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...
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg181.imageshack.us%2Fimg181%2F9498%2Fcanalsplitkw7.jpg&hash=c19c42b49d6fa954087af8aa8ba8a5fc3ed0d445)
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...
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg407.imageshack.us%2Fimg407%2F2643%2Furbanwastetechmq0.jpg&hash=6f386ab1d8fc79ae9c37069672c7af77dbc923a9)
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...
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg300.imageshack.us%2Fimg300%2F461%2Fmissingarrowsandroadfeasx3.jpg&hash=3bdd7f6b9c08a55dbc2494fd649a16d925b636b3)
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...
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg50.imageshack.us%2Fimg50%2F8606%2Fyeunglingsmallwarehousedl9.jpg&hash=c284f724a30ca0962cd949f07235c302167bd548)
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...
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg462.imageshack.us%2Fimg462%2F418%2Fschoolcomplexuplandsgymsi3.jpg&hash=c44db557a56ea4a6628e342fe7c21f18cceee2cd)
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.
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg172.imageshack.us%2Fimg172%2F391%2Fleftandrightofavenueuu3.jpg&hash=fda737f6748cdcde2f8f3ab514888eef8d9f9cc2)
A look at what some places should look like and what they look like with the bug...
Goober bus stop T intersection
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg46.imageshack.us%2Fimg46%2F9196%2Fgooberbusstopdq6.jpg&hash=c80c4ac73a4014c56bb85fe7b098c69a584e5e6e) (https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg172.imageshack.us%2Fimg172%2F1584%2Fgooberbusstopbuggedhi9.jpg&hash=bf1ae4a42932a88b9c11bc02311c19d7a2dc5eec) (https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg170.imageshack.us%2Fimg170%2F667%2Ftintersectionzq3.jpg&hash=4e2fb1690d91d9f20bb82c3bf7eef9bce4f871d7) (https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg503.imageshack.us%2Fimg503%2F1209%2Ftintersectionbuggedtj6.jpg&hash=af8f1a539acb7d9ca28a738faf8f9ebc78ce14b7)
T intersection
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg170.imageshack.us%2Fimg170%2F4708%2Ftroadintersectionhg1.jpg&hash=667c141e1ead2f58d9f2fc83101195b56111bd4e) (https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg255.imageshack.us%2Fimg255%2F5194%2Ftroadintersectionbuggedqn9.jpg&hash=aef9212fd9772510235a8673476bbfce2079a318)
+ intersection
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg257.imageshack.us%2Fimg257%2F2861%2Fxintersectionhi3.jpg&hash=d48b874431c0823bafc8fbd800292771def1faea) (https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg257.imageshack.us%2Fimg257%2F2799%2Fxintersectionbuggedqu8.jpg&hash=38444b52cbae470060d32af71affd69f525dfc1a)
Avenue
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg257.imageshack.us%2Fimg257%2F1203%2Favenueun7.jpg&hash=6b3079bdcef917648461f716acd261e92bd40f24)
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg255.imageshack.us%2Fimg255%2F1303%2Favenuebuggedho4.jpg&hash=2543ef04e77de8b5d05b10205b83daafe2a3d3f6)
Area around highway neighbor connection/avenue intersection
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg501.imageshack.us%2Fimg501%2F1243%2Fhighwayareaud9.jpg&hash=1258973dfdd418d0c398dd5447928a218dca1417)
Some of the stripped-down industry
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg501.imageshack.us%2Fimg501%2F480%2Findustryez4.jpg&hash=1ae2784727ebf4d9947c8925193e3badd0a9d33b)
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...
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg257.imageshack.us%2Fimg257%2F2121%2Fcityviewmi8.jpg&hash=53e470afa6e1d3f99a74c282ea7cf343f750e71a)
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...
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.
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... ()what()
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. :)
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):
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg261.imageshack.us%2Fimg261%2F2435%2Fgraphicssettingser9.jpg&hash=d301bd3e658e791d6d32c3baa229e4e05551f046)
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... :(
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
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...
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.
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... ???
Did you change the terrain mod perhaps ?¿
Hmmm... Nope. I had used one of PEG's rock mods on another region but I don't use any terrain mod... ()sad()
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?
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...
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 (http://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=24&threadid=86999&enterthread=y)) seems to be about the same problem and offers possible resolution. I also communicated with Bernhard on the basis of this post (link (http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=241.msg7193#msg7193)), 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
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...
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.... :bomb:
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:
Hmmm... Yes, I have also noticed the fluctuation in the size of the .sav file... ()what()
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 (http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=993.msg45160#msg45160)). 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
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:
Quote from: wouanagaine on June 20, 2007, 02:08:18 PM
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... &mmm
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 $%Grinno$%
Bruce
The Prop Pox strikes again! :angrymore:
This time a monatery I had built using Kwakelaar's Schiffenberg set was among the victims...
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg407.imageshack.us%2Fimg407%2F1244%2Fmonasteryqj9bn5.jpg&hash=5a8479c7053c9bb7fcd5e80677d74352f7c1262f)
Again, the discreet line dividing the affected area from the rest of the city, seen clearly in this pic of Marrast's seawalls...
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg156.imageshack.us%2Fimg156%2F7687%2Fseawallsm4.jpg&hash=b706ed17266c259f695b6c804fe97e1350024630)
This is a different city to the one in the first set of pictures - the neighbor to the north. Large city tile, also fully-developed, this time with a population around 840,000.
This time, using backups of the .sav file, I was able to work my way month-by-month up until the point where the problem appears. I noticed the following:
1. City .sav file starts off at 15.6mb but swells temporarily to 25mb one month prior to the problem occurring.
2. When the bug happens, the .sav file drops to 14.7mb.
3. The bug occurrs on a specific date. Saving one day before produced no bug but saving any time after, no matter how long the game runs, produces the bug.
4. Defragmenting had no effect and my page-file memory is set to 4GB.
5. Bulldozing some buildings prior to the "bug date" allows the game to run longer (up to 2 years) before the bug occurrs but anyway it happens eventually.
This last one tells me that the bug is not actually related to the date at all but to something that grows in that time period. It may either be a bad plugin or that the city reaches some sort of "critical mass" of props, at which point the program or the machine can no longer render them all properly.
For the time being, I can't find any way around the problem. The city is currently at the 25mb .sav file stage, 1 month before when the bug occurrs. If I can't figure out a solution, that's where it will stay forever...
I remember that I had a similar problem in two of my cities (medium sized) back in 2003, well before Rush Hour was released. All props seemed to be missing until I rebuilt/regrew the lots in question, and when inspecting the filesize, I also noticed that it went down (but the files were not larger than 3 or 4 MB at that time). Anyway, it never happened again, and I'm really glad that it didn't (and maybe it was caused by another bug in SC4 Vanilla anyway). Needless to say, it's extremely annoying, and I can feel your pain...
For what it's worth it I checked my savegames, and all cities (many of them in the range of 500,000 to 600,000 inhabitants) have up to around 15 MB, with two notable exceptions: My two largest cities that hold 800,000 and 1,1 million residents are both about 33 MB large, which can't be justified (only) by the larger amount of buidings, props or inhabitants, since other cities are equally complex (or even more complex). It might support your theory about the "critical mass", though, where the filesize seem to grow rapidly over a short time. Unfortunately, I don't have any ideas how to overcome the problem, but I thought this information might help you to pinpoint the possible trigger(s).
Thanks, Andreas. It worries me a little that this problem occurred on a medium city tile for you. I had thought that playing medium cities might be a way to prevent this and recently re-rendered my favorite region with all medium cities instead of all large... :(
I noticed the release notes to the EP1 Update mentioned the following:
Renderer updates to avoid memory corruption when model instance has an invalid position.
Anyone know anything about this? Maybe they didn't fix it completely?
Anyway, I've tried running the city and paying attention to exactly what grows during the period when the bug sets in, to see if I can identify a problem plugin that causes this. There doesn't seem to be one - the buildings that grow have grown other times in other cities with no problem. It seems to be more a cumulative effect related to the total number of buildings in the city - the critical mass thing - which is why bulldozing some areas can extend the amount of time before the bug sets in. I've tried bulldozing the buildings that will end up located in the affected area after the bug and I've tried bulldozing in totally different areas of the city and the effect is the same - the more I bulldoze, the longer the game will run before the bug appears. Eventually though, the buildings grow back and the bug appears.
I'm going to try to put together a table of details reported by all the people who have suffered from this - city tile size, population, .sav file size, amount of custom content, etc. So far, I'm really mystified what the trigger is. There aren't any 100% commonalities - mainly large city tiles but also reported on medium; mainly populations in the hundreds of thousands but also reported on cities in the tens of thousands; mainly people with bulging plugins folders but also people with a modest amount of custom content... &sly
Hi snorelli
can you make a report of the following entries in the savegame ( filesize in reader )
buildings a9bd882d 299b2d1b 00000000
props 49c05c8f 299b2d1b 00000000
retaining walls 49c05c9f 299b2d1b 00000000
You bet - I'll check and post tonight when I get home...
Hello Snorrelli.....
Just read the latest unfortunate strike of the prop-pox...I will be having two and a half days off of work, so I'm going to go through my entire region to see if any of my other cities have been affected. I will also look into my "Europa" region, which is built on the in-game's Berlin region. This region has more variety of city sizes, larger overall population and more complicated development. I have not opened this region for months, so I'll let it run, observe and keep taps on the file sizes, etc. If the bug manifests itself in this region, we may be able to pinpoint the trigger.
Also, I had an idea of calling in N_O Body of Simtropolis, however I see that you also reside there, and we have another victim. The main difference between the two of you and myself, is that the prop-pox seems to be striking in a definite area of your cities, while in Wesley, it is random. Prop-pox is in the North-Central, Central, and West-Central of my city. I utilise the Suburban Style bus stops in Wesley, and one can be completely intact, while just down the road, another one has the disease.
Bruce
OK - here's what I've got...
City 1 (from the first post of this thread)
.sav file = 28.5mb, city population = 399,195
buildings - 511,305
props - 22,476
retaining walls - 3905
For the second city (at the top of this page), I was able to track the bug more closely and have info on three separate save files...
City 2 - 6 months before bug appears
.sav file = 15.6mb, city population - 836,000
buildings - 321,071
props - 22,999
retaining walls - 13,911
City 2 - 1 month before bug appears
.sav file = 25mb, city population - 837,800
buildings - 322,297
props - 23,238
retaining walls - 13,512
City 2 - 6 months after "bug date"
.sav file = 15.3mb, city population - 839,112
buildings - 322,457
props - 23,457
retaining walls - 13,536
Hello snorrelli....I just read through Fledder200's thread, and realise that you have too. Did you notice his last picture? He was concerned about his tram....and according to his content in his post, he was saying that the Prop-pox issue was cleared up, however there is a major lot that is missing all of the props, in the upper left.
Unfortunately, I do not feel Fledder200 or any of us are out of the woods yet. You may have noticed that a length of time transpired from when I first started my thread and when I resumed. All was well in Wesley for that time period, and you have also mentioned that at times all is well with your cities, and then the bug reappears.
I realise you are looking for the trigger, but I have a question. According to the thread, Fledder200 thinks it may well be a couple of models he downloaded....I had thought the same thing at first, since most things that went missing were from BSC related models....quickly I found out that was not correct.
My question....do you think that a)it may be helpful to list on your thread those models, lots, etc that have been affected? b) do you think that the size of the Plugin folder in an individual's My Documents has any bearing on this?
My answer, at this time regarding 'b' is no, because it would affect those same models, etc., in every other city.
Bruce
Well, I had thought some of the entries would have exceeded some critical values, but it does not seems to be the case :(
Snorrelli....I'm not sure if this has any bearing, however: I have been downloading all of the updates and Mega-packs, here and also using the Cleanitol program. Lately, one thing that I have noticed is: when I put the BSC MegaPacks(1) cleanitol file in, it has come up with missing some dependancies....the three listed are: Smalltown USA Collector's Edition.dat, BSC MegaProps-Jenx Vol02.dat and BSC TexturePack JES Vol02.dat. Now when this first happened, I proceeded to redownload where directed, knowing that I had already had these. However, everytime I scan this particular cleanitol file, I get the same message, so obviously something is being misread.
As of yesterday, I am starting to get a plugin pack pop-up in my game in some cities, including Wesley...and the lots that are bringing up the brown boxes have all thier dependencies, again a sign of something not being read properly. So, I'm systematicly bulldozing those lots to see if they have any impact on the Prop-pox disease.
Bruce
The cleanitol megapack file is a little buggy :(. Those 4 dependencies are always displayed as missing even if you have them. I need to fix and reupload a list. sorry for the inconvenience
Hi Guys... Sorry - I've been having a crazy day today and will not be home until fairly late tonight so I can't respond in detail until probably tomorrow...
Bruce - I think you may have two separate things going on. As Wounagaine said, the cleanitol mega pack file lists those 4 as missing no matter what. I've been through that as well and redownloaded everything just to be sure I wasn't crazy.
Problem two is not the program misreading something or needing to download missing dependencies but rather that you have removed something you shouldn't have. Sorry if I'm stating the obvious here. Presumably you plopped or grew those lots and they looked normal or you would have noticed the brown box right away. Since then, you exited, saved and then removed something used by those lots from your plugins. Now when you reload the city you get the missing plugin warning (and brown boxes).
It is me again....Snorrelli, regarding the plugin pack missing pop-up now appearing in some cities of the Region I'm working in, nothing has been removed. It may be a seperate issue, but I'm not sure. The one thing that really perplexes me is: why you and the other two I know of that have this problem, have it in a very defined area of your cities, and why I have it all over in mine? The bright side is that yours is more easily tracked, while mine isn't. We shouldn't forget that mine started with the RLS Resort, in which the entire top of the Resort Tower was missing...then it went from there. The aforementioned is why I think, as I believe you do, that something in the save process is causing this, as further evidence is that if one bulldozes the affected lot and re-plops it, it is fine until one exits. Also if the same lot is used in another city of the same Region, it is fine. It may appear to be hitting some type of 'Critical Mass', but again, our other cities seem to be fine and can be more complicated than the affected one so the 'Critical Mass' should have hit there as well but did not, so I still feel that it is a localised issue....I think I'll completely clean out Wesley as to the affected BATs and let it run for several years....save and exit and open again to see if other BATs have been attacked.
Lastly Snorrelli, no need to apologise, we all have crazy days, hope you can relax abit!
Wounagaine...thanks for the info, and again...no need to apologise, I kinda figured it was something, and as I called it a 'misreading'....I'm one that is very appreciative of the Cleanitol program, as it has helped me immensely and will continue to do so in the future....
Cheers to everyone, and we'll get this 'Prop-pox' figured out yet!
Bruce
I am thinking ... anybody that has the Prop-pox issue ... dont you by any chance have another computer available so that you can transfer your region there and see if the same issue happens.
What are the chances that we have a memory address issue that is popping out with specific screen cards ...
I am just throwing some ideas into the ring here ...
What about a new program or utility that is sitting in memory waiting for a windoze call and is hogging SC4 memory blocks ... remeber the game is 5 years old and many new windoze utility software has been released since then.
....that is an interesting idea, however if that were the case, would not prop-pox appear in all the cities of the Region, and not just one or two?
Bruce
Quote from: BruceAtkinson on June 27, 2007, 05:04:25 PM
....that is an interesting idea, however if that were the case, would not prop-pox appear in all the cities of the Region, and not just one or two?
Bruce
Not necessarily. I whitnessed the prop pox going "orthogonal" in speaking of road layout. This would really make sense then.
On the other hand:
when I was experiencing trying to get rid of the prop pox I killed almost any process that was not absolutely necessary to run Sc4.
Another Interesting fact:
I start running
Windows XP last year in Novembe. Untill that time I run Windows 2000 and
never had the prop pox!!!My largest city map Gleiwemünde (
without the pox but more than twice as much the filesize than Rhenbrücken
with the pox) was builty entirely under Windows 2000. I later changed from Windows 2000 to Windows XP because Windows 2000 had a lot of serious and continuous problems with my 160 GB ATAPI Harddisk.
Now I became curious:
Which OS are you running and since when - before or after the pox? Maybe we have a WindowsXP problem here ....
Bernhard :thumbsup:
Hmmm ...yep ... you may be right ... XP or a XP Patch ... did you do a MS Update thinghy lately.
Just a quick note to chime in and say "me too." I've been running XP ever since I've had SC4 and have had this problem occur repeatedly over the past 3 years on 2 different machines, with 3 different video cards (all nVidia). A common element between them has been XP SP2.
That said, who doesn't use XP? A few might still have '98 or 2000 and a few have converted to Vista but aren't like 90% of us using XP and not having this problem?
Okay, Windows XP Professional with SP2, old nVidia Geforce2 MX400
A tad late but I finally checked my cities in the reader, too ...
City 1: Gleiwemünde
created and saved entirely under Windows 2000 SP4
no prop poxRegion Census:
|
| Residential: | 353,955 |
| Commercial: | 192,572 |
| Industrial: | 54,683 |
|
| FileSize: | 35,048,928 |
| building: | 586,489 |
| props: | 324,567 |
| retaining walls: | 798,676 |
City 2: Rhenbrücken
created under Windows XP,
with prop pox |
| Residential: | 468,169 |
| Commercial: | 228,642 |
| Industrial: | 79,031 |
|
| FileSize: | 14,125,353 |
| building: | 324,249 |
| props: | 129,251 |
| retaining walls: | 698,593 |
And about 90% using XP (IMHO even more - there aren't that much Mac Users and Win2K is 8 yeasr old!)
maybe it IS a conflict that occurs only with XP under certain circumstances?
For me, at the moment, it looks like that. And becaue of that, even if we don't find the "cure" for the prop pox we might be able to find out how to prevent the porp pox in the future ...
And again: - as long as I didn't use WinXP but Win2K there has been no prop pox!
Whoa! Are you sure those prop and retaining wall numbers are correct? I wonder why they're sooooo much larger than mine? :o
Rhenbrücken is build on a rather hilly area where I usually tried to avoid teraces with medium density 1x1 and 1x2.
Gleiwemünde isn't flat, too. In addition to this it has a lot of agriculture (BSC farms ...) !
But I'll cross-check the numbers again tomorrow!
Bernhard :thumbsup:
That might explain it - both my cities are almost entirely flat and no farms. I have noticed that the farms take up a lot of RAM and tend to make for large .sav files...
Bump...
Here's the table of victims and symptoms of this tragic disease:
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg340.imageshack.us%2Fimg340%2F4949%2Funtitledxy6.jpg&hash=5793852dd42179c273ae5bb26c3b44700c02717f)
I'll PM everyone and ask them to stop by and fill in the missing details. Not sure what it all means, but maybe we can find a pattern...
By the way, how the heck do you use the table function in the editor? I finally had to take a screenshot from Excel and post a jpeg. ()what()
In other news...
Acting on Colyn's suggestion (much to my wife's chagrin) I installed SC4 on her computer, copied the plugins and region folders and loaded the city. No dice. It's pretty much the same environment though, in terms of RAM, OS and nVidia card (though weaker). I'm pretty scrupulous about cutting out the unnecessary memory-resident programs and use CachemanXP to maximize available RAM for the game...
Bruce's issues with the missing plugins reminded me of something else - I should note that in both my affected cities I have removed plugins that grew or were plopped without bulldozing all instances first. Going through a fully-developed large city tile to find all the 1X3 lots that have grown like a plague, for example, is a frustrating excercise. I got the ones I could, removed the files from the plugins folder and then had to mop up a few I had missed (which had become brown boxes) when I reloaded the city. This did not happen close to the time the bug appeared but was an "event" in the history of both these cities.
I never took the "bulldoze all instances first" instruction very seriously because I found it did not crash my game or prevent me from loading the city, but maybe it causes this corruption?
...Snorrelli....this is a great table! I'll put as much info in as I can in a day or so....incidently, I am not running the experiment I mentioned prior, during my two days off...since my wife had other plans for me, like helping her pack our son's things and sending them off to Toronto, and for me to clean up my office area! Man!, doesn't she realise the more important things I must do! :thumbsup:
I have been going through my plugins folder manually, and have found quite a number of duplicated items....yes, even though I have thought I was being diligent and reading the 'read me' files and removing the redundant ones...I've still missed some! So that will take me another day or so, and then I'll report the size of the Plugin folder, (at present over 3GB), and other things in the table....meanwhile I'll also keep looking at the thread, as I'm learning so much from you and the others who have been inputing!
Now off to write some Music Reviews....
Bruce
P.S. Regarding running on a different computer, I actually was running on another, until last year...it too was XP Pro, but a slower machine with less HD space. No problems though with Prop-pox. I'm nnow running the game on a Windows XP Home Edition--again that info will be put in the table...
Nice table!! &apls
some more info about mine thingy :o
RAM = ermmm i think 1 GB
Vcard = NVIDIA® GeForce™ 6150
Virtual memory set to - ermmm gosh...i don't know :)
Grapics settings = all high, Hardware
Population = about 180.000
.save shrinks : don't know
size of the city = 30Mb
All the others i don't know
what i do know is that it was gone for a while, but it has returned again :(
and always when i try to make a new update :(
i even removed and re-installed the game!!
all i know that this problem suckes :(
The first two things in common seem to be a 64bit CPU and nVidia Card .... ???
And with 1-2 GB on each PC it seems not be a RAM problem, too ...
I opened up a thread on simforum.de with the same theme. There had been two other cases of the prop pox:
- Andreas said he had this porblem with Win2K and SC4 Vanilla (that was before RH was availbale!)
- Bikerbraut hat this problem, too, on a WinXP PC yet she couldn't give me any further details about hardware and .sav - details as she said it happened some time ago and that she had changed her pc in between ...
Andreas problem is rather extraordinary (pre - RH ... ) yet Bikerbraut's problem seems to be our disease ...
Maybe we should try and open such a thread over ST pinned at the starting page. To find out the reasons we need more data
I've filled large tiles many times, never seen it.
My comp only has 512 mb of RAM and is an easy 5 years old. It does have a MASSIVE processor (3.19ghz)
probably not ram.
I also had this happen regularly on a much older (2003 era) P4 2.4Ghz desktop in the past so I'm not sure if the 64-bit capability matters. The video card on my old machine was the same one you have, though - nVidia MX400. Then I switched it to a 6600 and it still happened. All nVidia though.
I posted the exact same first post over at ST and didn't get much response, other than N_O_Body's favorite advice "check the detail settings and set virtual memory to 4GB". I have PM-ed two people over there that have reported the same problem - jabezscratch and spoonman - and pointed them to this thread...
Hmm ... I do hope it's not my reliable nVidia Card ... would mean we could choose between lagging ATI drivers or the pox ...
Yeah, I got this advice from N_O_Body, too, including We shoudl all defrag our harddisk.
But then again - why should the problem happen with XP that works with my large harddisk but not witn win2K that has severe problems with harddisk partitioned bigger than 130 GB?
It stays strange ...
G'Day Snorrelli:
Here is some info for the Table:
OS: XP Home Edition/SP2 (Version 5.1)
RAM: 1.80GHz @ 960MB ram
Processor: AMD Sempron 3400
VCard: Nvidia GeForce 6150LE
HD: 80GB ST380811QAS (the computer is a Dell)--ok! stop the laughing
Virtual Memory: 5096MB
Large Amount of Custom Content: Yes
...in addition the Plugin Folder is: 3.98GB with 15,581 files...2,599 Folders. (uncompressed)
and I'm still going through the Plugin folder and manually looking for duplicates.
Bruce
...I have another question, I see that some of us are using SC4Datpacker, which essentially is a compressing program. As a TV/video Producer, I realise that utilising compression can decrease the quality of Video and audio...does compression do the same for the Simcity files in the Plugin folder? Also, if this is not a worry, why not use the Windows XP Compression tool?
Bruce
@Bruce: SC4Datpacker is not a compression tool like an audio/video codec. DivX, MPEG2 or MP3 use lossy compression, since they drop information that cannot be heard or viewed anyway. Of course this doesn't work for data. What SC4Datpacker does is merging all individual files into large DATs, and dropping unnecessary information like the preview pics that the Lot Editor creates, XML data that is used to transfer information between the BAT, the Plugin Manager and the Lot Editor and stuff like this. The relevant data for SimCity itself (3D models of the buildings, textures, exemplar files etc.) isn't touched at all.
The main reason why wouanagaine created SC4Datpacker is that SimCity reads a few large files a lot faster than many individual files. As you may have noticed, the 3D building models and textures are loaded depending on the rotation and zoom level, so even if you have a 3 GB plugins folder, only a fraction of this data is actually loaded into the memory. The rest is constantly read from the files, and this works better if SC4 doesn't have to open and read thousands of files in order to look for the necessary data.
I actually remembered an issue I had a little while back. I had a city and all maxis content was missing.... props, buildings, overlays. Just base textures were left. This problem was fixed however I dont remember how.
Andreas...thanks ever so much for setting me straight on the type of program SC4Datpacker is, and explaining what it actually does! &apls
Bruce
Well, I still can't figure out how to make a table here with the forum editor so I've posted another screencapture from Excel. Here's the updated info...
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg511.imageshack.us%2Fimg511%2F8859%2Funtitledml2.jpg&hash=29576254e6a47b13c3eb714ad0953d04117f4362)
I see that jabezscratch and spoonman haven't yet come by to add their info, but maybe we can continue to build a database of symptoms. In the meantime, I have added another one to the bottom - removal of files from the plugins folder without bulldozing all instances first. I don't know if that affects it but it was something common to both of my affected cities and Bruce mentioned he was getting the missing plugins warning upon loading his city.
Bruce - it must take you forever to load 4GB of plugins without using datpacker. I suggest you give it a try. You'll never go back. For finding duplicates, I suggest DoubleKiller (http://bigbangenterprises.de/en/doublekiller/). It's a small, free program that works very well for the job you're doing manually.
Unfortunately, I don't think we're any closer to an answer here. The only commonality is indeed Windows XP but, as we've said, XP is common to more than 90% of the people playing this game. The next possible culprit is large city tiles. I've always been suspicious of the program's ability to deal with them since Maxis didn't use them in any of the default regions...
I've got to say this is getting to be kind of a deal-breaker for me. :bomb:
You guys are all talking about 1 city lost to this problem but I have been having this happen regularly for three years now. I have three backup copies of every city I play, just in case the next time I load one of them I find that the Pox has struck (or in case it had struck previously on a part of the city I didn't see). Now when I load a city I pan around to all corners of it checking for the Pox first. Apart from the two cities affected most recently, I can say that EVERY city I have developed to a significant size has had this happen at one time or another. Sometimes I can overwrite the .sav file with a backup copy and take it from there, without the problem returning, and sometimes I can't. Sometimes I can bulldoze, rebuild and go on without any problem and sometimes I can't... ()sad()
Patrick, I think I can see there two more common things:
1. we all use nVidia - cards. Don't they have a unified driver for all cards?
2. I had some problems reinstalling the SC4Startupmanager after formatting and installing XP so I cannot say I am sure that I restored all lots correctly. It is possible that some of them did not "survived" moving to XP ...
Bernhard :thumbsup:
Oh, right - I forgot about the nVidia cards... Like you, I don't even want to think about that being the culprit... $%Grinno$%
I am now trying to recreate the problem by growing a test city and then taking files out of the plugins folder. Not much fun but I really can't enjoy the game anymore with the threat of this problem happening haning over my head.
Snorrelli...I do feel your discouragement, and knowing that you are the one that has suffered from this 'disease' more than the rest, however I sense that we are on the verge of a breakthrough. With all that you have done, and everyone else whom have inputed and have made suggestions, I think we are much closer. It is a process of elimination, and at times tedious, but please hang in there bud! ;)
As far as the table goes: I actually haven't taken out any plugins without bulldozing all instances, that is the wierd thing, I have all my dependancies, but on a couple of occassions I get a plugin pack missing pop-up, one is linked to the Cellular Tower, I think the GSX, yet I can plop it and it is fine, however the growable one shows as having a brown box, and the other is a government building, which until just last week was fine, and now it is showing as having the brown box...I forget which one, however I'll post it, once I remember....
I will download Doublekiller and use it....as far as datpacker, I'm a bit reluctant, as it seems that you must run the program after every time you download new models...and quite frankly I'm too lazy ::)
That is why it has taken me so long to do the maintenance manually, I know, it doesn't make sense!
Incidently, I put a call out to Ripplejet on my thread, and apparently he is away for awhile, however, I'm sure he will respond once he reads through both threads, he may have some good suggestions for us.
Hang in there, my friend....
Bruce
...so I downloaded Doublekiller, and I am amazed at how many duplicate and triplicate files I have..., and I have deleted some, however it is listing the same files, with same date and everything in two or three paths....usually pointing to several different folders. As an example, the Asian Building Pack 1....files showing the buildings in the Asian Pak folder and then a duplicate in a folder of the name of the building....now when I downloaded Asian Pak, I thought it had a readme or cleanitol remove list, which I of course would follow through on, so first, I am surprised I missed as much as I have, and second is there any instance in which the file, mostly a .dat file is needed to be in more than one subfolder, especially if the file in question is used as a dependancy?
Bruce
Quote from: BruceAtkinson on June 30, 2007, 10:55:49 PM
is there any instance in which the file, mostly a .dat file is needed to be in more than one subfolder, especially if the file in question is used as a dependancy?
If the files are identical, you only need one, regardless if it's a dependency or not. The game loads
all IDs and discards duplicates anyway.
Thanks again, Andreas.....I'll continue to clean-up my Plugin folder...most likely I'll see an improved performance in the game as well.
Bruce
Hi, I had suffered from this problem w/ my capital city of 2.6 million people. After much frustration, I simply wiped it clean and made a new capital city from scratch which currently has a population of 2.1 million. I have not seen this problem reoccur since then.
Here are some answers for the table:
CPU = Intel Dual Core 2.4
RAM = 4GB DDR2
HDD: Western Digital Raptor 10,000RPM
VCard = ATI 1900GT (256M)
Virtual memory set to - 4GB
Grapics settings = All high, Software
.save shrinks : Don't recall
I think that covers most of the info I can recall.
Good luck and I'll keep following this intriguing thread!
Just a quick additional note: I started to notice buildings being reduced to bare textures and I lost a lot of street junk. It just kept spreading and I just assumed that the file got corrupted and the corruption was spreading (somehow). I don't know if that theory holds water or if there is some other completely unrelated cause.
Hi jabezscratch. Thanks for dropping by the support group... ;)
Whoa - 4GB of RAM! :o I guess that settles the question of whether insufficient RAM is to blame once and for all. I'm also relieved to see this happening with an ATI card, since all the rest of us have nVidia. Looks like we can rule that out too.
I don't guess you remember if you might have removed something from your plugins folder without bulldozing all instances in your city first? Did you ever get the missing plugin pop up at city loading or save the game with brown boxes showing?
Also, was yours a large city tile?
Hello all....this post is not related to "prop-pox", however, I was just looking at my profile and the Karma section. Much to my dismay, I have supposdedly smited someone! How have I done that....the last thing I want to do is upset someone! Maybe I'm not understanding how the Karma works here....
Bruce
Bruce - I don't see how you could have smitten anyone (here, I mean - I'm sure plenty have been smitten by you in your time... ;) :D). I don't think you're allowed to give either good or bad Karma until 50 posts...
Only you and the recipient of the smiting can see it so if you're worried about it you might want to send a PM.
Now, this is interesting. I suppose I'm lucky in that I have never had this problem happen to me, either on a GeForce or an ATI card. One of my cities is full (taking up 38MB), so it has to be something else.
It's possible that somehow, the save file got corrupted by saving it while the city hasn't properly been rendered? Try zooming all the way out, waiting for the city to fully load before saving. Maybe this will fix the bug (or rather, prevent it from occuring)?
...Snorrelli, I was just thinking, since we are looking for commonalities regarding 'Prop Pox', I am going to start recording which lots have been affected. Although I have not been in Wesley for awhile, I did re-locate the Refinery Complex to another part of the city and rezoned the old location to medium industrial. When I go back in to Wesley in the next couple of days, I'll see if the new Refinery has been affected and what the old location looks like.
I'll post the affected lots here, so we can see if a pattern emerges. Throughout my three regions, only Wesley is affected, I've been lucky so far.....
Secondly, how much do you know about the Cam-A-Lot project? I'm wondering that with such a radical change in the game with this mod...if 'Prop-pox' may disappear!?
Bruce
Hi all... I've been busy rebuilding my most recently affected city from scratch. No progress or further insights on the cause, but I have updated the table with the last info provided by jabezscratch...
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg514.imageshack.us%2Fimg514%2F8062%2Funtitledbr7.jpg&hash=76d28ade0320db1165482f14810e3b4fe222e6ff)
Quote from: Shadow Assassin on July 16, 2007, 02:37:10 AM
It's possible that somehow, the save file got corrupted by saving it while the city hasn't properly been rendered? Try zooming all the way out, waiting for the city to fully load before saving. Maybe this will fix the bug (or rather, prevent it from occuring)?
I think this is exactly what's happening, although I have tried saving at all different zoom levels and it does not prevent the problem from appearing. At the farthest zoom, as Shadow Assassin suggests, the logic is that all the buildings have been drawn and are in the memory, so all should be saved. Unfortunately it doesn't work. It also occurred to me that a full large city at the farthest zoom might be too much for the machine or the program to process and save, so I've tried at the closest zoom and all zooms in between. Still no luck...
Quote from: BruceAtkinson on July 18, 2007, 01:22:49 PM
...Snorrelli, I was just thinking, since we are looking for commonalities regarding 'Prop Pox', I am going to start recording which lots have been affected. Although I have not been in Wesley for awhile, I did re-locate the Refinery Complex to another part of the city and rezoned the old location to medium industrial. When I go back in to Wesley in the next couple of days, I'll see if the new Refinery has been affected and what the old location looks like.
I'll post the affected lots here, so we can see if a pattern emerges. Throughout my three regions, only Wesley is affected, I've been lucky so far.....
Secondly, how much do you know about the Cam-A-Lot project? I'm wondering that with such a radical change in the game with this mod...if 'Prop-pox' may disappear!?
Bruce
Appreciate your research, Bruce. Let us know what you observe. About the CAM - I don't claim to be an expert on these things but from what I've understood of the mod I don't see any reason to believe it will impact the graphics properties of the game. I do feel pretty confident in calling this a graphics problem as this bug seems to be purely visual and commutes, jobs, residents and other game mechanics appear to be unaffected...
It looks like Windows XP SP2 is the only thing that is common to the entire thing. It's probably something to do with SP2 (unless we can get instances of it happening on SP1 or even pre-SP1).
Hi again, I have been inactive for about four weeks and have returned astounded at how far you have all come with this! My computer is in transit right now, but I will try to add my own stats to the table when it gets to me. I do know that I was running XP home with SP2 though. Great work here guys.
Stewart
I said it before - I never had the prop pox while I was using SC2K Win2K... it began with Win XP Sp2 ...
And since there are nVidia and ATI cards, 32 and 64 bit, single and dual, Intel and AMD CPUs on the list as well as we all have not too less RAM ...
I am "curious" - I just run a large map - with a lot of agriculture and less people though - for a while and it now closes to the "critical" file size ...
Anyway I will tell you if something happens regarding the prop pox (even though I pray it won't happen - my last three mını updates are all from that map ...)
Bernhard :thumbsup:
edit: Hit the "Post" - button by accident too early ...
edit2: Obviously I hadn't the prop pox in SC2000 bin Win2000 ...
I got this problem too (and therefore a reason to register here ;D).
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg231.imageshack.us%2Fimg231%2F8469%2Fandermatt9aug6831185921hn7.jpg&hash=90a12f0ffd85a60509de3c0dc9ca5a5cdb5c2bbd)
So I took the time to fill in the table:
OS: Win XP Pro SP2
RAM: 1GB
Processor: AMD Sempron 64 3000+
VCard: ATI Radeon 9600 (RV350)
HD: SAMSUNG HD160JJ; SCSI
Virtual Memory: 1534 MB
large city tile: yes
plugins: 750 mb
Graphics settings: all but shadows high; hardware mode
population: ~150.000
sc4 file: shortly before bug appears twice as big as normal; after bug appeared normal filesize
size of affected sc4 file: 12.898kb
buildings: 396612
props: 37515
retaining walls: 570 (flat city)
previously removed plugins without bulldozing all instances first: yes
some stuff I also discovered: the biggest file in the sav file is three times bigger shortly before the bug appears than after the bug appeared (16820973/5421470) Type is 2977aa47.
Additionally every time I save the city and reload it again after the bug appeared once a new part of my city is affected.
And something weird that somehow has to do with the bug: SC4 spawns tons of pedestrians in the northwest corner after the bug appeared:
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg231.imageshack.us%2Fimg231%2F7594%2Fandermatt2dez6831185922ed2.jpg&hash=9eac54774f574d24da12601dd6d5ab5ec5d121f1)
Just one question: does anybody of you used traffic generators in the affected cities? I used them a lot in the affected city for the first time, so SC4 might just be overwhelmed by so many cars...
I personaly havent had the problem Silentbreaker but one thought is, have you tried to set your graphic settings to software render instead of hardware and also try and remove the traffic generator. - pat
Traffic Generators ... possible, and doesn't bare a certain logic!
I used some of them in Rhenbrücken (and only there!).
Anyway I am going to check this out on the weekend (Rhenbrücken just takes too long to load on a workday evening ...
Bernhard :thumbsup:
Hi Silentbreaker - sorry to have to welcome you to our club... ()sad()
I've added your info to the table:
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg293.imageshack.us%2Fimg293%2F2374%2Funtitledwg7.gif&hash=2ead94b68974c10d936ed5da9cbd99ee29f762fd)
Some interesting observations you've made there. Maybe if we can identify what subfile that is that seems to grow before the bug sets in we can get a better idea of what's happening...
I've noticed the crowds of pedestrians at the corners of cities before but never made the correlation to the bug. I don't use any traffic generators but I've definitely seen similar things. Not sure what that means...
Snorrelli you might be a bit closer to figuring out or what might be a trigger...
I'm currently experiencing the same bug.
OS: WinXP with SP2 Update
RAM: 2GB
Processor: Dual Core, 2x Intel Pentium D CPU 2.8GHZ; running SC4 with only one
VCard: Nvidia GeForce7.300 SE / 7.200 GS
HD: 132 GB
virtual memory: no idea, where can i look it up?
bug affects on large city tiles? yes
Large amount of custom content used? Not at all, my plugin folder has 289mb; it's not packed
Graphic settings? 32bit colors, all details on maximum, 1024x768 resolution
affected cities population: around 1,1million
.sav file shrinks after bug occurs: i don't know, because i recognized the bug after it was too late.
size of affected .sav file: 29,5 mb
previously removed plugins without removing all instances from it: yes
I've never used any traffic generators. Is there a possibility that SC4 only supports a certain amount of props on each city tile and after the limit is reached, it doesn't save them anymore? Another reason might be that we have deleted plugings without removing all instances first. Maybe the game handles its saving just like it draws those props in a grid-fashion style. And once it has to save such a lot with deleted plugin, it just stops saving? That could also be an explanition: because most plugins are used in our biggest cities, and it's quite easy to overlook an instance of an removed plugin. Also, there are so many props and once the bug occurs, there's no way to overlook its effects.
Did you also notice that once you replop those Buildings, they have their props. I still have this "missing plugin" problem and will fix it by finally removing all instances. Maybe after i start bulldozing and replacing the affected lots, the problem will be gone. We'll see.
/edit: It might also be the other way around: When you load city, and the game stumbles over a missing plugin, it just stops loading props. Then after you save, it can't save the props it never loaded. Therefore, your .sav file shrinks.
//edit: I have localized my missing plugin. Have you also just accepted that a plugin was missing for a long period of time without caring about it? I did because i was unable to see any difference in my city (no brown boxes or obvious missing stuff), so i just played and clicked that info box away, that appeared after each time i loaded my city.
///edit: I bulldozed the missing instance and some affected lots. I plopped them again and saved, but when reloading, some just got infected (three from ~20-25 lots) again.
Another victim... Sorry to hear it, Diamond.
New table:
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg529.imageshack.us%2Fimg529%2F4180%2Funtitledap9.jpg&hash=dd5ac22e2fc6c4f254ff3a6fc30fe1e1163e89d2)
Quote from: Diamond on August 03, 2007, 02:45:12 PM
Is there a possibility that SC4 only supports a certain amount of props on each city tile and after the limit is reached, it doesn't save them anymore?
Theoretically, I think this is possible, but some of us examined the .sav file using the Reader and checked the size of the subfile where props are stored and it does not seem to be outside of established norms.
Quote from: Diamond on August 03, 2007, 02:45:12 PM
Another reason might be that we have deleted plugings without removing all instances first. Maybe the game handles its saving just like it draws those props in a grid-fashion style. And once it has to save such a lot with deleted plugin, it just stops saving? That could also be an explanition: because most plugins are used in our biggest cities, and it's quite easy to overlook an instance of an removed plugin. Also, there are so many props and once the bug occurs, there's no way to overlook its effects.
Did you also notice that once you replop those Buildings, they have their props. I still have this "missing plugin" problem and will fix it by finally removing all instances. Maybe after i start bulldozing and replacing the affected lots, the problem will be gone. We'll see.
/edit: It might also be the other way around: When you load city, and the game stumbles over a missing plugin, it just stops loading props. Then after you save, it can't save the props it never loaded. Therefore, your .sav file shrinks.
//edit: I have localized my missing plugin. Have you also just accepted that a plugin was missing for a long period of time without caring about it? I did because i was unable to see any difference in my city (no brown boxes or obvious missing stuff), so i just played and clicked that info box away, that appeared after each time i loaded my city.
///edit: I bulldozed the missing instance and some affected lots. I plopped them again and saved, but when reloading, some just got infected (three from ~20-25 lots) again.
At this point, I'm about ready to pinpoint this -
removing a plugin without bulldozing all instances first - as the cause of the problem. Unless someone can weigh in and say for sure that they have had this problem without having done that, it now seems to me to be the most likely cause.
I have indeed just accepted that a plugin was missing for a long period of time and let it go, although not one that gave me the missing plugin pop-up upon loading the city. The two that come to mind are a pink, wedge-shaped building from swi21 (can't seem to find it now) and
this lot (http://www.simtropolis.com/stex/index.cfm?id=4009) from BarbyW. In both cases, they grew like weeds all over my cities and, in the case of the transit-enabled florist lot, would not upgrade, so I took them out. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of instances in multiple cities and while I tried to bulldoze them, I didn't get them all. Months later, I was still coming across ones I had missed.
They never gave me the pop-up warning but, in the case of the pink swi21 building I kept the model, so the model would still show up but with no lot under it. In the case of the BLS GA florist, the TE-ed lot would still be there, with nothing on it.
Anyway, the specific lot isn't important. I think what happens is the .sav file gets corrupted somehow looking for a plugin that isn't there anymore. We can try to reproduce the problem by growing a city and intentionally removing one or more plugins that we know have grown in that city but it will be hard to prove definitively because the bug doesn't appear immediately after you remove the plugin. The .sav file gets corrupted and then this graphics bug can appear any time later on.
Is that correct, by the way? The bug did not appear immediately after you removed the plugin without bulldozing?
Snorelli,
I still don't have my computer to give more stats, but I am certain that I removed a plugin before bulldozing the lot in my city that was infected. Incredible detective work you are doing here.
Stewart
Quote from: snorrelli on August 03, 2007, 06:09:58 PM
Is that correct, by the way? The bug did not appear immediately after you removed the plugin without bulldozing?
Yes. I continued playing for several days until i got to observe first affections. Maybe there are two "triggers", and the bug only resolves when both come together, or a missing plugin makes it possible for the other trigger to get in action.
hi guys,
I played a bit around with my affected city and noticed the following:
On every LOT I built after the bug appeared, the props also disappeared after I saved and reloaded the city, even if they were in a non-affected area. So I think the bug is somehow caused by exceeding a critical mass of props.
And something about the file I mentioned in my first post (Type: 2977aa47). I swapped them around with the reader (from non-affected version to affected version and vice versa). And guess what: Many props now also dissappeared in the previously non-affected version of the city. It seems like SC4 uses this subfile to safe props too.
Unfortunately I was not able to fix the bug just by swapping this subfile. However I'm pretty sure that this bug is related to it because it is the only subfile that causes the extreme growth of the SC4-file shortly before the bug appears. All other subfiles (nearly) stay as they are.
Quote from: silentbreaker on August 04, 2007, 12:49:32 PM
And something about the file I mentioned in my first post (Type: 2977aa47). I swapped them around with the reader (from non-affected version to affected version and vice versa). And guess what: Many props now also dissappeared in the previously non-affected version of the city. It seems like SC4 uses this subfile to safe props too.
Unfortunately I was not able to fix the bug just by swapping this subfile. However I'm pretty sure that this bug is related to it because it is the only subfile that causes the extreme growth of the SC4-file shortly before the bug appears. All other subfiles (nearly) stay as they are.
I think this is particularly important. Maybe somebody with a better knowledge of the inner workings of the game code can shed some light on what this subfile is.
Quote from: silentbreaker on August 04, 2007, 12:49:32 PM
On every LOT I built after the bug appeared, the props also disappeared after I saved and reloaded the city, even if they were in a non-affected area. So I think the bug is somehow caused by exceeding a critical mass of props.
Well, ich just removed one missing plugin with ~less than 10 props, and pulldozed like 20 lots affected by the bug, and then plopped them again. But only on three of them props disappeared after reloading the saved game. But due to the fact that there are more than ten props and the bulldozed and replopped lots i guess there's no critical mass of props imho.
....Hello everyone, I'm back! Snorrelli....I know it says on the table that I have removed plugins without bulldozing all instances, however I have not done that. Actually I have never removed a plugin, just updated them or removed duplicates. So I'm sure that is not the trigger for Prop Pox.
I must apologise as well, as I mentioned that I will catalogue the lots in Wesley that have been affected by this dreadful disease...and I will, it is just that I got carried away building canals in a new city, that I haven't been back in Wesley....hopefully this weekend. I think if we examine the lots affected, we will see some type of pattern.....
Bruce
Quote from: BruceAtkinson on August 09, 2007, 08:26:07 AM
....Hello everyone, I'm back! Snorrelli....I know it says on the table that I have removed plugins without bulldozing all instances, however I have not done that. Actually I have never removed a plugin, just updated them or removed duplicates. So I'm sure that is not the trigger for Prop Pox.
I must apologise as well, as I mentioned that I
catalogue the lots in Wesley that have been affected by this dreadful disease...and I will, it is just that I got carried away building canals in a new city, that I haven't been back in Wesley....hopefully this weekend. I think if we examine the lots affected, we will see some type of pattern.....
Bruce
Hi Bruce,
Forgive me for being presumptuous, but I also noted you were getting the pop-up warning that plugins were missing when you load a given city. The game simply does not give you that warning randomly. It can only happen when you load the game with something in your plugins folder, then remove it, then load the city again.
Greetings Snorrelli!!....it is good to hear from you again......
Yes, you are right in that I have had the Plugins missing popup occassionally, however it has been the case of missing plugins, or dependancies...not that I have removed something from my folder. Even at present, I'm getting the pop-up in several cities, and it is because the growable GSX Microwave Tower, ( I think that is the name) is present, and I'm missing something, and so far, I've been just too lazy to go back and check what dependancy is missing. Now, having said that, I'll find out what is missing in the course of the next couple days....
Incidentally, I am now running all my Regions with the Colosuss Add On, but as mentioned, haven't been in any other city since downloading the mod...just my new city of Dartmouth, and it is progressing well, now at 30,000 people with a combination of Urban, Suburdan and Agriculture. Actually I'm loading this city up on purpose, with lots of Custom content, including a Canal System, trying to trigger Prop Pox, hopefully learning what we all want to know, what is triggering it.....
Bruce
...hello again, first....I have yet to re-enter Wesley, so I haven't documented which lots have been affected by the Prop-pox.
Secondly, I have a question....I have just used 'Doublekiller' and scan the actual game files in the Maxis folder, and lo and behold, it seems I have a number of duplicate files....the parameters I used were exact size, exact name, etc., but not exact date, as I wanted to see if any files were older than others. Now, I have re-installed Simcity at one time on this current computer and of course, my Rush-hour is the add-on disk....so I'm assuming these duplicates are a result of the re-installation. Is this correct? Also, would it be safe to delete the duplicates that are older?
Thanks:
Bruce
A reinstallation of the game itself would only overwrite existing files.
Duplicate files are probably from custom content that has been "installed" into different subfolders.
And yes, you can safely delete (the older) one of those duplicate files! ;)
I've used traffic generator lots, quite a lot of them on a full city tile... and never suffered from a Prop Pox. Also have removed plugins and reloaded a city with those plugins not loaded (therefore getting the warning pop up). Also didn't suffer from it.
It could be related to XP SP2, because that prop pox only seems to happen on SP2 machines. It could be the way the system is set up.
And also, I'd like a little more info: how fragmented is the hard drive? (accessories > system tools > disk defragmenter > click Analyze) Maybe the fragmentation could cause issues - performance is affected by how fragmented the drive is. Once you've analyzed it, click the View Report button, go to Save As, and copy the first half of that text file to your post (the bit above the dashed line). It could have something to do with it - the game might not deal well with "fragmented" save files?
And once you've posted your stats, defrag the harddrive, see if that fixes the problem.
SA,
After defragmentation I could push the number of residents a bit higher until the the pox came back again. And I defragment it rather often.
Unfortunately it didn't help me ...
Yes - I defragment regularly too... It does help performance but doesn't prevent or fix the Pox... ()sad()
I also have the problem...
My computer:
Win XP SP2
P4 3.2 Ghz
1GB RAM
NVidia Geforce 6600 256mb
4GB memory set
Large tile affected: yes
3.2 GB compressed custom content (some very old files in there)
Graffics all high (except draw speed to medium) Hardware rendering (software makes seasonnal trees disapear fromthe region view)
Population of affected city 260,000
I have deleted pluggins without deleting lots before but I haven't seen the missing pluggin message in 2 years.
I really hope a solution can be found.
Added you to the table, cowcorn... Unfortunately, we don't have a "fix" to offer you - only the chance to participate in our little support group...
I'm hopeful wounagaine or someone else with more knowledge of the game's inner workings will be able to identify the subfile of the .sav that silentbreaker was able to pinpoint - 2977aa47. If we can figure out what that subfile is and what it does we may have a better answer for how to prevent or fix the problem. In the meantime, welcome to the club... &mmm
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg451.imageshack.us%2Fimg451%2F5688%2Funtitledun1.png&hash=93805a19b527fec1bb4dc8e8a4cc503ff04ef7ad)
I have read these topic and must admit I don't understand everything, but I have the problem too.
My comp is:
Medion Pentium 4 CPU 3.00GHz
Win XP SP2
Memory 1GB
NVIDIA GeForce 6200 TurboCache 256MB
I build more to see how something looks then to grow a city (I hope you understand what I mean). That means that I have no people in my city. But when I am, let say, building a canal some of the peaces are disappearing and looks like in the first post (brown).
I have all the files I need and in the beginning there was no problem but now when there are more and more peaces, like roads an some buildings (police and so on) it's more and more a problem.
I hope this helps a little.
Zhensu
@Zhensu: This information helps a little, but it would help more if you could provide the information for the other cells in the table. If you have any questions about how/where to find that information, let us know...
Hi,
just came across this thread and i'd say i also have this "affliction". so here are some of my stats:
OS - MS Windows XP Home 2002 SP 2
RAM - 896 mb
Processor - Intel Celeron M 1.6 GHz
Vcard - ATI Radeon Express 200M Series
Bug affects large cities? no (i hardly play large cities)
Large amount of custom content? no (only about 200 mb of plugins)
Previously removed plugins w/o bulldozing all instances first? can't say for sure (i did remove certain plugins so i can't be 100% sure that i didn't miss bulldozing any instance of it... although i'm quite meticulous in following this rule)
I still have to check the answers for the rest of the queries so i'll have to come back and post later. i don't know how to check the .save file thing though so if somebody will be so kind and point me in the right direction...
Hope a "cure" will eventually be found.
Hey everyone!
It is Bruce....any more advances on the prop pox? I haven't been in my affected city, Wesley all this time, been working on a Mega-harbour concept in another part of the same region...a city I named Pacifica. Presently, I'm starting to go back to my other cities, and have noticed that I am not plagued by the Prop-pox in any of them, just Wesley.
However, I do have another issue...just the other day, I was in Pacifica and put the game on pause while I built a large Retail Centre, including a mall and a variety of Big Box stores. While in pause, I saved the city and then proceeded to take it off pause. It started to go through the process normally and then all of sudden, crashed straight to Desktop. Now, it'll load only for a few seconds and crash....no other cities in the same region are affected, it is just Pacifica. I'm wondering if I over loaded it with Special Lots, when I built the Retail super Centre. In addition, when it does load, it is still in the pause mode, which is understandable, as the last save was when it was in that mode. It stays for about five seconds before it crashes....any hints on how I may keep it up long enough to take it off of pause?
I may end up deleting it and putting a back-up in and starting over....
Bruce
Sorry to bump, but I stumbled upon this thread since I´ve been struck hard by the pox lately.
In my case it has grown worse over time and now affetcs the game so much it is affecting almost everything I build.
One thing I have noted though is that buildings are unaffected while props and textures are missing in great numbers and increasing.
However custom content seem to be doing better than the original Maxis stuff strangely enough.
In my case the prox is also removing and screwing up my overlay textures for almost all buildings.
Another thing I´ve noted is that the newer the plugin is, the better off it seem to be.
Unfortunately I can´t bring any screenies at the moment since my computer is off the net for the next couple of days.
I´ve also noted that the cities load a lot slower after the bug appeared, but fragmentation shouldn´t be the issue as I use diskkeeper to defrag both drives on a regular basis.
My stats are:
OS: Win XP SP2
RAM: 2GB
Processor: Intel P4 2.3Ghz
Vcard: 512MB Nvidia Geforce 7600GT
HD: 55,8GB system drive (where main plugins folder is located) + 279GB Game drive (where the game and the game´s folder plugins are located)
Virtual memory: 768MB paging file shared by all units
Bug affects large city tiles? Yes (actually it affects all my cities regardless of size and development)
Large amount of custom content? Yes, about 1,02GB containing 4788 files in 757 folders, all uncompressed.
Graphics settings: Shadows low, building renderingspeed medium, the rest set to high. 1280x1024 resolution and 32bit colour.
Affected cities populations: 149-~71.000
.sav file shrinks after bug occurs? no clue, didn´t check before the bug´s appearance...
Affected cities .sav info: Can´t find any subfolders in my Regions´ folders...
Previously removed plugins w/o bulldozing first? Yes, but not in the affected cities.
Also I´ve been experiencing problems with conflicting plugins (or so I believe) after the bug hit me, the Coit tower landmark now appears as a growable CO$$ building in my cities and the deconstructivist mall appeared on the wrong lot-size and w/o building (various walls from Tonksos Highstreet set appeared on the lot though) despite the fact that I had never installed the deconstructivist mall at all.
And recently I´ve been seeing an empty I-lot without name or building on it growing.
Also a lot named Radiotower has appeared without building, but with one or two walls stacked on top of eachother in different angles.
Hope my info helps in Your quest for the "pox vaccine"!
Yikes... it sounds like you have a particularly unpleasant case of the Pox, Swesim... &mmm
I have added your info to the table, but I'm not sure where to go from here in the search for a vaccine or a cure.
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg205.imageshack.us%2Fimg205%2F7383%2F99428969ax1.jpg&hash=f808138ee9ffe99f969c051420d59e56fc95eb6c)
It does seem that whatever is going wrong is in the .sav file. Don't forget you have two regions folders, just like the two plugins folders - one in program files/ and one in my documents/. Check both and find the sub-folder with your region. Then there should be a .sav file with the city name in that sub folder. If you know how to use Reader, check and see if you can come up with values for the three subfiles listed in the table. Also, check on 2977aa47, which silentbreaker identified as being suspicious...
The only other advice I can offer is to backup your .sav files and use your backups to overwrite the affected .sav file when the bug occurs. If you try to bulldoze and rebuild in the affected city, the behavior you describe seems to happen - the problem returns, expands and... "mutates"... :D
I´m a bit confused as there are no .sav files in any of my regions, all files end with .sc4, but the info You requested are there as follows:
Buildings (a9bd882d) = 175196, props (49c05c8f) = 97554, retaining walls (49c05c9f) = 11008, 2977aa47 = 1510506
The biggest city in the region is currently 4,95MB. Similar cities in older regions are about half the size...
Well, first of all....Happy New Year to everyone, especially Snorrelli....how the heck are you!
...Now to Swesim; I too have the problem with the Communications Tower, however this isn't related to the Prop Pox, it is something else altogether. The Coit Tower also grows as a Commercial entity in some of my cities as well...and again, unrelated to Prop Pox.
As you have already read through this thread, I am one of the fortunate ones that only have the Prop Pox showing up in one city; Wesley. I have no problem with the other cities in the Region, with the exception of the aforementioned affliction that you have with the Communication Tower, etc.
You also mentioned that a lot would grow, but only some of the props would show...and/or textures, but not the whole thing...now this may be related to what we have coined 'Prop Pox', however I'm not certain. I have noticed that some of my growable HongKong bats do the same thing, yet the ploppable ones do not! Still can't figure that one out.
Back to Snorrelli....can you believe that after all this time, I still haven't re-entered Wesley?! I have been busy building up other areas of the Region....and added another gig of ram, but haven't bothered with Wesley! I'm now having problems with, what I think is a corrupt save in another city Pacifica...same Region. The Issues just seem not to end! Oh well, it is still as exciting as always to play this game.
Cheers for now:
Bruce
Swesim,
The *.SC4 files (not the *.SAV files) are the saved game files, one for each city! :thumbsup:
The Coit Tower comes as growable Stage 6 CS§§§ with the CAM. ::)
Buildings growing on empty lots are related to badly modded landmarks.
A lot more information about them can be found here: Growing Empty Lots and How to Correct Them (http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=907.0)
Sorry for the confusion... You're right - the suffix is .sc4, not .sav... ::)
Table updated. I'll see if I can get someone to look into the mystery subfile...
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg249.imageshack.us%2Fimg249%2F1356%2F21874530cv1.jpg&hash=d90e9a37f3142b69b9780a3165dc6483b1507734)
In regard to a PM from Snorelli, I've dig a bit
the subfile 0x2977aa47 is listed as containing the network props.
The format of the subfile is unknown, but using the hex viewer within Reader, there are some recognizable patterns. and there are recognizable examplars TGI mention in that subfile.
I'll experiment more
Edit :
I removed the 0x2977aa47 of one of my savegame and I've got a lot of prop disapperead ( not networks props but lots ). I still have some props, my first guess is that I still have those that are 'timed' props, which may be saved in an other subfile
as you see, a typical Prop pox pic :
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg50.imageshack.us%2Fimg50%2F120%2Fscreenshot001fi9.jpg&hash=00aac2a334fc43647f770c307b3d17fd7557e004)
The trees are here because they are flora, and you can spot parked cars that are timed props
btw the subfile 0x2977aa49, seems to be the one where effect props are saved
And unfortunatly even if it seems to be that subfile which cause the prop pox bug, I don't really see a way to regenerate it.
Wow - I know we don't know how to fix it or prevent it yet but I feel a little excitement at having reproduced the problem and pinpointing where it happens. Thanks wouanagaine! That pic does look exactly like the Prop Pox...
Is there some kind of critical threshold on the size of that subfile that, if exceeded, causes the game to throw it out? ()what()
Quote from: snorrelli on January 04, 2008, 01:02:58 AM
Is there some kind of critical threshold on the size of that subfile that, if exceeded, causes the game to throw it out? ()what()
Until we figure out the actual format of that subfile, it is hard to tell.
The pattern seems to be :
offset 0 : 4 bytes = (x) length of prop data n°1 including these 4 bytes
offset 4 : x-4 bytes = actual data of prop n°1
offset x : 4 bytes = length of prop data n°2
etc...
so nothing related to the number of props in the savegame itself. But I suspect that there could be a max number of props somewhere in the code
Hmmm
I am not sure if the maximum overall number of props is a constant within the code or a variable calculated or influenced by the system itself.
I opened the last pox - free update of my pox town and blasted all seasonal trees (there were 100s of them if not thousends) and replaced them by SFBT Filler lots with non seasonal trees as a seasonal tree consists of 3 or 4 temporary props on the same place.
With this I could play the map for a while but when I started to plop again those filler lots to fill the spaces the pox came back ...
Anyway I will the check the .sc4 files and give you the numbers wıth and without the pox at the weekend.
Bernhard
Here are a some illustrations of my version of the pox as promised:
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fv469%2FFredrik_Gelin%2FSimcity%25204%2FHereisville_texture_2.jpg&hash=636a5cfb7335934c61701955de519b6f7d70d57e)
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fv469%2FFredrik_Gelin%2FSimcity%25204%2FHereisville_texture_1.jpg&hash=be69706b3968469691f37197d076df5d3a19c912)
As You can see the textures are somehow affected as well, and as it seems Maxis props & textures are hit harder than custom BATs and textures I suspect it might have something to do with what was read last or added last to the game...
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fv469%2FFredrik_Gelin%2FSimcity%25204%2FHereisville_props_2.jpg&hash=a34bd20b68c6e998a42fa464f78f523ccd832704)
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fv469%2FFredrik_Gelin%2FSimcity%25204%2FHereisville_props_1.jpg&hash=2eb35df1e74714c3c546fc76173636912aeb4154)
Same problem here, Maxis stuff take the blow while the custom lots seem to make it almost unaffected.
As a bonuspic the strange deconstructivist mall I was talking about:
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fv469%2FFredrik_Gelin%2FSimcity%25204%2FHereisville_deconstructive_1.jpg&hash=2dc5ac84522e810ad72423c9e9b2f58341bf9e97)
Quote from: Swesim on January 04, 2008, 12:34:23 PM
As a bonuspic the strange deconstructivist mall I was talking about:
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fv469%2FFredrik_Gelin%2FSimcity%25204%2FHereisville_deconstructive_1.jpg&hash=2dc5ac84522e810ad72423c9e9b2f58341bf9e97)
The
Deconstructivist Mall by
hdorriker is a landmark growing on an empty in-game lot.
It is listed here:
http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=907.msg24171#msg24171It has absolutely nothing to do with the prop pox! ;)
@Swesim: Is the problem spotty or does it occur in a clearly defined area? For example, is the problem area delineated by a road or other network - one side fine, one side with the Pox?
The problem as You can see in the pictures are spotted all over the place.
However I managed to cure my city (!) accidentally yesterday evening.
What I did was to run every Cleanitol list I had twice, once before and once after running doublekiller as it showed that I had several double instances of many prop- and texturefiles, actually I had four identical instances of two files with props...
After doublekiller had done it´s job I didn´t have time to go back into the game until now and voila, it works fine again...
It helped for me, so I can only recommend that everyone else having these problems also run doublekiller or similar program to make sure You only have what You need in Your plugins...
Could it be that the problem arises when the game reads the same file over and over again? I know that the game is supposed to ignore the first reads in that case, but in my case this seems to be a clue as it didn´t work before, but worked fine after I cleaned up my plugins...
Whoa, Swesim... Congratulations! You may be the first person to ever cure the Prop Pox! I don't know what eliminating the duplicates does to fix it though... Could the Pox be a result of repeatedly reading the same file, or is it a result of "prop overload" and you reduced the total number of props by removing duplicate files? Then again, it could be some other conflict...
I wonder what the size of that subfile (0x2977aa47) is now that the problem is fixed?
This is an interesting theory indeed. I don't play that often, and my plugins folder is relatively small compared to some others (1.2 GB or so), but I'll try to keep it as clean as possible, removing outdated files whenever there's an update available, and also manually cleaning up a lot of files. If course this is no proof, but I never had any prop pox issues so far, and I hope it stays this way.
Quote from: snorrelli on January 05, 2008, 04:07:13 AM
Whoa, Swesim... Congratulations! You may be the first person to ever cure the Prop Pox! I don't know what eliminating the duplicates does to fix it though... Could the Pox be a result of repeatedly reading the same file, or is it a result of "prop overload" and you reduced the total number of props by removing duplicate files? Then again, it could be some other conflict...
I wonder what the size of that subfile (0x2977aa47) is now that the problem is fixed?
The size of 2977aa47 is now 2099412 according to the reader, but then I have played the city for a couple of hours more...
I´m just glad the darn thing is gone again...
...I realise that the following is not related to Prop Pox, however is there a thread that deals with Network Puzzle pieces that can cause Crashes To Desktop?
Bruce
@Bruce: There is a well-known bug that occurs when hovering a puzzle-piece over another transit enabled lot and results in a crash to desktop. People who use GLR are most familiar with this bug but other puzzle pieces can also cause this effect. Nothing to be done about it, I'm afraid, except to be very careful... ;)
Is that the issue, or are you having some other problem?
....Hey, Mayor Snorrelli....how the heck are you! Hope you had a nice New Years' and nothing but the best in 2008!
Regarding CTD with a puzzle piece, I was working in one of my Rural areas, Queensbridge, and placed an overpass using the Rail & Road puzzle pieces, and all of a sudden it crashed to Desktop. However, me thinks I did hover over a Transit enabled lot...so I'll be careful next time.
You know, I feel bad, as of late, as I haven't really paid much attention to the Prop Pox, due to the simple truth being that I have been avoiding going in to Wesley...but with the recent posts, regarding Cleanitol and such and having it, Prop Pox, clear up...for at least one citizen...I will be taking the plunge and going in and seeing what shape I'm in ;)
While I'm at it, I think I'll try and go back in to Pacifica as well, as that city also crashes, but for a completely different reason than the Puzzle pieces bug. I started a thread on that a while back, but abondoned it as I felt that Pacifica's issue was a corrupt save, but what with reading some of the other threads relating to crashes, it may well be something else that I can correct....anyway, thanks for the reply Snorrelli, and if I find anything different in Wesley, I'll certainly post it here...
Best:
Bruce
Something that occurred to me while reading through this is that if you have downloaded from the official site you may inadvertantly have picked up duplicate files. Glenni started a thread about the gems that are hidden in the rubbish there and as a result of a bit of testing I found that whole sets of outdated props etc were included with downloads.
Have a look here: http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=3287.0 as it may explain why some have dups even though they thought they hadn't ;D
()testing() For my first post here, I shall add another piece to this puzzle...
I first noticed the pox in my game when I went to plop Maxis' minor league stadium and the lot lacked a building. It was annoying, but I didn't think much of it figuring that I screwed something up with the gazillion plugins I'd downloaded up to that point -- I've only had the game for two months, but I've made good use of the this and other user content sites. ;) This happened almost right after a specific download, but more about that in a moment.
The next problem I noticed was when I started plopping Maxis' parks and they were treeless, and certain lots -- still not sure if they were downloads or Maxis ones -- started spawning excess plaza tiles that were covering street tiles, and the trees from the streets vanished. That prompted me to search the forums for a cause -- thus bringing me here.
I tried several of the less intensive fix suggestions I found -- maximum page file, setting changes, software rendering, etc. -- but none of them worked. I resorted to uninstalling everything and doing a fresh install. This fixed the missing props issue for a few minutes. Then I reinstalled that download I mentioned before and BAM! bye-bye props. I saved the city, uninstalled and reinstalled the base SC4 game from the CDs, opened the prop-less city and the props were back. Trees are still skimpy on the streets, but maybe the heavy coverage was do to NAM??? Anyway, the cause of my vexation is the EP1 patch from Maxis. It seems a case of "Some old bugs fixed, some new bugs added."
System details:
HP Pavilion zv6000 laptop
Windows XP Home (2002) SP2
AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3200+
498mhz 512mb ram
ATI Radeon Xpress 200M
80gb HD, 500gb external hd
4gb virtual memory
It's effected cities from 0 to 300,000+ population, large and small tiles alike.
It has been around with an empty plugin folder, and with a folder in excess of 2gb.
File size info: n/a
I've probably deleted plugins without bulldozing, but that wouldn't matter in the case of the reinstalls.
Yeah, I know, not much of a gaming system, but I'm not much of a gamer. Hopefully this data will be of use in finding the cure for this pox upon our houses -- so to speak. ;)
EDIT: I just installed the fab 4 of NAM (June '07, Essentials, Jan '08, RHW/MIS). There was no return of the pox; however, I saw several cases of kids TPing nonexistent trees on the streets, so some tree props are clearly not being displayed. %wrd
@Barby: well, I did find Plugin_RCI_Buildings_Prop_Modd.dat, but that's the only one mentioned in that thread... Like most people, I had some period of newbie downloading from the official site, without knowing what I was doing, so there may be other extraneous junk in there... ::)
@Piyer: I'm not so sure what you've got is the Prop Pox. I've never heard of it affecting lots as you plop them. In all reported cases so far, this bug occurs when you load a saved city and in all cases the saved cities looked completely normal when they were saved and exited before...
What version of the game do you have? Is it Deluxe, which includes both the base game and the Rush Hour expansion?
Quote from: snorrelli on January 11, 2008, 02:34:35 PM
What version of the game do you have? Is it Deluxe, which includes both the base game and the Rush Hour expansion?
Snorrellli, I have the deluxe version of the game.
Well, I have taken the plunge and utilised Datpacker, and while in the game, it does seem to run faster, however I'm using both compressed and uncompressed folders, so if I did what Datpacker calls for, removing the other subfolders, it would most likely run even faster....but I haven't cause that is just me, and I'm not getting any of the problems related to running both Compressed and Uncompressed......then I went in to Wesley, and Prop-pox is still there. Again, I'm lucky...as Prop-pox only exists in Wesley. That got me to thinking...if I'm using all of the custom content and mods that I use in all of my cities...and not re-arranging my plugins for say rural cities/areas, and doing something different for Metropolises...then why is prop-pox only in the one city? It makes me still think that a dependancy or a couple are either being misread or not there and that is what is causing the prop-pox...that coupled with the Plugin Missing message box that keeps coming up in Wesley and some of my other cities, and I have triple checked for dependancy and according to all reports, I have everything I need.
Another question, regarding Datpacker...is there an easy way to reverse the compression, or does one simply delete the Plugin compressed folder and re-downloaded all that material?
Just thoughts and questions I have, while driving in from Cleveland! :)
Bruce
Bruce... One should not delete the original, uncompressed files, but rather should move them to a separate folder called "plugins_disabled" (or whatever other name). The game will not read anything but the file named "plugins". Then, when you want the original files back, you simply delete the plugins_compressed and put the original files back in... ;)
Thanks Snorrelli....yes, I think that is what I was saying in my convoluted way of saying things :)
So, does Datpacker copy and compress these files, or are they just moved to the Plugin_compressed folder? In other words, if I just delete the Plugin_compressed folder, are the same files still in the Original subfolders, or do I have to move them back in?
Now, on to more important things--The Prop-pox: It seems by re-reading this post, we are very close to solving this...so just for my own sake, maybe a re-visit to the behaviour of the Prop-pox may reveal something we all overlooked. Remember when I first posted, I thought I was missing some dependancies regarding the BSC...however that proved to be not the case. As Prop-pox developed in Wesley, I was seeing other lots disappear....now couple that with the Plugin Missing message box coming up in Wesley when you first load it, and again in several other cities...that in itself does not make sense, as I have mentioned before...all dependancies that I need are reportedly in my possession. So, with so much Custom Content that I have, and running several mods...maybe the game is not reading everything it has to, causing both the message box coming up and seeing the Prop-pox manifest itself in Wesley....does any of this make sense, or am I just shooting in the wind?
Bruce
It appears the prop pox is not limited to Windows XP SP2, but can affect cities created under Window Vista Home Premium. The pox has erased props in two lateral bands across my city of Egelpolder. Gone are rows of seasonal trees, canals, farm fields and buildings and nearly all other props.
My computer stats for the chart:
Vista Home Premium
Gateway Model M-1617
Processor AMD Turion 64 X2 Mobile Technology U-58, 1900 MHz, 2 core(s), 2 Logical Processor(s)
Total Physical Memory 1661.50 MB
Available Physical Memory 958.96 MB
Total virtual Memory 3.99 GB
Available Virtual Memory 2.87 GB
Page File Space 2.43 GB
Display: ATI Radeon X1270
Adapter RAM 384.00 MB (402,653,184 bytes)
Resolution 1280 x 800 x 60 hertz; Bits/Pixel 32
Hard Drive: Western Digital - Size 222.44 GB; Free Space 162.50 GB
Bug affects large city tiles
Custom Content: 1.95 GB (compressed with DatPacker, except for Essentials, Mods and NAM)
Graphic Settings:
Visual Effects - Medium
# of Cars/Sims - Medium
Shadows - Low
Building Draw Speed - Medium
Texture Quality - High
City Detail - High
Custom Resolution – 1680x800x32bit
City affected population size: ~15-20K
Save city file: 9 MB; not sure if it shrank
Size of subfile in Reader for:
a9bd882d – 432,323
49c05c8f – 24,014
49c05c9f – 1,262
2977aa47 – 4,017,867
Yes, did mistakenly remove plugins (custom retaining walls and relotted base texture of some farm fields) without bulldozing every instance (missed/forgot to bulldoze a few). I reset the sealevel several times in order to place retaining walls as seawalls, then later removed them.
Also of note, the pox also affects the same city file on my desktop computer. I regularly sync the files between the laptop above and the desktop if I have played a city file while travelling. (The desktop is a Gateway GT-5034, AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4200+, Total Physical Memory 3.0 GB, Available Physical Memory 1.93 GB, Total virtual Memory 6.17 GB, Available virtual Memory 4.99 GB, Western Digital Hard Drive 298 GB/208 GB Free, Nvidia GeForce 7600GS, resolution 1280x1024x32bit, SC4 graphic settings and plugins the same as laptop.) On both computers I have ReadyBoost-enabled Flash drives.
...I was playing the game last night, and in a new city, building it from the ground up....my game was getting slower and slower as I was adding more custom content. At one point in the game as I zoomed from '2' to '4', the lots would be re-drawn as per usual, but slower...and this gave me an opportunity to see something; for most of the lots, they were completely intack, however on some of them, it took a couple of seconds for the whole thing to appear...and during this 'redrawing', the first stage looked very similar to what we see with the Prop-pox, only some of the lot is there, then it is all there, as I said before....but it got me to thinking that possibly the Prop-pox is affecting the drawing of the game. Maybe, something is hindering the games' ability to draw the lots completely? That in a random way, the info is being blocked....does this make any sense?
Bruce
I do think the same Bruce, unfortunately I couldn't valuate this ...
Bruce that makes alot of sense since lately I noticed Ive had a few CTD's and I read the report... At the end of the report it said "Instruction data is not readable -- Unable to get the EIP." At the start of the report it said under Exception time which is the "Exception code: 0xC0000005 (-1073741819) ACCESS_VIOLATION."
So I wonder about the data if it becomes corrupted and that is then why there is the Prop Pox... I just kinda hope Im not on the verge of getting the bug myself...
But anyways if anyone wants to read the exception reports are attached, the last 3 reports are included in the zip.. The 2 are from the 3rd which I noticed was kinda wierd in itself cause the first report is generated when I started to play but no CTD, then the 2nd one is when the crash actualy happend a little more then 2 hrs later when I was saving...
The other report which i was talking about above is from early this morning when I was starting to play again and all the sudden it crashed on me....
ACCESS VIOLATION is usealy issued when the program is trying to read a memory that is not belong to it anymore
Unfortunalty Exception Reports are generally not very usefull ( even for the programmer who code the game, so for us who don't have the code it is unuseable )
If you run the console line version of DatPacker, you'll get some informations about your plugins size, and how much memory it will use if the game load every bit at any time. You'll see that it is quite massive, much more than any virtual memory can handle. Fortunatly maxis programmers are smart enough and they come to a nice cache algorithm to handle most case that they envisioned at the development time ( ie that maybe 6 years from now ). The algorithm has proven to be very efficient as most of us have much more plugins that what maxis every thought. However I think the algorithm has some 'worst case scenario' that some of us are triggering and the game stall/crash or just lost track of props.
So maybe we are on to something, however here is another rub...I'm playing the same region for months, and I have Prop-pox in only one city in this Region, a city called Wesley. Now Snorrelli and others are seeing the Prop-pox in other cities they have created. In my case, Wesley is a large city, but not fully developed...I have lots of unzoned areas within its borders. I do have lots of Custom Content, however I also have much more in other cities of the same Region, and no Prop-pox. Some of this is old ground being covered, for some of us whom have had Prop-pox for a while...but as I mentioned in my last message...the pox looks very similar to a half drawn lot....could the information be blocked by a corrupt save, as if we read back over this thread, Snorrelli and others discovered a certain pattern in the size of the .sav file....and now with what we are currently discussing, possibly the two situations are combining to trigger this disease!
Bruce
Hi all.....this may be a stupid question, however here goes! Is there an utility programme that will allow us to 'see' or 'read' an individual city file? One that may be able to show us how the data sits, the values...etc.?
Bruce
Ilive reader ?
...Hey, thanks wouanagaine !
Now, with Ilive reader, could not it be used to analyse a city that suffers the Prop-pox, and by making comparisons with a city that doesn't have Prop-pox, but has the same Lots and Models, and could we then find out what might be happening with the affected city?
Bruce
....P.S.: This may have already been done, obviously I don't know :)
Bruce
Quote from: BruceAtkinson on February 14, 2008, 07:56:31 AM
Now, with Ilive reader, could not it be used to analyse a city that suffers the Prop-pox, and by making comparisons with a city that doesn't have Prop-pox, but has the same Lots and Models, and could we then find out what might be happening with the affected city?
Since the internal structure of those files isn't known, the Reader doesn't know how to display the information.
Thus, you will only be offered to see the content as such in raw hex format or in a simple decoded field format.
As long as Reader doesn't know what properties and values the fields contain, the hex information is very hard to read though.
Apologies for neglecting this thread of late... Not that I have any real insight or solutions to offer... ()sad()
@Itrskn: I have added your info to the table. My condolences on joining our club. Interesting that the bug has occurred with Vista too. Just to be clear, I *think* we should have the specs for the computer you were using when the bug first appeared. I've noticed that once it's there, it will continue to be there no matter where you load or access the saved city afterwards...
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg146.imageshack.us%2Fimg146%2F7308%2F52100238dd2.jpg&hash=d6e1ce0c162d875d1c75fbd5124c2991bf6e4fb2)
Not sure what the size of the mystery subfile tells us. In all the case where the size has been measured, it accounts for around 40% of the total save file size... So what? ()what()
I'd encourage anyone else watching for this to back up the save file regularly. Eventually you will reach a point where you can pinpoint the moment when the bug occurs and can compare the size of this subfile immediately before and after the bug, as silentbreaker has done. A dramatic increase, then decrease in the size of this subfile is directly connected to the Pox. Problem is, I have no idea if it is somehow the cause of the Pox, or a symptom. ::)
@snorrelli --
The information you so kindly entered into the table is indeed for the computer where the pox first appeared. i.e., the Turion laptop with pre-installed Vista. The pox apparently got moved to the other computer's version of the city file when I synced the files. (I listed both sets of specs just in case it made any difference to your investigation...)
I knew about the pox from my XP days, and had hoped it wouldn't happen on Vista machines since no one had reported it. &mmm
Hey Snorrelli...it is great to hear from you again! I trust everything is well with you!
If you read my earlier post, regarding the Building Draw Speed when my game was going quite slow, what I didn't say in that post was that I'm thinking that the Prop-pox could be directly related to the mechanism of that process. Having watched some lots get drawn at that slow speed, and in stages, made me think of how similar the initial stage looks, with only some of the props and not all of them.
Is it possible that whatever the Prop-pox is, it is corrupting or blocking the full process of the game's Building Draw process? However, it still wouldn't explain the randomness of what we see, but it may at least point us in the right area....
Your thoughts?
Bruce
P.S. I have added another gig of ram to the computer, which has helped in the overall speed of the game.
Hi Bruce, sorry - I meant to reply to your observation before... Yes, when the problem occurs, it looks to me too like when you're waiting for the "rendering wave" to roll across the city and draw all the buildings as you scroll around. I don't know enough about how the game works to say whether the Prop Pox is related to draw speed or whether it just looks similar.
Because the bug seems to occur during saving, I had wondered if the program somehow "draws" the city tile in a similar way during the save process. I thought maybe the bug occurs if:
- You lack sufficient RAM?
- The program encounters too many props to process and save?
- If it encounters an "error" like a place where a lot has grown or been plopped and then been removed from the plugins folder?
- If the city is somehow otherwise too large and too complicated to process in the amount of time it allows itself to save?
I have tried playing with different draw speeds and still get the same effect, however... %wrd
One thing I believe the info in the table tells us is that the first and last theories are not the causes. Among the victims included in the table, the Pox has affected all sizes of cities, with populations running from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands and file sizes ranging from 5MB to 30. There seems to be no shortage of RAM among the victims either. Besides, it is only affecting a relatively small number of people. What separates my 2GB of RAM from someone else's 1GB of RAM who is not suffering from this problem?
The middle two theories are still possibilities though. We don't really understand how this mystery subfile works. Wouanagaine has determined that it includes network props and silentbreaker pointed out that it is the largest subfile in the city save file, so it is possible that it reaches some critical mass and... ugh... I don't know "and what"... ::)
It does also seem that all the victims either definitely or possibly have removed files from the plugins folder without bulldozing all instances first. I suspect this may have to do with it just because I am very careful about those things but I know I did it in the two cases of the Prop Pox I've encountered most recently.
Then again, it could be that these ideas are completely off base and the cause is something entirely different, related to information or observations that we're not even tracking in the table and haven't even discussed here yet. To tell the truth, I've gotten a little frustrated with the research. &mmm
It should be 'easy' to know if the cause ifs the 'remove files from plugins without bulldozing' for someone who is willing to go on a test spree
Step 1 => Have a quite developped region, make a backup of it
Step 2 => Remove some files from your plugins ( I'll first go for plop )
Step 3 => Run the region for a while and see if the prop pox appears ( maybe you'll have to play more than one city ). By running I just mean hit the cheetah button and wait 10 game years, do not interfere with the game other than zooming in/zooming out for redrawing
Step 4 => if prop pox appears, save the city, and show us your figures from the original file and the new one
If nothing appears, try Step2 with removing some growables ( that have already grown and are still able to grow again ie do not remove stage 1 growable if you have a skyscrapper forest )
If nothing appears, try Step3 with really playing the game
If nothing appears, then it certainly have nothing to do with files removal
Yes - I've tried to reproduce the Pox using the exact method you describe, and have not been able to. That's not to discourage anyone else from testing - one of the elements of research is to have different researchers run the same test multiple times and then compare results and try to identify divergences...
Part of the problem is it that it's clear removing files from the plugins without bulldozing definitely does not cause the Prop Pox every time. Many people have done this and only a few of us develop the Pox, so if it is connected to the problem at all, it is likely only a part of the equation...
Can it be caused by updating files ?
ie you remove a file because a new one is updated, but yuo forgot to bulldoze all instance of old one ?
Not in my case... yet. The two cases I remember clearly and that were linked to these two Pox infected cities were growables that I removed because I decided I didn't like them and because they grew too much. Because they were all over the place, I did not bulldoze all instances first.
That said, because I'm paranoid that removing without bulldozing is a cause of the Prop Pox, all the recent updates and re-releases of BSC lots, including CAM-ified versions, have been giving me fits. :D
I'll have to tell this in two posts, due to the size of the accompanying pictures: In this picture we see what might be the starting of Prop-pox. The 6x2 area surrounded by the street....however please notice the rural Tennis court. Now, when I hovered the Question Mark over this area, it came up as the Tennis Court, no matter which way I approached the area. When I tried to bulldoze the area, it wouldn't bulldoze, so I thought of something....(next picture/next post)
Bruce
....in this picture you see the 6x2 area restored....this is what I did: I bulldozed the actual Rural Tennis Court and replaced it with the Olympic Tennis a few more blocks to the east, (out of the picture). When I went back to the 6x2 area, the query worked fine, however still no props. I tried to bulldoze once again, however that did not work...so I tried to build the street over the affected lots...that worked. The streets were drawn in, and then when I tried to bulldoze, it worked and I rezoned the 6x2 area and it was restored such as you see it. Notice I put a park in the general area of where the old Tennis Court was...however I do not think that had a bearing on anything.
The reason I'm posting this is: I have had peculiar instances in other cities when using some lots, such as the Rural Tennis Court, in which the query in adjacent areas would always come up as the other lot, same as the first post of this little story. So I'm wondering in the case of the real Prop-pox affected cities, are we using Custom Lots that are in someway interferring with the Draw system of nearby areas, and hence not allowing the full lot of that area to be drawn?
Bruce
I think you may experiencing the growing empty lot & the immortal lot syndroms both a the same time
It may be a good reason for prop pox to appear anyway
Bruce, would you have a link to that rural Tennis Court?
I'd like to take a look at the modding of it. :)
Hey, RJ....here it is: http://www.simtropolis.com/stex/index.cfm?id=2153
It is a "Rural Minor League Stadium" Pack from simtropolis. I've had it for quite a long time....
Bruce
Quote from: BruceAtkinson on February 19, 2008, 03:05:27 PM
Hey, RJ....here it is: http://www.simtropolis.com/stex/index.cfm?id=2153
It is a "Rural Minor League Stadium" Pack from simtropolis. I've had it for quite a long time....
Bruce
Thanks Bruce!
All eight stadiums included in that package by gshmails are modded the same way and are heavily "immortal".
The stadiums themselves are Maxis props, and the invisible building is centered 8.8 m from the left edge and 8.8 m the upper edge.
However, the width of the invisible building is set to 104 m and the depth to 110 m.
These should both have been 16 m, but have obviously been manually modded.
Thus, the building overhangs 60.8 m (2.7 tiles) on the left side and 63.8 m (2.9 tiles) on the upper side.
That means that any other lot within three tiles to the left and behind the stadium will get the same name and query as the stadium.
And you will have problems succesfully bulldozing the stadiums and affected neighbouring lots.
Thank-you!, RJ....that explains alot from some other issues I had, using the stadiums....I thought maybe I was on to a small breakthrough with the dreaded Proppox, but alas...we're not there yet!
Bruce
By the way, since I have your attention....one of my cities, Pacifica will cause an immediate Crash to Desktop, and me thinks I have inadvertently corrupted the last save, is there any way that one can examine the file to see what has corrupted and possibly correct it?
Bruce
By the way, in reply to the "removing plugins and loading city w/o deleting instances of removed plugin" theory, I can begin to refute it. I removed a particular set of outdated lots, and loaded a city with the outdated lots in it after removing the files multiple times. There has been no case of "Prop Pox" yet!
Quote from: dragonshardz on February 21, 2008, 07:10:15 PM
By the way, in reply to the "removing plugins and loading city w/o deleting instances of removed plugin" theory, I can begin to refute it. I removed a particular set of outdated lots, and loaded a city with the outdated lots in it after removing the files multiple times. There has been no case of "Prop Pox" yet!
Yes - as I said above, many of us have done it, but only a few of us have developed the Pox. So, if it's related at all, it's not the only reason. For example:
- If rendering/save engine encounters an instance of a lot that is missing from plugins,
and X, Y or Z...
I am now another victim of the prop pox :'( Only with Maxis props though. I really only noticed today when I plopped the mayor's house and this is what I saw:
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi5.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fy171%2Fbarbyw%2FMayorsnoprops.jpg&hash=2eba58c3ab58285f0b5a9bd3221f37fd20225959)
This is a small city of less than 2000 inhabitants and has only been started today. It is the Grand River Valley region for mrbisonm's Region Play at Simtrop. I went through other cities and the mayor's house, the Maxis churches, City Hall plus any custom lots that use a lot of Maxis props are affected. None of the city files are over 3MB and I haven't changed any settings. I do have one thing to try though. I shall report back.
Could it be related to the patching we tried in another place ?
Well I suppose it could be. ::) I'll try to undo that.
Ouch - I must admit other people have reported missing only Maxis props before and I've dismissed these cases as "not the Pox." Maybe it's a related ailment? A different strain of the same disease? Just to clarify, were the props missing from the moment you plopped or did it look fine initially and you discovered the props missing after a subsequent save-exit-reentry?
I can confirm it is not related to Wou's comment. It was and remains the same when plopped in this tile as I have demolished and replopped after waiting a while. The even odder thing is that some of the props and overlays missing are showing on other lots. I checked a number of tiles in this region and the mayor's house shows the same on all of them. I have no idea when it started as I often just plop and don't really look with the mayor's house etc. None of the tiles have a population of over 50k
Hmmm... Very odd - particularly since you've got the two lamp posts and the hedge fencing... ()what()
did you check it in another region?
considering the Prop Pox afects only single cities I don't think that would
Never mind. I have noticed, when scrolling in my largest city, that before the render "wave" goes across the screen, Peg's canals in particular look Poxed. Thankfully they haven't ever STAYED Poxed.
~~Dragonshardz~~
then I would venture to say shardz that is not the prop pox but a mere graphic glitch then any thing... So rest assured your safe from the prop pox shardz...
yes, I knew that Pat. :D Just noticing that the Prop Pox seems to be a more....shall we say, permanent version of this prerender-wave glitch.
considering my 2+ GB of plugins, If it hasn't happened yet it's not likely to!
~~Dragonshardz~~
A quick report back that the missing props are there in their full glory in other regions. It just seems to have affected this region for some reason best known to itself. It's a pity as this the region I am playing for mrbisonm's regional play at Simtrop.
Does the missing prop only affect the mayor house ?
You can try removing examplars from savegame files
No, it doesn't only affect the mayor's house but all Maxis rewards - churches, city hall etc - and custom lots that use Maxis props and textures. It is odd as it some of the props like the flower beds show on some lots but not others. I am beginning to wonder if it is related to the patchwork we did and it will take time to undo that in the savegames.
Did you not back up? ;)
Yes I did but I haven't needed the back up as the props are magically back again. I have no idea why they went or why they reappeared but they did and they have.
They found out they were dealing with a goddess and got scared. $%Grinno$%
I'm not going to question your eyesight. :P
LoL Diggis that is it the game found out it was messing with the goddess so it decided to correct itself lol
Hi Everyone....
Just went in to Wesley, after all this time....and of course, Prop-pox is still plagueing this city, and as we all know, only this city. However I have noticed a couple of things which I haven't posted before....one is odd, and has been happening since I discovered the pox in Wesley. When a city is about to fully load, we hear certain sounds just prior to the full load...in Wesley, I hear the sound of waves, which is odd, as Wesley is an inland city and no shore line in existence....
Second, yesterday and today I have been building the new Newman Oil Refinery in Wesley. Yesterday I plopped the Main Refinery, the Seperator lot and the Heat Exchange building. This morning, when I went in to Wesley, Prop-pox did its damage to the three lots.....I decided to bulldoze them and re-plop. I noticed when I did this, that in a brief second, when I bulldozed the lots, all the props appeared before the dust plume happened. So this got me wondering if for some reason the Prop-pox is actually a glitch in the City Detail mode.
Bruce
Interesting Bruce
That would means the props are still there in the savegame, but with some tweaking preventing them to be display, all props for all lots have a flag telling in which zoom level they can be displayed ( the 2nd or 3rd rep in the LotConfig property ), it may happen that this flag is zeroed
Another explanation can be when you bulldoze a lot, the game reload the lot and display the explosion effect from it
As for the sound I have no idea
If only I had time, I'll spend some in decyphering the savegame part of props :(
...just one more thing, I do not think I have mentioned this to anyone before, however in my case anyway, all the lots that are aflicted with Prop-pox do not lose their functionability. When I query, they are operating fine, doesn't matter what it is...a bus stop, building commercial or otherwise...so that leads me to think that nothing is altered in the model, just the outward props....
Bruce
....While playing Wesley this morning, I had a fire in the Main Newman refinery....here is a picture of the refinery after the fire....over 50% of the missing props re-appeared!
I will send an additional post showing the Separator building, which shows missing props, and how the Main Refinery looked prior to the fire
Bruce
...here is the second picture:
Damn, very strange, I'm clueless
...so, I'm going to do a little experiment. When in Wesley next, I'm going to snap some pics of areas afflicted by the prop-pox and then set a couple of fires, put it out and if the same thing happens, take pictures of the restored or partially restored lots....and if this proves significant, I'll post them here....if not, well, I'll just re-plop the lots....and that is another thing, in Wesley, most of the lots that are afflicted are ploppable ones...maybe that is another clue.
Bruce
....well, my experiment did not yield anything new, other than reveal my firefighting skills need to be improved, so I have sent the whole Wesley Fire Department to "SC4Devotion School for Firefighters"! ;D
I set a couple of fires on the Separator Building and it burned to the ground! I tried the New World Court House, and the same thing...my engines didn't get there in time!, so it burnt as well.....so obviously I have to 'bone-up' on my design of Fire Stations and where they are placed within the city...which is a totally different subject than the prop-pox!
However, that sound of waves that I mentioned in a previous post was heard everytime on the lots that burnt...which is odd.
I did notice something that may be related, though....the game slowed done quite intensely and I had to go and do something, so I was on Zoom 4, and saved the game....when I came back, the game was still saving....after an hour it was still saving, so I knew something was wrong, so I dumped out of it, forceably.....haven't been in it since, so not sure if the city is corrupted or just at the previous save point.....I'll keep everyone posted.
Bruce
...ok, so now I know why I haven't been in Wesley for a good long time! It is just too frustrating and discouraging, as prop-pox is so widespread....looking over a nice rural area of the city, with some upper class homes and nicely treed streets, and then come across a bus stop, park and mansion that are missing 70% of their props! :(
I think I was deluding myself when I thought, no problem-just replop and keep going, however because it is so wide spread, I would be spending all of my time just making the corrections, and only having to do so again the next time I enter the city!
So I am almost at the point of dumping the city and starting from scratch....as I have the 'virgin' region in a back up, so I may just go in to the virgin region, name the area Wesley again, and re-introduce it to the developed region....I am not there yet...but close.
It's a shame, as Wesley has developed into a very nice Urban/Rural area, with rolling meadows and expansive farms in one area, and a metro looking dynamic city in another portion...and of course, I'm a stubborn person, and do not want to admit defeat.....
Thanks for listening!
Bruce
I had this happen to me too. I guess if you build up a large tile too much, it stops saving some props and textures. It got so irritaiting having to redraw and replop forgotten networks all the time, I obliterated the city with the issue, and had to start over, but this time, I left a lot of open space, so it wouldn't have this issue again. The one lot I noticed still has half of the textures missing, no matter which city its in. The good thing about starting over, is taking advantage of new transit networks.
....Hi everyone, here I am just thinking again...which by the way, could be dangerous!
Anyway...knowing that there is a good number of us plagued with the Pox....would it be beneficial to setting up a test region, and importing our afflicted cities? In this way, we could monitor the behaviour and analyze the cities and possibly get closer to a cure.
Bruce
....so, I have decided that I will not destroy Wesley and start over....I'll just keep conducting Urban Renewal and Rural Renewal....as I believe that we can collectively come up with a cure for this Prop-pox thang!
Here is a picture of the CSX Farming Fuel Depot, and the CSX Produce Packaging plants....please note all building props are non-existent, however each lot is fully functional.
....now, here is the same area after I re-plopped the affected lots.....
...one more! This is a picture of a residential area, showing the prop-pox at work, however with varying degrees of missing models.....
Bruce, you may want to stop doing multiple posts. The edit button is there for a reason. For images, please host them offsite at a free image-hosting site, like Imageshack.
Now... I don't have the problem yet... at least... but it is puzzling to find out what's the cause of all this prop disappearing.
- Allan Kuan
Edit: Actually Bruce multiple posts are perfectly valid. As for the pic, yes they should be hosted offsite Wouanagaine
May have to do with game instability from dual or quad core processors....
Quote from: flame1396 on June 27, 2008, 12:41:59 PM
May have to do with game instability from dual or quad core processors....
Been a while since I posted the table, but as you can see, we've only got a couple of victims with dual core processors. Doesn't seem to be a dual/quad core issue, nor an nVidia/ATI issue, nor a RAM issue, nor a virtual memory issue, nor even an XP/Vista issue...
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg146.imageshack.us%2Fimg146%2F7308%2F52100238dd2.jpg&hash=d6e1ce0c162d875d1c75fbd5124c2991bf6e4fb2)
...So, kids....tell me how to host images offsite.....
Is that what everyone does in the "Show Us Your..." thread?
Let me know, as I do not want to take up valuable web space, here, on the forum.
Bruce
Hi Bruce - try this thread. (http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=4438.0) It has a tutorial for how to use imageshack and photobucket, which are the two most popular image hosting sites...
The short version is:
1. upload image to hosting service
2. copy the direct link to the image provided by the service
3. click the picture frame icon (above the smilies) on the post reply/edit screen here at SC4D
4. paste the direct link address between the brackets
I see a small relationship... if Itrskn has his program running under compatibility mode with Windows XP SP2 as the compatibility mode selection... then hmm...
But still, seeing that most other people's computers work well without the bug, this should not be a problem at all.
Although I do not have the bug, I find it worrying and odd that this would occur. = \
- Allan Kuan
....Not sure if we have discussed this aspect before, however since in our affected cities, the prop-pox manifests itself with missing props, however the lots are fully functional...and the base texture is still present. So, maybe the problem lies in the 3-d rendering portion or the way the engine assigns the locations for the models? Just some Canada Day thoughts!
Bruce
In reference to XP compatibility mode for Vista -- I double-checked the properties and I am not currently using the compatibility mode and still get the prop-pox. I did use the mode for a while out of initial uncertainty over the reliability of Vista-- I can't remember when I stopped using XP compatibility mode and any correlation of that choice with the dreaded pox, except that it still occurs on occasion.
As almost all people listed in snorelli table run under XP, I don't think it has something to do with Vista specific
As said before, I suspect a corrupt in the props entry in the savegame ( I made a post about it somewhere in previous pages )
What I like to know is : Does the first time the prop pox appear is during game playing or after a load of a city ? I'm not sure this point has been made clear ( if it can )
If last time the city was saved the city was ok, then if you load it the prop pox appears, then we can certainly guess it is a savegame problem
Before quitting everything was OK, after saving with the above mentioned effects the prop pox became visible.
I know for sure as I made a lot of pictures of my affected city each time I quit the city.
In the next days I hope I will find the time to compare my cities Rhenbrücken (made under XP with 1,5MB RAM, 15MB filesize, prop pox) with Gleiwemünde (made under Win2000 with 512mb RAM, filesize > 33mb)
Bernhard
for me it is always after loading a saved city that it first appears
Quote from: wouanagaine on July 02, 2008, 12:03:05 AM
As said before, I suspect a corrupt in the props entry in the savegame ( I made a post about it somewhere in previous pages )
What I like to know is : Does the first time the prop pox appear is during game playing or after a load of a city ? I'm not sure this point has been made clear ( if it can )
If last time the city was saved the city was ok, then if you load it the prop pox appears, then we can certainly guess it is a savegame problem
Always after loading a saved city. The city plays and looks fine. Then I save it, exit it and reload it at a later date, and it is corrupted...
So can we definitly acknowledge the problem lies in the savegame, and more exactly I guess in the entry that contains all props of the city ?
...yes, we can acknowldege that....however when one re-enters the city and replops some of the lots that are affected, saves and exits...then re-enters, one will stand a 50% chance that those lots will stay corrected, but others are then affected, plus the odd occurance that happened to me with the oil refinery and the fire...instead of 90% 0f the props gone, there are now 70% there....and I have entered and re-entered the city in question three times.....
Just another thing...I remember way back when the Prop-pox first appeared in my city, it was Bus Stops with parks, both 2 tile and 3 tile ones, and then it spread....and that is when I noticed that re-plopping actually had some positive affects.
Bruce
Personally I'd nuke the city and start over.
...aaahh, that's the easy way out....trying to find a cure is much more productive for all concerned!
Bruce ()stsfd()
Quote from: wouanagaine on July 02, 2008, 02:50:50 PM
So can we definitly acknowledge the problem lies in the savegame, and more exactly I guess in the entry that contains all props of the city ?
Yes - and more specifically with subfile 2977aa47, which seems to contain network props.
This subfile greatly expands in size when the city is affected by the bug, but before the bug has actually been observed by saving and reloading the affected city. Then, when one reloads the affected city and observes the Prop Pox, the subfile shrinks dramatically, presumably as a result of the missing props. This fluctuation has an affect on the overall size of the savegame file, but has been pinpointed to this specific subfile by
silentbreaker.
Hi Snorelli et al,
I am also a victim of prop pox. It affects the largest city in my relatively new region. The city has only 47K sims and covers about 2/3 of its large (4x4 km) city tile. The savegame file size is 15.5 Mby. For the records, I run a Pentium 4, 3GHz, with 1.5 Mby ram memory, a Gforce FX5200 video card with 256 Mby, Windows XP S2 prof edition, 40 Gby hard disk. I have about 500 Mby of custom content, half of it in /MyDocuments/Simcity4/Plugins (lots and some models) and the other half in the /ProgramFiles/Maxis/Simcity4/Plugins folder (props, textures).
I apologize in advance for the length of this message, but I'm trying to help giving as much info as I can based on the tests I am reporting below.
I initially thought (before finding & reading this thread) that it had something to do with changes I (recklessly) made to some of the installed lots in an attempt to correct the "growing empty lots" problem. However, I have backup copies of my region, which allow me to replace the infected city by a 'clean' previous version of it and run the game to see if the problem appears again. Thus, I made one step back, removed all changes I did to suspicious lots and played with the 'clean' city several times. Prop pox always strikes again after a few game years. Sometime the savegame city file grows to 25 Mby just at the last time I save the game before prop pox attacks, some times I just get a savegame file with decreasing size after prop pox strikes. This seems to depend on the exact game time you decide to save your city. Sometime the missing props are spread all over the city, some other times they are restricted to a certain corner of the city (but a different one for different trials). The simptoms are the same as already described here: lots remain functional, props are missing in Maxis lots as well as custom lots. Generally, the first lots to be affected are SimGoober's rural bus stops and building in custom farms, but I also saw props of PEG's streams & ponds and Jeronij's & Mas71's walls disappearing (perhaps they all call my attention as there are several of these lots in this city).
I followwd suggestions of people over simtropolis and increased the swap are to 4Mby, and also repeated the tests playing in my laptop, which has completely different specs as well as an older version of my game (several of the lots I now have are not yet installed in the SC4 version I have in my laptop). I copied the 'clean' version of the test city and installed as a new city in an old, test region I had there. Guess what? prop pox also strikes. Thus, I confirm it has nothing to do with computer specs, video card specs, memory & graphics settings. And, in my case, I can tell it also has nothing to do with instances left behind of previously deleted plugins.
The table below gives some information I extracted from the gamesave files of the infected city. Stages 0 corresponds to decease-free versions of the city; stages 1 to the first gamesave file just after prop pox strikes; the other stages are a sequence of gamesave files after prop pox has entered into action. The numbers in the table are in Kby. As one can see, the gamesave file keeps shrinking every time you save the city after you are infected by prop pox. And essentially what decreases is the size of the internal file which has the network props; the other one keep roughly their original sizes.
stage savegame buildings props ret.walls network props
-------------------------------------------------------------
0a 15599 593.3 257.6 18.6 6346.8
0b 15576 591.6 256.8 18.6 6336.5
1a 14919 591.0 256.2 19.0 5628.6
1b 14859 590.0 255.2 19.1 5635.2
1c 14806 587.3 254.2 18.9 5608.9
2 14481 590.1 256.3 19.0 5175.7
3 14417 589.8 255.4 19.1 5112.4
4 13953 585.5 253.2 18.5 4628.4
-------------------------------------------------------------
In one of the simulations/trials I did, the gamesave file increase to 29.9 Mby and stayed at this size for another save before prop pox striked. I kept playing and saving while the gamesave file shrank and some 3 game years later the file size increased again to 25 Mby, stayed there for two consecutive 'saves' before decreasing again to 14 Mby (more and more props disappearing...).
If someone has ideas of tests that could be made in order to figure out where/what is the problem, please let me know. Because I have a decease-free version of the infected city, we can perform several tests including/removing things (plugins) to see if there is a particular configuration which allow us to get rid of the problem. In the meanwhile I am exploring one suspicion I have, namely, it might have to do with lots with undefined or missing props or double defined props (I will be scanning all my custom lots in LE searching for culprits). I say that because I remember somebody (sorry, I forgot the name) reporting in this thread that he got rid of prop pox after cleaning his plugins folder and deleting several duplicate files (containing duplicate definitions of props used is some lots).
I will be back later (hopefully with better news),
Bap
Welcome, bap (and my condolences on the Pox)...
This sounds like a classic case and you have provided a very detailed and thorough examination of exactly how it occurs and what can be observed in the savegame file. This exactly matches what other victims have reported, particularly in regard to the network props subfile.
Due to the volume of info here, I have not yet added your specs to the table. I think your post bears careful study on its own. I am now coming to suspect that the parameters included in the table are not relevant to the problem anyway, apart from the savegame and subfile info.
Some questions to anyone who knows more about the game's coding:
1. Is it possible that there is some threshold for total size/number of network props, beyond which the game cannot process them all?
2. Does subfile 2977aa47 contain props that are included in or modified by NAM or other transit network mods?
3. Is it possible that mods affecting the transit networks, including NAM, street tree mods, sidewalk texture mods, under-rail texture mods, or others could push the game beyond this threshold?
Quote from: snorrelli on July 06, 2008, 02:48:42 AM
1. Is it possible that there is some threshold for total size/number of network props, beyond which the game cannot process them all?
In this regard, I would add that the search for a cure to the prop pox would much benefit from contributions by people which actually are
not infected by the decease. For example, it would be particularly interesting if people who developed large cities (city surface fully occupied, lots of transit networks, train, highway, subway & el rail lines) drop by here and let us know the size of their gamesave file and network sub-file. If we find at least one person which has a 'clean' city with network file of, say, 12 Mb, then the possibility that a threshold was violated in the case of the infected players may be discarded. If one finds that nobody, no matter how large his/her city has grown, has a network sub-file larger than, say 6 Mb, then this hypothesis becomes stronger.
Cheers,
Bap
Well I'm working on filling up a large tile. I'll get back to you when I fill it up.
Or if I get "infected".
I really suspect the size, but I think this does depend on the computer, someone on Youtube made a video of a fully filled up large city tile, with the highest population ever, and it didn't look like it had the pox. I don't know if this is related, but what exactly is the behavior of the additional folder called "exemplars" in the Sim City 4 folder in the My Documents section, I know that isn't initially put there when you first install the game, but maybe there is some sort of hidden/hardcoded behavior? When I had the Pox before, the real only forgotten thing was the exemplar 21's/network stuff, and very few regular lots. Heres a suspected cause of the Pox I encountered. Right now, I don't have full population anywhere, but my only Pox case I have caught, seems to be the replaced Mayor's lot, the stuff initially showed up, but now the one side seems to be forgotten in every city, while it still appears correctly in the lot editor. When I first got this lot eyons ago, I had left the old ones about unintentially, so while the old lot was everywhere, and only the 2x3 tiles, it had textures way out of the old lots bounds, and interfering with whatever else was going on. So thats one issue, I do still have occasion some weird overlay textures, with no lots under them occasionally, or the overlay textures going over the road, or out of bounds where their not suppose to be. Something else, not my problem, but also previously discussed has been puzzle pieces/interchanges where if you accidentally place them that they go over an existing lot, you may have just got rid of a lot not realizing it with either the building, texture or props still there. It is usally one of the 3 not all of them that seem to be forgotten. Why am I saying this? I think a good source of data corruption, causes memory damage, and results in the prop pox.
I also suspect memory corruption somewhere, which leads to savegame and particulary the networks prop entry corruption
I however still don't see the relation between networks props entry and the prop pox on lots ( which should be in relation to the normal prop entry, not the network one )
However my assumption is that SC4 use kind of linked list to store and access props in memory, if for whatever reason that linked list began corrupted, then it can certainly either explain the growth or the shrink of the savegame file
I'd really like to know from those who have access to more than one PC, if an infected city is infected in all PC or not
J-dub, about the video on youtube, I don't think it is infected either, however a massive skyscrappers city will certainly use a very small amount of props as most of skyscrappers fit their lot. I think a good experiment will be to fill a large city with a suburbian style, where much more props will be used
So a large tile with suburbs huh? Any other requirements? Or things to use while testing? I need an excuse to play for a bit.
Quote from: xxdita on July 08, 2008, 02:05:49 AM
So a large tile with suburbs huh? Any other requirements? Or things to use while testing? I need an excuse to play for a bit.
:)
Lots of variety to increase props ?
And maybe one tile with NAM, one without ?
maybe someone who had the prop pox previously to increase chance of getting the prop pox ?
maybe someone who have the prop pox can bulldoze everything ( not the obliterate button ) and let growth begin again to see if the prop pox remain after saving ( this is another experiment ) ?
Quote from: wouanagaine on July 08, 2008, 12:20:12 AM
I'd really like to know from those who have access to more than one PC, if an infected city is infected in all PC or not
Yes.
I've tried importing corrupted cities on other PCs, both using the in-game import feature and by copying and overwriting savegame files in the regions folder. I have also tried playing these cities in their pre-corruption stage on other computers to see if the Pox still appears. The result is the same. Changing the computer makes no difference.
What's interesting about having access to corrupted cities in their pre-corruption stage is that the Pox seems to exist and its eventual appearance seems to be inevitable, well before any visible signs appear. I have not been able to go back and change anything in the city in the pre-corruption stage that prevented the Pox from appearing later.
EDIT:
Quote from: wouanagaine on July 08, 2008, 02:59:07 AM
maybe someone who have the prop pox can bulldoze everything ( not the obliterate button ) and let growth begin again to see if the prop pox remain after saving ( this is another experiment ) ?
This sometimes works and sometimes does not. Sometimes lots will regrow without problem and, when they do, their affect on adjoining networks will cause the network props (street lights, etc.) to be restored also. On the other hand, sometimes, as was the case with the city shown at the beginning of this thread, the Pox existed in one discreet area of the city no matter what. Even when all lots were bulldozed in that area and allowed to regrow, they looked fine during play but, upon saving, exiting and reloading, even the regrown lots in that area were affected.
I have not tried bulldozing ALL lots in an affected city, including ones in unaffected areas, to see what impact that had...
Well the other day I gave my friend my region to play and for some reason on his computer, when he loaded it he got prop pox, while my cities are perfectly normal. Keep in mind they are the exact same cities.
Quote from: sincitybaby on July 08, 2008, 11:48:04 AM
Well the other day I gave my friend my region to play and for some reason on his computer, when he loaded it he got prop pox, while my cities are perfectly normal. Keep in mind they are the exact same cities.
Quite Interesting
Do you have the same plugins folders ? or do he have more stuff than you ?
@Snorelli, thanks for the report, Do you have same plugins also on the second laptop ?
he actually has less then I do, and what's even stranger is that when he tried to start a new city he had prop pox. He recently had his harddrive wiped so space should have not been an issue. ()what()
Quote from: wouanagaine on July 08, 2008, 12:44:18 PM
@Snorelli, thanks for the report, Do you have same plugins also on the second laptop ?
2nd is a laptop and I have tried on a 3rd, a desktop, as well. Same plugins in all cases...
@sincitybaby: I don't mean to patronize, but if he has fewer plugins than you, he's probably missing some that have grown in your cities. When he loaded yours, it might have looked like the Pox, but if he had your same plugins folder all would have been normal.
That said, I note you said you gave him your
region and when he tried to start a
new city, the Pox appeared. Are you not talking about him trying to load cities you have already built on your machine?
well there were missing dependencies for the custom lots, but the normal maxis lots had no trees or props, and when he tried to start a brand new city in the region, the same problem appeared
...hey Team....let's back up abit....as reported by snorrelli, and others...in the affected city(s) one can correct the Prop-pox in several locations, however it most likely will re-appear elswhere in the city. Also the prop-pox by nature is random.....having the same lots appear normal in other cities, and having network related lots and models seems to have no affect, nor does population, complicated and diverse cities, etc. As you all know, I have only one city that is affected: Wesley, which is in the Region "NanimoSouth", created years ago. I also run the Berlin Region and nothing is affected there. I have very simple and and very complicated cities in both Regions and all is well with the exception of Wesley.
Even a simple thing as bulldozing say the affected bus stop to one tile over will allow for a correction to stay, however when one re-enters the city, another area not affected could all of sudden be affected....I think these properties of the disease is what is perplexing all of us...as they do not make any logical sense.
Bruce
Quote from: sincitybaby on July 08, 2008, 03:26:12 PM
well there were missing dependencies for the custom lots, but the normal maxis lots had no trees or props, and when he tried to start a brand new city in the region, the same problem appeared
Hi there. This goes in the line of my above suspicion, namely, missing dependencies mean that the city has lots (either plopped or grown) that have undefined props. The LotExemplar makes reference to a prop that is not defined anywhere in your plugins folders. It may be that after a certain number of lots with undefined props are plopped/grow in a city, the memory will be corrupted (possibly with a buffer overflow) and the city will start showing 'prop pox'.
Let me report what I did over the two last weekends (I only have time to play SC4 over weekends ()stsfd()). I used SC4Tools to screen all lots in the plugins folder in search for undefined props and textures. The search led to a total of more than 40 lots with undefined props/textures. At least a dozen of them were installed in the city affected by the pox. I spent the weekend trying to fix the affected lots by eliminating or replacing the undefined prop/texture with one I do have in my prop/texture packs. This is time consuming, because sometimes it is hard to find where the missing prop is hidden in the affected lot (I load the lot in LE, select the prop tab, and start searching moving the cursor over all props in the lot until I find one with no instance & name). In some cases I could't find the missing prop in LE and had to load the LotConfigExemplar file in ilive Reader and scan line by line to find the one containing the missing prop from its instance number (when you click the lotexemplardata it opens a tab and shows 13-16 numbers, the instance of the prop is the last number in the list).
Important: if one decides to do the same thing, searching for and correcting lots with undefined props, please remember that BEFORE changing the affected lot, you have to find & delete ALL occurrences of it into your region, even in non-affected cities. (this particular step is really what eats most of my time in this exercise). One thing that helps (in the case of plopped lots) is loading the city gamesave file in iLive Reader, and looking at the list of exemplars of plopped lots with the analyzer. It allows one to know if the lot you are trying to correct was or was not plopped in the given city.
I haven't finish the cleaning procedure yet, but I hope to have this done next weekend. Then I will be able to play with the clean version of the affected city and see if it still shows prop pox after a few city saves. If this line of reasoning is right, eliminating the undefined props/textures from all lots in your plugins will possibly avoid memory corruption and will solve the prop pox problem.
Another suggestion, this time for all players affected by the prop pox: if you have time, please scan all lots in your plugins folder with SC4Tools (analyser) to see if you find lots with undefined props/textures. If something is missing, the SC4Tool program will say 'could not find all data' and will show a red cross aside of the instance number of the undefined prop(s)/texture(s). If
at least one of the affected players find no undefined prop/texture in his/her plugins, then correcting lots with undefined props may be a good thing to do, but is possibly useless from the point of view of our current problem.
Hope to bring good news in my next message.
Ciao,
Bap
Hello every one. Last weekend I did some experimenting of my own. I had to re install SC after computer maintenance. Doing so, I installed it several times adding only one new mod at a time, then verified the results. Then un installing again and so forth. I first noticed that Props and Textures dissapeared when I installed the UPDATE_SKU1_TO_P1_B638 file. Without it, all worked fine. Then I also noticed that it did it again when the Colossus mod was installed.
Now I'm running SC4 RH without those two files.
Now reading through all your replies this sounds too simple of a bug for it to be believable.
What do you think? ()what()
Please check your graphics settings; whenever you install a Maxis patch/update, they will be set to "low", so certain props and textures seem to "disappear".
Quote from: SgtJoeDes on July 14, 2008, 06:51:44 PM
Hello every one. Last weekend I did some experimenting of my own. I had to re install SC after computer maintenance. Doing so, I installed it several times adding only one new mod at a time, then verified the results. Then un installing again and so forth. I first noticed that Props and Textures dissapeared when I installed the UPDATE_SKU1_TO_P1_B638 file. Without it, all worked fine. Then I also noticed that it did it again when the Colossus mod was installed.
Hello
SgtJoeDes. I find it hard to believe that SKU1 file is responsible for prop pox, because most (if not every) SC4 player has installed it. If that was the case, then prop pox will be a decease spread over most of the community and not a problem affecting only half a dozen players. For the same reason, it does not seem that a particular (and widely used) mod such as CAM would also be responsible for the problem. I am curious to see if you are able to make your SC4 version work fine if your graphical settings are set to high. Because prop pox is restricted to such a small fraction of the SC4 community, we should be looking for a rare situation or combination of parameters as the probable cause of it.
Bap
Hello I have recently caught the Prop Pox and have a picture to show. Also this is on a big city tile if that helps. I have been reading most of the thread and seems this is for now a random glitch in the game. I have recently upgraded my computer and have done a fresh reinstall of XP. The problem existed before, but when I loaded the city it was gone and I was happy. After a couple of days of playing it came back. So I have come to the conclusion that the saved game file is corrupt and always will be. The size of the file went form 47mb to 46mb so not much change. No other city has this problem. Also I have used the dat packer, maybe in a long shot this is causing props to load weird, has anyone tested this.
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi103.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fm139%2F_dwayner_%2FSimcityPropIssue.jpg&hash=ef1b91ce4f0cac86106fd9c485bb858f4147c023)
dwayner...
From your post at ST I hadn't realized you had run DatPacker and didn't think to ask, but did you try to put your original files back in rather than use the DatPacked file? I've had cases where things are gone after running DatPacker on my Plugins. Just a thought...
...and sorry to interrupt the thread with this, but I thought it might be important for dwayner to try.
I just had the same problem.
I just posted on simtropolis about it.
CaptCity leaded me the the conclusion that it happens when u enter a city and not having the needed files to get a building show up correctly, and then SAVE it and leave the city.
NEVER enter a city and SAVE without having all the needed files, at least thats what happened in my case, because all my other cities are working just fine, but not the one where i entered it and saved and not having all the needed files.
I had removed the Residential and Commercial dat files because i wanted to build in my industry city without having a loooong list of stuff i didnt needed.
And i was building a railway and that railway had to end in the city that got messed up because i was building railway in it, with no RC dat files and a lot of building turned into brown boxes, and i was thinking "whatever", they will show up again next time i enter the city having the RC dats in the plugin folder...but, a lot of em didnt, and now i have to repair the city for hours :( (bulldozing all the missing stuff, new building will then grow up, but gonna re-plop many of the building i plopped from the menu list)
Quote from: bap on July 07, 2008, 03:06:55 PM
In this regard, I would add that the search for a cure to the prop pox would much benefit from contributions by people which actually are not infected by the decease. For example, it would be particularly interesting if people who developed large cities (city surface fully occupied, lots of transit networks, train, highway, subway & el rail lines) drop by here and let us know the size of their gamesave file and network sub-file. If we find at least one person which has a 'clean' city with network file of, say, 12 Mb, then the possibility that a threshold was violated in the case of the infected players may be discarded. If one finds that nobody, no matter how large his/her city has grown, has a network sub-file larger than, say 6 Mb, then this hypothesis becomes stronger.
Cheers,
Bap
If someone can tell me how to get the required information, I will be able to post about a clean city 7 MB in size.
EDIT: the save file, sorry for any misconception
Quote from: platyfish124 on July 25, 2008, 08:02:05 PM
If someone can tell me how to get the required information, I will be able to post about a clean city 7 MB in size.
Hi
Platyfish124, thanks for your offer. You could load your gamesave file into Ilive's Reader, sort the entries by type (click the 'type' tab), and look at the filesize of the entries with types 2977aa47 (network), 49c05c8f (props), 49c05c9f (retaining walls), a9bd882d (buildings). We would be particularly interested in the size of the network file.
Unfortunately I have no good news.
I was able to find some 70 lots with missing props in my plugins folder. I first deleted all occurrences of the problematic lots from the cities in the region. Then I either added the missing props to my plugins folder or deleted the missing prop from the lot. Now I am sure that all lots in the plugins folders make reference to props which are defined in the plugins. After that, in the case of ploppable lots, I reinstalled them in the cities, in particular in the city affected by the prop pox. After a few save and return to region view, the infected city started to show signs of prop pox again. Therefore, it is not possible to know for sure if the pox is a consequence of memory corruption caused by undefined (missing) props in installed/grown lots. If this is indeed the true cause, it seems that deleting and correcting the affected lots in an infected city is not a cure for the problem.
It is perhaps useful to report that I discovered that the 2977aa47 subfile in the gamesave file reduces in size when non-network lots are deleted from a city. I tested deleting all instances of walls (Mas 71 kit) in the affected city and the network subfile reduced in size by 250 Kb. I also tested deleting all instances of Peg's stream pieces from the affected city and the network subfile shrank by additional 130 Kb. Thus, it seems this file contains not only information about network pieces & lots in the city.
I am also trying to develop large gamesave 4x4 km cities in a test region to see if they develop the prop pox too. I am using the same lots, props & mods used in the region with the affected city and I've been using the same kind of 'suburbia' style (only low density lots) I used in the affected city.
Finally, I recovered the history of my affected city. I have 4 backup copies of the city at different stages of development. Info about the total gamesave & network files are listed below. It seems the network subfile increased significantly in size from the first to the second save, perhaps signalling that the city was already affected by prop pox at that stage.
date gamesave(Mb) network(Mb)
2007/07/07 2.6 0.082
2007/10/20 8.9 2.906
2008/04/21 14.9 6.041
2008/07/06 15.6 6.331 (still without signs of prop pox)
Summary: We still don't know what causes prop pox, and I am out of ideas of possible tests to perform in an attempt to figure it out. Any suggestions or help is much welcome.
Bap
Quote from: U.F.F.E on July 25, 2008, 04:51:29 PM
I had removed the Residential and Commercial dat files because i wanted to build in my industry city without having a loooong list of stuff i didnt needed.
And i was building a railway and that railway had to end in the city that got messed up because i was building railway in it, with no RC dat files and a lot of building turned into brown boxes, and i was thinking "whatever", they will show up again next time i enter the city having the RC dats in the plugin folder...but, a lot of em didnt, and now i have to repair the city for hours :( (bulldozing all the missing stuff, new building will then grow up, but gonna re-plop many of the building i plopped from the menu list)
U.F.F.E., a relevant question: did you solved the problem after replopping all the affected lots and saving the city, or do you keep seeing lots with missing props when you go into the city?
Bap
Hiya,
I'm one of the unlucky city owners as well, I've been dealing with this problem for a while now and luckily i found this thread to find it wasn't an unique problem...
A Small shot of the size of appearance of the prop-pox:
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Finlinethumb15.webshots.com%2F4814%2F2075883310103284452S500x500Q85.jpg&hash=bf41f06a05ee9b3ce6cd1998dda6ac009659db80) (http://good-times.webshots.com/photo/2075883310103284452yvzmED)
Supposed to look like this:
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fthumb12.webshots.net%2Ft%2F71%2F71%2F2%2F81%2F21%2F2774281210103284452mqWevY_th.jpg&hash=0c797af8f862848b8e1ed063ef776e86af1b2cb1) (http://good-times.webshots.com/photo/2774281210103284452mqWevY) (https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fthumb12.webshots.net%2Ft%2F69%2F569%2F2%2F84%2F25%2F2761284250103284452Agoeme_th.jpg&hash=7d6e7121bf658e452e97f3834bdad9f2e9847c62) (http://good-times.webshots.com/photo/2761284250103284452Agoeme) (https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fthumb12.webshots.net%2Ft%2F50%2F750%2F2%2F13%2F31%2F2653213310103284452HZRFwV_th.jpg&hash=1ef02b86b14b2a4863ce89676a0be9db3973a094) (http://good-times.webshots.com/photo/2653213310103284452HZRFwV)
The appearance of missing textures is located in the mid-north and mid-west of the tile
And another strange occurrence, unfortunately no screenshots. I started a new tile in a new region and layed down 4 roads crossing each other. Saved the tile, loaded the tile, and the crossings were missing... A new tile with nothing else but 4 roads crossing each other..
I must say I've changed my rendering from hardware to software and then 90% of the missing ploppables reappeared, but still a lot of them are missing. I've seen that a list is kept up with the details from each users whom is confronted with the problem, here are mine:
OS: Ms Windows XP SP3
RAM: Corsair 2 GB DDR2
CPU: Intel C2D E6600
VGA: NVidia EAN7950GX2
HDD: OS: Western Digital 36GB Raptor
HDD: SC4: Wester Digital 36GB Raptor (Both on a different one)
Virtual Memory: 2056Mb
Custom Content: ~1.6GB compressed
Large City Tiles: Yes, medium as well
Graphic Settings: Effects: M, Cars/Sims: L, Shadows: M, Draw Speed: M, Tex. Quality: M, City Detail: M, Custom Resolution: 1680x1050, Software rendering
Affected Cities Populations: ~1,200,000
Save file shrinks: Yes, but when I turned Software rendering on it doubled in size, 68Mb
Reading Save file: Buildings: 460.247, Props: 97.813, Retaining Walls: 1.211.855, Mystery Sub File: 23.309.856
Removed plugins without bulldozing: Yes, never been a problem, been playing the cite from the beginning with missing files.
I haven't quite finished reading this thread so some info in my post might be said by someone else before.
@ Ripplejet, tnx mate!
Quote from: lof102 on August 19, 2008, 01:50:23 PM
Reading Save file...: How do i do that :P?
You can open a *.SC4 save file in
iLive's Reader (http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=656) :thumbsup:
Quote from: bap on August 09, 2008, 06:11:13 PM
U.F.F.E., a relevant question: did you solved the problem after replopping all the affected lots and saving the city, or do you keep seeing lots with missing props when you go into the city?
Bap
Bap: yes its all fine now, i just needed to bulldoze the damaged buildings, and then let the game regrow it, or ofcouse if u plopped the buildings by urself, u just need to replop em
Hello, I have been having similar problems in my cities, mostly with the 'Maxis' stuff. But here is the thing, I have been doing some testing and play'n around using some of the previous suggestions; turning all the graphic stuff on high, rebuilding, etc. but as I read further and further and on other forums, pages, the problem still occurs after re-installation, running full graphics, and a very bare minimum of plugins; NAM, NAM Essentials, and CAM, I ran the game three different ways; Zero plugins, NAM only, and then all three. There is one thing to note, I also ran the game a fourth way, no plugins, and no "Maxis" update, then tried with plugins, something very interesting, I would not recommend it though, I had many CTDs with no update. I mostly written in hopes that someone had found a way to fix this annoying issue. :angrymore: Thank and peace.
Quote from: iam015984 on March 02, 2009, 12:49:28 PM
Hello, I have been having similar problems in my cities, mostly with the 'Maxis' stuff. But here is the thing, I have been doing some testing and play'n around using some of the previous suggestions; turning all the graphic stuff on high, rebuilding, etc. but as I read further and further and on other forums, pages, the problem still occurs after re-installation, running full graphics, and a very bare minimum of plugins; NAM, NAM Essentials, and CAM, I ran the game three different ways; Zero plugins, NAM only, and then all three. There is one thing to note, I also ran the game a fourth way, no plugins, and no "Maxis" update, then tried with plugins, something very interesting, I would not recommend it though, I had many CTDs with no update. I mostly written in hopes that someone had found a way to fix this annoying issue. :angrymore: Thank and peace.
iam015984, there are good news for you. Please have a look at the most recent developments concerning the Prop Pox here (http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=7066.0).
Bap
thnks Bap $%Grinno$%
In an attempt to solve the reasons for Prop Pox and also to try to find a solution we need as much information on what people had in their plugins at the time the Pox struck. bap has identified one problem pack but as that was not released until late 2007 there must be similar ones from 2003/4. If any of the afflicted could identify what packs/lots etc dated 2003/4 that they had in play this would help in our testing process. I know it is a faint hope but it would be useful if possible.
How much info would you like, and in what form? I just bought a new copy of deluxe, and have done a complete re-install of the game, and am editing my plugins folder, but I do have backup copies of the 2 cities I had that got the pox, and their regions. I also have a backup of the plugins folder I used on them. The cities are 34.6 mb & 58.2 mb, and the plugins folder is 2.01 gb (unpacked). If someone could advise me on how to do it, I would gladly donate them to research! Here is a sample of some pics I took in one of the cities.
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi124.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fp36%2Fowlsinger%2FSimCity4%2Fproppox3.jpg&hash=ecd74c11e51290c86d380d58afd24277c0cf017e)
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi124.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fp36%2Fowlsinger%2FSimCity4%2Fproppox2.jpg&hash=7e79c5983b84cca1b4556dbfec808332e0b4c038)
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi124.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fp36%2Fowlsinger%2FSimCity4%2Fpeepsinthecorner-1.jpg&hash=3bafa80cc29ceda7dd46c9674e95501751f782f3)
Kendra
Hi, Kendra. I am looking for any files that contained modded Maxis props from 2003/2004. There won't be many but as the pox struck before the BDK file was released there must be others around.
As far as the cities are concerned, for research purposes only the city savegame files are needed. You can upload them to a file sharing service like fileden and post the link here. I only tested the bap cities as they were all developed without custom lots.
If you can post a list of any files in your plugins when the cities were poxed with a creation date of 2003 or 2004 I can go from there.
;D I love the crowd in the corner, are they trying to escape the infection? ;D
Kendra, are you used to DOS command line ?
if yes, open a command line
navigate to your backup plugins folder ( the one which correspond to your prop poxed city )
then at dos prompt type
dir /b /s *.* > listplugin.txt
this will list all your files in your plugins folder into listplugin.txt
then attach listplugin.txt here
If you have some plugins in the maxis folder, do the same
I don't know much about using the DOS command prompt, but I did find a way to it. (I have Vista). How do I navigate to the backup plugins folder? I have it on a flash drive, K: , named PluginsB. I can move it back to my SC4 documents if I need to.
Sorry, I'm not very computer smart!
Kendra
In the Command Window type:
K: <enter>
CD PluginsB <enter>
Then following wouanagaine's instructions. ;)
Done! :thumbsup:
(after a few flashbacks to 1974)
However, I don't seem to have the option of attaching the text file to the post? No matter. ;D
Kendra
Edit: Here is the link to the .sc4 file for one of the cities. (The other file was too big to upload, according to fileden)
http://www.fileden.com/getfile.php?file_path=http://www.fileden.com/files/2009/3/12/2361237/City%20-%20Glitter.sc4
Here is the link to the plugin.txt file.
http://www.fileden.com/files/2009/3/12/2361237/My%20Documents/listplugin.txt
Thanks
i still need to know if you guys found the cure of the prop pox... this has only happened in one of my cities with has a medium city tile. Here are the pictures:
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi673.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fvv91%2FTmiguelT_2009%2Fweird1.jpg&hash=65395dc269b04ea19b440a00daabab78cbc10cda)
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi673.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fvv91%2FTmiguelT_2009%2Fweird2.jpg&hash=1dc5715b95d40223120aa533e7533f5924fa8b37)
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi673.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fvv91%2FTmiguelT_2009%2Fweird3.jpg&hash=41caf2a90c55ff61eaaa693092604e617858353c)
this is a medium city tile with only 110,000 sims and 115,000 commercial jobs. sorry if i'm bumping this thread but i'm so frustrated and i need some help :bomb:
I too have a case of Prop Pox.
What makes this especially bad for me is that I have proven myself to be a "first prize at the village fair" idiot, by not having a backup of the city tile. In fact, it crossed my mind only yesterday that I should make a backup, but I put it off for another day... only today I opened the city and got this...
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi297.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fmm211%2Fpsander5%2FMiscellaneous%2FHamilton0001.jpg&hash=886ade100ad405c7fec513b12a8dd680591583ff)
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi297.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fmm211%2Fpsander5%2FMiscellaneous%2FHamilton0003.jpg&hash=940f69b218b1fc0a1e1aa3432230b798417b7dfa)
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi297.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fmm211%2Fpsander5%2FMiscellaneous%2FHamilton0004.jpg&hash=bb0cbe5a87dbf5a30d74a1c8cc058866fa75a90b)
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi297.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fmm211%2Fpsander5%2FMiscellaneous%2FHamilton0005.jpg&hash=f36d5742e94d440c27ec6e7fc46cb3ac905797db)
This city is my most cherished, and was intended to be the focus of my CJ that's been under development for the last year :(
I've never encountered the Pox before, but I don't think i've ever developed a city that has quite this many props... at least since I downloaded the BDK file which I believe is the only currently known trigger. I actually have another city in this region that is right on the file size threshold at 16753008bytes, although I haven't run that city in a number of months - possibly before I downloaded the BDK.
I used the excellent SC4 Save tool to diagnose my case:
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi297.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fmm211%2Fpsander5%2FMiscellaneous%2FHamilton0006.jpg&hash=bb9cd18fe1b21cfbe315a289589cf089a7027440)
It confuses me that my file size size is less than the 6MBy threshold, but I guess it's not below by a great deal so it could fit into a 'margin of error'.
I've read the technical "What causes prop pox" topic, but I'll admit that most of it goes over my head. I think I understand the basics, and I am encouraged to see that there might be a fix somewhere on the horizon.
I'd like to contribute to the research if I can, but be advised that I'm not a technical player... my plugins folder is a complete mess for example... so I don't really get much of the complicated file stuff, though I am familiar with some basic modding terms.
I await further instructions ;D Or a magic antidote &mmm
PS. I applaud all the effort that's gone into this so far. It shows dedication beyond my own patience!
Quote from: psander5 on September 11, 2009, 12:55:12 PM
It confuses me that my file size size is less than the 6MBy threshold, but I guess it's not below by a great deal so it could fit into a 'margin of error'.
You're actually way below that threshold, which is 16 MB on the prop subfile alone.
It's the first time I've heard of a prop subfile this small getting the prop pox.
Quote from: psander5 on September 11, 2009, 12:55:12 PM
I'd like to contribute to the research if I can, but be advised that I'm not a technical player... my plugins folder is a complete mess for example... so I don't really get much of the complicated file stuff, though I am familiar with some basic modding terms.
I'm trying to stay away from here and enjoying my vacation in the sun for the next 10 days or so... ::)
However, if you'd want to upload the Hamilton SC4 file somewhere, maybe someone else would want to take a look.
Otherwise, I'd like to take a look at it after my vacation. ;)
QuoteYou're actually way below that threshold, which is 16 MB on the prop subfile alone.
It's the first time I've heard of a prop subfile this small getting the prop pox.
Really? Oh, I thought 6MBy was the flipping point, where it jumped to 16MBy. But you're the expert!
Enjoy your holiday! Don't spend any of it tending to this ;D
Here's the city save file (http://www.fileden.com/getfile.php?file_path=http://www.fileden.com/files/2009/9/12/2572637/City%20-%20Hamilton.sc4)
I've discovered good way to help prevent Prop Pox: Have a lot of open, unused space or lots that are just textures. This isn't easy to do on mostly flat maps, but on mountainous maps or maps with lots of water, like the Invermere Valley map, it is very easy to do.
Now that I think of it I still have a backup copy of my old pluggin folder from 2007. I kept it on my external hard drive while I rebuilt my pluggins. If someone would be able to analyse it there might be some informations to gather. However since it's quite a gigantic folder I don't really know how we could process. I'm thinking of solutions to that if someone is interested to do the autopsy...
Quote from: psander5 on September 12, 2009, 05:22:46 AM
Here's the city save file (http://www.fileden.com/getfile.php?file_path=http://www.fileden.com/files/2009/9/12/2572637/City%20-%20Hamilton.sc4)
Thanks,
psander5! :)
I cannot say which prop(s) has/have caused the prop file to become poxed.
However, you have clearly had the BDK in your plugins while playing.
E.g., in this city there are some 125 umbrella props, all of which are timed,
and set to appear between 09:00 and 18:00, just like they were set in the BDK.
Your prop subfile isn't that small though (6 MB as you mentioned)...
The prop subfile is compressed and 5.4 MB is its compressed size.
However, its uncompressed size is 14,633,493 bytes,
which I definitely should have seen from your posted image... &ops
This tells us that some lots have recently been deleted,
and that the size has dropped back under 16 MB due to that.
We've had several indications now that it's actually the deletion of any of these timed props that causes the pox.
Notably if this happens when the size of the prop subfile is just above the 16 MB size and drops down below it again.
The reason for these props to become deleted can be manual bulldozing of lots containing them,
but also the process of lots upgrading (and lower stage lots thus being deleted).
Quote from: cowcorn on September 23, 2009, 12:02:33 PM
Now that I think of it I still have a backup copy of my old pluggin folder from 2007. I kept it on my external hard drive while I rebuilt my pluggins. If someone would be able to analyse it there might be some informations to gather. However since it's quite a gigantic folder I don't really know how we could process. I'm thinking of solutions to that if someone is interested to do the autopsy...
Since we are primatily looking for DAT files (prop packs and such), could you do the following:
Open the DOS Command Line (or Command Prompt), found under Accessories.
Change the directory to your backup folder (with the CD command).
Enter the following command:
DIR *.DAT /B /S >LIST.TXT
That will create a LIST.TXT file, listing all your DAT files in that folder and all its subfolders.
Send me that file in an e-mail or upload it somewhere and I'll take a look and distribute it further for autopsy... ::)
Greetings everyone:
I should of thought of this before, here's the deal....I still have my original city in which Proppox appeared way back when. Now, with all the research that has been done, it may be conducive for someone to look at Wesley and see if anything else appears within its structure.
So, if anyone is interested, just let me know where and how to download Wesley, one of the original cities plagued with the pox!
Bruce
I got this as well, is there a fix?
I did several things in order to track this down.
1. Complete re-install added all updates installed cam and nam only zoned out a few lots had missing overlay textures ie no driveways, trees and such on maxis lots.
2. Complete re-install added all updates installed cam only zoned out a few lots had missing overlay textures ie no driveways, trees and such on maxis lots.
3. Complete re-install added all updates installed nam only zoned out a few lots had missing overlay textures ie no driveways, trees and such on maxis lots.
4. Complete re-install added all updates installed no custom content zoned out a few lots had missing overlay textures ie no driveways, trees and such on maxis lots.
5. Complete re-install added no updates - everything is fine.
Quote from: sedator on September 01, 2010, 01:51:39 AM
I got this as well, is there a fix?
To the prop pox... no... :(
Quote from: sedator on September 01, 2010, 01:51:39 AM
a few lots had missing overlay textures ie no driveways, trees and such on maxis lots.
The prop pox would never lead to missing overlay texture... &mmm
Thus, I wonder if there's something else that's wrong, e.g. an error in one of the SimCity_x.dat files.
Such an error should have been corrected after each complete re-install though...
Where did you download the updates, and are you sure you installed the correct SKU update?
I found proppox in one of my recent cities.
Never had the BDK file in the plugins list though. So thater is definitely something else going on.
Are you still interested in scrutinizing the files? I have several backups of the ciy and region. And of course I could make a list of installed plugins.
Quote from: FrankU on September 01, 2010, 02:15:43 AM
Are you still interested in scrutinizing the files?
Yes. Would you have backups of the city both (shortly) before and (shortly) after the prop pox has appeared?
I make backups of the region every 0,5 million inhabitants. This could mean that I have a backup of the city with somewehere around 200.000 sims and about 400.000 sims. I am not sure. I'll check what I have exactly when I am at home again.
Anyhow: the city will not be much larger than 400.00 sims.
I downloaded the updates here and at the maxis site, tried both versions with the same result. What I was seeing when I ran the game with the update cam and nam as the only additional plug-ins was; Lots would develop, commercial units would appear on grass or a concrete slab...no props or parking lot textures, residential units would develop on grass only, no driveways, cars, trees, fences nothing just a house in the middle of a grassy lot. Before I nuked everything I saw it affect all the maxis lots in my cities. I also saw it appear on the older BLS housing lots, never seen it affect simgoober or mike325 lots though.
Yesterday I put all my plug-ins back in and the issue I had returned so it is definitely coming from one of my plug-ins. My game was fine until I added the plug-in folder. I will take some pics and post them here.
Hi RippleJet,
I prepared a set of files for you. The whole bunch is about 20MB, how could I send them to you?
Quote from: FrankU on September 02, 2010, 07:33:53 AM
I prepared a set of files for you. The whole bunch is about 20MB, how could I send them to you?
Upload them on a file hosting service, e.g. www.fileden.com ;)
Quote from: sedator on September 02, 2010, 07:30:49 AM
I downloaded the updates here and at the maxis site, tried both versions with the same result. What I was seeing when I ran the game with the update cam and nam as the only additional plug-ins was; Lots would develop, commercial units would appear on grass or a concrete slab...no props or parking lot textures, residential units would develop on grass only, no driveways, cars, trees, fences nothing just a house in the middle of a grassy lot. Before I nuked everything I saw it affect all the maxis lots in my cities. I also saw it appear on the older BLS housing lots, never seen it affect simgoober or mike325 lots though.
sedator, if it was not for this very last sentence, I would say that your problem might be a graphical resolution option set to low. When you install one of Maxis updates (EP1 and/or SKU) it usually switches the game graphical resolution back to low. Lots appear without cars, fences, and most cosmetical props because this makes the rendering faster. This is easy to check. You just need to look at the game graphical options to see if your resolution is set to low. If you do a full reinstall without any updates, you may have the initial graphical resolution set to high, and you will see the grown and plopped lots with all their details (i.e., props). This may explain why you solve the problem when you just do a full reinstall without no further updates. It is worth checking if this is indeed the case before considering yourself another victim of Prop Pox.
RippleJet,
This should be the url to my file.
http://www.fileden.com/files/2010/9/3/2959800/FrankUProppox.zip
I hope it is of any use.
FrankU
Thanks, Frank! I'll download it at home tonight. ;)
Frank, I cannot access that file... your link only takes me to FileDen's homepage...
I wonder if you've set that file to be private only?
Quote from: bap on September 02, 2010, 04:22:31 PM
sedator, if it was not for this very last sentence, I would say that your problem might be a graphical resolution option set to low.
Also had it not been for him saying he was loosing textures as well... no graphic setting would remove them as well...
Sedator sent me two PNGs, which I converted to JPG and uploaded on Photobucket.
I'll let him explain at what stages these images were taken...
March 11:
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi232.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fee198%2FRippleJet%2FNewCity-Mar11.jpg&hash=b4fa767f703894ca7b2731621e3d5c7786c58c33)
May 6:
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi232.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fee198%2FRippleJet%2FNewCity-May06.jpg&hash=8870b8f85e0074a32baa617af5e7e34833badc3a)
PS,
sedator!
Read this (http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=7010.0) for more information on how to upload and show images here on SC4Devotion. ;)
You might also want to
read this (http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=2767.0) for information about converting PNG images to JPG. :)
It looks indeed more like the graphics settings have been reverted somehow. The shadows in the second image look like what the software mode is producing, or a very old/incompatible graphics card in hardware mode. Maybe the details settings were switched to "low" during that reset as well.
The first pic is with no updates applied and no plug-ins in either the C:/Program folder, or the simcity my doc folder. This shows what the lots should look like, I get the fences, driveways, cars and so on.
None of my graphic settings are on low all medium to high and hardware rendering. I don't have a great system by any means but I can get detail it just runs slow.
The second pic is with no updates and my original plug-in folder in place. As you can see I am starting to loose stuff from the lots.
Both pics came from quick test cities, some of the larger cities I had going before I nuked everything had more problems than these pics show.
Most of the problems I seen came from the maxis lots, but some BSC lots were affected. My minor league stadium was just a grass lot, several parks were also just grass lots. Flower Market was just a building on an empty lot.
I don't know if I have another Issue or what but a lot of what I seen in my cities looked like what a lot of the pics in this topic have looked like.
Quote from: RippleJet on September 03, 2010, 11:42:04 AM
Frank, I cannot access that file... your link only takes me to FileDen's homepage...
I wonder if you've set that file to be private only?
As far as I know everything should work fine. I am now in the office and are not logged in into Fileden, and never was before. When I click the link I immediately get the question "do you want to download the file ... " And then the filename, what was it? Something like FrankUPropPox.zip.
Maybe you try again?
If it still does not work I'll try something else.
After Tage had a problem downloading your file he asked me to try. I was also unable to download it BUT today when I tried it worked so Tage can try again later.
Quote from: RippleJet on September 03, 2010, 11:42:04 AM
Frank, I cannot access that file... your link only takes me to FileDen's homepage...
I wonder if you've set that file to be private only?
Works for me too Tage... but as a popup. Do you have them blocked?
Here and today at work there's no problem accessing it...
I got the window asking where to save it right away.
I'll try again at home tonight. ;)
OK, so it does work.
Thanks in advance and I hope my files can be of any use with the search for the prop pox causes.
Quote from: sedator on September 03, 2010, 06:40:08 PM
Both pics came from quick test cities, some of the larger cities I had going before I nuked everything had more problems than these pics show.
This tells us what you have is not Prop Pox. You would need lots of props (prop subfile beyond 16Mby) ir order for this problem to manifest itself. Your problem appears on almost undeveloped cities.
Quote from: sedator on September 03, 2010, 06:40:08 PM
None of my graphic settings are on low all medium to high and hardware rendering. I don't have a great system by any means but I can get detail it just runs slow.
OK, we can presumably also exclude the graphics problem explanation.
Quote from: sedator on September 03, 2010, 06:40:08 PM
The first pic is with no updates applied and no plug-ins in either the C:/Program folder, or the simcity my doc folder. This shows what the lots should look like, I get the fences, driveways, cars and so on.
The second pic is with no updates and my original plug-in folder in place. As you can see I am starting to loose stuff from the lots.
I don't know if I have another Issue or what but a lot of what I seen in my cities looked like what a lot of the pics in this topic have looked like.
It seems something in your plugins folder is the culprit. The best suggestion I can give is to ask you to make binary search with the content of your plugins folder. Since it is quite easy to reproduce the problem (it appears on a small, undeveloped city), this may not take much time. The procedure is as follows:
1) Divide the content in your plugins folder in two parts of comparable sizes.
2) Develop the test city with only one of the the two subsets of plugins. If the problem appears, you know that the culprit lot/package is sitting in this particular ("bad") subset. If not, mark this as the "good" subset.
3) Develop the test city with ony the second subset of plugins. If the problem appears, you know the culprit is in this particular ("bad") subset. If not, this will be the "good" subset.
4) Eliminate the "good" subset from the search. The problem is not there. Divide the "bad" plugins subset again in two separate subsets of comparable sizes. Go to step 2.
If you have 200 files to search for, the first run will help you constrain the problem to only 100 files, the second run will help narrow the search to 50 files, and so on. After 7-8 runs your search will be narrowed to only a couple of possible culprits. If the number of possible problematic files is larger, it will take you more steps to narrow the search to 1-2 files.
The algorithm is straightforward if you have only one problematic file to find. It may get a little bit trickier if the problem results from the interaction of more than one file. But the basic idea is the same: you have a reasoned way to narrow down where the problem is.
I wish you good luck with your search. Please let us know what you find.
Bap
Hi Everyone,
So I was just checking out this forum because I suddenly started having the prop pox.
I decided to develop my city's coast with Pegasus' CDK3 Mods so I downloaded some stuff. That's When I Started Having the problem. Is there something wrong with one of the CDK3 mods that I just don't know about? Please help!!!!
I don't think my computers RAM is the problem as my city only had about 70,000 people and no skyscrapers or other tall buildings.
Here (http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=7066.0). Posts #2 and #3
So another city in the same region has gotten the prop pox. Is there any reason that it would be interesting to upload this city also?
And is there anything I can do to help find the bad prop in my plugins? It's really annoying and it makes me want to abandon the region.
Maybe I really should put some time in finding the prop, but is it possible and how should I do it?
Finally, do we have a list with all props (download link incl) causing the prop pox?
I have heard of an umbrella, and some simcity props modded in a plugin by PEG, but which ones exactly?
Quote from: cogeo on October 12, 2010, 09:53:41 AM
Finally, do we have a list with all props (download link incl) causing the prop pox?
I have heard of an umbrella, and some simcity props modded in a plugin by PEG, but which ones exactly?
bap listed all four of them in his thread: ;)
Quote from: bap on February 24, 2009, 08:53:46 AM
PEG_OWW2_BDK_RESOURCE.DAT
Quote from: bap on February 24, 2009, 08:53:46 AM
items 11, 12, 13 and 14 (exemplar names R1x1x2_BeachChair_29B2, R1x1x3_PatioChair_290D, R1x2x2_Recliner_2911, and R2x3x2_$$Beachumbrella_2900)
But these are the four that are identified. There must be more.
At least: I do have prop pox, but the identified prop pack is not in my plugins and never was.
Quote from: FrankU on October 12, 2010, 10:19:18 PM
There must be more.
Yes, but so far we haven't been able to find or identify any of those... &mmm
Quote from: FrankU on October 12, 2010, 10:19:18 PM
But these are the four that are identified. There must be more.
At least: I do have prop pox, but the identified prop pack is not in my plugins and never was.
I haven't found the identified pox mines in my plugin folder, too, yet I am a pox victim ...
I would think that only an automatied script would find them. As far as I understood, that would be possible as the pox mines are static props defined as timed props.
I guess it would be possible to use BAP's Maxis city that he developed. And then put a small set of lots into the pluginsfolder, let the new lots grow and see if the proppox bursts out....
If not, try the next set of lots, if yes try to find out what props are the reason.
Would that work?
Maybe I can dedicate some time in trying to narrow the mass of my own plugins into a small amount of lots or proppacks that may contain the evil stuff. If this is considered helpful, I'll do that.
Quote from: RippleJet on October 12, 2010, 11:46:44 AM
bap listed all four of them in his thread: ;)
Thanks for your help! :)
It's just outrageous that the author does not recognise these as the source of the problem and refuses to provide a fix.
Even if these do not cause the prop pox, he shouldn't have modded them (change them from simple to timed) in the first place anyway, as lotmakers may have used them in their lots, and expect them to work in their original way. If he wanted them timed, he could have made new prop exemplars (with a different instakce ID). Enough said!
@Franku and others: I was considering to make a new utility, named say "Installation Analyzer". It would scan the installation and generate a report about possible duplicate files and conflicts. If a second instance of an exemplar was found, it would be added in the list, along with an "conflict level" indication (Duplicate, Override, Conflict, Redefinition etc). Other functions: Find a file (by ID or Name) and Find References (usage). It would be then easy to add a function detecting if a prop was changed from simple to timed or vice versa. But SC4 is an old game (and this does not encourage me to make this), plus I do not currently have much time. Anyways, is there some utility capable of searching the installation?
Maybe this solution would not work for a Post-Prop-Pox city, but what if an overriding mod was made that turned those specific props back to vanilla maxis? That way all of the pox-causing lots could be used again.
Quote from: Lowkee33 on October 13, 2010, 01:14:17 PM
Maybe this solution would not work for a Post-Prop-Pox city, but what if an overriding mod was made that turned those specific props back to vanilla maxis?
Safer not to ever have those modded props in your plugins in the first place.
Otherwise, e.g. with the help of
SUM, you could at some stage play the game without having those overrides...
And since once might be enough to cause havoc...
Quote from: bap on February 24, 2009, 08:53:46 AM
However, at the time of writing there is no way to restore an infected city. I am afraid it would not be possible to restore poxed cities. It seems once the sc4 city file is corrupted, there is no way back.
From the extensive testing done by BSC and also during the development of the SC4Explorer program, we came to the conclusion that Prop Pox is triggered when a Maxis prop with a NightTimeState is changed to have a Prop Time of Day property. This prop is usually one commonly used on Maxis lots especially the residentials.
There is a lot more information in the other Prop Pox thread with the research done by bap.
So does that mean that all non-Maxis props are clean? And so it is safe to use all prop packs that contain new material?
Maybe you guess why I ask:
1. I'd like to help finding an unfound cause.
2. I'd like to start a new region without Prop Pox Viruses in the plugins.
Quote from: BarbyW on October 14, 2010, 03:34:17 AM
From the extensive testing done by BSC and also during the development of the SC4Explorer program, we came to the conclusion that Prop Pox is triggered when a Maxis prop with a NightTimeState is changed to have a Prop Time of Day property. This prop is usually one commonly used on Maxis lots especially the residentials.
And more generally, any change that causes a prop-reference record of different length to be saved in the gamefile (city). Timed props store additional information in the gamefile, like state or days elapsed since activation, making the prop-reference record larger. I'm not sure, but I think that props using the NightTimeState property are just like the simple ones, as they don't need to store anything additional in the gamefile (the prop just shows a different model during the night, so such props might not be really "timed").
Quote from: FrankU on October 14, 2010, 03:41:02 AM
So does that mean that all non-Maxis props are clean? And so it is safe to use all prop packs that contain new material?
Neither the Maxis props are problematic, nor the non-Maxis ones are necessarily OK. The problem basically occurs if you save a city containing references (instances) of the prop, and then install a modded version of the prop, and more specifically a mod that causes the prop-reference record length to be saved in the gamefile, for example changing a prop from simple to timed or vice versa.
Quote from: FrankU on October 14, 2010, 03:41:02 AM
2. I'd like to start a new region without Prop Pox Viruses in the plugins.
The Prop Pox is not literally a "virus", instead it's a data corruption problem caused by the combination described above.
In theory at least, the prop-pox won't occur as long as you do not install a modified version of a prop, to which the city file does contain references (instances of the prop). Ie if you start a new region, even with PEG's mods installed, you should not get the prop-pox if you don't unsinstall them (causing them to revert to their original version), or install another modified version.
Quote from: FrankU on October 14, 2010, 03:41:02 AM
1. I'd like to help finding an unfound cause.
This could be an extension (new function) to the SC4Explorer program: it should load the city files one by one, and for every prop instance found, check if there is a discrepancy (different record length) between the prop reference in the gamefile and the prop definition in the effective (last loaded) plugin. I dnn't know if this is technically feasible or how much work it really is, it's just an idea. I would say don't delete your problematic region, instead backup it, along with your currennt plugins installion, of course. It could prove a good testbed.
Quote from: cogeo on October 14, 2010, 10:21:54 AM
The Prop Pox is not literally a "virus", instead it's a data corruption problem caused by the combination described above.
Ah, no now I remember; the Pox is caused by bacteria, so it should be called an infection.
And to make everything clear: it is completely clear to me that the Prop Pox has nothing to do with computerviruses. I just said virus, because, well, the Prop Pox is referred to as if it were a disease.
I have several questions
I'm working on a realistic nightlight mod based on Light Replacement Mod v3 by mrtnrln. See thread http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=12101.0
During thinking on how to insert light poles and cones into stoplights I found it probably will cause prop pox. It would require changing the stoplight prop from ResKeyType1 to 4, which means different prop length. If I understand well, that can cause prop pox. Can somebody confirm it?
Furthermore. I read through this thread and what I understand about prop pox, any change in the prop length can cause prop pox. This means, that the LRM v3 already can cause prop pox, because it directly replaces maxis streetlights with new models, and the new props many time have different amount of data in ResKeyType4 line.
Am I right, that any replacement type mod is a potential source of prop pox? What should I do, if I know, that my mod will inherit prop pox from LRM v3?
Replied to you in the other thread (http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=7066.msg355411#msg355411). ;)