High numbers of rendered sims cause my PC to crash

[Mudge]

High numbers of rendered sims cause my PC to crash.

I installed and patched under a Clean Boot with no problems.
I've run the game under a Clean Boot with no errors until...

At 10,000+ population the game comes to an unplayable stuttering crawl.
At 15,000+ population the game outright crashes.
These occur repeatedly with the lowest in-game settings under a Clean Boot.

I edited the Residential Buildings > Monestary to show:
1 Worker
999 Fake Population

I quickly built a 30,000 population, along with 100 other non-residential building types. There was no crash and no hint of a slowdown. Strangely, there were no vehicles being rendered other than Police Cruisers, which i'm sure actually aided the stability. I only had enough time to let it run for about a 30mins -no problems.

So, at least in my case, high numbers of rendered sims and/or vehicles cause problems. It seems that the rendering, pathfinding, and general processing of so many sims is over-stressing my CPU (a P4 3.0). If i use this population value edit, then i'd have to rebalance/edit the Work Buildings to accomodate the lowered number of workers -a tall order indeed.

I don't for a moment think that this is the cause for everyone's troubles, it's simply my cause, so it would seem so far. Just putting my two cents in.

[PsYChoWaTrMelon]

yeah i know what you mean i have a quad core at 3ghz which i run at 3.8
and i have problems when my workders get to around 2300+ where it almost
halts and at 2500+ it crashes. i understand that even though the pop said
93k and i had 2512 workers who knows if they will ever be able to make it
run good with as many as i had.

you said there were no police cars? i find that when i make cities with
subways only i have no slow down after 2300+ but seriously i don't this
this game was meant for a city of my size btw i lay on 1024 map size.

[Mudge]

To clarify, only Police Cruiser vehicles were rendered after adding Police Stations. No other vehicles showed up, and yes, i built roads -weird. I have no clue what the trigger is for residential vehicles.

If i use this population edit 'cure', it'll unbalance the game leaving me with too few workers to achieve a profitable status with Work buildings. Maybe Venues too, i haven't had time to properly check all of the consequences. I suppose if enough people had the same problem/resolution then perhaps a future patch could include an option to render More<--->Fewer sims/vehicles. Heh, come to think of it, perhaps the lowest settings i tried mask and prohibit the vehicles from showing up. Would serve me right for doing such a quick and dirty test run.

Edit: i have a quad core at 3ghz
<snip>
That's enviable. I demand a :drool: smiley, there's no other appropriate response! It's tough to imagine that CPU getting bogged down, though i really don't know if this game is optimized for multithreading.

[Rubus]

...It's tough to imagine that CPU getting bogged down, though i really don't know if this game is optimized for multithreading.

it's not.

I've got a quad too q6600 2.4GHZ

It only seems to use cores 1 & 4 & hardly touches the others.

Core 4 seems to run @ 90% while 1 runs at around 10% most of the time too.

edit:

added idle core usage screenie.

http://i115.photobucket.com/albums/n287/Rubi68/cores-scs-idle.jpg

[Mudge]

That must be quite frustrating to have such processing power available only to have the game unable to properly utilize it. At least i know why my CPU is choking -it's quite simply weak by today's standards. I'll probably do a new build soon-ish using Core2, a lot of bang for the price imo.

I've not found anything yet that operates as a configuration ini, but truly i haven't poked around much either. Perhaps there's some options there that could be enabled/tweaked. The original release of the game Oblivion was tweaked to death by users to better optimize any multithreading capabilities that were in the ini, though i believe this need was made obsolete by the ensuing patches/updates. It's not a true multithreaded app either, but the tweaks did help.

[Rubus]

Not half as frustrating as shelling out £240 on a 8800GTS only to have to turn down all the settings to medium :D

[panikattak]

While I was doing a experiment the other day, I observed the botanical garden spawning a hippy. I followed the hippy around for a bit until the hippy returned to the botanical gardens and ended it's life cycle. Later on, I knocked down the botanical garden which was the only hippy producing building in that experiment.

After a little while, I noticed a sim walking around in my venue area after everyone else left for the night. I checked it out and it was a hippy walking around. I thought that was weird and followed it around for a while watching it walk until venues opened. Then it visited a couple of venues but ended up walking around again when the next return to home cycle came around. I watched the hippy for four cycles walking around and visiting venues, but unfortunately, I wasn't watching exactly what happened when it finally dissappeared.

I haven't tried to recreate this yet because I've been kinda busy the last few days. But I noticed it and now I wonder if there is a problem with special sims spawning, but not being able to unspawn because the building that spawned them was bulldozed before they could return and end up sticking around longer than they were suppose to.

Just something to look at. More than likely it was just a glitch for me, but maybe it's part of a larger problem?

[PsYChoWaTrMelon]

heh heh yeah you wouldn/t figure quads would get bogged but this game does
not even use them. windows has taken care of dispursing the data across the
cores. It does run faster i must say but thats only by design of windows. i
can only imagine what it would be like if this game was actually designed for
multicores and wasn't broken. it just might be a beast but hey i guess
TM can only do as much as EA would allow.

[Mudge]

Well, the game has now run for four hours straight and not a single crash/error in a city with a 35k population, which i was unable to attain prior to my editing. The stuttering is non-existant below 10k, and barely noticeable at populations above that number. That's not even with a Clean Boot. I ran a Normal Boot, IE connected, with Firewall and AV real time scannng on. Needless to say the game is much more enjoyable without the crashes. The nearly stutter-free experience was a pleasure. That's a fun little sandbox city builder game hidden underneath those issues.:p

I simply reduced all of the residential homes' spawned worker population by 50%.
I was running at 1024 x 768.
The options of Day/Night Cycle, Weather, Specular, and Vertical Sync were On. (i don't like Bloom -left it Off)
All graphics settings as high as they would go. (*Except for the Shadow Detail which i left Off as i think they're not very pretty. The game did run fine for over an hour with Shadows On and it didn't seem to increase stuttering at all)

It could be that this is truly a memory leak/RAM overload issue, and all i've accomplished is slowing down the leak. I run an ATI x1950Pro AGP with 256MB V-RAM. So if it is a V-RAM issue then folks with less V-RAM will still get swamped pretty fast. It only took me about 10 mins to edit the buildings, so it's a rather quick fix that worked a charm -for me anyway. Now i'll edit the Work building workers requirements, and the Venue capacity too i suppose, to reflect the changes in produced workers.

[Rubus]

heh heh yeah you wouldn/t figure quads would get bogged but this game does
not even use them. windows has taken care of dispursing the data across the
cores. It does run faster i must say but thats only by design of windows. i
can only imagine what it would be like if this game was actually designed for
multicores and wasn't broken. it just might be a beast but hey i guess
TM can only do as much as EA would allow.

Vista + Quads = Dream Machine.

I can encode AVIs using AVG, Rip 3 DVDs at the same time with DVD Shrink & watch a movie with Zoom Player on my 2nd monitor all at the same time.

yesterday I was running SCS windowed & encoding AVIs. No bother at all.

Quads are the way to go. Vista puts them all to great use.

I've heard XP uses them well also but I've not dual booted this machine as I hate XP now :D

[omni2226]

Another thing to look at. I edited the roads and did away with everything but streetlights, fire hydrants and mailboxes. I saw a small improvement in speed by doing this in larger Citys.
Hadnt even considered changing the number of workers and pop per building. May give that a try this weekend, Im in the mood to get mad at something anyway, may as well be a PC game I smash with a hammer :).

[Mudge]

:( Ah well, this time around the game began stuttering at +30k, and got progressively worse. At +45k the game froze, that was after about two hours of play. I heard Ye Olde Error Message's sound play and tried to Alt-Tab to the desktop. The PC then rebooted entirely which is odd as i have my PC set not to reboot on crash. So great, now i don't even have an Event report. Pfft

It's starting to smell more like a memory leak. My first playthrough was on a fresh boot, the second, and shorter time, was not. And i'm guessing that the more worker sims that the game has to process causes an acceleration of the problem ending in the inevitable crash. Though it sure ran purdy till 30k this time. So, while reducing the numbers of worker sims helped, it did not fix the crash/freeze/stutter of large populations. Anywho, perhaps i'll try editing the building's worker population even lower and try, try, try again. Methinks i'll just edit one Home to have one worker and 50k Fake pop. I'm just a too curious masochist i guess.

@omni2226
In the end it's just a game. Though i can surely relate to your frustrations -as it stands i, too, paid good money for a borked product. Not exactly a warm fuzzy i'm having here either. I expect Q&A to perform just a wee bit better than what i'm experiencing with this 'finished' product.

[Mudge]

I experienced my first freeze that required a hard reboot. yay for me eh?
It was the M'sft Visual C++ Runtime Library error with the code: 0x40000015 at address: 0x781346b4
The game crashed after about 10 mins playtime without fail after that error. Same city, new city, large or small, made no difference.

I'd looked through the PC's Event Manager and saw several entries for an error concerning "side-by-side". I'm no software wizard but that seemed to match part of the description for the Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 SP1 -"~For libraries that support side-by-side deployment model..." So i figured why not and...

I used the Winows Add/Remove Programs and removed the Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable Package (x86) v. 2.0.50727.762
I then ran a Repair on .NET 2.0, just in case.
I installed Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86) Version: 8.0.50727.762 from:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=200B2FD9-AE1A-4A14-984D-389C36F85647&displaylang=en

The game did stop crashing, at least so far but, who can say with any certainty for how long. It can't hurt to try and it doesn't take very long to do.
Frankly, i can't handle looking at the game screen, its giving me a headache. Its the stutters -they're awful. This game is running like a jerky slideshow at +20k pop. I ran FRAPS, which doesn't seem to work well with this game, so i'm not positive i should trust the readings. When it could actually get a reading, i got nothing but single digits, even on an empty map. In the dense part of the +20k city it went from less than 1 to 3 fps, in the empty outskirts it averaged 6fps. My eyes are bleeding over here!

There's also some odd graphics artifacting when looking straight down at the water at the closest zoom. These artifacts move a bit like the simulated waves themselves, and they only appear on the right-hand side of the screen.
Edit: I'm on WIN XP, and no, i'm not running any sidebar gadgets or feeds.



Edit2: I've had a city of +50k pop. running for about 2 hours without a crash now. Even moving the camera around continuously didn't crash it. I don't want to say that what i tried is a fix for the problem, but it seems to work so far for me.

The stutter is very bad though, it gets very jerky.
Running the game at Normal speed:
The empty outskirts of the city get 11-12 seconds per game hour at about 15fps.
The dense part of the city gets 35-50 seconds per hour at about 3fps.
Weird, i can run Oblivion with graphics sliders +75% maxed and get 35fps avg. And that game will make CPUs/GPUs cry, yet my PC does well enough. So why does SCS run so poorly?

I understand that there's an acknowledged memory leak that will be addressed -that might help. If and until then it's not very interesting to play with such stuttering/jerkiness, its really quite frustrating trying to move around and/or build when the game becomes so unresponsive to the controls. I hope this issue can be addressed in a future patch/update. Till then this game gets shelved -pity.