SC4 Devotion Forum Archives

Sim City 4 Devotion Tools => Tools - General Discussion => SC4 Startup Manager (SUM) => Topic started by: CaptCity on July 18, 2009, 07:13:21 PM

Title: Startup Manager v2
Post by: CaptCity on July 18, 2009, 07:13:21 PM
Hope this is the right place for this... First a little backstory... I've been using Startup Manager v2 for a very, very long time. I love it and I've never had any problems. Today, however, something interesting happened.

A little more story...

I have a couple test regions that I use to test various things before putting them into use in my regular regions. One of these regions is actually an older version of the other. Today I installed the NAM update in my usually test region and noticed something different.

Now, I happen to have had BTM v2 installed and noticed that the ElRail tracks were not altered any more as they should have been. OK... I replaced the NAM with the version I had before the new install, but the tracks appear the same - not as they should have. Ok, it's not the NAM. So now I look in my 'Test' folder where I place my test items. Nothing new in there, but I remove everything anyway and run the game. Tracks are still not right, and now I'm really curious because absolutely no other plugins ever change in this test region.

The next thing I do is to fire up the other test region (the earlier version). I need to point out that the plugins for this region are identical to the plugins in the other. The only thing that changes are the test items. Well, the tracks in the cities in this region are all right. So I install the new NAM update and check again. Tracks are still good, and I'm stumped. At this point in time the plugins in both of the regions are the same, but one is good and one is not. Now I'm thinking maybe I had done something and forgot. So I have the great idea to start swapping plugins (luckily there aren't that many), and, guess what, after having completely switched every plugin from one region to the other, nothing changed. The 'bad' tracks were still in the same region and the 'good' tracks the same, and I'm really stumped. I'm thinking I had a corrupted city file that has somehow 'locked' a prop in place.

I'm staring at my plugins folder when I see the only other thing I can think of that might be changing as I flip between regions, and that is the 'SimCity 4 StartupManager.cfg file'. So I remove it and fire up the game, thus creating a new SUM cfg file. Well, you guessed it, now both regions are showing the correct tracks. So what I'm guessing happened is that the cfg file somehow 'locked in' that certain track prop and would not allow the correct prop to override it? Is that likely what happened or even possible? Really just curious as if anyone else has run into anything even close to something like this.

Thanks for baring with me and reading through all this (if you did... ;) )

Title: Re: Startup Manager v2
Post by: k808j on July 18, 2009, 09:40:41 PM
@ CaptCity

Try upgrading to v3. I have not had any problems with it.
Title: Re: Startup Manager v2
Post by: CaptCity on July 18, 2009, 11:21:09 PM
k808j...

I've used v3 in the past, and I haven't had any issues with it either. Using v2 is really just a personal preference, not because of any problems I've had with v3 (Do you know the one about old dogs and new tricks...  ;) ), and I'm sure that the situation I overly described above was probably just a fluke...
Title: Re: Startup Manager v2
Post by: Andreas on July 19, 2009, 05:49:09 AM
Well, both versions of the SUM just move around files (or hide them from Windows), so I doubt that they could cause the issue you described. Not sure what really happened here, though.
Title: Re: Startup Manager v2
Post by: CaptCity on July 19, 2009, 02:07:57 PM
Thanks, Andreas, for taking a look here. I wasn't sure how SUM treated the files as it 'moved them around' and what is in the .cfg file. This was probably just those 'gremlins' on my computer.
Title: Re: Startup Manager v2
Post by: Andreas on July 19, 2009, 03:58:31 PM
The config file basically stores the layout of your plugins folder, and for SUM v3, your region profiles, but it doesn't touch the files itself.