Crash when plopping certain lots, roads, streets, or rail tiles.

[joshua43214]

I am posting this up incase someone has a similar issue.

Summary:
I would have a CTD when plopping certain buildings, or when I would plot a street, road, or rail tile. This would only occur when plopped in specific spots - so the problem was not city wide, only in certain parts of the city.
When I would bulldoze the effected areas multiple times, I would get the ground shake and bulldoze sound even if the areas was visually empty.

To solve the issue, I de-zoned the area twice (even if not zoned), and bulldozed everything in the areas that were affected (blank tiles included) until I not longer got the ground shake and bulldoze sound. Sometimes on the last bulldoze I would get the sound with no ground shake. In the end, I cleared out an area about 30x60 squares to fix and area about 10x20. I would get the sound and shake in areas that never had been developed, but probably had been used as in-game sandbox area for looking at plops.

I do not know what caused the problem, but this let me continue to play with out starting over.

General background (the tl;dr part. you can ignore unless interested):
This is a bit convoluted, I have a suspicion for what caused the issue, but no proof.
Started a city like normal, this is an industrial town still at low population (about 19k).

Built a little (and fun) area that converts trash to food and water (yes it includes the McDonald's factory) next to a rather complicated RHW interchange. This is the area that was affected.

About 25 tiles south was the jestarr Coal Power Plant (http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=2361). This power plant causes a bug that will permanently pollute the water and air in area it was plopped in. After discovering this, I reloaded the city from an earlier back up, then reinstalled SC4 hoping it would cure the problem - both failed).So I tweaked the power plant to have lower pollution and tweaked the Ionizer Hydro Power System from the STEX to eat the pollution from the bug. I have verified that my tweaked air/water cleaner is not causing a second bug by being too clean.

I then tried to get IRM for CAM to work. After spending a lot of time I gave it up and decided to go back to my earlier CAM set up. I made a massive brain fart when I reorganized my plugins folder to convert my CAM lots to IRM, rather than copying from the back up plugins folder to the new folder, I accidentally cut and pasted.
Rather than trying to just reinstall all my CAM lots from an earlier backup, I decided to just reinstall everything (over 800 zips) and trim out some unwanted fat while I was there. As I reinstalled everything, the files I chose not to reinstall where moved to a special folder incase I decided I wanted them back.

After sandboxing for quite a while to make sure that I had everything working I went back to my city under development.

As I was developing my D-I area, I came across a SOMY lot that I though would go great in my little (and fun) waste to food and water area. I could plop the lot on one side, but got a CTD when plopping on the other side. I then started the usual routine of deleting buildings, etc to isolate the problem. I removed everything from my plugins folder except the SOMY lot and it could plop fine. I quickly narrowed it down to the game would CTD with the SOMY plop, and the a_CAM and z_CAM folders (I do use the combined CAM/SC4_01 dat file). So I sadly decided to change my plans.
I did finally get the lot to plop and was rebuilding the rest when I got a CTD plopping a street tile as a marker. I discovered that If I loaded the game, I could cause a CTD by plopping a street, road, or rail tile in 3 or 4 small areas. So apparently the SOMY lot was not the problem.
This was when I resorted to the strategy mentioned at the top of the post. Repeatedly delete everything until no more sound or ground effects. I could then build like normal. I also did the same for the undeveloped areas that get used occasionally to test plops, because I found that I could cause a CTD in those areas as well.

My suspicions:
Two days later, I was working again on my I-D area when I noticed some of my Nightowl filler pieces where missing buildings. Searching my plugins revealed I was missing the Murimk prop pack. Searching my download archive, I found the missing prop pack in a folder titled "mine stuff." The mine stuff folder was all the downloads and dependencies for Paeng's coal mine set up. I had opted not to reinstall this, and discovered a number of prop packs and buildings I actually did want in this folder.
My suspicion is that I had used something from that file, and when I reimported the city, reinstalled my plugins with fat removed, then loaded the city, a "ghost" was left behind that would cause a CTD when I tried to plop something on an emtpy tile occupied by a ghost.

I hope this is of some use to someone. I wasted a lot of valuable play time to fix a problem that was ultimately of my own making.

[HappyDays]

Jesstar's Power Plant does not cause permanent pollution. Not only was it tested before it was allowed to be uploaded, I have just tested it myself in several cities. When destroyed, the pollution it generated will slowly dissipate over the course of several years.

In short, it is not the source of your issue. More likely it is a very old air pollution cleaner lot. Given large enough numbers, it's quite possible for the permanent pollution bug to be triggered.

You need not worry about making the revolution mod work with CAM, as a happy fun dude by the name of Shadowstrike made the mod CAMpatible.

http://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/29669-industrial-revolution-mod-cam-version/

At least, I assume you haven't used this. I can't quite tell from your post in the CAM forum. This should fix your problem, otherwise.

Is the tile you're having problems with a fresh tile, or an old tile you've played for a long time? Older tiles will have issues if you've been switching plugins, primarily if it comes to pass that props/lots/buildings are being replaced by ones with the same instance but are otherwise completely different. It seems to me that your tile has become partially corrupted over time. There are many, many causes for city tiles becoming corrupt and only a few are known.

You may wish to consider starting over, completely over with your plugins. Get rid of all of them. Keep the CAM stuff though; that's safe. And as far as I am aware, everything available on SC4Devotion is also safe and unlikely to cause issues.

I suggest the above due to the large number of plugins you have and the consistent issues you're encountering. Although you can ignore it if a fresh tile isn't have problems from the beginning to end of its development.

When rebuilding your plugins suite, take a more careful approach when you download buildings from sources other than SC4Devotion, especially lots that are very old. Tools like Datanode and PIM-X are excellent for finding and correcting problems, but if you just want to play then caution will be your best defense.

Further, keep backups of your plugins as you continue the process of rebuilding them. This way if you run into city corruption it will be easier to find the cause, as you'll be able to go back to an older version of your plugins suite instead of having to start over.

[APSMS]

Also, you should delete the z_CAM folder. The traffic simulator in it is very outdated and will cause issues using some of the newer NAM networks and various RHW updates.

[joshua43214]

@HappyDays;
Thank you for the long reply.
Please reread the post and you will see that everything thing you comment on is in the original post, with the exception that I did not say explicitly that this was a new region with only 1 city.

I made my original post to share my experience with others who may also being having unexplained CTD's. I have noticed that the knee jerk response to CTD's is "set your affinity," and the generic and totally useless "must be a conflict..." (doh), from people who start answering questions before they finished reading the question.

The jesstar Coal Power Plant does indeed cause this bug (so do some other lots), I have verified it on sandbag cities. Perhaps the pollution does dissipate over time, but it remained the same for over twenty years on my tests, and took over a year to clean up with the black hole. I like the plant for its grungy industrial look, I usually use ones that are more balanced.

@ APSMS, thanks for the reminder. I am pretty sure I reinstalled NAM (running cleanitol) after I reinstalled all my plugins to make sure nothing bad snuck in. I will do it a second time to make sure.

[HappyDays]

@HappyDays;
The jesstar Coal Power Plant does indeed cause this bug (so do some other lots), I have verified it on sandbag cities. Perhaps the pollution does dissipate over time, but it remained the same for over twenty years on my tests, and took over a year to clean up with the black hole. I like the plant for its grungy industrial look, I usually use ones that are more balanced.

It does not cause infinite pollution. Remove all your plugins, leaving in only the coal plant and its dependencies and test it in a fresh city tile. You will find it works as intended with no pollution bugs. The air and water pollution will go away on their own in a few years. The garbage will remain until the heat death of the universe, as per vanilla Maxis settings.

In response to your post on the download page for the plant: http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/coalvswind/c02c.html

In summary: Coal powered plants are very polluting.

It is difficult to give specifics on what to do in the case of a conflict because people often have many plugins and those plugins vary greatly from person to person. That's why the advice tends to be nebulous. Datanode and PIM-X will help you far more than I can.

Your post struck me as a cry for help, made out of frustration and anger that the experience you paid for has turned so sour. I acted accordingly and offered my best advice for the problems you've described.

Edit: I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt, so I'm doing a test where I run Jesstar's plant in a fresh tile for a few hundred years, then I'll blow it up and see what happens. So far my tests have been plopping it in a city, waiting until pollution maxes out, then blowing it up. Perhaps something occurs after a long enough period of time.

By the way, what other lots cause infinite pollution in your opinion? They may need to be tested, as well.

Edit 2: 300 years, multiple explosions, and the pollution goes away as expected. Gave me a chance to go through and analyze each building that grew because I'm OCD like that, too. Jesstar's coal plant is working dandy. If you're still having problems after plopping the plant with a virtually empty plugins suite, you'll have to tell me exactly what you did, how you did it, and when so I can attempt to repeat the steps and see if the results are the same. As you know, repeatability is key.