• Welcome to SC4 Devotion Forum Archives.

The Prop Pox!

Started by snorrelli, May 03, 2007, 08:53:49 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Nardo69

Rhenbrücken is build on a rather hilly area where I usually tried to avoid teraces with medium density 1x1 and 1x2.

Gleiwemünde isn't flat, too. In addition to this it has a lot of agriculture (BSC farms ...) !

But I'll cross-check the numbers again tomorrow!

Bernhard  :thumbsup:

snorrelli

That might explain it - both my cities are almost entirely flat and no farms. I have noticed that the farms take up a lot of RAM and tend to make for large .sav files...
Have you ever had the Prop Pox? Join us to help find a vaccine or a cure.

Totuna e dac-ai murit flăcău ori moş îngârbovit;
Dar nu-i totuna leu să mori ori câine-nlănţuit.

snorrelli

Bump...

Here's the table of victims and symptoms of this tragic disease:



I'll PM everyone and ask them to stop by and fill in the missing details. Not sure what it all means, but maybe we can find a pattern...

By the way, how the heck do you use the table function in the editor? I finally had to take a screenshot from Excel and post a jpeg.  ()what()

In other news...

Acting on Colyn's suggestion (much to my wife's chagrin) I installed SC4 on her computer, copied the plugins and region folders and loaded the city. No dice. It's pretty much the same environment though, in terms of RAM, OS and nVidia card (though weaker). I'm pretty scrupulous about cutting out the unnecessary memory-resident programs and use CachemanXP to maximize available RAM for the game...

Bruce's issues with the missing plugins reminded me of something else - I should note that in both my affected cities I have removed plugins that grew or were plopped without bulldozing all instances first. Going through a fully-developed large city tile to find all the 1X3 lots that have grown like a plague, for example, is a frustrating excercise. I got the ones I could, removed the files from the plugins folder and then had to mop up a few I had missed (which had become brown boxes) when I reloaded the city. This did not happen close to the time the bug appeared but was an "event" in the history of both these cities.

I never took the "bulldoze all instances first" instruction very seriously because I found it did not crash my game or prevent me from loading the city, but maybe it causes this corruption?
Have you ever had the Prop Pox? Join us to help find a vaccine or a cure.

Totuna e dac-ai murit flăcău ori moş îngârbovit;
Dar nu-i totuna leu să mori ori câine-nlănţuit.

BruceAtkinson

...Snorrelli....this is a great table!  I'll put as much info in as I can in a day or so....incidently, I am not running the experiment I mentioned prior, during my two days off...since my wife had other plans for me, like helping her pack our son's things and sending them off to Toronto, and for me to clean up my office area!  Man!, doesn't she realise the more important things I must do!  :thumbsup:
   I have been going through my plugins folder manually, and have found quite a number of duplicated items....yes, even though I have thought I was being diligent and reading the 'read me' files and removing the redundant ones...I've still missed some!  So that will take me another day or so, and then I'll report the size of the Plugin folder, (at present over 3GB),  and other things in the table....meanwhile I'll also keep looking at the thread, as I'm learning so much from you and the others who have been inputing!
  Now off to write some Music Reviews....
  Bruce
P.S. Regarding running on a different computer, I actually was running on another, until last year...it too was XP Pro, but a slower machine with less HD space.  No problems though with Prop-pox.  I'm nnow running the game on a Windows XP Home Edition--again that info will be put in the table...   

Fledder200

Nice table!!  &apls

some more info about mine thingy :o

RAM = ermmm i think 1 GB
Vcard = NVIDIA® GeForce™ 6150
Virtual memory set to - ermmm gosh...i don't know :)
Grapics settings = all high, Hardware
Population = about 180.000
.save shrinks : don't know
size of the city = 30Mb

All the others i don't know

what i do know is that it was gone for a while, but it has returned again :(
and always when i try to make a new update :(
i even removed and re-installed the game!!

all i know that this problem suckes :(
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Life is too short to wear bad clothes...and ugly shoes!

Nardo69

The first two things in common seem to be a 64bit CPU and nVidia Card ....   ???

And with 1-2 GB  on each PC it seems not be a RAM problem, too ...

I opened up a thread on simforum.de with the same theme. There had been two other cases of the prop pox:

- Andreas said he had this porblem with Win2K and SC4 Vanilla (that was before RH was availbale!)

- Bikerbraut hat this problem, too, on a WinXP PC yet she couldn't give me any further details about hardware and .sav - details as she said it happened some time ago and that she had changed her pc in between ...

Andreas problem is rather extraordinary (pre - RH ... ) yet Bikerbraut's problem seems to be our disease ...

Maybe we should try and open such a thread over ST pinned at the starting page. To find out the reasons we need more data

flame1396

I've filled large tiles many times, never seen it.

My comp only has 512 mb of RAM and is an easy 5 years old. It does have a MASSIVE processor (3.19ghz)

probably not ram.
The most astounding and unique aspect of the human race is our fervent application of our ingenuity to kill each other, thus completely defying the near-universally proven fact that the ultimate goal of a member of a species is to ensure the survival of the species.

snorrelli

I also had this happen regularly on a much older (2003 era) P4 2.4Ghz desktop in the past so I'm not sure if the 64-bit capability matters. The video card on my old machine was the same one you have, though - nVidia MX400. Then I switched it to a 6600 and it still happened. All nVidia though.

I posted the exact same first post over at ST and didn't get much response, other than N_O_Body's favorite advice "check the detail settings and set virtual memory to 4GB". I have PM-ed two people over there that have reported the same problem - jabezscratch and spoonman - and pointed them to this thread...
Have you ever had the Prop Pox? Join us to help find a vaccine or a cure.

Totuna e dac-ai murit flăcău ori moş îngârbovit;
Dar nu-i totuna leu să mori ori câine-nlănţuit.

Nardo69

Hmm ... I do hope it's not my reliable nVidia Card ... would mean we could choose between lagging ATI drivers or the pox ...

Yeah, I got this advice from N_O_Body, too, including We shoudl all defrag our harddisk.

But then again - why should the problem happen with XP that works with my large harddisk but not witn win2K that has severe problems with harddisk partitioned bigger than 130 GB?

It stays strange ...

BruceAtkinson

G'Day Snorrelli:
      Here is some info for the Table:
  OS: XP Home Edition/SP2 (Version 5.1)
RAM: 1.80GHz @ 960MB ram
Processor: AMD Sempron 3400
VCard: Nvidia GeForce 6150LE
HD: 80GB ST380811QAS (the computer is a Dell)--ok! stop the laughing
Virtual Memory: 5096MB
Large Amount of Custom Content: Yes 
    ...in addition the Plugin Folder is: 3.98GB with 15,581 files...2,599 Folders. (uncompressed)
and I'm still going through the Plugin folder and manually looking for duplicates.
Bruce

BruceAtkinson

...I have another question, I see that some of us are using SC4Datpacker, which essentially is a compressing program.  As a TV/video Producer, I realise that utilising compression can decrease the quality of Video and audio...does compression do the same for the Simcity files in the Plugin folder?  Also, if this is not a worry, why not use the Windows XP Compression tool?
  Bruce

Andreas

@Bruce: SC4Datpacker is not a compression tool like an audio/video codec. DivX, MPEG2 or MP3 use lossy compression, since they drop information that cannot be heard or viewed anyway. Of course this doesn't work for data. What SC4Datpacker does is merging all individual files into large DATs, and dropping unnecessary information like the preview pics that the Lot Editor creates, XML data that is used to transfer information between the BAT, the Plugin Manager and the Lot Editor and stuff like this. The relevant data for SimCity itself (3D models of the buildings, textures, exemplar files etc.) isn't touched at all.

The main reason why wouanagaine created SC4Datpacker is that SimCity reads a few large files a lot faster than many individual files. As you may have noticed, the 3D building models and textures are loaded depending on the rotation and zoom level, so even if you have a 3 GB plugins folder, only a fraction of this data is actually loaded into the memory. The rest is constantly read from the files, and this works better if SC4 doesn't have to open and read thousands of files in order to look for the necessary data.
Andreas

flame1396

I actually remembered an issue I had a little while back. I had a city and all maxis content was missing.... props, buildings, overlays. Just base textures were left. This problem was fixed however I dont remember how.
The most astounding and unique aspect of the human race is our fervent application of our ingenuity to kill each other, thus completely defying the near-universally proven fact that the ultimate goal of a member of a species is to ensure the survival of the species.

BruceAtkinson

 Andreas...thanks ever so much for setting me straight on the type of program SC4Datpacker is, and explaining what it actually does! &apls
  Bruce

snorrelli

Well, I still can't figure out how to make a table here with the forum editor so I've posted another screencapture from Excel. Here's the updated info...



I see that jabezscratch and spoonman haven't yet come by to add their info, but maybe we can continue to build a database of symptoms. In the meantime, I have added another one to the bottom - removal of files from the plugins folder without bulldozing all instances first. I don't know if that affects it but it was something common to both of my affected cities and Bruce mentioned he was getting the missing plugins warning upon loading his city.

Bruce - it must take you forever to load 4GB of plugins without using datpacker. I suggest you give it a try. You'll never go back. For finding duplicates, I suggest DoubleKiller. It's a small, free program that works very well for the job you're doing manually.

Unfortunately, I don't think we're any closer to an answer here. The only commonality is indeed Windows XP but, as we've said, XP is common to more than 90% of the people playing this game. The next possible culprit is large city tiles. I've always been suspicious of the program's ability to deal with them since Maxis didn't use them in any of the default regions...

I've got to say this is getting to be kind of a deal-breaker for me.  :bomb:

You guys are all talking about 1 city lost to this problem but I have been having this happen regularly for three years now. I have three backup copies of every city I play, just in case the next time I load one of them I find that the Pox has struck (or in case it had struck previously on a part of the city I didn't see). Now when I load a city I pan around to all corners of it checking for the Pox first. Apart from the two cities affected most recently, I can say that EVERY city I have developed to a significant size has had this happen at one time or another. Sometimes I can overwrite the .sav file with a backup copy and take it from there, without the problem returning, and sometimes I can't. Sometimes I can bulldoze, rebuild and go on without any problem and sometimes I can't... ()sad()
Have you ever had the Prop Pox? Join us to help find a vaccine or a cure.

Totuna e dac-ai murit flăcău ori moş îngârbovit;
Dar nu-i totuna leu să mori ori câine-nlănţuit.

Nardo69

Patrick, I think I can see there two more common things:

1. we all use nVidia - cards. Don't they have a unified driver for all cards?

2. I had some problems reinstalling the SC4Startupmanager after formatting and installing XP so I cannot say I am sure that I restored all lots correctly. It is possible that some of them did not "survived" moving to XP ...

Bernhard  :thumbsup:

snorrelli

Oh, right - I forgot about the nVidia cards... Like you, I don't even want to think about that being the culprit... $%Grinno$%

I am now trying to recreate the problem by growing a test city and then taking files out of the plugins folder. Not much fun but I really can't enjoy the game anymore with the threat of this problem happening haning over my head.
Have you ever had the Prop Pox? Join us to help find a vaccine or a cure.

Totuna e dac-ai murit flăcău ori moş îngârbovit;
Dar nu-i totuna leu să mori ori câine-nlănţuit.

BruceAtkinson

Snorrelli...I do feel your discouragement, and knowing that you are the one that has suffered from this 'disease' more than the rest, however I sense that we are on the verge of a breakthrough.  With all that you have done, and everyone else whom have inputed and have made suggestions, I think we are much closer.  It is a process of elimination, and at times tedious, but please hang in there bud! ;)
   As far as the table goes: I actually haven't taken out any plugins without bulldozing all instances, that is the wierd thing, I have all my dependancies, but on a couple of occassions I get a plugin pack missing pop-up, one is linked to the Cellular Tower, I think the GSX, yet I can plop it and it is fine, however the growable one shows as having a brown box, and the other is a government building, which until just last week was fine, and now it is showing as having the brown box...I forget which one, however I'll post it, once I remember....
  I will download Doublekiller and use it....as far as datpacker, I'm a bit reluctant, as it seems that you must run the program after every time you download new models...and quite frankly I'm too lazy ::)
   That is why it has taken me so long to do the maintenance manually, I know, it doesn't make sense!
Incidently, I put a call out to Ripplejet on my thread, and apparently he is away for awhile, however, I'm sure he will respond once he reads through both threads, he may have some good suggestions for us.
  Hang in there, my friend....
Bruce

BruceAtkinson

...so I downloaded Doublekiller, and I am amazed at how many duplicate and triplicate files I have..., and I have deleted some, however it is listing the same files, with same date and everything in two or three paths....usually pointing to several different folders.  As an example, the Asian Building Pack 1....files showing the buildings in the Asian Pak folder and then a duplicate in a folder of the name of the building....now when I downloaded Asian Pak, I thought it had a readme or cleanitol remove list, which I of course would follow through on, so first, I am surprised I missed as much as I have, and second is there any instance in which the file, mostly a .dat file is needed to be in more than one subfolder, especially if the file in question is used as a dependancy?
  Bruce

Andreas

Quote from: BruceAtkinson on June 30, 2007, 10:55:49 PM
is there any instance in which the file, mostly a .dat file is needed to be in more than one subfolder, especially if the file in question is used as a dependancy?

If the files are identical, you only need one, regardless if it's a dependency or not. The game loads all IDs and discards duplicates anyway.
Andreas