Sim City 4 = hte POO

[silverpig]

It sucks. Once I get to ~50 000 people, the game runs soooo slow on my system that it becomes unplayable. If I turn all the graphics down to fugly levels, it's playable up to 100 000 people per city, but that's about it. LAME.

It's not like I've got some ancient computer either.

XP @1900+
512 MB DDR
GF2 GTS

You'd think this'd be enough. I've checked the Sim City BBS and people with 2.53 GHz P4s with 512 MB ram and GF 4 4600s are getting the slowdown at the same population levels I am.

I hope this gets fixed soon.

Some day I'll be rich and famous for inventing a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet.

 

[HolyShiznit]

That sucks. Your system should definitely be fast enough for a game like that. Looks like they rushed it out to market before it was polished.

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Guns kill people just like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
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[Jake75]

Agree, I´ve been playing this for some time now but I kind of lose interest in it when it slows down to disturbing levels...It´s the same thing with CIV3, everyhting is fine until you advance into the industrialisation.
Talk about ripoff, the guy at the store shows the game for 10 minutes...everything is running smoothly until you settle down and play it for a week at home, it is then it hits you...you´ve been ripped off (again).

It blows bigtime.

Sure, it´s probably alot of complex mathematical calculations going on during the game but I´ll still think the programmers could make a better job.
Just like in the old days, look at the programmers that used their C-64´s, they squeezed every little percent out of that box, that´s skills. Todays programmers are just lazy and they probably use crappy 'ready to go' code from lots of other sources to save time...no wonder things gets slow.

Wankers.

<font color=blue>My sig, not yours</font color=blue>

 

[thaloc]

I agree that SimCity 4 sucks big time slowing down on big cities, but it's not becouse programers are lazy. I'm a programmer (however we don't do games), and I know how it works. A big and complex software can't be fully optimized by hand, becouse it would take years to do it, and it would be virtually impossible to do it without making zillions of bugs in the process. That's why we write a big piece of software for Polish goverment in Java - it's slow alright, but it has an automatic memmory garbage collector, is platform and system independend, and that combinend with third-party commercial application server (which handles lots of client-server communication, data synch&caching) greatly improves rate at which program developes. I could not imagine writing out application in C++ - that would be a horror! A rich-featured language + complex CASE and 'visual' programming tools speed up program development, but make programs less optimized. That's the price of fast making big programs.
I think something similiar applies to games development - games already are using third-party audio&visual libraries like DirectX and OpenGL, and perhaps some others. Also game developers may use plenty of their own different tools and libraries, used in many of their programs, and not-so-well optimized for every particular program they were used in.
Something I heard some weeks ago : "Programs today are no longer being written - they are produced". I could not agree more.

 

[nja469]

Though the video card is a bit dated? Overall I agree, major lag so far with SC4, but EA said a patch isn't too far off to correct some bugs and hopefully helping out overall game performance.

 

[silverpig]

The video card isn't the problem. The slowdowns are always accompanied by major swapping to the hard drive. Also, people with faster processors and vid cards than I have, but with only 256 MB ram are getting it worse than I am. There are people with Ti 4600s that are also having the same problems.

Some day I'll be rich and famous for inventing a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet.

 

[nja469]

Yea I'm noticing the slow downs are when the game is doing something with the hard drive, which seems to be quite often. This game was not optimized very well for performance.

 

[silverpig]

I'm up to 105 000 people now, but only because I turned the city details down quite a bit. The game mostly looks like ass now, but at least I'm making progress.

Some day I'll be rich and famous for inventing a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet.

 

[HolyShiznit]

That's inexcusable game performance. The odds of me buying this rushed game are dwindling rapidly.

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Guns kill people just like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
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[silverpig]

Hopefully they'll patch it. I just find it a royal pain in the arse that you have to have a Hammer CPU, 1.5 gigs of ram, and a Radeon 9700 Pro just to run a sim game.

Some day I'll be rich and famous for inventing a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet.

 

[dhlucke]

Screw it! I'm not downloading that game!

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<A HREF="http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?dhlucke" target="_new">Introducing the NVIDIA GeForceFX: The first Videocard designed exclusively for deaf people!</A></font color=red>

 

[HolyShiznit]

Tsk Tsk.

Yeah the fact that it is a <b>SIM</b> game makes me surprised at the poor performance. The Sims always had laggy screen scrolling, but otherwise it ran well. A city sim shouldn't be demanding at all.

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Guns kill people just like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
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[Conehead]

Unless you set AA, AF and LOD so high that you can see the wrinkles on your citizen's khakis!

"Hey!! Who's that hiding behind the bush??!...Well Wingding of course!"

 

[silverpig]

Actually, I'd expect a SIM game to be the most taxing on hardware. Think about it, in order to accurately simulate a city, there are millions of things the cpu must keep track of. Of course, the more detailed the simulation, the more taxing on the system...

Some day I'll be rich and famous for inventing a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet.

 

[HolyShiznit]

The other Simcity's I've played all ran well, and were not as taxing on my system as the more action-oriented games of their respective times.

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Guns kill people just like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
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[silverpig]

Yeah, but they were fairly low detail sims.

But I know where you're coming from though... You could run all the previous sim city games on a decent to sub-par computer by the day's standards no problem. Now even power users can't run the game very well.

Some day I'll be rich and famous for inventing a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet.