[Guardian]

Nice challenge to have. That's really built up for a "pass-thru" city. Nice work, looks great.

I hate when many buildings look the same, but I understand why it happens. Just something you have to gloss over I suppose.

[brian51]

Pierre,

thanks for your latest CJ post.

Most of the cities in the Talaran cluster are reaching maturity and don’t grow much any longer

I found it interesting as I have this situation myself in many cities in my region..
Many cities are approaching saturation as i like to put it,,

With the cities that have water ( you mention you have some of those yourself)..
Sometimes, I will continue to try and expand some of those by filling in the water areas with land ..

But I also would like to mention and point out that you have some of the most lovely CBD areas Ive seen from anyone really..
Im quite proud of this aspect of your game playing and I always have been !

It is also great to see you are still trying to find solutions to you over saturated neighbor connections..
Those are always quite difficult to resolve as you know.. And often require creative and well thought out solutions ..

Thanks, Brian

[pierreh]

The names of the cities in my clusters have a french-language flavor. With very few exceptions I selected obscure villages or places on topographical maps.

Twp days ago during a hike in the neighbouring mountains of Haute-Savoie, not very far from the Mont-Blanc range, I encountered the 'real' Deramey. There was a sign on the path:



The sign says 'Le Deramey'; it is common for places to be named 'le someplace' or 'la someplace', but on the topographical map it is 'Deramey', without the 'Le'.

Deramey is in fact a very small hamlet, perhaps four or five houses, barns and shacks. There was nobody around when I passed by. It is possible that one or two of the old houses is used as a 'secondary residence', or could be rented during the summer.



This is of course a far cry from my 'game Deramey', a striving city with about 1.25 mio Sims and a bustling CBD, a small view of which follows:

[brian51]

Pierre,

Ya, ive always loved the names you select for your cities..
and I admit I certainly do not out as much thought to the names as you do my friend..

But also , yes that was quite interesting on your Hike..that you were in the real Deramey.


Thanks for your back ground on that and your pics were just wonderful !,
really enjoy those..

And of course as all of us in the community know , you have the most wonderful CBD creations
and images to show the rest of us, how it is done !

[pierreh]

A completely different topic today: extremely slow running of the game in some cases, which I'll detail here.

My computer (an Asus Ultrabook laptop with a very decent performance, Intel's Core i7 chip, etc) runs under WIndows 10 since the memory card crash of this spring. The SimCity 4 game itself runs under Steam, since I don't have a CD drive, whether internal or external.

If I start the game after having done other things with the laptop, like e-mail, googling, reading texts on the net, etc, the game runs extremely slowly. For example, when starting a city I usually get some messages in boxes, say about some avenue being clogged by traffic, or simply about the mayor doing a good job of running his city: switching from a box to the next can last several seconds. Any action, like moving the visible part of the city, or changing the scale, takes also several seconds, up to say 20 to 25 seconds.

In short, the game is not usable. My only recourse is: exiting the game (which itself can last up to a minute), closing other stuff runniing (typically Firefox, Skype, possibly WhatsApp, etc), and restarting the computer. With a minimal amount of other things running, the game then runs normally.

This is a rather new behavior. It is as if, when 'too many' other things are running on the computer, or have run on it, the game is slowed down enormously. After a restart, things are 'fresh' and the game runs again at normal speed. Memory contention? I looked at what the Task Manager shows when the game runs slowly: there is abnormally high CPU utilisation by the game's exe, as if the game was 'thrashing'.

Has anyone encountered a similar behavior of the game?

EDIT: Since this is now happening regularly, when starting, as soon as the game shows the current region, I try to 'move' it a bit. If the reaction is not immediate, I know that the game is running slowly, and I exit immediately, restart etc. This doesn't cure the problem but it saves me some waiting time.

[Guardian]

That's terrible. You try cleaning up unused/unwanted startup programs? Those little things running in the background add up. Sometimes its not a magical fix, but it might help with seconds of response time.

[pierreh]

That's terrible. You try cleaning up unused/unwanted startup programs? Those little things running in the background add up.

Thanks for the suggestion. I haven't checked that. There are surely a good number of them. Actually, when I run the Task Manager and look at all the stuff that is running I am puzzled; surely a lot of that serves no useful purpose whatsoever, it is there possibly 'just in case', or because Mickeysoft decreed that it should be running, or whatever.

But: if those are launched by Windows at start-up time, they are always there, regardless of what I run afterwards, then they cannot be, by themselves, the cause of the game's slow running? That slow running really depends on how much other stuff I purposedly run. Like right now, I run Skype (lauched at startup), Firefox (used among other things to post this), Acrobat Reader, Libre Office, and WhatApp. Surely if I start the game now on top of those it will be slow. Which of those programs and tools is the cause of the slow running, I really wonder. Anyway, restarting the computer prior to running the game is a minor inconvenience, I can live with it. It's just that I don't like unexplained facts if I can help it.

[Darvince]

Often what I do when I try to play games, as I have never had a very good computer, is to shut off all the other programs that are running before opening the game. For many, it enables me to play them at all. If SimCity 4 has good performance when you run it right after you restart the computer, I would first blame Firefox, especially if you have many tabs open. Many websites these days are very resource intensive only because they can be, running all sorts of unnecessary and poorly coded scripts constantly.

[brian51]

Hi Pierre,



yes overall, i am not sure what is going on really



I think I have some variations is how fast the game runs or preforms ona  given day , but i suppose i consider this normal behavior these days ..

exiting the game (which itself can last up to a minute),

This, really seems strange, and I have never been clsoe to taking that much time exiting the game..

I can offer one suggestion -

Post this also into the help desk channel on discord sc4/ nam , and I can direct people to it also it may be able to offer us some advice as
to what may be going on and what to do about this..

But meanwhile, do keep us updated on anything new you may try or find out to resolve the "game running slowly" issues..

Thanks, Brian

[pierreh]

(...) I would first blame Firefox, especially if you have many tabs open. (...)

Thanks, Darvince, I think that you have identified the main culprit. I do tend to open many tabs in Firefox, and leave them open even if I don't need them immediately, or any longer. And, as you point out, some web sites cause various scripts to run, some quite poorly written and therefore resource-intensive.

Thanks too, Brian, for your suggestion to bring the issue to the help desk on Discord. I'll keep this in mind, in case the problem keeps bothering me even if I do a preventive restart if I want to play the game after having done many other things on my machine. For now I'll simply do a restart before playing the game if I have done a lot of other things, which is usually the case.

---------

A short while ago we had a few exchanges about the game sometimes growing many instances of the same building. I found a rather extreme example in Deramey, where in a residential area on the edge of the city, the game grew no less than 9 instances of the same building next to each other. Let's say that this was a development by a real estate promoter that had lots of money but limited creativity...

[Guardian]

Yep, with them being so organized, I would definitely consider it to be a not-so-creative developer.

[Darvince]

Lol, reminds me of the Stuyvesant development.

[pierreh]

One of the goals that I had assigned to myself recently has been reached: 16 millions Sims in the region (2 clusters).



The other goal, one city reaching 1,5 Mio Sims, is still not reached, but the largest city (Salveille) is now at 1.44 Mio Sims, so it is slowly getting there.

However, I have discovered what could be considered as another anomaly of region playing. I'll post about it soon.

[brian51]

Congrats Pierre!.

on your latest mile stone of 16 Million in a  region

and you did this with a lot more style than i ever did with your quality cities, my friend..

I still predict at some point you will over take my current population of 18 million .. !

On that day shock waves will be sent thru the entire SC 4 community

[Darvince]

Congratulations on your tremendous region! I'm excited to hear about the anomaly.

[pierreh]

I am not loosing sight of the anomaly I want to document. But at present I am struggling with the after-effects of upgrading my NAM to Version 38. In particular I am having an issue with RHW bridges, of which I have quite a few in my cities. Until this is satisfatorily resolved, I am suspending my playing. Cities where I cannot rebuild RHW bridges are useless.

[pierreh]

While the RHW bridge issue is being looked at, here is another little gripe of mine: once upon a time there were 90 degree narrow curves for RHW MIS. This allowed constructs such as this one:



There are 2 'asymetrical' ramps, in other words, one entrance ramp and one exit ramp only, because the highway ends not much farther on the left of the picture. When I built those ramps (admittedly quite a while ago) I could use the 90 degree narrow MIS curves; the picture shows 4 of them.

Unfortunately, those curves were removed from the RHW set. I wish that they had been placed in the set of deprecated stuff, but they are not there. I find that annoying. After all, there are narrow 90 degree curves for standard Maxis roads and one-way roads, so I don't see why we could not have similar curves for MIS.

[brian51]

Pierre.

thanks for your 2 Cj replies today

I am going to ask about these 90 degree MIS curves right now in discord..

I agree that we will both be disappointed if those have been removed from the nam .

I will post again here once I find out something on those..