SimCity 4... Argh!

M

mr saturn

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 6, 2006
Messages
205
I spent a good 4 hours on a city, and man it was PERFECT. I zoom out for a sec and bam, crash to desktop. You guessed it, I never saved. Anyone know if SimCity 4 secretly autosaves or something? I'm very, very miffed. :(

Tried going into the game, that region is blank. What a horrific slaughter.
 
I don't think it has any secret save feature, should just rebuild it better then before, also remember to save :)
 
I've had that problem on my computer too. At first I thought it was my installation, but I eventually reformatted (for other reasons) and gave it a whirl again. The problem persisted. I don't play SC4 anymore :( How depressing.
 
I had that problem too now that I think about it, on my old p4 rig. Oddly enough, it only seem to happened while overclocked. And I never had that problem with other games. Not sure if that was truly the problem but that's just what I observed.

Pity too because SC4 really doesn't have any technical problems outside of that as I recall.
 
SC4 does that to me all the time. It happens so often that I get into the habit of saving before I zoom out. I have CTRL+S set as a macro on my n52 speedpad. I really feel your pain. I spent about 2 weeks working on a huge region for a City Journal and a few of my cities crashed almost every time I loaded them. I got fed up and baught Oblivion. It's been 2 weeks now and my SC4 cravings have gone away. I know I will come back though. SC4 is the game I have repeatedly come back to the past 4 years whenever I get sick of playing HL2, UT2K4, BF2, etc.
I believe the problem arrises from SC4 not being able to load trees, buildings, everything into memory fast enough. I have 2gigs of ram so I know it's not a problem with being able to store it all, just how fast it can be recalled. There are no real solutions mentioned at www.Simtropolis.com. I know because I've looked. Having a ton (In my case almost a gig) of BAT's and LOT's installed doesn't make it any better.
I suggest saving before zooming out everytime (zooming in is never a problem) and only zoom out one level at a time. Zoom out, wait for everything to be "drawn" onscreen, zoom out again. I tend to play at about the middle zoom so I don't have to make dramatic zoom swings too often. It cuts down on the crashing but doesn't prevent it.
 
Yeah, it happened while I did a fast zoom out.. Damn! I just got this fancy G15, it'd be nice to use some of these macro keys for something.

I'm actually the exact same way with SC4, I play it when I'm really bored of everything else. BF2, Oblivion, EVE, Dawn of War, and SC4 are my current cycle. Yeah, big cycle for after exams :D
 
I could never get the hang of SC4, always ended up in debt and had abandoned residential and commercial districts. :(
 
CodeX said:
Why do my buildings always turn brown and shitty looking, lol :confused:
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Because you make your city badly and people move to it, learn how shit your city is and move to my SUPER CITY :D
 
I was the master at simcity 1 for pc. One city had 1.6 milion residents,.. I think I set a world record...
 
roninblade said:
how much better is sim city 4 then 3000?
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It is about 100x better IMHO. Make sure you get the Deluxe version that inclused Rush Hour though.

Go over to Simtropolis.com and look in the forums at the city journals for pics of the kind of things you can do. I posted some gorgeous cities at the bottom people have created. Keep in mind that these are full of Lot's and Bat's (buildings and mods) so they look a lot better than SC4 out of the box. Cycledogg's terrain textures give it far more realism as well.

Thames is my fav:

http://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=36&threadid=62056&enterthread=y

http://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=36&threadid=67742&enterthread=y

http://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=36&threadid=68274&enterthread=y



Look in this sub-forum for tons of different pics in the "show us your..." threads.

http://www.simtropolis.com/forum/categories.cfm?catid=23&entercat=y
 
CodeX said:
Why do my buildings always turn brown and shitty looking, lol :confused:
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That's because poor people are moving into your wealthy buildings. Raise your education, health and richer people will move in, and clean up your slums :)
 
I was great at Simcity 2000 and 3000, but I could never succeed at Simcity 4 and always end up losing money in short time.

I've never had the crash happen to me though, but the last time I played SC4 was on my P4 1.3 right with 256 RAM and a Radeon 7500. It already ran like crap to begin with. And AFAIK, it doesn't do any sort of backup saving at points in time - if your region is not showing the results of your last building, then sad to say but you're SOL.
 
Is SC4 better than the SNES Sim City? Anyways SC4 always had some type of CTD for me until I built my own fast computer. Now it runs smooth and never CTD's anymore (does get bogged down if I increase the speed)
 
mr saturn said:
I spent a good 4 hours on a city, and man it was PERFECT. I zoom out for a sec and bam, crash to desktop. You guessed it, I never saved. Anyone know if SimCity 4 secretly autosaves or something? I'm very, very miffed. :(

Tried going into the game, that region is blank. What a horrific slaughter.
Click to expand...

My girlfriend was raging about this earlier...
 
Hmm... How long as sim city 4 been out? Ive had every version of sim city since it came out on the commodore 64.
 
bob said:
Hmm... How long as sim city 4 been out? Ive had every version of sim city since it came out on the commodore 64.
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Hm, has to be 3+ years now. I remember I had a friend buy me a copy of Rush Hour to play on the lappie when I was in the hospital back in October of '03.
 
Hmm... Ill have to check out walmart today and see if they have it.
 
When you make a city on the largest size map.
I hope you have a good video card
Some times at closer zooms your card can get hit with a lot of work and shit can slow down.

I love that game.
It hard at times to balance out the different citys you can make.
Trying to make a city that is nothing but a trash dump is imposible, the costs always out weight the income, I wish there were mods out there than could adjust some aspects of the game.
 
bob said:
Hmm... How long as sim city 4 been out? Ive had every version of sim city since it came out on the commodore 64.
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January 2002. I baught it on release and played it straight for about 2 weeks and quit. About a year later I started playing again when user created Bat's and Lot's started coming out more frequently that made it more enjoyable.
 
Majin said:
Trying to make a city that is nothing but a trash dump is imposible, the costs always out weight the income, I wish there were mods out there than could adjust some aspects of the game.
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Knowing EA, there's probably a "Sim City: Slumlord" expansion pack coming down the turnpike for you :p
 
anyone have some decent n00b info on SC4? I am too stupid to use railway stations etc. :D
 
I guess I'm lucky. I've been playing SimCity since the first incarnation and have always found it easy to get big cities :) That is, of course, until it decides to crash. I can't wait to upgrade to Conroe this summer--I'll probably have to give SC4 another try at that point.
 
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