Missing buildings and content along city tile edge

[belfastsocrates]

This is a rather random issue that I've never experienced before. I only noticed this today and I don't know how long this has been an issue as I haven't visited this part of the tile in weeks as I've been working in another area. Beyond this edge the city is unaffected.

I have been having some game play issues lately with some CTD's and at times the game screen will stall and 'flicker'

I seriously hope it's not prop pox!

Does anyone have any idea what the cause could be? I'd really appreciate some input. I could demolish the affected areas and rebuild but I'd like to avoid that if at all possible

[mgb204]

Assuming you've not been mucking around with your plugins folders (i.e. removing content), this does bear the early warning signs of prop pox.

Have you got a backup of this city tile? Obviously this is no use if Prop pox is the issue, but since that's little more than save-file corruption, it's equally possible with the other problems you've been experiencing that somehow the save file was just damaged and it's not actually Prop Pox? Either way, if you restore a working backup and keep playing, eventually you'll see if the problem reappears or not. I forget the tool used to check your save file for Prop Pox, but I'd also recommend testing both the current save (and any backups) with this to give you a clearer picture.

Incidentally, are the problems with CTDs and the like unique to running SC4, or are they occurring with other applications on your PC? SC4 is quite stable once you get it going, have you perhaps updated the GPU drivers, in which case rolling them back may solve it.

[belfastsocrates]

I've only started experiencing CTD's and game play issues since I upgraded my RAM from 3GB to 8GB. I had been playing SC4 pretty uneventfully for over a year or more before I upgraded the RAM. I'm assuming that's causing the CTD's, maybe there is such a thing as too much RAM for SC4?

I have been adding new plugin content but I haven't removed anything which features in that area of the city tile.

I do have a backup, I think I made a copy a few weeks ago so at worst I would lose some work if this is just a corrupted file. I could cope with having to rebuild parts of the city more than I could manage prop pox, that would depress me immensely, so much lost work

[mgb204]

Doubtful I'd say, the only correlation I can foresee is perhaps down to the 4GB Patch which may/may not have been installed with the NAM? In which case re-installing the NAM should prompt for the 4GB patch to be applied to your game if it's not been already - assuming you must have a 64-Bit version of Windows here?

My system has 16GB, I've never encountered problems with SC4 with the exception of the usual suspects, SC4 as a 32-Bit application wouldn't even try to use more than 3GB in any case.

I have been adding new plugin content but I haven't removed anything which features in that area of the city tile.

This suggests you may have removed something, SC4 really hates it when something that was installed (props/buildings/models) is taken out but content that uses it remains. That's why I only ever add to my plugins, I never remove any once a city has started building. If you are not sure about some new content, always test in a special region setup purely for that purpose.

[belfastsocrates]

I'll have a look and see, I made a total backup of the region and plugins at the end of May. I'll made a copy of the saved city and load that to see if there's an issue, that'll help me see if it may be related to plugins or something else. I think the only thing I removed was Gizmo's night mod and RJ's longer night lights .dat. I do have an obscene plugins folder and I very rarely remove anything.

I reinstalled NAM a few days ago. I'll maybe have a look at that again in case I missed something when I uninstalled it. How can I tell if the patch was installed?

[belfastsocrates]

It seems to be a corrupted save file. I loaded a backup from 8 weeks ago and the corrupted city section doesn't exist.

I'm just going to use this backup and start rebuilding the industrial area I've been working on. I'll load the corrupted city and take some images of the unaffected areas I had been working on and use those as a rebuilding reference. Incredibly annoying but at least I had a backup I suppose......could have been worse 

I would like to address the CTD's though as I don't want that damaging future saves.


Backup city

[mgb204]

The problem with Prop Pox is that whatever triggers the problem lies dormant unless a certain set of conditions come into play. If that is the problem, restoring the backup will appear to work, but you'll find later that even the backup starts to exhibit the same problems once more. Either way the best you can do right now would be to make a new backup (for all the other cities, assuming you have not already), and keep them along with your original backups. There are some instructions on how to check the Network Subfile on pg. 3 of the prop pox thread, I believe a tool, SC4 Save, has a feature to do a more user friendly check - not that a search for such a thing is yielding me any results.

The NAM 4GB patch should happen automatically if you've a 64-bit OS installed, I'm not entirely sure how to check if it's been patched or not though. That said, this patches the game .exe I believe so once it's there, unless you uninstall SC4 it is not necessary to do it again.

[belfastsocrates]

Thanks for that Robin, I'll make additional backups and do so often. I'll perform the prop pox check as well.

I'll be devastated if it is indeed prop pox



Edit:

The file size of 2977aa47 in the 'corrupted' city is 3,213,001 and the 'non corrupted' is 3,277,708


I may look at recent plugin folder amendments and see if an issue is happening there. I have a backup of those as well from May so I can use that folder and add recently installed plugins gradually to use with the backup city.

[NCGAIO]

CTD - Make inactive audio  through audio:off at the command line and use the minimal graphical settings while you working on tile ..

[MandelSoft]

A pretty effective method to counter the effects of the Prop Pox (not the cause) is to switch your graphics to low city details, re-open the city tile, save it, and switch back to high details again and reload the city. Setting your city details to low actually removes props from the save file. By switching back to high detail again, all high detail props are added back in, and this is why this method works.

However, the effects will come back again once you start saving this city again under high detail...

[joshua43214]

The program MGB204 mentioned is wounagaines SC4 SaveGame Explorer
http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=2021
Run savegame explorer
double click the city in question
double click the prop sub file
wait a few for the tool to run
a message will display on the tool saying if the save has the pox or not, and a window will pop up with a graphic display of all props in the city.

I do not know how wou's tool works, but it does find corruption in the prop sub file in exactly the same places as the tool I wrote. If you want more info, read the prop pox thread. I wrote some very long and detailed posts between pages 30 and 35 on my own exploration of the problem. In short, there is no cure and the root cause is not known. It is rare. The only verified plugin to cause the pox is Peg's OWW2 BDK. This has been verified by a number of users (including me), you can see page 35 of the prop pox thread to verify it yourself (it will take much less than an hour). There is a link to a test city that you can use to verify your plugins folder and see if it will cause the pox.
If wou's tool says you do not have the pox, you probably have a rendering issue. Switching between detail levels can sometimes fix this.

As for CTD's. By far the most common cause is trying to run a multi-core rig. SC4 does not support multicores and will crash when core a makes a decision that conflicts with core b's decision. This happens mostly during path finding of automata - so the bigger the city, the more frequent the crashes.
Make a shortcut to the game on your desktop
right click the shortcut and select properties
paste this line into the "target" box:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Maxis\SimCity 4 Deluxe\Apps\SimCity 4.exe" -CPUCount:1 -r1920x1080x32
Make sure the path is correct to the .exe file, some rigs need the Apps deleted
You can delete or change the resolution to match your monitor, but you should leave the refresh rate at 32.
You can add a -w to run in windowed mode.

RAM is one of those things that can be bad out of the box even with top shelf RAM, and not all RAM will run on all motherboards stably. If the RAM you purchased is not on the motherboards manufacturers website as being supported, then it may not work. I assume you are running a 64bit system, a 32 bit system will not run 8Gigs of RAM.
Regardless you should always stress test new RAM.
memtest64+ (not memtes64) or prime95 are excellent tools for testing RAM stability
http://www.memtest.org/#downiso
http://www.mersenne.org/download/
memtest64+ is probably the better tool since it focuses on RAM and puts less load on the CPU. For example my rig will BSD with prime95 running at 4.7GHz but pass memtest64+, my crash is caused by CPU instability at that overclock, not by bad RAM.

My current rig BTW
i7-5960K 3.5Ghz 6 core CPU oc'd to 4.5Ghz
Asus Rampage V Extreme motherboard
32GB Corsair Vengance DDR4 1333.1 RAM
Dual MSI Twin Frozr V GeForce GTX980 GPU's in sli mode
1Tb SSD main drive
500Gb SSD temp file drive
2Tb HDD storage drive

I do some large data analysis. So far I have only used ~26GB of RAM, I would swamp the 16GB on my old rig pretty often. I probably need to modify some of my code since I am not pushing the new system hard enough lol.

[mgb204]

Just to stop any further speculation, I've analysed the affected save files, it's simple file corruption as far as I can tell, in any case it's certainly not prop pox as the subfiles don't exceed 4MB.