diamon

Originally posted by: sneakeypete The beautiful thing about steam is that you can buy it anywhere. Saves on publishing in smaller out of the way countries.quote> The horrible thing about Steam is the lack of patching rollback. This is vital imho, as patches often introduce bugs (show-stoppers). Without rollback games can become unplayable. Make the patching process rollback-able (is that a word?) and I'll happily use Steam. As to DRM - please don't. I see a comment from Philippe Da Silva that says to the effect "best effort not to include DRM". Cool. I won't buy if DRM included.

Personally I would hate this to be going anywhere near Steam. I've had a really bad experience recently with Empire:Total War on Steam. Specifically, the updating. While its great to have patches automatically installed, any patching system MUST have a rollback facility. Steam doesn't. 2 patches mad my game unplayable until a 3rd patch was release (10 days or so later). If there had been a rollback feature then I could have continued to play the earlier version.

Originally posted by: your_adress_here You could try listening to Neil Young. It won't solve your problems, but it's beautiful music.quote> Good choice, although judging by the hemisperical picture I'd also suggest Rush!!! Canadians sure know how to rock. On the subject of boredom: Take a break. Go do something else for a while. Walk the dog? Learn to play guitar? Take the missus to the cinema? The biggest issue I think you're having is 'lack of creativity', right? So, leave it alone for a while. Freshen your mind and a idea will come to you. Maybe, riding the bus zoned out to your ipod. I find this a great way to drift off and let the creative side of my mind find me avenues to explore. A seed of an idea can be germinated (as someone has already said), by taking a look at what others have done in CJs. I was inspired recently to create a very rural region (been done to death by some really great CJ builders), and found the break from building massive super-cities with terrific networks and civic amenities to be really refreshing. I never had communities over 10,000 people. In fact at least 6 of the smaller cities in the region had less that 1000 sims. These cities became the 'bread-basket' of my farming communities. Some very clever reward chains to be built in the BSC farming series too. The them of my region was "would I like to live here", and most of the time the answer was YES! I also find it challanging to create cities on varied altitudes. Take one on Ennedi's slope mods (there a particularly tricksy one) that alters the way transaport networks can be built. Then find a map with lots of interesting altitude changes and get creative. As for abandonment - it's all driven by demand. Create demand and they will come. Let demand be satisfied and they will leave. Look for inspiration where you live. See a nice park? Model it in one of your cities, build a small community around it. Give it a theme. Link it to another part of town. Link both parts to another city in the region. Link that city to a 3rd, 4th, 5th, etc. Give each a slightly different flavour. Don't give up though, just take a break and chillax

I'll just add my (new-found) advice, as I've experienced something similar. Use DatPacker on your Plugins folder. It's made all the difference to me. I was experiencing CTD's about every 15 minutes (not when zooming though - mostly clicking the menu button which expands the bottom UI). Since packing I've had NO CTD's - so I conclude that DatPacker works (for me at least) Give it a go, as well as the advice about processor affinity. Good luck

slystone2 - Thanks for the clarification about DatPacker. Makes sense. In the last 4 hours no CTD's So, I'm going to conclude that: IF YOU HAVE A PROBLEM WITH CTD's (due to plugins) TRY DATPACKER!!

I've been monitoring CPU0 and CPU1 during the last hour while running SC4. Both cores are running ~50% (CPU0 is usually about 60% and CPU1 is about 40%). This is just standard priority. I'm not change this priority. However, maybe I was a bit premature in my disappointment with DatPacker. In this last hour I've had NO CTD's Compare this to CTD's about every 15 minutes or so. Maybe compression is the answer? More testing required though.

Wasn't so impressed with DatPacker - reduced my Plugin folder from 1.21 Gb to 1.14 Gb. I suspect this is because I have installed recent STEX/LEX/PLEX stuff that is already packed. Going to try again now. Wish me luck

Incidentally having devil of a job formatting this post - sorry. Years ago I used to play SC4 on a relatively lowly spec machine with little or no problems. Got on with real life for a while and recently built a much more powerful rig and thought I'd give SC4 another try - it's a terrific waste of my life. Current spec is: Athlon 64 X2 6000+ 4Gb SLI-compliant RAM (OCZ) - due to 32-bit OS only 3.2 Gb useable by Windows. NVidia 9800 GT (only 1 so far - SLI to come in the future) - Uses latest driver OS - Windows XP Pro Service Pack 3 (only 32 bit - sadly 64-bit XP is bugged to death, and I'll NEVER install Vista, maybe Windows 7 in the future). 2 X 320 Gb 10000 rpm Maxtor (Raid 1). Page file: Maximum usage I've ever seen is 558 Mbytes even when system is heavily loaded. So, I expected that SC4 would fly on this machine. And it does, however it is really prone to CTD in SC4. Almost never have a problem with any other application - aside from a really buggy application thats supposed to scan Media directories for changes - bloody sony crap (note to self: must buy a new MP3 player). The CTD occurs almost exclusively when I click the ... button that expands the UI to allow me to save/exit to region/whatever the other buttons do/ on the bottom of the screen. The Exception Report shows: Exception time: 03/06/2009, at 21:16:00. Exception code: 0xC0000005 (-1073741819) ACCESS_VIOLATION. Current thread ID: 2128 (0x00000850). Version information: Application/module path: F:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 4 Deluxe\Apps\SimCity 4.exe Application/module version name: SimCity 4 Application/module version: 1.1.640.0 System version: Windows NT 5.1 System memory: 2048 Megabytes total, 2048 Megabytes free. Exception module: F:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 4 Deluxe\Apps\SimCity 4.exe. Exception address: 0x0096d938. Sectionffset: 0x01:0x00566938. Notice: System memory - 2048 Megabytes total, 2048 Megabytes free How can that be? Windows XP Task Manager says Memory available 3406252 (+3Gb). Does SC4 have a limit to the amount of memory it will use? Well, nevermind that, how can there be as much memory free as there is memory available? I've read in other thread about using DATPACKER to compress Plugins folder (~1.2Gb - I love this extra content that makes the game come alive for me), so I'm going to try that I've already used Cleanitol to remove un-necessary files, and use it whenever I add new content. I've also read about altering the priority of SC4.exe and forcing it to use CPU1 leaving CPU0 free for other stuff. I'm not completely convinced about this but willing to give it a go. Has anyone got any idea about this memory report in Exception Report please? Anyone got any other ideas how to make this more stable? Any advice will be gratefully received. Thanks for taking the time to read this.