Lord Yabo

Originally posted by: PattyO A quick question to you... I understand if you don't want to say, but can you give any hint how you did this. It seems all very astounding that SC4 has been out for 6 years now and no one so far has written a code to avert a very well-known and annoying bug, yet you wrote one in a night. Also, as was said on page 1 of this thread, does this tool save the game data and the satellite image, or just game data? Because someone on 1st page suggested that instead of saving both, you save just data with this tool so that save times are brought to a minimum... can you investigate to see if this is possible for a second version? Nevertheless I will be downloading this immediately. Thank you! *Edit* I googled an autosave as well and found a blog by someone named "The Real Red" who just created (June 28,2009) an autosave for SC4 - I can see that Lord Yabo saw this as well on the 15th of July and posted a thank-you, saying "Based on ideas in this article I wrote a simpler to install and use C# version." Therefore, I think that if this program does work, credit is due to this "Real Red" as well for writing the base for what would become Lord Yabo's program. Just my $0.02 the-real-red.blogspot.com/2009/06/sim-city-4-crashing-to-desktop-autosave.html << The Real Red's blog quote> In answer to your first question, why if after 6 years no one can do this, the answer is in the edit you mentioned. Everyone was probably looking for a way to MOD Sim City 4, meaning to work from inside Sim City 4. When I saw the Real Red post with the Python script, I was intrigued, because his approach was to address the problem from outside SC4, which is literally out of the box thinking. His script sends a Ctrl-S via the Win32 API call SendKeys. This causes SC4 to think you pressed Ctrl-S from your keyboard, and promptly saves your game. To use Real Red's script he provides some instructions of crap you have to download and install, which I (nor many people) are interested in doing. It also has no GUI. Though I own a software company and we use SendKeys in our applications, I never thought of that being a solution here. So kudos to Real Red for the idea. Hence, what I posted on his blog telling him I took his idea and went further with it. So, in a nut shell, the program I wrote presses Ctrl-S for you every X minutes, hence an auto-save. Once I knew the direction to take, i took me about half an hour to write and test the program. He mentions a problem where his minimizes the UI ingame. My program has no such issue, which I attribute to a difference between Python and C#. Hopefully this answers why it could be done in a night.

Originally posted by: bluemoose DLing right now, awesomest Thing ever, BUT, i know when i save my city in SC4, it takes at least 3 minutes, (for my largest city), will the Game freeze when its saving, or not. If no, you have truly made a miracle modd. Thank you so much!quote> Sorry to say, yes it does freeze while saving. It behaves the same as if you clicked Save City yourself.

Originally posted by: miggoycor You should upload this to STEX or LEX!quote> I don't know what those are.

Originally posted by: Deathcat001 I like it. Good idea and will definaly be downloaded. A few questions: 1) Does it need to be turned on or is it automatic? 2) Will it lagg the game on slower computers? (because the computer i have sim city 4 downloaded on has 80GB HDD 2GB RAM, NVIDEA GEFORCE 2, and its ok considering no lagg for high graphics on sim city.) quote> 1) You need to run the program I wrote either before or after you launch sim city 4. Once you launch the auto save program, you need to click the Start Button. From that point on it just runs in the background and you don't need to touch it. After people start using it I'll collect feedback and maybe make a new version. 2) Despite the ridiculous system requirements I posted (I was mostly kidding) the auto saver does not impact your system at all (in terms of processor, or ram, etc.). All it does is tell SC4 to save your game every X minutes. So however long it takes to save the game on your system remains the same. This is why I made the save frequency configurable by you the user. If it takes 3 minutes to save your larger city, maybe you will want it to auto save every 60 minutes instead of every 15. You can adjust it to whatever you are comfortable with.

Originally posted by: Aro0w does it work?quote> Yes, it absolutely 100% works! Last night I started up the auto save program and began playing SC4. Every 10 minutes the screen would pause (5 secs on my computer) and a pop up would say "Saved" and show the file name (just the same as when you save it manually). After playing SC4 for 4 hours last night, with the auto saver running, IT NEVER CRASHED! Stupid murphy's law... Based on last night, I could say the auto save actually prevents crashing! :-)

If you are like me, you love Sim City 4, but hate losing your work when it crashes to desktop. I was googling around for something and I came across these forums. Everyone was asking for an auto save, but no one had one. I found a link to this Save Alarm mod: https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=78 But I didn't want just to be warned, I wanted the game to save automatically. So after not finding anything, I decided to write a simple app that automatically saves the game for you. You can read about it and download it here: http://www.thehobbykingdom.com/forum/default.aspx?g=posts&t=3621