The Prop Pox!

[snorrelli]

@Barby: well, I did find Plugin_RCI_Buildings_Prop_Modd.dat, but that's the only one mentioned in that thread... Like most people, I had some period of newbie downloading from the official site, without knowing what I was doing, so there may be other extraneous junk in there...

@Piyer: I'm not so sure what you've got is the Prop Pox. I've never heard of it affecting lots as you plop them. In all reported cases so far, this bug occurs when you load a saved city and in all cases the saved cities looked completely normal when they were saved and exited before...

What version of the game do you have? Is it Deluxe, which includes both the base game and the Rush Hour expansion?

[Piyer]

What version of the game do you have? Is it Deluxe, which includes both the base game and the Rush Hour expansion?

Snorrellli, I have the deluxe version of the game.

[BruceAtkinson]

  Well, I have taken the plunge and utilised Datpacker, and while in the game, it does seem to run faster, however I'm using both compressed and uncompressed folders, so if I did what Datpacker calls for, removing the other subfolders, it would most likely run even faster....but I haven't cause that is just me, and I'm not getting any of the problems related to running both Compressed and Uncompressed......then I went in to Wesley, and Prop-pox is still there. Again, I'm lucky...as Prop-pox only exists in Wesley.  That got me to thinking...if I'm using all of the custom content and mods that I use in all of my cities...and not re-arranging my plugins for say rural cities/areas, and doing something different for Metropolises...then why is prop-pox only in the one city?  It makes me still think that a dependancy or a couple are either being misread or not there and that is what is causing the prop-pox...that coupled with the Plugin Missing message box that keeps coming up in Wesley and some of my other cities, and I have triple checked for dependancy and according to all reports, I have everything I need.
  Another question, regarding Datpacker...is there an easy way to reverse the compression, or does one simply delete the Plugin compressed folder and re-downloaded all that material?
  Just thoughts and questions I have, while driving in from Cleveland!
Bruce

[snorrelli]

Bruce... One should not delete the original, uncompressed files, but rather should move them to a separate folder called "plugins_disabled" (or whatever other name). The game will not read anything but the file named "plugins". Then, when you want the original files back, you simply delete the plugins_compressed and put the original files back in...

[BruceAtkinson]

Thanks Snorrelli....yes, I think that is what I was saying in my convoluted way of saying things
   So, does Datpacker copy and compress these files, or are they just moved to the Plugin_compressed folder?  In other words, if I just delete the Plugin_compressed folder, are the same files still in the Original subfolders, or do I have to move them back in?
   Now, on to more important things--The Prop-pox:  It seems by re-reading this post, we are very close to solving this...so just for my own sake, maybe a re-visit to the behaviour of the Prop-pox may reveal something we all overlooked.  Remember when I first posted, I thought I was missing some dependancies regarding the BSC...however that proved to be not the case.  As Prop-pox developed in Wesley, I was seeing other lots disappear....now couple that with the Plugin Missing message box coming up in Wesley when you first load it, and again in several other cities...that in itself does not make sense, as I have mentioned before...all dependancies that I need are reportedly in my possession.  So, with so much Custom Content that I have, and running several mods...maybe the game is not reading everything it has to, causing both the message box coming up and seeing the Prop-pox manifest itself in Wesley....does any of this make sense, or am I just shooting in the wind?
  Bruce

[ltrskn]

It appears the prop pox is not limited to Windows XP SP2, but can affect cities created under Window Vista Home Premium. The pox has erased props in two lateral bands across my city of Egelpolder. Gone are rows of seasonal trees, canals, farm fields and buildings and nearly all other props.

My computer stats for the chart:
Vista Home Premium
Gateway Model M-1617
Processor AMD Turion 64 X2 Mobile Technology U-58, 1900 MHz, 2 core(s), 2 Logical Processor(s)
Total Physical Memory 1661.50 MB
Available Physical Memory 958.96 MB
Total virtual Memory 3.99 GB
Available Virtual Memory 2.87 GB
Page File Space 2.43 GB

Display: ATI Radeon X1270
Adapter RAM 384.00 MB (402,653,184 bytes)
Resolution 1280 x 800 x 60 hertz; Bits/Pixel 32

Hard Drive: Western Digital - Size 222.44 GB; Free Space 162.50 GB

Bug affects large city tiles
Custom Content: 1.95 GB (compressed with DatPacker, except for Essentials, Mods and NAM)
Graphic Settings:
Visual Effects - Medium
# of Cars/Sims - Medium
Shadows - Low
Building Draw Speed - Medium
Texture Quality - High
City Detail - High
Custom Resolution – 1680x800x32bit
City affected population size:  ~15-20K
Save city file: 9 MB; not sure if it shrank
Size of subfile in Reader for:
a9bd882d – 432,323
49c05c8f – 24,014
49c05c9f – 1,262
2977aa47 – 4,017,867

Yes, did mistakenly remove plugins (custom retaining walls and relotted base texture of some farm fields) without bulldozing every instance (missed/forgot to bulldoze a few). I reset the sealevel several times in order to place retaining walls as seawalls, then later removed them.

Also of note, the pox also affects the same city file on my desktop computer. I regularly sync the files between the laptop above and the desktop if I have played a city file while travelling. (The desktop is a Gateway GT-5034, AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4200+, Total Physical Memory 3.0 GB, Available Physical Memory 1.93 GB, Total virtual Memory 6.17 GB, Available virtual Memory 4.99 GB, Western Digital Hard Drive 298 GB/208 GB Free, Nvidia GeForce 7600GS, resolution 1280x1024x32bit, SC4 graphic settings and plugins the same as laptop.) On both computers I have ReadyBoost-enabled Flash drives.

[BruceAtkinson]

...I was playing the game last night, and in a new city, building it from the ground up....my game was getting slower and slower as I was adding more custom content.  At one point in the game as I zoomed from '2' to '4', the lots would be re-drawn as per usual, but slower...and this gave me an opportunity to see something;  for most of the lots, they were completely intack, however on some of them, it took a couple of seconds for the whole thing to appear...and during this 'redrawing', the first stage looked very similar to what we see with the Prop-pox, only some of the lot is there, then it is all there, as I said before....but it got me to thinking that possibly the Prop-pox is affecting the drawing of the game.  Maybe, something is hindering the games' ability to draw the lots completely?  That in a random way, the info is being blocked....does this make any sense?
  Bruce

[Nardo69]

I do think the same Bruce, unfortunately I couldn't valuate this ...

[Pat]

Bruce that makes alot of sense since lately I noticed Ive had a few CTD's and I read the report... At the end of the report it said "Instruction data is not readable -- Unable to get the EIP."  At the start of the report it said under Exception time which is the "Exception code: 0xC0000005 (-1073741819) ACCESS_VIOLATION."

So I wonder about the data if it becomes corrupted and that is then why there is the Prop Pox...  I just kinda hope Im not on the verge of getting the bug myself...

But anyways if anyone wants to read the exception reports are attached, the last 3 reports are included in the zip.. The 2 are from the 3rd which I noticed was kinda wierd in itself cause the first report is generated when I started to play but no CTD, then the 2nd one is when the crash actualy happend a little more then 2 hrs later when I was saving...

The other report which i was talking about above is from early this morning when I was starting to play again and all the sudden it crashed on me....

[wouanagaine]

ACCESS VIOLATION is usealy issued when the program is trying to read a memory that is not belong to it anymore

Unfortunalty Exception Reports are generally not very usefull ( even for the programmer who code the game, so for us who don't have the code it is unuseable )

If you run the console line version of DatPacker, you'll get some informations about your plugins size, and how much memory it will use if the game load every bit at any time. You'll see that it is quite massive, much more than any virtual memory can handle. Fortunatly maxis programmers are smart enough and they come to a nice cache algorithm to handle most case that they envisioned at the development time ( ie that maybe 6 years from now ). The algorithm has proven to be very efficient as most of us have much more plugins that what maxis every thought. However I think the algorithm has some 'worst case scenario' that some of us are triggering and the game stall/crash or just lost track of props.

[BruceAtkinson]

So maybe we are on to something, however here is another rub...I'm playing the same region for months, and I have Prop-pox in only one city in this Region, a city called Wesley.  Now Snorrelli and others are seeing the Prop-pox in other cities they have created.  In my case, Wesley is a large city, but not fully developed...I have lots of unzoned areas within its borders.  I do have lots of Custom Content, however I also have much more in other cities of the same Region, and no Prop-pox.  Some of this is old ground being covered, for some of us whom have had Prop-pox for a while...but as I mentioned in my last message...the pox looks very similar to a half drawn lot....could the information be blocked by a corrupt save, as if we read back over this thread, Snorrelli and others discovered a certain pattern in the size of the .sav file....and now with what we are currently discussing, possibly the two situations are combining to trigger this disease!
   Bruce

[BruceAtkinson]

 Hi all.....this may be a stupid question, however here goes!  Is there an utility programme that will allow us to 'see' or 'read' an individual city file?  One that may be able to show us how the data sits, the values...etc.?
Bruce

[wouanagaine]

Ilive reader ?

[BruceAtkinson]

...Hey, thanks wouanagaine !
   Now, with Ilive reader, could not it be used to analyse a city that suffers the Prop-pox, and by making comparisons with a city that doesn't have Prop-pox, but has the same Lots and Models, and could we then find out what might be happening with the affected city?
Bruce
  ....P.S.: This may have already been done, obviously I don't know
Bruce

[RippleJet]

   Now, with Ilive reader, could not it be used to analyse a city that suffers the Prop-pox, and by making comparisons with a city that doesn't have Prop-pox, but has the same Lots and Models, and could we then find out what might be happening with the affected city?

Since the internal structure of those files isn't known, the Reader doesn't know how to display the information.
Thus, you will only be offered to see the content as such in raw hex format or in a simple decoded field format.
As long as Reader doesn't know what properties and values the fields contain, the hex information is very hard to read though.

[snorrelli]

Apologies for neglecting this thread of late... Not that I have any real insight or solutions to offer...

@Itrskn: I have added your info to the table. My condolences on joining our club. Interesting that the bug has occurred with Vista too. Just to be clear, I *think* we should have the specs for the computer you were using when the bug first appeared. I've noticed that once it's there, it will continue to be there no matter where you load or access the saved city afterwards...



Not sure what the size of the mystery subfile tells us. In all the case where the size has been measured, it accounts for around 40% of the total save file size... So what?

I'd encourage anyone else watching for this to back up the save file regularly. Eventually you will reach a point where you can pinpoint the moment when the bug occurs and can compare the size of this subfile immediately before and after the bug, as silentbreaker has done. A dramatic increase, then decrease in the size of this subfile is directly connected to the Pox. Problem is, I have no idea if it is somehow the cause of the Pox, or a symptom. 

[ltrskn]

@snorrelli --

The information you so kindly entered into the table is indeed for the computer where the pox first appeared. i.e., the Turion laptop with pre-installed Vista. The pox apparently got moved to the other computer's version of the city file when I synced the files. (I listed both sets of specs just in case it made any difference to your investigation...)

I knew about the pox from my XP days, and had hoped it wouldn't happen on Vista machines since no one had reported it. 

[BruceAtkinson]

Hey Snorrelli...it is great to hear from you again!  I trust everything is well with you!
  If you read my earlier post, regarding the Building Draw Speed when my game was going quite slow, what I didn't say in that post was that I'm thinking that the Prop-pox could be directly related to the mechanism of that process.  Having watched some lots get drawn at that slow speed, and in stages, made me think of how similar the initial stage looks, with only some of the props and not all of them. 
   Is it possible that whatever the Prop-pox is, it is corrupting or blocking the full process of the game's Building Draw process?  However, it still wouldn't explain the randomness of what we see, but it may at least point us in the right area....
  Your thoughts?
    Bruce
P.S.  I have added another gig of ram to the computer, which has helped in the overall speed of the game.

[snorrelli]

Hi Bruce, sorry - I meant to reply to your observation before... Yes, when the problem occurs, it looks to me too like when you're waiting for the "rendering wave" to roll across the city and draw all the buildings as you scroll around. I don't know enough about how the game works to say whether the Prop Pox is related to draw speed or whether it just looks similar.

Because the bug seems to occur during saving, I had wondered if the program somehow "draws" the city tile in a similar way during the save process. I thought maybe the bug occurs if:

- You lack sufficient RAM?
- The program encounters too many props to process and save?
- If it encounters an "error" like a place where a lot has grown or been plopped and then been removed from the plugins folder?
- If the city is somehow otherwise too large and too complicated to process in the amount of time it allows itself to save?

I have tried playing with different draw speeds and still get the same effect, however...

One thing I believe the info in the table tells us is that the first and last theories are not the causes. Among the victims included in the table, the Pox has affected all sizes of cities, with populations running from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands and file sizes ranging from 5MB to 30. There seems to be no shortage of RAM among the victims either. Besides, it is only affecting a relatively small number of people. What separates my 2GB of RAM from someone else's 1GB of RAM who is not suffering from this problem?

The middle two theories are still possibilities though. We don't really understand how this mystery subfile works. Wouanagaine has determined that it includes network props and silentbreaker pointed out that it is the largest subfile in the city save file, so it is possible that it reaches some critical mass and... ugh... I don't know "and what"...

It does also seem that all the victims either definitely or possibly have removed files from the plugins folder without bulldozing all instances first. I suspect this may have to do with it just because I am very careful about those things but I know I did it in the two cases of the Prop Pox I've encountered most recently.

Then again, it could be that these ideas are completely off base and the cause is something entirely different, related to information or observations that we're not even tracking in the table and haven't even discussed here yet. To tell the truth, I've gotten a little frustrated with the research. 

[wouanagaine]

It should be 'easy' to know if the cause ifs the 'remove files from plugins without bulldozing' for someone who is willing to go on a test spree

Step 1 => Have a quite developped region, make a backup of it
Step 2 => Remove some files from your plugins ( I'll first go for plop )
Step 3 => Run the region for a while and see if the prop pox appears ( maybe you'll have to play more than one city ). By running I just mean hit the cheetah button and wait 10 game years, do not interfere with the game other than zooming in/zooming out for redrawing
Step 4 => if prop pox appears, save the city, and show us your figures from the original file and the new one

If nothing appears, try Step2 with removing some growables ( that have already grown and are still able to grow again ie do not remove stage 1 growable if you have a skyscrapper forest )

If nothing appears, try Step3 with really playing the game

If nothing appears, then it certainly have nothing to do with files removal