What causes Prop Pox (and how to avoid it)

SC4BOY · October 14, 2009, 02:02:15 AM

Thanks Barby.. duly noted. I'll see if that helps me out..

Quote from: Diggis on October 14, 2009, 12:55:50 AM
SC4Boy, for what you are doing you can skip steps one to 5.

I have already tested a similar case (and also on this case) .. the simple setting and saving in MIN, then loading, setting to MAX, saving and re-loading does not seem to correct the issue.. unless you have some tip I'm missing

Here is the thread for the case I spoke of (though my recent discussion relates to a different city in the region

Diggis · October 14, 2009, 05:45:34 AM

I read your post there, sounds weird to me. I have no problems doing steps 5 and 6 on their own, and the settings ARE retained within my save file.

SC4BOY · October 16, 2009, 03:57:00 AM

hmm.. well i went through the cycle again.. and you're right they did save..don't know what I got confused before.. anyways.. here's the story

The city after I had loaded the city without plugins as it looked reloaded.. the settings are those I normally play on before changing settings

The settings I put in to save the city right before saving at min values

The city settings after loading at min values showing the max settings

The final city after the max save, reloading and set back to my normal settings. As can be seen, whatever did or didn't happen during the process, nothing was resolved with respect to the missing elements

If you have suggestions, I'm certainly willing to listen.

Going through all that was what lead me to conclude the full steps procedure would likely be all that would help... Its not only that the visuals are bad, but by looking at the RCI graph, many of those elements lost during the load without plugins also lost the values of the missing buildings population.. there is a MASSIVE drop in the population resulting from the empty plugins load.

Since I have all the game states backed up I may fool with it to see what good running the city for some time would do.. if the conditions are set, SC4 often quickly recovers from wiping out sections of a city, but I don't know if this may be so massive that it would take many years for it to recover.

RippleJet · October 16, 2009, 05:57:56 AM

Ingame lots seem to appear correctly... e.g. the stock exchange.

This would actually renounce that you are suffering from the prop pox...

SC4BOY, just to confirm that you're not missing any prop packs...

Could you query a couple of those lots where everything is missing?
Then use BuildingPlop in Buggi's Extra Cheats and plop those same lots.
Be sure "City Details" are set to high when doing this...

If the props are showing up correctly on those newly plopped lots,
then we at least know you're not lacking any prop packs.

SC4BOY · October 17, 2009, 08:40:36 AM

Quote from: RippleJet on October 16, 2009, 05:57:56 AM
Ingame lots seem to appear correctly... e.g. the stock exchange.
This would actually renounce that you are suffering from the prop pox...

yes I definitely don't have prop pox (yet anyways.. haha.. *crosses fingers*)

QuoteSC4BOY, just to confirm that you're not missing any prop packs...

Could you query a couple of those lots where everything is missing?
Then use BuildingPlop in Buggi's Extra Cheats and plop those same lots.
Be sure "City Details" are set to high when doing this...

If the props are showing up correctly on those newly plopped lots,
then we at least know you're not lacking any prop packs.

Sure.. I have moved past the issue by using SC4TF to correct the "crashing terraforming" issue, but I did save copies of the "missing stuff" city.. After I put the "old" city back in (before I did the "empty plugins" changes) all the things that were there showed up again properly.

I do recall casually clicking around a few of the lots, but I had no intent in mind so really didn't attempt to organize what I was seeing. When I did it, there was no result at all.. in fact I could not even find a spot using "cntrl-alt-shift ?" which would give any data at all.

Just as an added note, I played around with the plugins folder trying to isolate EXACTLY what set of plugins were causing the "crash to desktop on terraform" situation, but it is unconclusive so far.. I got tired of trying things and restarting after a while.. but I probably will take it up again in a moment of boredom..

I thought it would be obvious like a slope mod or the NAM but I tried quite a few things before giving up temporarily. At this point the only thing I can do that allows "crashless terraforming" on this old city is to take all plugins out.

Diggis · October 17, 2009, 08:56:18 AM

Quote from: SC4BOY on October 17, 2009, 08:40:36 AM
yes I definitely don't have prop pox (yet anyways.. haha.. *crosses fingers*)
Sure.. I have moved past the issue by using SC4TF to correct the "crashing terraforming" issue, but I did save copies of the "missing stuff" city.. After I put the "old" city back in (before I did the "empty plugins" changes) all the things that were there showed up again properly.

So you removed stuff from your plugins and couldn't figure out why it wasn't showing up properly....

SC4BOY · October 17, 2009, 01:08:03 PM

Quote from: Diggis on October 17, 2009, 08:56:18 AM
So you removed stuff from your plugins and couldn't figure out why it wasn't showing up properly....

I thought you said you read the thread.....

The short answer is yes I did take stuff out, and no I was neither surprised nor puzzled in the least that things didn't show properly

The whole series of posts both here and there had nothing to do with that point

Diggis · October 17, 2009, 01:29:20 PM

You're post with the pictures indicates that you were trying to figure out why the props on the lots weren't showing up... and the one below indicates that they did show up when you put the plugins back in. I know this stems from another problem but thats the way it read in here. Apologies if I am missing something.

SC4BOY · October 24, 2009, 07:22:03 AM

While on the other linked thread, RJ requested that I try out elements of your "step recovery" from the prop pox thread.

The reason I posted this was that I was not familiar enough with the tool to do the full steps that you outlined.. I did try it, but as I was using the tool it was clear to me that I didn't know what I was doing and that there was little to be accomplished from fumbling around with it when I didn't have the knowledge to do so.

Then it was asked that I do the last two steps, which I did. It did not recover the missing items. Others thought that doing this might recover the missing items (or "reload" them)

So at this point, I am saying simply that, given my current knowledge, I've done what I know how, and can contribute no further. A step-by-step "tutorial" would be nice, but I realize everyone is tight on time. Given my current lack of experience with it, I'll have to give up on that part for now.

With respect to my city itself, as I've mentioned I corrected the issues from a former save and moved on.. Since it crashes on terraforming certain sections of the map, I have to use SC4Terraformer to do terraforming in areas that cause CTD's, then reload it into the region and go from there. This works fine, but is sort of a round about method.

I was trying these items to hope to contribute to the subject.

SC4BOY · January 11, 2010, 02:37:43 PM

Well it does appear that my largest city has gone into "prop pox" territory.. I expected this to happen sooner or later as soon as the file became big enough. This is the picture of the very beginning of it. Note that this is the northeast corner of the city and "propagating" to the south as it was suggested it would be...

BarbyW · January 11, 2010, 02:50:47 PM

SC4BOY: can you put your city into a zip file and upload to a file sharing site like fileden, please? Post the link here; We can then have a look at the file to see if it truly is the prop pox.

SC4BOY · January 11, 2010, 03:03:21 PM

Of course.. will post and give link in a few minutes.. actually had just popped back on to edit my post and mention that the uncompressed prop file had dropped from "pre-pox" size of 15.6+Mb a few game months before to 14.4-ish Mb immediately after ..

Since I saved the "pre-pox" size (of course as we seem to have learned, "pre-pox" is just a convenience as the file's "pox future" has been sealed long ago) I'll post both files.. You can look to your heart's content and if you want other info, just let me know.

Ok, fileden links: (PS: sorry.. forgot to zip them, only ~30% reduction anyway)
Pre-pox
Post-pox

BarbyW · January 12, 2010, 09:29:23 AM

As you have correctly surmised your city is poxed. Could you possibly get a list of all the plugins in use for this city? You can email a text file to me.

SC4BOY · January 12, 2010, 04:29:23 PM

Quote from: BarbyW on January 12, 2010, 09:29:23 AM
list of all the plugins

As other's also may wish to see it, I've also put it zip'ed on fileden CURRENT PLUGINS LIST. Recall however that one of the peculiarities of the SC4 savefile system is that it uses not only any plugin CURRENT, but ALSO ALL PREVIOUS plugins, even if deleted now .. hopefully this will be useful to you however.. I don't know what I may have deleted as this was started before CAM 1.0 came out. As I use fairly "standard" plugins, I expect you will simply find something that you have seen before. Good luck!

hmm.. added note is that many of those plugins have never been used.. for example no airport mod was ever used.. I'm sure there are others too.

BarbyW · January 13, 2010, 12:06:17 AM

I didn't have to look far to find the problem. I can see you have PEG-OWW2_BDK_RESOURCE.dat in your plugins folder. If you read the initial report by Bap and also other reports by those of us who have been testing you will see that this file will trigger Prop Pox every time.

SC4BOY · January 13, 2010, 01:36:10 AM

Sounds good on paper, but as you will note above, this region has been in construction far longer than this total thread

So the knowledge (which I have followed fairly closely from the beginning) couldn't help me on my region... Perhaps next time

Nice to know it was only one lot however! I expected several.

threestooges · January 13, 2010, 02:16:05 AM

Well, that may have been the only one you had. As I understand there are several plugins that contain the necessary features to trigger the issue. This is one known file that has not yet been amended. If the problem arises again, it may be you have another one in there somewhere, but from what I understand of the trigger, it would be unlikely.

BarbyW · January 13, 2010, 03:38:08 AM

In fact that is the only file that so far we have positively identified as causing the problem. I have investigated many others but still not found another that causes the true Prop Pox.
The knowledge in this thread may be newer than your region but you could have identified that file yourself as the problem. Please note that this is not an anti-anyone situation but merely another confirmation that file is a problem.
To date I have never had Prop Pox in a city. I just checked my largest city in GRVII which is a medium tile with a population of over 250K. I have a plugins of custom content of 3.5GB plus terrain mods etc. I checked the savegame file in SC4Save and it found a total of 52985 props in the city. This is made up of 35089 props on lots, 17885 T21 props and 11 props not on lots - neighbour connections etc. I use the BSC Maxis Blockers although I have some modified Maxis R$ lots to fill the custom content gap.
The problem is caused by modified Maxis props with no change of IID especially the beach umbrella which is used in many Maxis R$ lots. In SC4PIM I checked the lots that used that prop either alone or as part of the prop family and found that there are 19 Maxis lots in families using this prop. The likeliehood of it being in a city, therefore, is high. If you have the modified props that have Maxis IIDs then the lots will be affected whether you have used the beach lots or not. Deleting the dat and returning to a pre-poxed city will not have any effect either as any erroneous props will have been saved in the savegame file already.

SC4BOY · January 17, 2010, 03:39:56 PM

Quote from: BarbyW on January 13, 2010, 03:38:08 AM
To date I have never had Prop Pox in a city. I just checked ......

As far as I know the ONLY number that matters as to whether you have the pox or not is if the PROP FILE exceeds 16MB... I've never seen nor heard of any instance showing up below that number. After your prop file exceeds that number THEN you know if you have a pox'd city or not.

I never had any visual indication of the pox until that picture above which happened just after the prop subfile exceeded the limit and the overflow caused the disappearance of the props and subsequent apparent decrease in the props subfile size.

dragonshardz · January 18, 2010, 08:09:03 AM

I don't mean to bash on anyone's obviously painstaking research, but, Barby, I've had large city tiles with over 500k population, with the PEG file you mentioned installed (unmodified), and Prop Pox has never been an issue for me.

I'm not saying you are wrong; under the correct circumstances, PEG-OWW2_BDK_RESOURCE.dat most likely does contain a trigger for Pop Pox. I just feel that the underlying cause of Prop Pox may go deeper than a incorrectly modified Maxis prop.

*DISCLAIMER: This is what I have found to work best for me and is an opinion. I apologize for any lack of clarity that may have caused anyone to take this as a statement of fact.*

I have found that the easiest way of preventing Prop Pox is to not only take care of the files with known Maxis props that have been modified incorrectly, but also to take steps preventing those files which have Prop Pox triggers that have not been discovered. Those steps are as simple as:

Never build on a completely flat tile, of whatever size.

While completely flat tiles contain the largest amount of room for city building, they also allow for the largest number of potentially Poxy files to have an effect. Make sure not only that your city contains hills, but that there are areas where you cannot build or where it would not make sense to build. One map that I feel hits all this right on the nose is the Invermere Valley map.

My $0.02