Elegnaim

I think I'm going to experiment with using the Set Affinity option on SC4 and forcing it to only use one "processor" (CPU isn't a dualcore but apparently it is hyperthread). Apparently that increases stability a lot on Vista, and I can think of a number of other games that have major issues with hyperthreaded or multi-core systems.

This system is neither modern nor fast.

I reinstalled the video drivers and everything's working fine (there are still random crashes, though. I think some of those are related to some of the custom sounds from the building mods I've installed. I need to clean out my mod folder when I get ambitious). So this seemed... pretty idiosyncratic, and I'm not really sure what caused my drivers to break, but... that seems to have been the problem. That being said, I will run disk defrag and scan disk and disable unnecessary services just as a matter of general computer maintenance.

This is definitely an issue with the 945GMA integrated adapter that my laptop has, although, as I said, that didn't have scroll speed issues. I mean, yes, it was slowish, but not slow to the point of the game grinding to a near halt when I scrolled /any/ amount. It could very well be a driver *configuration* issue, though. I do recall the Catalyst drivers having some weird default options set after a fresh install. I'll look into that and see what I turn up. Tiny. Population was right around 1000. I'm familiar with how to play SC4. I cranked the speed because, as far as I know, cheetah mode is somewhat more taxing on the system, as is scrolling the view quickly and frequently, and I was interested in doing a bit of a stress test. No, but I don't think that would matter. The one problem I COULD see arising from this would involve mods not loading properly, but that usually causes other problems. No, I just didn't feel like going through the effort of reinstalling SC4, Rush Hour, and the necessary patches. Copying it to the HDD then back over was actually faster. As I said, I have the discs, and my DVD drive works fine.

That worked (which surprises me since changing from Hardware to Software rendering in most games usually tends to... make them slower?) However, I cranked the shadow, draw speed, and visual effect settings, set the game on max speed, and started scrolling madly and it promptly crashed. Still, you seem to have got me on the correct line of addressing this issue.

System: Windows XP SP2 3Ghz P4 3 GB DDR1 SDRAM ATI Radeon X600 128MB. Page file is 1536 to 3072. Hard drive has about 50 gigs of free space. Max is around 160. Running the game at fairly standard settings, although lowering the quality of things doesn't seem to improve the speed. Similarly, maxing out the visual settings doesn't appear to worsen anything. Rendering mode is set to hardware I had previously been able to run SC4 fine on this system, although at the time there was only a gig of ram installed. A few weeks ago, I reinstalled Windows, and added some additional RAM. It also works fine on my laptop, which is... a considerably worse system in every way. And only had a single gig of real memory. - This isn't a proper install from the disc. I just copied the install directory and relevant My Documents folders over from my laptop. I don't know if that could be causing the issue. That being said, I doubt that it's a problem related to incorrect plugin installs, because... that hasn't changed at all since the last time I ran it on my laptop, and it worked fine then. - I am NOT running any no-cd cracks. - I am using NAM, although, as I was running it on my laptop previously, the less taxing pathfinding mods are in use. - Dropping texture quality and city detail to the lowest DID seem to help for small cities, but not much for larger ones. - Page file usage is hovering at around 834 megs, and SC4 is using 341 megs of real memory when running. So, yeah. The only big change since the last time I ran the game on this system is that now there are an additional two gigs of ram, and I don't see how adding more memory would decrease performance. Actually one possibility is that my video card drivers are configured wrong. I DID have to reinstall those, too.

Sorry -- car lifespan is fine, I think. Just the people that walk around and stuff. Also, I generally run it at the lowest or middle speed. Running it on a laptop with an Intel GMA 945... chipset, with 2 Gigs of ram, and an Intel Centrino Duo. Had a similar problem on another computer I own, though.

Running Rush Hour with NAM, and some various other lots which aren't to blame. Ever since installing Rush Hour, the people you see walking about in your city are only visible for well under a second before dissappearing. Even with NAM's "extended lifespan" plugin thing, and the relevant settings in SC4's option menu maxed out, they don't last that long. Prior to installing Rush Hour, you could easily follow them for at least a block or two before they vanished. I'm not sure if it's Rush Hour or NAM or something else causing this, but has anyone else had this problem, and can I fix it somehow? Thanks.

Complexity and versatility in a simulator are, in my eyes, good things. I installed SC3K tonight and messed around with it briefly, and what I really missed about SC4 was the micromanagement. A lot of people apparently hated that, but I loved the level to which I could customize and fiddle with my city. Also, once I got used to the region in SC4, going back to a single-map city just feels tiny and opressive. Except SC3K is especially akward about this, and a lot of it goes back to the zoning too. SC2K was a very zoomed-out sort of game. In SC4, you can get down and look into individual neighborhoods and fiddle with details and road networks and the like. Sc2K is more zoomed out. Maybe more macro-view. SC3K gets into a problem, though, where the more detailed and up-close graphics mixed with the more macro-level play style just makes it feel akward. In Sc4, you zone individual lots. In SC3K, you zone tracts of land an they just sort of develop however they want to. That's on example, I guess. The biggest difference between SC2K and SC3K is probably best exemplified with the manuals, though. The back half of SC2K's was a collection of poetry, art, and essays about cities. Sc3K, unless I'm completely misremembering this, just had a generic EA-style manual. Maybe from a purely gaming standpoint, SC3K works better. From a simulator standpoint, though, SC4's got unmatched complexity and versality and fiddle-around-with-itude. The urban planning experiments forum sort of proves that. There's one factor that I'd like to see a city builder address properly, though. Demographics. Religion, ethnicity, age, and personal interests are all factors that affect where people live and how happy they are.

Automata lifespan is better in NAM, but still not great. For some reason, I recall this only being a problem with Rush Hour. Back when I had plain sim city, you could usually fall walkers and cars for quite a while. With Rush Hour, lifespan dropped from about ten-twenty seconds to one.

This case might be because the city's too big, though. To test it, I loaded one of the larger pre-built cities that came with... Rush Hour? vanilla SC4? Anyway, yeah, takes forever to load, and crashes. I think it was the Big City thing in Timbuktu, BTW. Anyway, this scares me. My cities will eventually get larger. And I have *GOOD SPECS*. 512 megs ram, a... 4 gig pagefile, erm... probably a 3 ghz pentium 4, ATI Radeon X660, I believe. Perhaps we should look into a method of addressing this issue.

Assuming you have enough R$$ and R$, then A) The fares generated from the mass transit should be pretty decent. B) You can probably safely tax them up to about 10.5 percent, really. If you've enough people, that should cover it.

Now what I want to know is would you still play SC if you had to go thru all that just to build an on/off ramp?!? Of course I would. There's a disaster remember. If the sims complain, I just burn the little !@#!$^s. And it's not like they can impeach me or something. It's not like I don't have the Death Switch under the God menu. Or the llama cheat.

I use some sort of order. I don't like my city going all over the place. I don't like GRID grids though. At least, not for everything. My current layout is a central avenue with neighborhoods branch off it. It butts into a highway, which goes to other avenue groups. These are basically mega-neighborhoods. This looks pretty similar to suburban Ohio, in a lot of ways.

Huh. How do you build them?