It is a common thing for one's game to just close out of the middle of nowhere. This is commonly referred to as CTD (Crashing to Desktop). It isn't uncommon, and can happen to almost anyone.
I have recently found and learned some tricks to prevent the annoying CTDs. Here are those tricks.
- Did you recently install a new plugin to SC4? Try removing it.
- If you have recently upgraded your computer, try running in compatibility for XP SP3, or as an administrator
- If you haven't allready, install necessary patches. This can help tremendously
- Reverse any settings or changes you recently made to your computer. That might be the cause of CTD
- Have you deleted or modified any critical SC4 files? You may have to reinstall the game due to this
- Make sure you keep your drive that the game is stored on (in most cases, C), well maintained by defragmenting, running the disk cleanup, and chkdsk. These can be found by going to My Computer, right click on the C Drive, click properties, and click the tools tab. Also make sure there isn't any virus, malware, or trojan on the computer.
- Watching Event Viewer can tell you critical information all about critical errors on the computer. Most of these important and high priority errors can be affecting performance. If you see an ntfs error, reboot the computer, fi you see any disk errors, try running the chkdsk, and set to attempt recovery of bad sectors. This helps too.
- Running the game out of this path can help as well:
C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c "high priority sc4 /high "C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 4 Deluxe\Apps\SimCity 4.exe" -w -intro:off
I hope this helps.[/list]