caddman74

I need to post an update, and correct myself on my last posting. And, I suppose....to apologize. I thought I knew how to run Datpacker, but apparently, I admit....I did not. So, basically, I got really frustrated today because I'm trying to play my game with nearly a thousand plugins in my folder, and the game just will not run well. Even the tiny cities take literally five minutes to open a menu in, so the game has just become lame. So, I frantically surfed the internet looking for ways to speed up my game play, and kept coming up with threads on Datpacker. I began to think that maybe I wasn't running it correctly, and so I carefully read all the forums I could find. Interestingly enough, I learned that I was indeed running Datpacker incorrectly, and was missing a VERY key step in the process....moving the sub-folders to another directory. In addition, I did not know how Datpacker opperated until today after conducting my "online" research. In short, after successfully running Datpacker for the first time, my Plugins folder has been dramatically reduced in size, and the only sub-folder left in there is my Plugins_Compressed folder, where all of my .DAT files are now stored. And thanks to this wonderful and misunderstood program, my Simcity game is now back to the original playing speed, and I can FINALLY turn my graphics back up to maximum! So, I am sorry, I misunderstood this program. I take back all the negative stuff I've written about Datpacker and formally apologize. Okay that's all I'm writing. Now I've got three hours before I need to sleep, and these remaining hours are going to be spent building a colossal mega-city with all the bells and whistles.....and I won't be falling asleep while waiting for menues to open....

I would like to add something to this thread. I did not have any problems downloading Datpacker, BUT....I have used it twice, and so far both times have resulted in the program removing several key plugins and customized lots. My entire SFBT collection has been wiped out, and all the textures for my custom parks have dissappeared. I am removing it from my computer. What really ticked me off was opening up my favorite city and seeing an entire neighborhood of brown boxes. The reason this ticked me off? The boxes themselves, not the implications that several plugins and props were missing. No, see, I have downloaded a mod into my plugins folder that replaces brown boxes with small, almost unnoticable red flag poles. This allows the lots to not be covered entirely in a brown box. And this stupid datpacker removed that mod, which I can't remember the name of, so now I have to do without. AND MY TOYS 'R' US LOTS ARE GONE!!! ARRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!

Eggman111: That's an awesome idea, and as soon as I finish posting this response I'll download that. Hopefully that'll help. Yeah this city I created was one of my favorites so far, just everything done perfectly and falling into exactly as I had planned, duplicating my home city of Seattle very nicely. So I hate to lose the city and start over, as I was just about finished. At any rate, I wanted to post an update, because I just tried an experiment to see if I could single out the culprit. What I did, was de-zone all of my zoned areas first, removing all growable lots. Then, working a section of the city at a time, I bulldozed all but the roads and parks, beginning with all utility buildings first. Finally, I bulldozed the entire city, leaving only three lots with known glitches that won't allow them to be bulldozed: two police parking lots and one statue of Abraham Lincoln. And even with all of this done, the pollution continued to rise. In fact, with all my air-purifying lots removed, the air and water pollution TRIPLED its rate of increase. Last resort will be to demolish the city and wipe the slate clean. If this doesn't do the trick, then some stupid lot has permanantly glitched my city (permanent at least until I figure out which one it is and erase it from my hard drive and send a few hate mails and a nasty home made RAM consuming virus program to the creten who created the lot). Hope I can figure out which lot caused this. If anything, it'd work perfectly for lowering the desireability and land value for my "ghetto" cities which are my toughest challenge to build.

I don't know what caused it, nor can I figure out what building, if any, developed that caused this issue. I noticed while playing that everyone was suddenly moving out of my city, and the water was turning dark brown. I check my air pollution grid, and it shows the entire city in the deepest, brightest red possible, and the same with water pollution. So, i exited and reloaded a previous save, removed everything around my water facilities, removed ALL of my industrial zones, my landfill and waste-to-energy plant, and still the city begins crawling with pollution. The only building I can think of that may have caused this was a downloaded library that said it caused heavy pollution, but even with that removed the city continues to pollute. There is also the Tokyo Primary school that I've never plopped in any other city, but even with that removed the pollution still spreads. So I'm wondering if anyone else has had this problem, and if you know of a heavy-pollution causing lot that I may have downloaded. I have so many downloaded lots that it'd take way too long to write the whole list. Please help.