Djohaal

Ok so here we go on more testing. 1: Multiple cores: Stability did improve significatively when setting SimCity to a single core, however from this post you can imagine it wasn't enough. 2: DirectX Wrapper: A must from my testing, while SimCity does run a itty bit slower, it is the only stable configuration I managed to use, if I remove it I start getting some very nasty sprite errors in large city, and the game crashes less than 5 minutes in. So it might be an educated guess that for up to date nvidia drivers you need a directX wrapper. 3: Datpacking: Datpacking very file intensive collections seems to improve in-game stability for me, alongside with loading times. I've managed to datpack the NAM with no errors and the game seems to run a little faster. 4: Region size: Another confounding factor that I realized now is the region size I'm playing. I'm using a humgous 20x20 large city region, I wonder if poor optimization in the region menu might be leaking memory and making me start off in a bad footing so crashes are more common. I'll try testing this later by isolating one of my crash prone cities and testing it in a standard size region. 5: Stability, city size and camera: I'm noticing two clear trends with instability in SimCity. First is the overall ammount of "stuff" going on in a city. My rural cities are pretty much crash free and I can play for long bouts of time. However I'm encountering far more crashes (up to one every 20 minutes) in my larger 400k pop large city tile. Tied almost directly to it seems to be camera usage. The more I zoom in and out, rotate the camera or flip between aboveground and underground views, the faster performance degrades. After a few times in a large city tile it seems the game enters some corrupt or unstable state where fps gets choppy even in a fully-loaded zoom and while paused. Almost inevitably in this state a quick save ends up in a CTD, or even if I leave the game running for longer after this starts the game ends up crashing.

Alas I might have fallen victim to confirmation bias. The moment I tried to move up from mostly farms and into a large city tile with a significant population (about 170k sims, and 80% ish coverage of the large tile) the crashes when saving reappeared. I can't get even 10 minutes of game in a city without it crashing when saving, even if I use the "quick" save function. I did a test with a "clean" SimCity, that is, no plugins at all (other than sc4fix and extra cheats). Managed to push to a 250k test city with zero issues, what leads to the conclusion that -something- in my plugins folder might be the culprit. Now for the ten million dollar question, how do I even begin troubleshooting such an obtuse error? EDIT: So the plot thickens and this soap opera never ends. It seems I might accidentally have clicked the set to default option in sc4launcher, giving SimCity a very unstable access to all my 20 cores. I rolled it back to one core and the cursed city ran fine for some 20 minutes and saved without crashing. Stay tuned for more thrilling and heart-throbbing updates in Djohaal's misadventures with an awfully old piece of software.

Apparently the forum had spazzed out when I was typing my post, windows and menus showed everywhere and I thought it had deleted but apparently it posted an accidentally snarky remark I meant to ask: so how workable is the growify command at the moment? I'm interested in making some "arcologies" in my cities by using residential ploppables, is it feasible to use in an actual game atm or still mostly experimental?

So how' - disregard this post, it was mostly to chrome having a seizure. Real question is two posts below

What I meant by slope tolerant is that jeronij and marrast seawalls can be plopped on a properly shaped coastline that is several meters above sea, unlike Pegasus stuff that mostly auto-flattens to that infernal almost-sea level default. Are there any other good seawalls in the marrast/jeronij style?

What are some good, generic looking coastal development kits similar to marrast's embankments and jeronij seawalls that are more slope tolerant than pegasus stuff?

Can GMAX at least unwrap UVWs? Making a surface you can paint in photoshop would help with doing fake ambient occlusion. Or if one is going to put that much effort into it, might as well get a student license for 3dsmax.

Yeah, I assumed (wrongly) that because the target field carried over in the BAT export window between the two scenes that the maxscript knew I was pointing it to the same target. It does render, but injects the FSH all messed up it seems.

Nevermind, it was some operator stupidity. Now it has lighted itself up properly in SimCity. Go figure. The having-to-click-again-in-the-target-sc4model-button fact remains however.

I've re-rendered and now the model seems to be correct from inside the reader. The trick was to while in 3dsmax, click on the button to choose the gmax output twice, once in my day scene and one again in the night scene. Sadly however I passed it trough the plugin manager into a landmark and it unfortunately still doesn't light up a night

I believe that the base Gmax renderer maxis bundled with the BAT does not supply bump maps.

Ok, so I need some help on why my render won't light up at night. I'm on BAT4Max on 3dsmax 2012 with Autodesk hotfixes 1 and 2 applied, doing an HD render. I have two scenes set up, one for daytime lighting and one for night time. The night scene has no light objects as its entirely lit trough self illumination and final gather. The model renders fine and both FSHs get merged properly, however both in simcity4 when exported as a landmark building it doesn't light up and the individual S3d files in the reader also fail to swap to the night texture when I toggle it in the S3D viewer, even though the FSHs are there. I'm attaching the .sc4model file. THEGG-0x5ad0e817_0xedefb473_0x70000.SC4Model

That roundabout ornament and those urban slope walls, from where are they from?

Yeah I read about that, I never use save and quit/exit. But the crash when just "exiting" to region view still happens.