AWatkins

Interesting stuff. I have been wondering what leads to my ever increasing, out of control R$ demand. I read the workforce and occupational demand one, and was wondering how does education correlate to wealth level? Will a population that becomes more educated lead to more wealth? I noticed that a low wealth individual has to have a high education to work in the higher wealth buildings. I take it this then causes businesses to move in that have a higher demand for higher wealth, which causes higher wealth sims to move in and so on. So, in order to lower demand for R$ in my city, I need to increase all sim's education level and wait?

NetPCDoc: Huh, I have seen Vista go into la-la-land many times, however I have not seen this on XP. Poorly written code can hang and race conditions would occur differently on different hardware, including different speeds as well as number of CPUs. If Vista is really more likely to go into la-la-land with multiple cores, my guess is it is just hitting a race condition when it does that and that race condition is less likely with less parallel tasks going on. I don't really want to get into a debate, but I really had to comment on this. Running minimized or in the background has nothing to do with threads in the program in question. That is an OS function. Wikipedia is more eloquent than I; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread(computer_science) You can easily tell how many threads SC4 has running in task manager. The number is 12 to 13 while running my current city. Anything but the most basic applications are likely to be multithreaded.

I still believe that your main speed problem has more to do with the dual-core / dual processing features - and that you need to turn these off (restirct processing to one-core / one processor) while running SimCity.quote> NetPCDoc: Could you explain your thoughts behind this statement? The most simple applications (single threaded applications) will not take advantage of multiple cores. However, they wont act slower than they normally would on a single core system. If you look at game benchmarks what you see is identical performance between say a dual core CPU and a quad core CPU. This is because it would run the same, no matter the number of CPUs, because the application wasn't designed to do that many tasks at once. Anyway, if this were the posters problem, then everyone with a dual core CPU would also have this issue. I have a dual core CPU and it runs SC4 like a dream... even with both cores active.

mwacuk: I was referring to if the OS simply crashes without trying to start the game. If it crashes at the end, when the game starts, it probably is a driver issue. I have Vista as well and when the game crashes it doesn't blue screen. It just goes to the desktop. While blue screens can occur without a hardware issue, if I see blue screens while doing something trivial (installing an application), it could mean hardware or possibly a virus. Yes, you can get these utilities online, just do a google search. These are Linux live CDs with a boot option to run a program called memtest. In kubuntu you can just choose the menu option to check your memory on boot of the CD. chkdsk is a windows utility and comes with your OS. Run it from the command prompt.

What kind of video card do you have? CPU and RAM aren't everything and integrated graphics generally perform really poorly. It could be poor graphics performance. Did you have a better graphics card in your old system? That could be why it ran fine there and not on your new system. 2 GB is plenty to run vista and SC4. Of course if you wanted to upgrade, DDR2 costs less than dirt. More is better, but I don't think that is your issue. I only have 2 GB and everything runs fine with memory to spare. It is true, Windows swaps when it doesn't need to. Generally, however, this is memory that isn't actively in use at the time. (Unless, of course, you run out of physical memory for things actively in use.) The only other thing I can think of, if all drivers are up to date, is making sure you have the latest DirectX 9 installed (9.0c I think). Hope you figure it out.

mwacuk: What OS are you running? If you have problems installing the game (with blue screens no less), I would say the issue is probably beyond drivers and the like. Your issue sounds like either the OS is in a really bad shape or you have hardware issues. Does everything else install/work well? You could try running chkdsk. Also, running memtest from a kubuntu or knoppix disk would test your RAM. Edit: Does it crash when the game loads at the end of the install? If it is that, then NetPCDoc is probably right. I had issues with Audio drivers crashing SC4 in Vista on game startup.

Vista is quite a bit slower than XP. I believe Vista SP1 has some performance improvements, but it still isn't anywhere near XP. That said, I'm not having much issue running SC4 on my system running Vista. Try installing the lastest drivers for your system, especially the video drivers.

HA! Figures I would post something and figure it out a few seconds later... Anyway, the roundabout is going the wrong way!

I tried to make a one way roundabout with 6 different roads converging and all I get after putting that in place is a bunch of no connection zots... Is a 6-way roundabout not possible with NAM? Thanks

Date: 2/1/2005 5:01:45 PM Author: Daeley Doesn't road cost 10

Any possible way to make a tool that measures the distance between two points? I find myself spending most of my time counting and recounting to make sure I got it right. I even place 1x1 streets everywhere as markers. A workaround would be a road like tool that doesn't build anything and costs 1 simolian per square no matter what the ground looks like underneath (roads change in value depending on the terrain manipulation needed to build it) Also, no one answered the earlier post, but I really like the idea of automatic pipes underneath all streets. It would make it much easier to manage the water that way.