A further comment on 1.2-RC6

[A Nonny Moose]

Running on UBUNTU 10.04 current to recent hours.

When running Simcity 4 Rush Hour with a very small suite of plugins, sometimes the graphics goes haywire. The early symptoms are RGB + black squares appearing here and there. As this develops, graphic objects start to take on primary colours. I've never let it go to a crash.

Sometimes restarting the game fixes this. You can tell because when the tile you were working on is called up, the junk is gone. Often, the junk appears on the Region display. When this happens, only a restart of the machine fixes it, and while going down, gdm displays a funny screen with text in the background, as if it has lost its opacity on the come down screen.

I postulate that, since the game is a real memory hog, that somewhere in the play, when adding graphic objects, the graphics kernel gets stepped on.

Now, I have a small machine with only 1GB of RAM, but I have tons of swap space, so there should be no trouble with paging unless we are really getting a page-table overflow, which is possible with my small RAM.

As soon as I can afford it, I will be getting a bigger box to run this, but it may be quite a while. Meanwhile, I am enjoying the game, and I do encourage you to continue whatever you have been doing, because over the last couple of candidate releases, things have improved significantly.

By the way, as a computer user, programmer, O/S programmer, now retired, I really do appreciate all the work you guys are doing. Hurrah!

[eps]

On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 10:06 AM, A Nonny Moose
<[email protected]> wrote:

When running Simcity 4 Rush Hour with a very small suite of plugins, sometimes the graphics goes haywire.  The early symptoms are RGB + black squares appearing here and there.  As this develops, graphic objects start to take on primary colours.  I've never let it go to a crash.

That's strange. I played Simcity 4 using Crossover for an entire
summer while stuck in the country a couple of years ago and it ran
flawlessly the entire time. This was on a Mac though. I never
considered that Wine didn't support it as well. I should really grab
it out again and build a few cities.

Can you be sure your plugins are not causing the issue? If it is one
of them you could isolate it and work out why it's making things go
bad.

[A Nonny Moose]

I don't think the plugins are the problem. I suppose I could remove the directory and make a test, but the problem arises more having to do with the increasing number of graphic objects. Since I am the creator of some of these plugins, I am very familiar with the way plugins interact with the rest of the program. All they really do is add to the existing tables of available objects.

Not all the plugins are active in tiles that have shown this problem. It is just that, after a certain not very large size of developed city, this may (or may not) crop up. Its a bug, its annoying, but I am living with it.

For about a year before 1.2-rc4 SC4 wouldn't even start on this machine. I will run a separate scenario without any plugins, and see if it occurs.

[A Nonny Moose]

So I ran without any plugins. The problem occurred when I had loaded up about 1/8 of a large tile with lots of lots, and graphic objects like subways, elevated rail, stations, bus stations, etc.

I still think it is a paging problem, but I can't tell whether it is something that wine does or Linux does. This has all the symptoms of running out of space, but there are so many people with their fingers in that pie, I can't tell which thumb has the plum.

[James Mckenzie]

A Nonny Moose <[email protected]> wrote:

So I ran without any plugins. The problem occurred when I had loaded up about 1/8 of a
large tile with lots of lots, and graphic objects like subways, elevated rail,
stations, bus stations, etc.

Can you try running from the terminal and capture a log file: http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#get_log

Post the log to a site like pastebin.com and then post the URL here so someone can look at it?

Thank you.

James McKenzie

[A Nonny Moose]

In my very messed up large tile that was full of graphics glitches, I caused a cataclysm that removed the seaport and surrounding stuff. The entire problem disappeared.

One wonders if seaports, being a kind of black hole for freight traffic, are causing this problem. It doesn't occur on Windows XP. I've only seen it when I run the wine package.

[A Nonny Moose]

OK, we obviously crossed. The tile with the problem is in the bit bucket, sad to say, but I ran the same page as outlined above under terminal and added the seaport. The log is on my private web site at this address:[url]http://www.ezlink.ca/~jwinterton/JohnPage.htm[/url] and is in the last table entry on the page. That is a lot of stuff, and there seems to be quite a few error notations. Hope this is helpful.

[A Nonny Moose]

First of all, I updated my plugins, and the size of the core load for it is on the order of several MB. When the game loads now, I only get the percussion track of the sound files, and the graphics problem persists.

Things do seem better however, so keep going.