mymaidmary

Update: was able to get a puzzle piece/TE lot CTD, but it took effort. The test was using a few copies Shmail's GLR station as well as couple Maxis El-Rail stations, then selecting the tram puzzle piece and attempting to hover it over stations. However, the game would not let me. As I moved the cursor over the lot, the puzzle piece would simply flip to the other side. At edges of stations, the puzzle piece would flip to the bottom, then around to the other side. Eventually, using a larger puzzle piece (one of the tram avenue intersections) I did manage to get the piece to hover over the station, and, boom, straight to desktop, but it wasn't easy. I needed patience, trying to move the piece just enough to be over the station and trying not to let it flip to the other side. On a second attempt, I did seem to manage to hover the puzzle piece over a Shmail station, with no crash. A large avenue piece also did not cause a crash as the game seemed to be preventing it from hovering directly over a station. The city was a small test town, low population, with few zones and the barest of essentials to get growth. (Purpose of town was my own little workshop for trying out tram networks and the tram vehicle plugins. Perhaps a larger, more complex city would present more danger. Other posts about the TE-lot crash don't mention the behaviour I observed of the puzzle pieces skipping over the lot. Don't know if others want to try to replicate my experience. (game version 1.1.640, using CPUcount:1 in shortcut. No custom resolution or windowed run)

I had been away from SC4 (Deluxe) for a while - on my old machine, large cities would take too long to load, scrolling would mean waiting for the game to draw all the buildings and networks - everything greyed out and redrawn street by street. Can't remember the specs of my new home machine, but off-the-shelf HP with AMD six-core processor running Windows 7. The game ran fast and reliable, can't think of a single CTD. But then I remembered all the beautiful BATs and mods people had made. Got a bunch, plugged them in, CTDs appeared. I was new to NAM, so the puzzle piece CTD was common. The other common CTD was fast scrolling in a semi-developed city or quick zoom with the mouse wheel. A large amount of zoning at once (a wide swath of farmland, a whole new residential subdivision) seemed to provoke a crash as when something other than the zoning tool was selected. One city was particularly crash-happy, and would crash when a landmark/reward lot was hovering over development, looking for a place to plop. I suspect this just made the scrolling crash happen sooner... Last night, I could not provoke a CTD. I zoomed like a madman, I scrolled fast enough to make sims seasick. No crash. I had done the following: finally got the update in for 1.1.640. Found I had a the wrong plugin for landmark employment. So, put the RH version in, blew up the building that was there and built a new one. Also added -CPUcount1 to the shortcut target line. Strange thing is, I tried to provoke the NAM puzzle piece crash and couldn't get it to go. But it was late and maybe I wasn't doing the right thing...