MAC 64bit factfinding - CTD's

[xxdita]

The 64bit of SC4Deluxe is now available on the Mac App store and will likely be coming to Steam shortly.

So far, CTD's have been reported with Modern Arched GHSR Station and Modern Arched HSR Station from NAM, as well as spa's St Paul's Building.

If we can find commonalities in the problematic lots, then we can hopefully figure out a fix, or at least help others avoid CTD's. So please report any issues you find with any custom content conflicts with the MAC 64bit version here.

[Tarkus]

As I noted over on ST,  when memo did the initial work determining what was causing the crashes with the Mac port after it went to Universal Binary, it was primarily due to the encoding on some of the exemplar files in the Additional Bridges.  My initial guess is that there's something similarly obscure afoot here with the files in question, related to whatever Aspyr did in the process of converting the game to 64-bit.

memo hasn't been particularly active in some time now, and because there pretty much are no mod tools on par with ilive's Reader or Tropod's SC4Reader that work on Mac, he was having to use his own custom (unreleased) tools he built from scratch with his jDBPF library.  I'm not sure this is going to be particularly easy to find without that level of expertise.

-Alex

[xxdita]

Thanks to Tarkus pointing me to memo's notes on the first Aspyr release, I have found the solution and have been able to update a few files on the LEX for MAC 64bit compatibility.

MAC versions of the game have always had an issue with Float32's that have a Rep Count of 1, but never this severe before. It was originally noticed with Transit Switch properties, preventing stations from functioning properly. Now the same issues are appearing with 3 Slope properties on lots, causing a CTD for 64bit MAC players.

There seems to be little rhyme or reason to what may be causing the problem, and it isn't an error I've been able to repeat with PIMX or SC4Tool.

But I do remain committed to helping as I can, regardless of the OS, so please report any problems with 64bit compatibility here, and I will try to provide a fix as soon as possible.

[cowcorn]

I have just completed the process of building my plugin folder for the 64 bits version of SC4 and it loads to a new city correctly with everything in except the NAM. As soon as I install the NAM it will crash to desktop when opening a city. I run on High Sierra 10.13.6. Note that I am using crossover on the side for installations and I resorted to the Mac App store version after failing to make SimCity run correctly in crossover. I copy applicable files from the Crossover installation to Aspyr's installation.

Edit : After checking over at Simtropolis I have removed Modern Arched GHSR and HSR Stations and it resolved the issue.

[xxdita]

Rest assured I'll make sure that these lots are corrected for the upcoming release of NAM37.

I will continue to monitor all reported problematic lots. I just wanted to make sure we had a thread for it over here, so that we did have a reporting process for our SC4D members.

With SC4D being home to both the NAM team and BSC, it can often be easier on the few of us qualified to provide such tech support in a central location. Tarkus and I both try to do as much community outreach on other sites as we can, but SC4D will always be our top priority.