dogma555

Good stuff here! Just keep an eye on Horseface and Ziggie and its smooth sailing !!

Stunning ^ ^

Man these are nice!! I'm almost ashamed to even post some of mine, but I guess they'll do for now:

Lots of inspiration here! Here's what I've been keeping busy with:

Welcome back.. I'm surprised there are people who manage to stop playing SC4. But no matter how good your specs are, you have to remember that the game's 2003 architecture is the bottleneck that there is no way to get around.. the game will simply never run as smoothly as brand new games hitting the market. It will run no better than you remembered it running, unfortunately. If you plan on playing SC4 a lot and as trouble free as possible, I would go dual boot and play this game (as well as all other "old school" games) in either Windows XP or Windows 7. Me personally, I have no interest in the frustration of getting older games to run on Windows 10 smoothly anymore. I prefer to just install and play. You can do it, but expect to spend a lot of time on workarounds.. my experience was the furthest I could get was where the game would run, but I couldn't get night lighting on custom BATS. Eventually I just continued to play it on an older OS. Hopefully someone here has had some success stories they could share though..

Truth is there is nothing you can really do.. Hardware upgrades will yield no noticeable results because the game's early 2000's architecture itself will be the bottleneck. Maxis simply never foresaw the sheer amount of modding that this community would bring to the table .. You can delete all the image files in your plugins folder (.jpg preview files that come with most BAT files) to shave off a minute or two at best.. All you can really do is wait. I have a 12GB plugin folder, and it takes about 8 minutes to load the game. I've found that NAM is the main culprit with long load times, but the game is obviously far too primitive without it. Just find something else to do in that time and then hibernate the computer with SC4 still running instead of shutting it down so you can just ALT+TAB right back in whenever you need to.

This is devastating to hear. Nonny Moose was such a great guy. He will truly be missed

Sometimes you just can't beat that organic growth look.. some of my favorite areas are like 90-95% organic and its certainly interesting that it just happened to grow that way.. but other times, you really need to be able to plop that certain skyscraper in the right spot of a CBD, and there's nothing cheating or even unrealistic about that. Plus the word "cheating" isn't really the right way to put it.. as SC4 is not a game you play to WIN and BEAT.. it's a game you play to keep it going! Especially considering the game ALLOWS you to open the landmark menu and plop from a laundry list of buildings.

Or better yet.. a government that can help provide JOBS to these people, not just handing them free money .. so they can have the dignity that comes along with having a job and earning their money. Something like a modern day version of what FDR did to cut the unemployment rate almost in half with public works programs, like a modern day version of the WPA. especially in manufacturing.. We need a whole lot more of those yellow tile zones HERE rather than in other countries! Caps on wages and hours is what we are going to need eventually if income inequality continues on to this extent. For a job that pays $100,000 for 40 hours of work, I'd rather have two people sharing that work.. at $50,000 a year with 20 hours a week each worker. More people will have disposable income to go around, less class conflict, more time for people to devote to various arts and hobbies. End the days where the economy resembles a game of musical chairs. But total removal of govermnent is just pure anarchy .. I don't want to live in some wild wild west where there aren't even laws, courts, judges, military, etc..

The peak memory usage I've ever seen anyway is 1.1GB. So , you might benefit from a wee bit more ram, considering my total machines ram usage (to run the operating system) would be about 1.5GB... and about 2.0GB with firefox loaded up with tabs. Dreaded crash people must not have disabled extra cores on their processors, put SC4.exe priority on high, or be playing in software mode! I've been meaning to try an SSD in the machine I run SC4 on. What were your load time differences like for say, launching sc4.exe, launching tiles with ~500k populations, and launching the landmark menu with a large plugin folder?