Spinmaster

cpu: Intel Core Duoquote> From what I've read so far, that's a suspect. There are a few other threads devoted to these multi-core/hyperthreading cpu's and how much Sim City seems to hate them (they weren't even sketches on pizza boxes back when the game was developed). Do also check those background processes though as Constantina advises, SimCity is a memory-hog, especially when you add in a heap of wonderful plugins from the STEX and other sites. And also make sure your video drivers are up-to-date. Someone else would've chimed in with that eventually, but rightfully so, it's always sound advice. If not for your dual-core cpu, that would've been my first suspect.

Originally posted by: mrbisonm I have seen it only once four years ago in one of my cities that had the airforce airport and there was a crash of planes when the sims jumped out of their planes with a parachute. I was so amazed at that time that I didn't think to take a picture of all of this, I know I should have. It didn't happen ever since......... I hope that someone else can confirm this, so I don't show up as a firstclass heel here!quote> I don't doubt it at all, sounds quite plausible. It does seem there are at least a few very-rare random disasters. My train crash & toxic spill, your plane crash and parachutes. Makes one wonder what other rare disasters exist but nobody has seen. Pipe bursts - another "only on purpose" thing - lower the budget for your water pipes maintenance. You have to do it via the budget menu. Unfortunately it's not impressive. If you're expecting geysers and floods, nope - just no-water zots and unhappy sims (might be another step to getting one of those riots though ). Potholes are similar - road maintenance budget. There are a lot of little things like that, but they're better described as "consequences of being evil" than a true disaster, and there's nothing random about them - if you don't deliberately bump your water pipe or road maintenance budget down, you'll never see a pipe burst or a pothole. If you do, you will.

Fire is really the only disaster you can get automatically without doing something almost deliberately evil. Starting up a new city, trying to save money, most people would say "don't bother putting fire stations until you have a fire." Agreed. If you follow that advice, there's a good chance you will get a fire (particularly in an unwatered ID area), but unless you unluckily stepped away at that moment, usually you can deal with it before any real damage is done; just plop a (your first) station somewhere and dispatch an engine. Usually also by the time your first fire breaks out, you *hopefully* are making enough money to justify keeping it anyway, but if not... bulldoze and repeat later if necessary. Nuclear power plant explosion - Prophet42 hit that one (or if you're REALLY unlucky, and one of those fires started on your unprotected and unwatered nuclear power plant while you were away.... or if you're evil and set one on purpose ). Riots - but you have to almost deliberately depress an area - a LOT - just to get a few people mad enough to riot. Set some fires of your own (or don't put out the ones that start). Cut off water, road funding... plop a toxic waste plant between a few tenements. Basically, be deliberately evil (and obviously, no police coverage). Even the slightest hint of mercy is enough to prevent a riot (I think someone had a mod to increase the chances though, if you're really desperate to see one, but they're not particularly impressive anyway imo). Missile Misfire - if you have that missile test range, occasionally a missile will explode - and rain fire all over your city. An excellent reason not to ever have one (or if you're evil... to have one ). One time... I swear I did have a freight train crash, complete with a toxic spill. I don't remember, however, if it just "happened" or if I had done it myself via UDI (I am evil, sometimes ). I'm pretty [sure] it can be done via UDI, but I half-recall it just happened on its own once. I remember being surprised anyway. But I haven't seen it since, and it was a long time ago, so I don't remember 100%. Can anyone confidently confirm this? I don't think there are any other automatic disasters, unless you count Murphy's Law - a game crash right after you finished building something awesome ... but before you saved.

Wow. I'm... baffled, nobody else mentioned Pegasus' CDK Leveler? Useful for much more, but a god-send for anything you want to put on a coast, for example... ferry terminals. I've also found it very useful for: Leveling land for highways, rails, and other transit lines Consistently level beaches Embankments (for bridges, rails, etc) Ponds/lakes which pretty much need level land to make sense Landfills Of course... the CDK itself Well... pretty much any time I need a large area leveled fast, safe, and cheap It's even quite useful as a planning marker i.e. plop a few where you plan to build something large later on. Yeah I know, you can use the signs & labels, but they're only good for a "general idea" of where you want to put something (and the labels are hard to read with a bunch of trees and other stuff around 'em). But for ferries ... my oh my, the leveler is an "essential" I think. Mind you, you'll still have to do *some* terraforming to make a smooth slope down to the now-lowered coast (e.g. the "soften" god-mode tool), but the hard part is almost ridiculously easy with the leveler.

Actually now that you mention it, I do remember a problem with those particular walls and the NAM ramps. The walls are gorgeous, but the ramps fan out a little too far and appear to go *through* the walls a little (or is it, the walls stick out too much? My apologies to all if I just lit a debate-fire). There are some other walls though, that (s)he could use, either as replacements or even mixed i.e. just replace the parts around the overpass. I know there are also some wall-pieces (from buddybud and/or jeronij, I think - someone please correct me on this) which were designed specifically for the NAM's ramp and puzzle pieces i.e. using "overhanging props" to give a full appearance of a wall where it should be around the ramps and under the avenue/road/etc. Anyway, I've been learning - slowly - there is often a big difference between "hard" and "requires patience" with SimCity. Don't misunderstand me though, this ain't me scolding anyone - I often don't have the patience required, either - that's the hard part. But judging from how smooth and nice breizhion's sunken highway is, I'm guessing (s)he does have the patience - just needs a pointer to the required tools.

It's not really a "bug" at all. A little unsightly, but not a bug. The default game-drawn overpass "expects" to be a specific height above the highway. It also expects you're drawing a ground-level avenue over a ground-level highway, and thus want the avenue to go UP and over the highway "however high it must" to clear it. But because of the sunken highway (which must be at a certain depth to use those eye-candy walls effectively), the avenue's "ground-level" is higher than normal above the highway - so the avenue has to bend *down* instead, to hit that specific height above the highway. Yuck? Yes. But it's not "extremely difficult" to fix this, either. Check out the NAM (Network Addon Mod), in particular the avenue puzzle pieces and custom interchange pieces. If you haven't played with those puzzle pieces before, I'd recommend spending some quality learning-time in an empty city, to play around with all the pieces available and how to put them together (hit TAB to see all the pieces, and yes you'll usually have to rotate them to fit them together). Even if you don't use all the pieces, it's very worthwhile to at least get familiar with which ones exist and the infinite ways you can put them together. You'll quickly realize you can build almost any kind of overpass/interchange you can imagine AND make it look gooooooooooood. For your particular overpass, you'd need a combination of avenue-over-ground highway, avenue/one-way intersection, and avenue-on-slope puzzle pieces (roads menu, "avenue puzzle pieces"), plus single-sided ramp pieces (highways menu). I think the ramps you want are in the "Single-Sided Parallel Ramps" highway menu item. I don't remember the exact names for the pieces and menus (and I'm pretending to work, so I can't open the game to look) but they're pretty easy to find.