I Got Those Googly Eyes and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Blues OK sorry but this is a rant ... that leans towards some helpful advice for Sim City 4 .... For the last few months I have spent every spare hour building up a new region, Mirellia. After much experimentation I found that I just can't make realistic looking region terrains using the various tools/tutorials I found on the net (I tried Terragen and a landscape designer tool that I found at Simtropolis ... I even tried using Jasc's PSP! ) At the end of the day I just love playing with the god mode terraforming tools but as we know this takes a dogs age ... Mirellia is 16 large maps and I have lovingly sculpted the whole region and though I say so meself it looks pretty darn nice. There are "rivers", lakes, moutain ranges, mesas, canyons, spectacular cliffs, island, plains, long surf-washed beaches ... oh I love it. Then yesterday the unthinkable happened ... :disappointed: I was off work, sick, and I enjoyed "wasting" most of the day tinkering around. The region has grown slowly but organically. The central 4 squares (the oldest ones going back to last Christmas) are a glorious tangle of roads and the oldest of all, Mirellia itself, was into its 150th year with a population peaking out at 300k. I still had a nice mix of ICR, a balanced budget and a $M1.5 in the bank ... with never a cheat ... not even after the accidental demolition of the region's only hydrogen power station when I had no funds to buy a new one. So what happened yesterday? I had decided it was time Mirellia had some serious urban renewal ... and I had some fun. I spent the afternoon and a million simoleons bulldozing whole swathes of slums and dirty industrial estates. I enjoyed meself. Terraforming (the expensive way) to reshape waterfronts, landscaping better approach roads to new avenue/highway bridges (ie smooth shallow slopes). Weaving elevated highways around my the worst congestion spots (avoiding kncocking down my best buildings ... oh y'know the kind of thing. Late on Dr Norton decided it was time for the scheduled weekly disk clean up and i found myself looking at the desktop. Oops! Forgot about that! :cheeky: I cancelled the action and returned to the game. It seemed ok ... everything was still going. I played on for another hour ... cos (a) I wanted to finish the remodelling of the new downtown area and (b) I figured that if it was gonna crash I'd rather it did it before I replaced the original file -- while I still had it! -- by doing a save . I had not saved all afternoon in case the overall effect of the huge remodelling job caused unexpected problems like all the Sims moving out ... (there was no back up ... :disappointed: ) Anyway the game worked perfectly for another hour. OK, fine! Time to save & exit and catch an "after" screenshot of the region before getting some food. Click click leave puter to its thang while I disengage cat's claws from jeans and take her to kitchen for an overdue dose of Iams ... return to desk with cup o' java and a contented tuneless hum ... Eh! Aaaaaarrrrgggghhhhh! My beautiful region now has a flat green square where Mirellia once sat. Anyway ... What follows is my advice for this annoying situation. It's not a common bug (there's a link below) but if it can happen then it's best to have a strategy for dealing with it. So first of all .... Don't Panic - even if you haven't got a specific back-up file you may still be able to rescue the situation First off exit immediately to desktop without anymore loading/opening/saving of regions cities etc. On your recycle bin right click and look for the city you have just seen obliterated. Hopefully it will still be there. Look for the time it was last modified .. it should be the version of the city that you loaded before things went pear-shaped. If you restore that file your city should be back to its original state ... I haven't actually tried this .. cos I panicked. Plan B if above fails ... First save a copy of the ruined city ... in case someone finds a way to repair it) Restart the game. Create a new region (unless you have a spare blank city of the right size in any other region) Click on a blank city square (the same size as your wrecked city) and choose import city. Import your wrecked city and open it to play it. Yeah it's still there. It's just the region view that's gone. Trouble is a search indicates that sooner or later it'll crash completely so the best you can do is to salvage your landscaped terrain. So ... in the god mode click on the dynamite and blow the city up. When the dust clears save and exit to region. There's your landscape back! So load up your original region and import the landscape into the ruined (flat) city square. At least you now have your region back in all it's landscaped glory and you can start over with the city that went pear-shaped ... older and wiser. OK sorry this took so long. The problem is pretty rare (eg this from last year) but it is very annoying as well as soooo frustrating! Oh ... and remember folks .... although the routine of "backing up" your files is always top advice, a week old back-up won't be much consolation if you have clocked up 10 or 20 hours play in the meantime. Best advice is (if you have disk space to spare is to copy your My documents/Sim City 4/ folder immediately after every play session and then paste it into a new folder named something like SCBACK_UPS ... Don't get hurt like I did!
Yeep! I'm sorry you had such a misadventure!! But thanks for sharing and guiding us through what to do if it happens to us! I have quite a few sims 1 game data backups but none for sim city yet. Guess what? I think it's about time!!! : I really enjoyed your writing style telling us everything too.
Thanks Fae. An update. I got bored today and tried to repeat the great disaster to see how my advice panned out. It turns out (at for me it did) that extracting the oldest copy of the file from the recycle bin doesn't work ... luckily I had a back up this time ... For what its worth I am using XP pro/Athlon 2Gig cpu/1 gig RAM/NVIDIA 5600 with 256meg of memory. I caused the problem the same way as the other day by deliberately hitting the Windows key and messing around with some other stuff before going back to SC4. It took a few attempts and SC has to have been running for a while ... at least a couple of hours I have a utility called Rambooster usually running in the background ... both 'crashes' (the real one and the forced one) were preceeded by a serious memory "shortage". (Rambooster's icon in the sys tray turns from its friendly red and black to a sickly yellow) Mouseover the Rambooster icon pop up a tool tip - it reported less than 10mb free RAM (out of 1024!! Yipes!) Obviously SC4 is doing something with the RAM that Rambooster can't clear out while the game is running. (I suspect that visiting the desktop gives it an opportunity for a sneaky bit of housekeeping (like a houseproud Mom who comes in your room and charges all your surfaces up with a load of static with a vigorous bit of dusting ... LOL) I guess that I'll just have to try again the experiment again only without the rambooster ... takes a deep breath ... nah, not yet ... I got Body Shop up and running (at last)
I usually run rambooster too. I've experimented with running it while playing sims 1, sometimes I alt tab out of sims and run the optimize on rambooster and after that my game performance is better for a while... I haven't tried it with sim city 4 yet though as I still haven't played that as often.
