I'm going to explain this whooole situation that I got myself into with the plugins folder....
Okay so I haven't played Simcity 4 in about four months, I'd been really busy with work and then school and the holiday season has brought me a lot of free time. So I come back into the community here and at Simtropolis and before now, I've never really paid too close of attention to goings-on and developments, so I'd never heard of the CAM. Up until now I'd just been downloading random buildings I thought looked cool. Now I've changed and I want to start growing my cities instead of just engineering them to look good (and also clear out that disgusting packed landmarks tab). I started by downloading the CAM blindly not realizing all the problems it causes for already settled cities. So I removed it from plugins, and came on here and learned about it. Then I decided that most of the crap in my plugins folder I didn't need anyway-I tossed it all out and decided to start afresh. I reinstalled CAM and at that point the only things left in my plugins was NAM, CAM, a water mod and a terrain mod. I went to the CAMpatible buildings list and basically downloaded EVERY building on it. Every one. You can imagine how long this took. And then I downloaded every Dependency. Then the dependencies of the dependencies. Then the dependencies of those if there were any. Theeeen I had to comb through all these downloads, install all of them into plugins, double check I have all the dependencies and everything and they're all in the right places. It came down to about 300 buildings and then all of the dependencies for them, around 2GB of stuff. I've put hours and hours into this....initially I had a desktop crash while loading the city (which is in a newly created region) and it took about an hour to figure out that it was a problem with my terrain modd. But now I have a real stumper that I've looked through the forums and can't find a solution to.
I've tried plopping several of the buildings I've downloaded, like the CSX Palace of Justice for instance, and the instant it's plopped the game crashes to the desktop. This happened with several other custom buildings as well. I don't know what to do. Could it be a missing dependency? A clashing modd? The result of something that interferes with CAM? Can regular buildings even clash with CAM? I've thought of just uninstalling CAM, but I can't really do that without losing all my work because almost my entire plugins folder is CAMpatible buildings only and I'd have to remove all of them. Can anyone help? I just want to play Simcity :'(
I'm sorry to hear you're having such a problem, I've had the same problem myself at times and its very frustrating. Just so that we can rule hardware issues out, could you tell us about your PC, specifically CPU, RAM, graphics card, hard drive space, and what flavor of Windows you have?
Cheers,
Kevin
intel core 2 duo T8300 at 2.4ghz, Nvidia geforce 8600M GS, with 4gb ram, and windows Vista. I probably have about 150GB of free hard drive space
SC4 isn't designed to deal with multiple cores, but is possible to work around it. This issue can cause some odd behavior, including random CTD's, so try this first before we move along to Plugins-related issues.
The first thing to do is after you've started the game and get to the region view, hit ctrl+alt+del to bring up the Task Manager. Then, under the Processes Tab find SimCity4.exe. Next, right click on it and select "Set Affinity," from that box select make sure that only CPU 1 is checked. The go back to the game and see if that causes any crashes.
Let me know what you find out!
Cheers,
Kevin
From the sounds of your explanation... ;)
Make sure you have no terrain mod files installed at all, and try to place those buildings....
Make sure you have all the dependencies, including master and slave ones ::) , installed, specially those called Essentials files.
If this does not solve your problem, you may want to consider making a donation to the site and get our SC4 DVD with all what you need for a fresh start, including NAM, CAM and most of the dependencies ;D :thumbsup: (this works better on a fresh game install)
I tried both turning off the core and removing the terrain mod and i'm still getting the same result of crashing after placing a building. This time I tried plopping the Living Mall and it crashed....so maybe this is a problem with the sc4 update or something? also, the essentials files I have are the bsc essentials, ndex essentials, and the csx essentials. they are all placed directly in the plugins folder along with bldgprop 1 and 2. I have everything else sorted out nicely into buildings, dependencies, mods, CAM and NAM, so I can locate anything very easily
Just my thouights on your problem its a real pain but when rebuildiing a new game i always add a few items at a time as i have had simular problems.
my method is to instal nam and cam run the game , add a few building without out a gig of dependencies and see if it still works, i then dat pack what i have and use only the plugins-compressed dir removing all other plugins from the plugin dir.
i then add more items and continue play if all works well i save the plugins compressed dir move all the plugins back to the plugins dir and recompress again, repeat these steps untill the game starts crashing. delete the last set of added plugins because the problem probaly lies in one of those and just play the game using the files in plugin-compressed you can add different plugins and try again till the next crash . I hope this kinda sense makesbut ne stepm at a time worked for me although its a real PITA as i said earlier