd all be skyscrapers. You can further narrow down the search by using "residential" or "commercial". So if you end up with 100 of something either way, at least with the tagging system they're all the category you're interested in. Several mods have already volunteered their time in this thread. Futher, I described how a group of 5 people, tagging 20 STEX files each a day, can have the whole STEX done in 6 months. It only SEEMS very time consuming if you observe it as a task to be done all at once. I don't know how the programming for users/super users is set up on this site. If it's not possible, it's not. But I'm not in a position to know for sure, unfortunately. I cannot assume it's not, though. Ideas are not often drawn from the possible, but rather from the "What if". The initial push will be the hardest. Keeping it maintained won't require nearly the effort nor the number of people given how few files are uploaded a day. Perhaps when 2013 is out there will be a flood of uploads; see below. It's acceptable; I can at least find files if I spend enough time looking for them. I believe it can be improved, in a timely and meaningful manner, and in such a way it can handle all future city simulators that will involve this site (2013). This community has always been willing to tackle challenges when they come down the pipe (CAM, NAM, re-doing the forums) when it serves to benefit everyone, so why stop at search? Google currently uses an enormously powerful algorithm to determine relevance of the results you get. The STEX search is a simple keyword search. They can't be compared. But that's neither here nor there. You're again arguing for going through half a dozen search terms (Residential, apartments, condos, tower, estate, tenement) to find what you're looking for. Each search will have many pages and TONS of irrelevant results. Whereas if the tag system were used: residential, midrise You get every single midrise apartment-style residential building on the STEX in one list. One search and everything related to the subject is available But what's wrong with improving it? Yes, it once sucked. Once it didn't even exist. It kept improving, evolving to meet the demands of the user base. It became more convenient and easier to use. Why not continue the trend? Because it's too hard? Hard work built this fandom, and virtually everything thought impossible about SC4 and its fanbase has been proven totally possible. How to eat an elephant? One bite at a time! Human nature. Someone sees a better way of doing something, they propose a way to do it. Or if they have the talent and position, do it themselves.

Intriguing. Is it a lot you made yourself, or is it one you downloaded? If the latter, could you link to it? If the former, could you attach the lot file to a post and link to the dependencies? I want to test this.

Not that I am aware of, no. It would have to be a very subtle conflict, since every other game of yours works fine. With more information, though, I now have something else to desperately cling too. Tree lots: I find it queer that the vanilla cities work correctly, whereas the self-built cities do not. Despite the fact that the tree lot files slow you down, I'm not sure they're the problem...perhaps they only exasperate the situation. 1: Try to plop a bunch of your tree lots in the vanilla city. See what happens. If it slows down... 2: Remove all your plugins, start a brand new city, and see if it slows down. If not... 3: Add in ONLY the tree lots and their dependencies, and plop a bunch of them. See if it slows down. The last thing you can do to confirm, beyond shadow of a doubt, that the tree lots are causing a problem: Make a big city, vanilla city. 500,000+, every corner of a large tile used. If there's no (major) slowdown, add in your tree lots. If it's not the tree lots, then it's possible something ELSE in your plugins folder is causing the problem.

You've had MORE PCs, none of which have worked with SC4? That quantity of hardware will not so fail so consistently with one piece of software, not even a buggy mess like SC4 can be. Some program you're installing or some configuration change you're making is causing the issue. Whatever it is, it's involved every single system you've built and put SC4 on. I don't see another logical explanation.

That's quite alright...I'm just pulling things out of my hat, as normally what you've done fixes the problems you describe. This system is almost identical to my own, and as before, it runs SC4 fine. Since you've encountered the same problem on 3 completely different systems, I am led to believe a program you've installed/came pre-installed on each system is causing the issue. Nonny refers to the hardware footprint the game is taking up while running (In-core size of the game). Task manager will tell you the CPU usage and the RAM usage, including the pagefile. Although, I can predict SC4 will be using nowhere near 8 gigs (It can't), nor will it be using close to its 2 gig max (Max for 32-bit programs). Even if every single file in the game was loaded into memory, you're only looking at roughly 1.6 gigs worth of memory usage (Game files + your plugins).

SimCity4Mayor: Two options I can think of: 1: Disable shadows. These are CPU hogs. 2: Re-install video card drivers. Given how powerful your video card is, something may have gone wrong with installing the drivers/something else if you're having lag this bad. Your computer is vastly superior to mine, so the problems you're experiencing are not normal by any means. I've had cities upwards of 10 million sims and the lag I experience is somewhat low. Nonny: Older versions of Windows didn't handle the pagefile efficiently. Since Vista, this has been remedied. Vista/7 is MUCH better at handling memory than 9x/XP, and you no longer need to follow a "Twice as much memory" kind of rule for the pagefile to make up for the operating system's inadequacies. The more physical ram you have, the less important a pagefile is. I personally recommend just letting Windows handle it, unless you want to save some hard drive space by shrinking it.

Late to the party, but I have to say this is a brilliant journal. Great job.

I don't think forum posts need to be looked at with the same level of scrutiny. The most important reason to tag a Lot file is to categorize it and make searching by a category feasible, because most lot file descriptions don't contain words I would consider universal for defining a file of its type. For instance, we'd agree that "residential" is a word that would accurately help define ALL buildings that have residents. While it's true a search of the STEX with that word will bring up 27 pages of results, I know for a fact that there are many more residential buildings than just 27 pages worth. More importantly, many files that AREN'T residential files are also listed, obfuscating the results. Forum threads on the other hand, being composed of words, innately contain more information about their subject matter than the typically short description found with STEX files. As an example, I was pondering putting tags in this topic to help people find it in a search. However, I couldn't think of any tags that help define this topic better than anything I've already written in the topic. Finally, forum threads tend to shift subject matter slightly as time goes on. What a thread begins at and ends at are often not the same, making accurately tagging them problematic to anyone who isn't following the thread. STEX files, on the other hand, are quite unmoving on their subject matter, being one or two files. There's also the problem of quantity; there are far more threads than there are STEX files. Only a few STEX files are added in a day, while a couple dozen threads are added a day. No one could keep up! Certainly! There are only 16,000 files. If 5 people work on tagging just 20 files a day each, it will take merely 160 days to tag every file on the site. As I said, an elephant may seem too big to eat. That's why you eat it one piece at a time! It's a matter of keeping it in perspective. People will volunteer for a small project that requires a little bit of effort every day for a while over something that seems entirely insurmountable. Since I came up with the idea, I'll go ahead right now and volunteer. I can't say I fulfill the "active" requirement...I mostly lurk. But hey, if it greases the wheels, I'm all for it.

So I'm not the only one... I ponder the creation of a second site when, seemingly, it's attempted to be the exact same site that it's inspired by. What does it offer beyond what Simtropolis does? Really, the question is: Why?

Corporations ARE composed of people. That does not mean they are good people, or moral people, or people who care about their customers. On the flip side, that doesn't automatically make corporations evil, or bad, or composed of pricks. Remember: Actions speak louder than words, or a title, or a way of running a business. EA's actions have spoken quite loudly, I think.

Hmm...while I question whether this actually works, the same effect can be achieved by doing the following (No re-installing!). It assumes you have administrator privileges. 1: Right click on the Maxis folder in C:\Program Files (x86). 2: Click on Properties. 3: Click the Security Tab. 4: Click the "Edit" button. 5: Click on the "Users" entry in the "Group or user names" box. It will have the computer's name in parenthesis after it. 6: Check the "Full Control" check box in the box below the "Group or user names" box. 7: Click the Apply button at the bottom right of the window.

iEatRazorz: You are understand it correctly. The question is: Is what's outlined in the EA ToS legal? Does anyone know of any court cases that have tested whether or not this reach of power is legal in regards to a game company owning everything (fan)made for its game? I disagree. It doesn't have nearly the scope of the EA ToS. The scope of the license agreement is limited solely to the tools themselves and ensuring their products can't be sold. The only line that may suggest otherwise: "Game content and materials copyright Electronic Arts Inc. and its licensors. All Rights Reserved" Is likely intended to refer to the Tools & Materials, not their products. "Game content" refers to the patches. "Materials" refers to the lot editor, and the like. This license agreement is a legal framework for the event someone takes the Tools & Materials and attempts to sell them, not a claim to ownership like the EA ToS is.

Explanation and (one of) the cause(s) of Prop Pox: https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=7066.msg224888#msg224888 Trees aren't considered props, unless they're used as such (Obviously).

My recommendation at this stage is to remove the last city you saved in the last region of yours you played. See if the game loads it then. Nonny: It's possible to save a blanked city tile using Terraformer, assuming the city information itself still exists in the region folder.

The Colossus Addon Mod is a BSC exclusive. Players on Simtropolis will pretty much never encounter it unless they also go to SC4devotion. Further, it takes quite a bit to get started on CAM in a proper sense due to the buttload of downloading needed to get buildings and props. Really, CAM is a niche product for those who want to take their game to the max. It's RippleJet's dream given tangible form... The doubled workforce bug exists innately in CAM 1.0, and isn't limited to a few unlucky folks. ANY mod that changes the RCI exemplars has a doubled x bug.

Get it installed, then check. You may consider removing both plugins AND any of the regions you've played/created. This will force SC4 to load a Maxis default region.