The Prop Pox!

[CaptCity]

dwayner...

From your post at ST I hadn't realized you had run DatPacker and didn't think to ask, but did you try to put your original files back in rather than use the DatPacked file? I've had cases where things are gone after running DatPacker on my Plugins. Just a thought...

...and sorry to interrupt the thread with this, but I thought it might be important for dwayner to try.

[U.F.F.E]

I just had the same problem.

I just posted on simtropolis about it.

CaptCity leaded me the the conclusion that it happens when u enter a city and not having the needed files to get a building show up correctly, and then SAVE it and leave the city.

NEVER enter a city and SAVE without having all the needed files, at least thats what happened in my case, because all my other cities are working just fine, but not the one where i entered it and saved and not having all the needed files.

I had removed the Residential and Commercial dat files because i wanted to build in my industry city without having a loooong list of stuff i didnt needed.
And i was building a railway and that railway had to end in the city that got messed up because i was building railway in it, with no RC dat files and a lot of building turned into brown boxes, and i was thinking "whatever", they will show up again next time i enter the city having the RC dats in the plugin folder...but, a lot of em didnt, and now i have to repair the city for hours (bulldozing all the missing stuff, new building will then grow up, but gonna re-plop many of the building i plopped from the menu list)

[platyfish124]

In this regard, I would add that the search for a cure to the prop pox would much benefit from contributions by people which actually are not infected by the decease. For example, it would be particularly interesting if people who developed large cities (city surface fully occupied, lots of transit networks, train, highway, subway & el rail lines) drop by here and let us know the size of their gamesave file and network sub-file. If we find at least one person which has a 'clean' city with network file of, say, 12 Mb, then the possibility that a threshold was violated in the case of the infected players may be discarded. If one finds that nobody, no matter how large his/her city has grown, has a network sub-file larger than, say 6 Mb, then this hypothesis becomes stronger.

Cheers,
Bap

If someone can tell me how to get the required information, I will be able to post about a clean city 7 MB in size.

EDIT: the save file, sorry for any misconception

[bap]

If someone can tell me how to get the required information, I will be able to post about a clean city 7 MB in size.

Hi Platyfish124, thanks for your offer. You could load your gamesave file into Ilive's Reader, sort the entries by type (click the 'type' tab), and look at the filesize of the entries with types 2977aa47 (network), 49c05c8f (props), 49c05c9f (retaining walls), a9bd882d (buildings). We would be particularly interested in the size of the network file.

Unfortunately I have no good news.
I was able to find some 70 lots with missing props in my plugins folder. I first deleted all occurrences of the problematic lots from the cities in the region. Then I either added the missing props to my plugins folder or deleted the missing prop from the lot. Now I am sure that all lots in the plugins folders make reference to props which are defined in the plugins. After that, in the case of ploppable lots, I reinstalled them in the cities, in particular in the city affected by the prop pox. After a few save and return to region view, the infected city started to show signs of prop pox again. Therefore, it is not possible to know for sure if the pox is a consequence of memory corruption caused by undefined (missing) props in installed/grown lots. If this is indeed the true cause, it seems that deleting and correcting the affected lots in an infected city is not a cure for the problem.

It is perhaps useful to report that I discovered that the 2977aa47 subfile in the gamesave file reduces in size when non-network lots are deleted from a city. I tested deleting all instances of walls (Mas 71 kit) in the affected city and the network subfile reduced in size by 250 Kb. I also tested deleting all instances of Peg's stream pieces from the affected city and the network subfile shrank by additional 130 Kb. Thus, it seems this file contains not only information about network pieces & lots in the city.

I am also trying to develop large gamesave 4x4 km cities in a test region to see if they develop the prop pox too. I am using the same lots, props & mods used in the region with the affected city and I've been using the same kind of 'suburbia' style (only low density lots) I used in the affected city.

Finally, I recovered the history of my affected city. I have 4 backup copies of the city at different stages of development. Info about the total gamesave & network files are listed below. It seems the network subfile increased significantly in size from the first to the second save, perhaps signalling that the city was already affected by prop pox at that stage.

   date     gamesave(Mb)   network(Mb)
2007/07/07     2.6              0.082
2007/10/20     8.9              2.906
2008/04/21    14.9             6.041
2008/07/06    15.6             6.331 (still without signs of prop pox)

Summary: We still don't know what causes prop pox, and I am out of ideas of possible tests to perform in an attempt to figure it out. Any suggestions or help is much welcome.

Bap

[bap]

I had removed the Residential and Commercial dat files because i wanted to build in my industry city without having a loooong list of stuff i didnt needed.
And i was building a railway and that railway had to end in the city that got messed up because i was building railway in it, with no RC dat files and a lot of building turned into brown boxes, and i was thinking "whatever", they will show up again next time i enter the city having the RC dats in the plugin folder...but, a lot of em didnt, and now i have to repair the city for hours (bulldozing all the missing stuff, new building will then grow up, but gonna re-plop many of the building i plopped from the menu list)

U.F.F.E., a relevant question: did you solved the problem after replopping all the affected lots and saving the city, or do you keep seeing lots with missing props when you go into the city?
Bap

[lof102]

Hiya,

I'm one of the unlucky city owners as well, I've been dealing with this problem for a while now and luckily i found this thread to find it wasn't an unique problem...

A Small shot of the size of appearance of the prop-pox:

Supposed to look like this:
   

The appearance of missing textures is located in the mid-north and mid-west of the tile

And another strange occurrence, unfortunately no screenshots. I started a new tile in a new region and layed down 4 roads crossing each other. Saved the tile, loaded the tile, and the crossings were missing... A new tile with nothing else but 4 roads crossing each other..

I must say I've changed my rendering from hardware to software and then 90% of the missing ploppables reappeared, but still a lot of them are missing. I've seen that a list is kept up with the details from each users whom is confronted with the problem, here are mine:

OS: Ms Windows XP SP3
RAM: Corsair 2 GB DDR2
CPU: Intel C2D E6600
VGA: NVidia EAN7950GX2
HDD: OS: Western Digital 36GB Raptor
HDD: SC4: Wester Digital 36GB Raptor (Both on a different one)
Virtual Memory: 2056Mb
Custom Content: ~1.6GB compressed
Large City Tiles: Yes, medium as well
Graphic Settings: Effects: M, Cars/Sims: L, Shadows: M, Draw Speed: M, Tex. Quality: M, City Detail: M, Custom Resolution: 1680x1050, Software rendering
Affected Cities Populations: ~1,200,000
Save file shrinks: Yes, but when I turned Software rendering on it doubled in size, 68Mb
Reading Save file: Buildings: 460.247, Props: 97.813, Retaining Walls: 1.211.855, Mystery Sub File: 23.309.856
Removed plugins without bulldozing: Yes, never been a problem, been playing the cite from the beginning with missing files.

I haven't quite finished reading this thread so some info in my post might be said by someone else before.

@ Ripplejet, tnx mate!

[RippleJet]

Reading Save file...: How do i do that ?

You can open a *.SC4 save file in iLive's Reader

[U.F.F.E]

U.F.F.E., a relevant question: did you solved the problem after replopping all the affected lots and saving the city, or do you keep seeing lots with missing props when you go into the city?
Bap

Bap: yes its all fine now, i just needed to bulldoze the damaged buildings, and then let the game regrow it, or ofcouse if u plopped the buildings by urself, u just need to replop em

[iam015984]

Hello, I have been having similar problems in my cities, mostly with the 'Maxis' stuff. But here is the thing, I have been doing some testing and play'n around using some of the previous suggestions; turning all the graphic stuff on high, rebuilding, etc. but as I read further and further and on other forums, pages, the problem still occurs after re-installation, running full graphics, and a very bare minimum of plugins; NAM, NAM Essentials, and CAM, I ran the game three different ways; Zero plugins, NAM only, and then all three. There is one thing to note, I also ran the game a fourth way, no plugins, and no "Maxis" update, then tried with plugins, something very interesting, I would not recommend it though, I had many CTDs with no update.   I mostly written in hopes that someone had found a way to fix this annoying issue. Thank and peace.

[bap]

Hello, I have been having similar problems in my cities, mostly with the 'Maxis' stuff. But here is the thing, I have been doing some testing and play'n around using some of the previous suggestions; turning all the graphic stuff on high, rebuilding, etc. but as I read further and further and on other forums, pages, the problem still occurs after re-installation, running full graphics, and a very bare minimum of plugins; NAM, NAM Essentials, and CAM, I ran the game three different ways; Zero plugins, NAM only, and then all three. There is one thing to note, I also ran the game a fourth way, no plugins, and no "Maxis" update, then tried with plugins, something very interesting, I would not recommend it though, I had many CTDs with no update.   I mostly written in hopes that someone had found a way to fix this annoying issue. Thank and peace.

iam015984, there are good news for you. Please have a look at the most recent developments concerning the Prop Pox here .

Bap

[iam015984]

thnks Bap

[BarbyW]

In an attempt to solve the reasons for Prop Pox and also to try to find a solution we need as much information on what people had in their plugins at the time the Pox struck. bap has identified one problem pack but as that was not released until late 2007 there must be similar ones from 2003/4. If any of the afflicted could identify what packs/lots etc dated 2003/4 that they had in play this would help in our testing process. I know it is a faint hope but it would be useful if possible.

[owlsinger]

How much info would you like, and in what form? I just bought a new copy of deluxe, and have done a complete re-install of the game, and am editing my plugins folder, but I do have backup copies of the 2 cities I had that got the pox, and their regions. I also have a backup of the plugins folder I used on them. The cities are 34.6 mb & 58.2 mb, and the plugins folder is 2.01 gb (unpacked). If someone could advise me on how to do it, I would gladly donate them to research! Here is a sample of some pics I took in one of the cities.







Kendra

[BarbyW]

Hi, Kendra. I am looking for any files that contained modded Maxis props from 2003/2004. There won't be many but as the pox struck before the BDK file was released there must be others around.
As far as the cities are concerned, for research purposes only the city savegame files are needed. You can upload them to a file sharing service like fileden and post the link here. I only tested the bap cities as they were all developed without custom lots.
If you can post a list of any files in your plugins when the cities were poxed with a creation date of 2003 or 2004 I can go from there.
I love the crowd in the corner, are they trying to escape the infection?

[wouanagaine]

Kendra, are you used to DOS command line ?
if yes, open a command line
navigate to your backup plugins folder ( the one which correspond to your prop poxed city )
then at dos prompt type
dir /b /s *.* > listplugin.txt
this will list all your files in your plugins folder into listplugin.txt
then attach listplugin.txt here
If you have some plugins in the maxis folder, do the same

[owlsinger]

I don't know much about using the DOS command prompt, but I did find a way to it. (I have Vista). How do I navigate to the backup plugins folder? I have it on a flash drive, K: , named PluginsB. I can move it back to my SC4 documents if I need to.

Sorry, I'm not very computer smart!

Kendra

[RippleJet]

In the Command Window type:

K: <enter>
CD PluginsB <enter>

Then following wouanagaine's instructions.

[owlsinger]

Done! 

(after a few flashbacks to 1974)

However, I don't seem to have the option of attaching the text file to the post? No matter.

Kendra

Edit: Here is the link to the .sc4 file for one of the cities. (The other file was too big to upload, according to fileden)

http://www.fileden.com/getfile.php?file_path=http://www.fileden.com/files/2009/3/12/2361237/City%20-%20Glitter.sc4

       Here is the link to the plugin.txt file.

http://www.fileden.com/files/2009/3/12/2361237/My%20Documents/listplugin.txt

[wouanagaine]

Thanks

[TmiguelT]

i still need to know if you guys found the cure of the prop pox... this has only happened in one of my cities with has a medium city tile. Here are the pictures:







this is a medium city tile with only 110,000 sims and 115,000 commercial jobs. sorry if i'm bumping this thread but i'm so frustrated and i need some help