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Works exactly the same through Steam as with your own disc.
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Feb 8, 2014 05:30
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Eric the Mauve posted:Works exactly the same through Steam as with your own disc. Thanks. I know with some other games like Morrowind on Steam there's special file folder grognardery to be had. edit: No sense in making another post for this, but I've swapped over a MEGA region file I was making from scratch on my old machine. 12x14 (of the large city tiles) I had never finished forming the land of that behemoth. Looks like my quiet night in just got interesting. frogge fucked around with this message at 07:01 on Feb 8, 2014 |
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Feb 8, 2014 05:32
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I just picked this up thanks to the recent Steam daily deal, and holy crap is it a sluggish beast. The Big City tutorial crawls on my machine, which should be OK enough to handle this -- 8GB, ATI 5830, i5 quad (though I have the launcher set to 1 core). Any tips for optimization?
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Feb 8, 2014 23:00
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Read the OP, turn on software rendering and set the amount of cores to 1.
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Feb 8, 2014 23:09
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Never run in software mode. If you think it 'loads and plays faster', just turn off shadows in hardware mode.
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Feb 9, 2014 11:40
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It should play significantly faster and more stable in software mode, due to depreciation of certain graphics card functions used by hardware mode.
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Feb 9, 2014 12:22
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For me also the game runs faster in hardware mode, but don't ask me how or why. I think I even run it at full settings on a pretty old core 2 duo computer, so it might be a cpu quirk or something.
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Feb 9, 2014 12:58
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Has anyone tried running SC4 from a solid state drive? I reinstalled the game last night and am using my old 7GB plugins folder that I had kept backed up but it doesn't seem to load any faster than a mechanical drive install. It has been over a year since I last played it though so I can't really remember how fast the game loaded on my old HDD for reference.
Jugderdemidiin fucked around with this message at 07:33 on Feb 10, 2014 |
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Feb 10, 2014 03:30
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I wouldn't be surprised if a large part of the game's loading time is actually sorting up and cross-referencing the data, after doing the raw reading. If the game engine isn't built with large addon collections in mind, it might use inefficient algorithms for the loading and end up spending much more time than necessary.
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Feb 10, 2014 03:48
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nielsm posted:I wouldn't be surprised if a large part of the game's loading time is actually sorting up and cross-referencing the data, after doing the raw reading. If the game engine isn't built with large addon collections in mind, it might use inefficient algorithms for the loading and end up spending much more time than necessary. I did some digging and according to the SC4D forums disk installs can bottleneck things a bit and steam/disk image installs can be faster. I will probably just buy it again next time there is a Steam sale, my disk is in a rather sad state after 10 years of use anyway. Anyway, I had totally forgotten how much of a time sink this game is, trying to get everything just right can take hours. Here's 2 days of work on a new region using a modified Red Sea height map. I'm playing it in a total sandbox mode with unlimited cash as I like to just make it all look good and I always found that trying to watch your funds and make a city look good was just a pain in the arse.      That airport took the better part of 8 hours and I still couldn't get all the farms to grow on the tile, even with my agricultural jobs booster that adds fake jobs to force growth. The airports a take a bloody long time to build and get right, but when they are finished they look amazing and very much worth the invested effort I think.
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Feb 10, 2014 14:30
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Jugderdemidiin posted:That airport took the better part of 8 hours and I still couldn't get all the farms to grow on the tile, even with my agricultural jobs booster that adds fake jobs to force growth. I found that farms grow easier when there is a workforce to boost demand. So just build a bunch of houses in some corner of the map and demolish them once the farms have grown.
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Feb 11, 2014 10:34
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Does drat increase loading times when clicking on individual MMT at all? Because I installed the Grand Fromage pack (or a good chunk of it, excluding things I already had, and discovered a wonderful set of trees that I had accidentally originally downloaded in German are now understandable. Hurrah!) and now it's just painful to try and do anything in my city due to the long loading times between clicking on say, misc transport and how long it takes for the actual misc transport menu to pop up. i know drat is great for sorting the giant packs o' poo poo like plops, but will it decrease loading times too, or just make those long loads nice and organized? I'm in the process of rebuilding a plugins folder from scratch, but drat that poo poo takes forever. And there's so. many. sites. PLEX/STEX/LEX make it easier, but then there's the german sc4 site, and the japanese one, and the polish one all of which have some awesome, awesome buildings (the polish one is really great for soviet architecture. The most brutalist cities can be built with some of the plops/growables they have over there)
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Feb 13, 2014 14:15
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I think when I play this game again I'm going to go for a brutalist theme.
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Feb 13, 2014 14:24
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What's the diagnosis for a widespread unemployment in a region? My RCI demands a lot of low-wealth residential, and not much commercial or industrial. Its hard to tell exactly which classes are needing jobs, but I know I need more.
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Feb 14, 2014 04:03
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Jyrraeth posted:What's the diagnosis for a widespread unemployment in a region? My RCI demands a lot of low-wealth residential, and not much commercial or industrial. Its hard to tell exactly which classes are needing jobs, but I know I need more. You could try with the census facility, to give a better idea of the demand on the region. http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1831
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Feb 14, 2014 04:28
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Jyrraeth posted:What's the diagnosis for a widespread unemployment in a region? My RCI demands a lot of low-wealth residential, and not much commercial or industrial. Its hard to tell exactly which classes are needing jobs, but I know I need more. Most likely that means that there are plenty of low wealth jobs (although low wealth R always seems to be requested) and not enough jobs for high wealth residents. Maybe try setting up a high tech neighborhood (raise dirty and manufacturing taxes in the city to keep out the dirty jobs, provide enough services in the residential area to attract the appropriate workers), high tech industry employs a lot of $$$ citizens and is very lucrative in terms of tax revenue, and ultimately much easier to maintain than the lower wealth industries and citizenry.
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Feb 14, 2014 05:39
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Jyrraeth posted:What's the diagnosis for a widespread unemployment in a region? My RCI demands a lot of low-wealth residential, and not much commercial or industrial. Its hard to tell exactly which classes are needing jobs, but I know I need more. In my ventures in agriculture vs R$ while building big farming communities, I found that the demand for the two is linked in some way. - Build to many farms and not enough houses/trailers? New farms will not develop, I-A will drop sharply. - Build to many houses and not enough farms? New houses will complain about a lack of jobs, work outside of the city if you have a neighbour connection and R$ will drop. I also found that houses will grow and then population will vastly outnumber the number of available jobs, while boosting low-wealth demand. There is a tutorial on page 9 I think on how to create a big city with nothing but trailers and low wealth commercial without any of the pesky stuff like schools, water or other public services. Then you start making real big money as the poor can be taxed and only riot once in a while anyway.
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Feb 14, 2014 14:07
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And this I call "Keeping up with the Joneses". Of course, as in every neighborhood there are rebels. 
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Feb 15, 2014 20:15
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So, I've been playing SimCity4 without NAM and all my cities are developing just fine. Shouldn't they be crashing? What am I doing wrong? To be fair, I did get the awful commuter-loop that everyone was talking about. So long as I don't make it easy for my citizens to travel between cities, suddenly things seem to be fine. I only have about one or two connections to the adjacent city, and that seems to be working.
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Feb 15, 2014 21:27
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It's not that the game doesn't work without NAM, it's just less realistic and doesn't work as well.
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Feb 16, 2014 03:21
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And once you get lots of large city plots things can become unfeasible unless you take fairly extreme traffic measures.
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Feb 16, 2014 04:18
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Grand Fromage posted:It's not that the game doesn't work without NAM, it's just less realistic and doesn't work as well.
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Feb 16, 2014 17:34
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Had a nice weekend, played a lot and build out my favorite town in Fhuzo quite a bit. And then HT-I dropped in the negative. Would not go up and there was this one building in a new zone I just developed...  No idea where all these workers are. Does the building go 16 stories down? Are they telecommuting? Is it the invisible force of outsourcing?
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Feb 16, 2014 21:23
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Need to scratch my city building itch again, time to waste an afternoon away!
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Feb 16, 2014 21:40
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 Just getting started
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Feb 17, 2014 01:48
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Keetron posted:Had a nice weekend, played a lot and build out my favorite town in Fhuzo quite a bit. Try raising the land value of that industrial zone, put down some parks and stuff. Even if RCI shows no demand sometimes it will jumpstart growth, attracting workers to the new plants which in turn drive demand for more HT. HT also seems to benefit from landmarks but I'm not sure exactly how.
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Feb 17, 2014 12:50
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 Spent like an hour making hedgerows and stuff, game really runs kind of terribly in hardware render mode for me but the improved graphics quality makes it worth it IMO.
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Feb 19, 2014 05:30
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Shibawanko posted:Try raising the land value of that industrial zone, put down some parks and stuff. Even if RCI shows no demand sometimes it will jumpstart growth, attracting workers to the new plants which in turn drive demand for more HT. HT also seems to benefit from landmarks but I'm not sure exactly how. The issue is not that the zone is not desirable enough, it is that some building popped up with 3500 jobs where most HT-I has only a few hundred per building. One could argue it is a bunch of programmers, in a sister city of this one I have a building from Oracle which has room for 3500 workers and also in that town HT-I is negative now. So what to do? Accept a high worker count for a single building and a smaller industrial zone due to it or demolish it for some sprawl? I think I will leave them, demand will pick up over time when more workers become available and I can build some office parks around it to make it seem like, well, an office park. Also looked at my expenses, about half of it is the cost of maintaining the 1150 block of open grass. Is there a cheaper way to get the same effect on desirability?
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Feb 19, 2014 09:52
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Keetron posted:Also looked at my expenses, about half of it is the cost of maintaining the 1150 block of open grass. Is there a cheaper way to get the same effect on desirability? And I dislike when the buildings have inflated jobs, blame a lazy batter.
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Feb 19, 2014 17:54
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benzine posted:If it really bothers you try using this: http://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/23661-free-grass-park-mod/ Thank you for the link. I read about a little program that can change any element of a mod such as cost or worker count. Not sure what the name is tho, anyone familiar with this? Or is this another dive into the insanity that is SC4 modding?
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Feb 20, 2014 14:19
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Keetron posted:Thank you for the link. It exist, somewhat tricky to use. It'is the plug-in manager, you can found it here: http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?page=14 Although this plugin manager also exists. http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=2257 With both you can do whatever you want with that lot, but honestly it's easier to erase the offending building. I find easier to use the maxis one but ymmv.
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Feb 20, 2014 16:50
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rscott posted:
Try turning off shadows like someone else mentioned earlier. It can really help out with performance issues in Hardware mode.
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Feb 25, 2014 19:01
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Are there any mods which add things like traffic tickets for revenue?
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Feb 27, 2014 00:51
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bobthedinosaur posted:Are there any mods which add things like traffic tickets for revenue? There is little reason in the simulation to have it as there is no traffic behavior in play, only density and type. So what you are basically asking for is a source of income that is not related to the gameplay in which case: Moneytree!
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Feb 27, 2014 08:09
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Keetron posted:There is little reason in the simulation to have it as there is no traffic behavior in play, only density and type. So what you are basically asking for is a source of income that is not related to the gameplay in which case: Moneytree! Yeah, but my realism! I want the tiny hick town in the middle of the map between the two major cities to make its' money from speedtrapping passerbys.
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Feb 28, 2014 05:44
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bobthedinosaur posted:Yeah, but my realism! I want the tiny hick town in the middle of the map between the two major cities to make its' money from speedtrapping passerbys. Then you are looking for something the simulation does not provide. You can use the cheats in the link I gave you and play pretend to yourself, nobody will judge you for that.
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Feb 28, 2014 10:22
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... There are tollbooths for the stock roads, avenues and highways? I know that's not a speed trap, but it does both make money and slow traffic to a crawl, so they have all the function of one. Just be aware of what you're doing, especially with NAM. I remember laying down some tollbooths on a highway which made it slower than the neighboring roads. All the traffic diverted onto the side streets, which rapidly clogged and threw pollution into some nice residential districts. There's a NJ turnpike/Chris Christie joke in here somewhere. Emergent REALISM!
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Feb 28, 2014 17:33
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I could see a mod like that working, though. An ordinance that provides a pittance of income (or maybe a discount to police funding) in exchange for randomly worsening traffic at random points and/or reducing some measure of happiness.
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Feb 28, 2014 23:01
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Sadly the ordinances are hard-coded so Keetron does have a point there. If only, if only... In my dream world, the mod community puts its collective sperg aside in favor of a complete open-source game engine remake. They've custom-rebuilt like half the game at this point, its well within their abilities... if only, if only.
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Mar 1, 2014 00:37
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bobthedinosaur posted:Yeah, but my realism! I want the tiny hick town in the middle of the map between the two major cities to make its' money from speedtrapping passerbys. So you're making the Sim City version of Corfu, NY? 
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Mar 1, 2014 02:06
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