The Prop Pox!

[Swesim]

I´m a bit confused as there are no .sav files in any of my regions, all files end with .sc4, but the info You requested are there as follows:
Buildings (a9bd882d) = 175196, props (49c05c8f) = 97554, retaining walls (49c05c9f) = 11008, 2977aa47 = 1510506
The biggest city in the region is currently 4,95MB. Similar cities in older regions are about half the size...

[BruceAtkinson]

   Well, first of all....Happy New Year to everyone, especially Snorrelli....how the heck are you!
...Now to Swesim; I too have the problem with the Communications Tower, however this isn't related to the Prop Pox, it is something else altogether.  The Coit Tower also grows as a Commercial entity in some of my cities as well...and again, unrelated to Prop Pox.
   As you have already read through this thread, I am one of the fortunate ones that only have the Prop Pox showing up in one city; Wesley.  I have no problem with the other cities in the Region, with the exception of the aforementioned affliction that you have with the Communication Tower, etc.
   You also mentioned that a lot would grow, but only some of the props would show...and/or textures, but not the whole thing...now this may be related to what we have coined 'Prop Pox', however I'm not certain.  I have noticed that some of my growable HongKong bats do the same thing, yet the ploppable ones do not!  Still can't figure that one out.
   Back to Snorrelli....can you believe that after all this time, I still haven't re-entered Wesley?!  I have been busy building up other areas of the Region....and added another gig of ram, but haven't bothered with Wesley!  I'm now having problems with, what I think is a corrupt save in another city Pacifica...same Region.  The Issues just seem not to end!  Oh well, it is still as exciting as always to play this game.
  Cheers for now:
    Bruce 

[RippleJet]

Swesim,
The *.SC4 files (not the *.SAV files) are the saved game files, one for each city!

The Coit Tower comes as growable Stage 6 CS§§§ with the CAM.

Buildings growing on empty lots are related to badly modded landmarks.
A lot more information about them can be found here: Growing Empty Lots and How to Correct Them

[snorrelli]

Sorry for the confusion... You're right - the suffix is .sc4, not .sav...

Table updated. I'll see if I can get someone to look into the mystery subfile...

[wouanagaine]

In regard to a PM from Snorelli, I've dig a bit

the subfile 0x2977aa47 is listed as containing the network props.
The format of the subfile is unknown, but using the hex viewer within Reader, there are some recognizable patterns. and there are recognizable examplars TGI mention in that subfile.

I'll experiment more


Edit :
I removed the 0x2977aa47 of one of my savegame and I've got a lot of prop disapperead ( not networks props but lots ). I still have some props, my first guess is that I still have those that are 'timed' props, which may be saved in an other subfile

as you see, a typical Prop pox pic :

The trees are here because they are flora, and you can spot parked cars that are timed props

btw the subfile 0x2977aa49, seems to be the one where effect props are saved

And unfortunatly even if it seems to be that subfile which cause the prop pox bug, I don't really see a way to regenerate it.

[snorrelli]

Wow - I know we don't know how to fix it or prevent it yet but I feel a little excitement at having reproduced the problem and pinpointing where it happens. Thanks wouanagaine! That pic does look exactly like the Prop Pox...

Is there some kind of critical threshold on the size of that subfile that, if exceeded, causes the game to throw it out?

[wouanagaine]

Is there some kind of critical threshold on the size of that subfile that, if exceeded, causes the game to throw it out?

Until we figure out the actual format of that subfile, it is hard to tell.
The pattern seems to be :

offset 0 : 4 bytes = (x) length of prop data n°1 including these 4 bytes
offset 4 : x-4 bytes = actual data of prop n°1
offset x : 4 bytes = length of prop data n°2
etc...

so nothing related to the number of props in the savegame itself. But I suspect that there could be a max number of props somewhere in the code

[Nardo69]

Hmmm

I am not sure if the maximum overall number of props is a constant within the code or a variable calculated or influenced by the system itself.

I opened the last pox - free update of my pox town and blasted all seasonal trees (there were 100s of them if not thousends) and replaced them by SFBT Filler lots with non seasonal trees as a seasonal tree consists of 3 or 4 temporary props  on the same place.

With this I could play the map for a while but when I started to plop again those filler lots to fill the spaces the pox came back ...

Anyway I will the check the .sc4 files and give you the numbers wıth and without the pox at the weekend.

Bernhard

[Swesim]

Here are a some illustrations of my version of the pox as promised:



As You can see the textures are somehow affected as well, and as it seems Maxis props & textures are hit harder than custom BATs and textures I suspect it might have something to do with what was read last or added last to the game...



Same problem here, Maxis stuff take the blow while the custom lots seem to make it almost unaffected.

As a bonuspic the strange deconstructivist mall I was talking about:

[RippleJet]

As a bonuspic the strange deconstructivist mall I was talking about:

The Deconstructivist Mall by hdorriker is a landmark growing on an empty in-game lot.
It is listed here: http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=907.msg24171#msg24171
It has absolutely nothing to do with the prop pox!

[snorrelli]

@Swesim: Is the problem spotty or does it occur in a clearly defined area? For example, is the problem area delineated by a road or other network - one side fine, one side with the Pox?

[Swesim]

The problem as You can see in the pictures are spotted all over the place.
However I managed to cure my city (!) accidentally yesterday evening.
What I did was to run every Cleanitol list I had twice, once before and once after running doublekiller as it showed that I had several double instances of many prop- and texturefiles, actually I had four identical instances of two files with props...
After doublekiller had done it´s job I didn´t have time to go back into the game until now and voila, it works fine again...
It helped for me, so I can only recommend that everyone else having these problems also run doublekiller or similar program to make sure You only have what You need in Your plugins...
Could it be that the problem arises when the game reads the same file over and over again? I know that the game is supposed to ignore the first reads in that case, but in my case this seems to be a clue as it didn´t work before, but worked fine after I cleaned up my plugins...

[snorrelli]

Whoa, Swesim... Congratulations! You may be the first person to ever cure the Prop Pox! I don't know what eliminating the duplicates does to fix it though... Could the Pox be a result of repeatedly reading the same file, or is it a result of "prop overload" and you reduced the total number of props by removing duplicate files? Then again, it could be some other conflict...

I wonder what the size of that subfile (0x2977aa47) is now that the problem is fixed?

[Andreas]

This is an interesting theory indeed. I don't play that often, and my plugins folder is relatively small compared to some others (1.2 GB or so), but I'll try to keep it as clean as possible, removing outdated files whenever there's an update available, and also manually cleaning up a lot of files. If course this is no proof, but I never had any prop pox issues so far, and I hope it stays this way.

[Swesim]

Whoa, Swesim... Congratulations! You may be the first person to ever cure the Prop Pox! I don't know what eliminating the duplicates does to fix it though... Could the Pox be a result of repeatedly reading the same file, or is it a result of "prop overload" and you reduced the total number of props by removing duplicate files? Then again, it could be some other conflict...

I wonder what the size of that subfile (0x2977aa47) is now that the problem is fixed?

The size of 2977aa47 is now 2099412 according to the reader, but then I have played the city for a couple of hours more...
I´m just glad the darn thing is gone again...

[BruceAtkinson]

...I realise that the following is not related to Prop Pox, however is there a thread that deals with Network Puzzle pieces that can cause Crashes To Desktop?
Bruce

[snorrelli]

@Bruce: There is a well-known bug that occurs when hovering a puzzle-piece over another transit enabled lot and results in a crash to desktop. People who use GLR are most familiar with this bug but other puzzle pieces can also cause this effect. Nothing to be done about it, I'm afraid, except to be very careful...

Is that the issue, or are you having some other problem?

[BruceAtkinson]

....Hey, Mayor Snorrelli....how the heck are you!  Hope you had a nice New Years' and nothing but the best in 2008!
   Regarding CTD with a puzzle piece, I was working in one of my Rural areas, Queensbridge, and placed an overpass using the Rail & Road puzzle pieces, and all of a sudden it crashed to Desktop.  However, me thinks I did hover over a Transit enabled lot...so I'll be careful next time.
   You know, I feel bad, as of late, as I haven't really paid much attention to the Prop Pox, due to the simple truth being that I have been avoiding going in to Wesley...but with the recent posts, regarding Cleanitol and such and having it, Prop Pox,  clear up...for at least one citizen...I will be taking the plunge and going in and seeing what shape I'm in
    While I'm at it, I think I'll try and go back in to Pacifica as well, as that city also crashes, but for a completely different reason than the Puzzle pieces bug.  I started a thread on that a while back, but abondoned it as I felt that Pacifica's issue was a corrupt save, but what with reading some of the other threads relating to crashes, it may well be something else that I can correct....anyway, thanks for the reply Snorrelli, and if I find anything different in Wesley, I'll certainly post it here...
Best:
   Bruce

[BarbyW]

Something that occurred to me while reading through this is that if you have downloaded from the official site you may inadvertantly have picked up duplicate files. Glenni started a thread about the gems that are hidden in the rubbish there and as a result of a bit of testing I found that whole sets of outdated props etc were included with downloads.
Have a look here: http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=3287.0 as it may explain why some have dups even though they thought they hadn't

[Piyer]

   For my first post here, I shall add another piece to this puzzle...

I first noticed the pox in my game when I went to plop Maxis' minor league stadium and the lot lacked a building. It was annoying, but I didn't think much of it figuring that I screwed something up with the gazillion plugins I'd downloaded up to that point -- I've only had the game for two months, but I've made good use of the this and other user content sites.    This happened almost right after a specific download, but more about that in a moment.

The next problem I noticed was when I started plopping Maxis' parks and they were treeless, and certain lots -- still not sure if they were downloads or Maxis ones -- started spawning excess plaza tiles that were covering street tiles, and the trees from the streets vanished. That prompted me to search the forums for a cause -- thus bringing me here.

I tried several of the less intensive fix suggestions I found -- maximum page file, setting changes, software rendering, etc. -- but none of them worked. I resorted to uninstalling everything and doing a fresh install. This fixed the missing props issue for a few minutes. Then I reinstalled that download I mentioned before and BAM! bye-bye props. I saved the city, uninstalled and reinstalled the base SC4 game from the CDs, opened the prop-less city and the props were back. Trees are still skimpy on the streets, but maybe the heavy coverage was do to NAM??? Anyway, the cause of my vexation is the EP1 patch from Maxis. It seems a case of "Some old bugs fixed, some new bugs added."

System details:
HP Pavilion zv6000 laptop
Windows XP Home (2002) SP2
AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3200+
498mhz 512mb ram
ATI Radeon Xpress 200M
80gb HD, 500gb external hd
4gb virtual memory
It's effected cities from 0 to 300,000+ population, large and small tiles alike.
It has been around with an empty plugin folder, and with a folder in excess of 2gb.
File size info: n/a
I've probably deleted plugins without bulldozing, but that wouldn't matter in the case of the reinstalls.


Yeah, I know, not much of a gaming system, but I'm not much of a gamer. Hopefully this data will be of use in finding the cure for this pox upon our houses -- so to speak. 


EDIT: I just installed the fab 4 of NAM (June '07, Essentials, Jan '08, RHW/MIS). There was no return of the pox; however, I saw several cases of kids TPing nonexistent trees on the streets, so some tree props are clearly not being displayed.