Municipal airport is maxed out but building large int'l airport causes game to crash

[john737]

I have a city just over 600K in population. The one airport is the medium municipal airport and it's maxed out on flights. It's looking run down and dingy. So I tried to build a large international airport on the little open land remaining. Each time I plop it in and it begins to develop, the game crashes.

Any fixes for this? I'd like to revive the commercial demand as well relieve the flight demand.
Thank you.

[MGB]

To start with, you should try to find out if this is a general problem or something specific to the one city you are using. The best way to test this is to open a new, unused city and try to build the airport there, are you still getting CTDs?

Did you install any sort of Airport Controller / Custom (functional) Airport mods? You have to be very careful about using these things as you can literally break save files if you don't follow the instructions.

[Bfloo]

As far as the airport looking run down, it is prob bad placement, or a traffic issue.

I get crash issues with bigger cities all the time, even when I played on disk when this game was new.

[MGB]

There is a myth that SimCity 4 is some sort of unstable wreck that CTDs for no reason, the problem is that it is bunk. The question here is if the CTDs are directly linked to a specific action, because if they are, then that's a key indicator of where to look for problems. As mentioned, use of mods that alter Airport functionality in any way are highly complex and in many cases require you to follow very specific rules to prevent problems.

Originally posted by Bfloo:

I get crash issues with bigger cities all the time, even when I played on disk when this game was new.

Yes, large cities played when the game was new, probably ran into all sorts of resource issues, after-all even the developer's machines only had 1GB RAM and the average user back then would have had less. But times change and ten year old machines are powerful enough to play SC4 without any trouble today. However, SC4 was not designed to work with Multi-Core CPUs and Windows (Vista-onwards) tries to force matters. Long and short, if you have a multi-core CPU (you do), without telling the OS to restrict SC4 to just a single core, your game will be incredibly unstable.

There are other conditions which can cause CTDs, but almost all of them revolve around incorrectly configured setups, incompatible hardware and the #1 problem, use of mods. That's not to say mods directly lead to CTDs, but use of badly modded content, conflicting mods or just not following the instructions (or reading them to begin with), when installing things that make dramatic changes to the game, often trip users up.

The fact is however, if you configure SC4 properly and don't fall into the traps mentioned and have sufficient resources, SC4 is rock-solid stable. I have played it on a number of systems over many years and every such CTD that came along was ultimately linked to something wrong that was fixable.

[Bfloo]

I don't use mods. You are prob right about it being an issue on my end, but I have always had the same issue with this game over multiple pc's.

[MGB]

Go find SimCity 4 in your Steam Library, right click on it and select Properties. In the Launch Options add the command:

-CPUCount:1

This will tell Windows to stop trying to force multi-core operations for SimCity 4, which is the #1 cause of CTDs. Failure to add this command = unstable game on any CPU that has more than one core/thread on every version of Windows since Vista. The actual problem is Windows, not SimCity 4, if it didn't try to do something the game can't handle, the issue wouldn't occur.

[john737]

Originally posted by MGB:

To start with, you should try to find out if this is a general problem or something specific to the one city you are using. The best way to test this is to open a new, unused city and try to build the airport there, are you still getting CTDs?

Did you install any sort of Airport Controller / Custom (functional) Airport mods? You have to be very careful about using these things as you can literally break save files if you don't follow the instructions.

MGB, thank you for your input. Regarding any MODs for airports, no, I have not installed any. I'm a long time SC4 player but new to MODs. I installed NAM 42 in October and all has gone well. Then a few weeks ago I began to download various plots from Simtropolis. I've been sticking with ones that don't require dependencies yet since that's a little 'advanced' for me right now (lol). I'll work up up them soon since there seems to be so many really cool things to add to my cities. Most of the things like malls and shopping centers and some of the nicer buildings seem to require dependencies, so I've steered clear of them for now.

I did try building the large international airport in another city. I picked a small city in the region that only has freeway running thru it on to other cities and the various road and rail connections coming in from surrounded developed cities. The airport worked and functioned. So it looks like it's only a problem with the large developed city where I want to build it.

[john737]

meant to ask, what are "CTDs"? Commercial tourist demand?

[john737]

Originally posted by Bfloo:

As far as the airport looking run down, it is prob bad placement, or a traffic issue.

I get crash issues with bigger cities all the time, even when I played on disk when this game was new.

Bfloo, thanks for your reply. When you say traffic issue, do you mean the actual flights have bumped up against the capacity?

[john737]

Well lo and behold, I tried building the large airport again and it took!!

[Bfloo]

Originally posted by john737:

Originally posted by Bfloo:

As far as the airport looking run down, it is prob bad placement, or a traffic issue.

I get crash issues with bigger cities all the time, even when I played on disk when this game was new.

Bfloo, thanks for your reply. When you say traffic issue, do you mean the actual flights have bumped up against the capacity?

No, I meant cars, trucks, trains, etc

[john737]

Originally posted by Bfloo:

Originally posted by john737:

Bfloo, thanks for your reply. When you say traffic issue, do you mean the actual flights have bumped up against the capacity?

No, I meant cars, trucks, trains, etc

ok. Yeah that traffic is heavy on one side of the airport since the city grew up around it and got pretty dense there. However, since I was finally able to build the large airport across town, it alleviated the air traffic. The old airport capacity is about 167,000 and current usage is about 100,000. Usage had been about 167,000. Having some slack fixed the run down worn out look.

[MGB]

CTD = Crash to Desktop.

[john737]

Ah. Thanks!