Some kind of update?

[amishius]

I go to run the game today and it said there was an update, and now the game crashes to desktop while attempting to load a city. What on Earth kind of update could there be to the game? Can I revert back?

[amishius]

Well, in case anyone runs into this issue: the update (whatever it was?) updated the .exe and that required reinstalling the NAM 4gb patch. Easy peasy, it turns out.

[TarkusSC4]

Thank you for posting your experience with this, as it definitely serves as a good PSA to the SC4 players out there. I didn't get an update here on my end while checking just now, but if you ever encounter a situation where you need to reinstall the game, are switching copies (i.e. from disc to Steam), or Steam "updates" it (how/what was done with that update, I'm not sure, and quite curious), that's going to give you a fresh executable that doesn't have the 4GB Patch applied to it.

Curiously enough, this has been speculated to be one of the reasons we had so many issues with tech support relating to the 4GB Patch with NAM 37. The 4GB Patch has been part of the NAM ecosystem since way back with NAM 31.2 in 2013, believe it or not, and our old installer had an auto-prompt to run it. We thought that meant people would have it, but in the nearly 3 years between NAM 36 and NAM 37, it seems a pretty sizable percentage of our userbase went disc-to-digital, reinstalled, switched computers and just copied their Plugins folder to their new machine, or had some sort of "update" like this. Thankfully, with our new quicker release paradigm post-NAM 37 (for context, that was a year ago . . . and we're well underway with NAM 42 at the moment), we were able to work out a more user-friendly solution fairly quickly with the batch script, which has basically killed that tech support issue to darn near nil.

For those users who aren't comfortably manually applying the 4GB Patch to a reinstalled/fresh/"updated" copy, it's not necessary to completely reinstall the NAM using its batch script. There's a separate batch script included in the current NAM download package (SimCity4_4GB_Patch_Script_V3.bat) that just takes care of the 4GB Patch routine, without opening up the NAM installer afterward. Make sure it's in the same directory as the actual 4GB Patch itself (4gb_patch.exe).

-Tarkus