The Prop Pox!

[snorrelli]

This is a problem that has been happening with my cities from time to time, ever since I got the game 3 years ago. I have never figured out what causes it, nor have I ever seen anyone else mention it, but just in case someone knows what it is and how to prevent it, let me show you what it is.

This pic provides a good illustration. To the left of the avenue bridge all is well. To the right... well... I don't know how to describe it. It's like all the props are missing...



No street props, no canal water, no cars or other features (no traffic shows either, when the game is unpaused).

It's interesting what is left and what disappears. The pic below is the CSX Urban Waste Tech. One of the buildings and the smoke from the chimneys remains, but otherwise nothing but base/overlay textures...



Another common feature are the missing arrows to neighbor connections (in this part of the city only - the rest are fine). Note also the missing roundabout prop...



Here's a shot of the Yeungling Brewery. You can see that the lot has been stripped down to just the building model and the ground textures. The blank lot to the left is one of goober's small warehouses. Look also at the monorail shops - the shell is there but the storefronts are gone. Again missing neighbor connection arrows and road props too...



Here's a school complex with Uplands Gymnasium at the center. Everything but the models and ground textures is gone again. This affects Maxis content too - to the right of the school are basketball and tennis courts. At the corner is the small library. Check out the police station - no parked cars or fence. Also interesting is the soccer field - one of the goals vanished but not the other...



This is another look at the line dividing the corrupted area from the rest of the city, which is completely normal. On the right side of the avenue, everything is fine. On the left, everything's been stripped. Interesting that the cycledogg trees seem to survive.



A look at what some places should look like and what they look like with the bug...

Goober bus stop                                                        T intersection
         

T intersection


+ intersection


Avenue



Area around highway neighbor connection/avenue intersection


Some of the stripped-down industry


Finally, here is a wide-angle view of the whole city. The avenue dividing the corrupt area from the rest runs the entire length of the city, with neighbor connections at each end (marked by the yellow Xs). Everything to the left of the avenue is screwy. If you look towards the top you can see the missing canal water from the first picture...



OK - sorry if I overdid it on the pics but I wanted to post this here in an attempt to clearly define and describe this problem, the way you would an unknown disease. I am interested to know if anyone has ever had this same thing happen and, more important, if anyone knows how to prevent it.

It is this problem that is the main reason I keep backups of my last three (!!!) city save files. I regularly have to use one of them to overwrite a city like this and yet, as in this case, sometimes that effort is still not enough. Because this problem is only on this strip to one side of the city, I didn't notice it in time and all three of my backups have it...

Thanks for taking the time to look at this. I'm looking forward to your comments and ideas...

[marcosMX]

I had this problem before. Could you shows us a picture of your SC4 graphic setting.
You should set city details to High and 3 of cars to medium. Anyways I will show you a picture ofhow it should look later.

[Travis]

Interesting, at first I thought your graphics settings might have been reset to low, but what doesn't make sense is the fact that it occurs
on one side of the road and not on the other. That's just spooky... 

It must have something to do with that though; looking at your pic of the soccer field gives me a clue. If you were to look
in the Lot Editor, one of the goals is a prop (the one that's missing), the other one is represented as a building (one that's showing up).
I've had this happen to me before, I just restored my graphics settings to the defaults. Still doesn't make sense that it only happens
to part of a city tile, the reason would be beyond my knowledge. 

Hope that helped a little bit. 

[snorrelli]

Hmmm... Interesting suggestions both... It does appear to be just building models left and just props that have disappeared. The CSX Urban Waste Tech is another example. The structure that remains is the Maxis waste-to-energy plant building model, while the stuff that has disappeared are building props.

Here is a pic of my graphics settings (I play on a widescreen laptop, so I use custom resolution for 1680X1050):



I'll try setting the cars to medium first and then returning all settings to default and see if it helps...

PS - It may be worth noting that I used to play on a much weaker computer and did not have all settings on high but this problem has been a constant occurrence over the past three years and two different computers...


EDIT: Nope - doesn't appear to work (unless I misunderstood what you said about the graphics settings, Marcos). At least that doesn't restore the missing details. It might prevent the problem from ocurring in other cities. About the default settings - turns out those are my default settings, with the exception of the fog/clouds and the custom resolution...

[Pat]

I had some of the same troubles what i did to fix it was to set the Renderer from hardware to software that helped me out - pat

[flame1396]

I think It'd ahve to do with the building draw thing.

How the game unloads the props and stuff of a part of the city you ahvent viewed in a while...

I guess it drew it back and made a mistake..

Could i guess be used to make an odd story CJ...

[Frankie]

If you get a city that is very "full" as in the tile has lots of lots, and props and such, you will start to lose detail. I suppose it's because there are so many props and buildings to show that your RAM just cannot show it all. Or at least...that's what I've read while lurking the forums. This ''glitch" even happens to those of us with high-end computers...start losing props when cities get rather large.

[snorrelli]

Thanks guys... Even if I can't end up solving this problem, I feel some "therapeutic" value in just sharing my pain...

It does seem likely that the problem is related to the draw speed/graphics rendering. I have no idea how that works, but I've noticed, as I'm sure you all have, that when you zoom out or move to a new part of the city then the buildings render in a rolling wave that follows straight lines like the one here dividing the corrupt area from the rest.

Maybe switching the building draw speed to medium would help? Maybe it is able to draw the buildings faster than the props and so that's all that gets saved? I'll try switching it and see how it affects performance. The problem is I doubt this will restore the missing details and I'll only know if it prevents it in the future after months have gone by and I realize it hasn't happened again...

Also, though this city is a fully-developed large city tile (literally every square inch occupied), the problem occurs with cities that aren't yet fully developed as well. I find it really interesting that nobody else has really had the same thing happen. What could it be that is unique to my installation and would occur on different computers, different plugins and different settings...

[jeronij]

Did you change the terrain mod perhaps ?¿

[snorrelli]

Hmmm... Nope. I had used one of PEG's rock mods on another region but I don't use any terrain mod...

[Zaphod]

weird, ive never seen that before. Funny how its only on one side of an avenue. Thats nuts!

My laptop is old and slow, and my game usually crashes to desktop before I can ever build a city that large with custom content. Maybe frankie is on to something?

when was that section of the city constructed? if you demolish it and start over will the problem just go away?

how do you reproduce the bug?

[snorrelli]

Hi Zaphod - thanks for your reply...

Apart from the missing prop problem itself, this city posed a special additional problem I had never had before. Even when I demolished that section of the city and rebuilt (which I did several times), the bug would still appear when I saved, exited and reopened the city. Prior to saving it looked fine, so the glitch apparently happens during the save process. Every time this has happened before, if I didn't have a backup save file to overwrite the corrupt city, demolishing and rebuilding the affected area would take care of the problem. Not this time...

I have since blown up the whole city and started from scratch. Tragic, but so far the problem has not happened again. I did save a copy of the corrupt city in case anyone comes up with a theory for how to fix the problem in the future. To answer your question about reproducing the problem, I can't "make" it happen, nor can I predict when it will happen. I only know when I open up the city and find that the bug has occurred.

Agreed that Frankie's theory seems to be the most likely - it must have something to do with drawing a full city of that size, loaded with custom content. Although this bug sometimes happens even when the city is not completely developed, that is the most common thread I can find to the various incidents...

[stewart_garden]

Hi Snorelli,

I had the same problem a couple of months ago when the population of my city reached about 450,000 on a large city tile.  I did a thorough search of the forums at various sites and didn't find a cure, however, I did find others who had the same problem. 

This thread over at ST (link) seems to be about the same problem and offers possible resolution.  I also communicated with Bernhard on the basis of this post (link), but I don't think found he a solution either.

Just out of interest, is your situation similar to the the common features in the others' posts (large city tile, lots of custom content, large population etc)?

I ended up giving in and reconfiguring my region to mostly consist of small and medium city tiles in the hope that this might prevent the situation arising again.

Best of luck with this and please let us know if you do find a solution.

Stewart

[snorrelli]

Whoa! Thanks for the links, Stewart - those cases do seem to be the exact same problem! Large city tiles, heavily developed, lots of custom content. While I'm sorry they haven't found a magic fix, I'm relieved to know I'm not alone...

I'll communicate with them and see if they've come up with any other theories since their problems occurred. It's becoming more and more clear that this is the result of some problem in the capacity either of the machine or the program to draw large, heavily developed city tiles.

I would be amazed if it is the result of insufficient swap-file memory, but what do I know...

[flame1396]

I'v ehad a similiar problem but only with maxis content, all custom was fine.

a reinstall, defrag, and restart are all advised (from me at least) good luck, its an annoying bug to deal with.... 

[Nardo69]

As I told to Patrick in our PM conversation I have the same problem in my biggest city in my CJ Region (No,not Gleiwemünde, Rhenbrücken which should have become the capital of the region).

The bug only affects the props, it does not affect textures or building properties. It is not bound neither to custom content nor lots nor lot borders nor network pieces; big lots may be divided in sections with and without props.

It must have to do something with the sav-file of the city.

I whitnessed the following: As long as the bug has not taken place the size of the city map file increases whenever I expanded my city. As soon as the bug happens the size of the sav file decreases, the first jump down was around 250 kb at a filesize of around 14,8 mb not effected by the bug.

I could push the bug limit of the city by defragmenting my harddisk and increasing the virtual memory yet it happened again.

Interesting fact: In my region there are only two large cities on large maps:

Gleiwemünde the city I showed last year in my CJ on ST. Its current filesize is around 35 mb , its habitation around 354.000.  I saved it last time before I had serious trouble with my harddisk last year. It is NOT affected by the bug.

Rhenbrücken: ca. 470.000 inhabitants, filesize 14,2 mb with the bug.

There is another large tile with rural environment, around 30.000 inhabitants and 14.6 mb filesize - without the bug.

I would guess it is a hard disk problem but as I said before I couldn't find a solution for it.

Bernhard

edit: typo control ... /edit:

[snorrelli]

Hmmm... Yes, I have also noticed the fluctuation in the size of the .sav file...

[stewart_garden]

Hi again,

I noticed there was some activity in this thread and it reminded me that I uncovered a related thread the other day and pointed the originator to here, so thought I would include a reciprocal link for you guys (link).  Hopefully the more people that are aware of this, the more likely a cure becomes.  Which reminds me, we probably need a name for the bug - Sans Prop Syndrome (or SPS) anyone?

But seriously, good luck with this guys - as someone who has experienced this I know how frustrating it is.

Stewart

[snorrelli]

Thanks for the tip, Stewart. It seems we have another victim...

I noted his affected city was 70-80k in population, which hurts the theory of hitting some sort of population-related barrier that affects the save file.

I also noticed this comment from wounagaine:

around 32Mb is not that large, I recall having a 75Mb large city
I was expecting a bit more, however it should relate to one of the entry in the savegame, based on original maxis content, the developers may have took some decision that leads to some constraints we are not aware but that our custom content community had certainly exceeded

That's really my worst fear - an unexplained, Maxis-engineered limitation that we can't prevent or fix...

[BruceAtkinson]

 Quote from Snorrelli....That's really my worst fear - an unexplained, Maxis-engineered limitation that we can't prevent or fix... 

     For me, I'm not leaning that way, as with my way of thinking, if this was the case, we should see this in many other cities in the regions we engage in.
   I had another problem, regarding population and the Demand Caps, in which many gave great advice, however Ripplejet suggested something in regards to the save file and in how it may have been saved & corrupted by the computer (I think that was the jest...forgive me, I'm getting on in years and my memory isn't what it used to be)...and isolated only to that city.  The city's name is Westport, and is in the same region as Wesley...in fact it is just next door.  Trying to make a long story short here, we exhausted all known remedies, and I finally went back to the original region (NanamioSouth) and cherry picked the city square and re-plopped it, and now it is the largest city in the Region!  I'm reluctant to do that just yet to Wesley, mainly because I can get stubborn, but also because I truly think we can solve this, since it is no longer unique, and I'm just too lazy to rebuild Wesley
  Bruce