Vanishing Props

[delphi1981]

I recently downloaded some new building, props and textures for my cities.  After downloading, the original SimCity 4 parks, plazas and other recreational items lost there props?  Not sure what I can do about this.  I don't know if there is a confilct and that is why the props disappeared from the Maxis standard recreational lots.  I did run the CleanIt program and nothing appears to be missing.

Anyone have any ideas?  I am confused. 

[Andreas]

Check your graphics settings, maybe they got changed to "low". This always happens if you install one of the official updates or patches, but it also happens if the SimCity 4.cfg file gets deleted or corrupted somehow.

[fafalone]

It could be the prop pox. There was a thread about it, I had it bookmarked ever since that happened to one of my cities. Now it says the thread is missing or off limits, but basically it's a unresolved bug where props mysteriously start vanishing from a city. Mostly large cities with a lot of custom content, but there were no hard limits and wide variation.

What happened to that thread? It was at http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=1201.0

[dedgren]

That thread is not off limits or otherwise restricted.  fafalone, I've noted your access issue to staff, and they will take a look and see if some stray permission is not set correctly.

delphi1981, do you have a list of the things you installed, just for grins?  It never hurts for others to take a look at what you were adding when the problem occurred, although duplicating your situation entirely is probably pretty tough if you had the usual fairly well-stocked plugins folder to begin with.

I tend to install new stuff a thing at a time and play the game a bit between adding new custom content.  That may sound pretty methodical, but I've really not ever run into anything majorly bad (CTDs, texture conflicts, freezes, that sort of stuff) that I wasn't right on top of over the past six years or so.  If you install 20 new things at a time and something goes wrong all you can pretty much do is yank it all back out and start over.


David

[fafalone]

Thanks, they fixed it; didn't even notice the whole technical help board was missing.

Back on topic, there's other threads on this issue worth checking out:

What causes Prop Pox (and how to avoid it)

and

Disappearing Props - not to be confused with Prop Pox

[delphi1981]

Thank you all for the information.  I checked out the link and basically, I ended up uninstalling SC4 and then reinstalling after I did a full system defrag.  This time, I am making sure that the Graphics are all set to high and that the rendering is set to software and not hardware.  Hopefully, this will help me out.  At least I can see that I am not the only one that has had this issue.  Just weird that it only happened to the Maxis props and not the custom props.  Oh, well, on to building ...