Screen Flash On Load - Asset Error?

[romeomgolf]

I last played C:S in early March and when rebooting this week after updates the game wouldn't load at all, hanging in the loading screen. This relates to playing the game on a Mac;

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015)
Processor 4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
Memory 32 GB 1867 MHz DDR3
Graphics AMD Radeon R9 M395X 4 GB

Things I know so far, all relate to starting a fresh game and not trying to load an existing save:

- It won't load at all with all subscribed mods/asset enabled (this includes after checking the broken mods list and updating those with updates for the latest game) - The game hung on the loading screen and beach-balled, completely frozen.
- It runs fine with 'no workshop' in the launch options.
- When launched with 'no mods' in the launch options the game console at the bottom appeared but the entire map screen was black with just the white dashed outline of the start tile. This suggests an asset rather than a mod, right?
- When booting the game with player.log open, each time the game failed/froze I unsubscribed from the mod or asset it got stuck with. Eventually, the game loaded but with the flickering screen as here: https://youtu.be/dpbpTIBVkgI

Mods and assets removed during this last step included; Road Colors Changer++; RICO Revisited 2.1; Roads United Core 2.0 and various texture packs; Hide It!; Sharp Textures; Remove Decoration Sprites. All of these logged as where the game froze on loading.

I'm assuming something is broken or clashing, but no one seems to have reported this particular issue.

Does the flickering screen indicate a particular mod/asset?
Are there a particular group of assets I should focus on?
Are the removed assets/mods likely to be the cause, or just circumstantial to where the game crashed?

TIA!

[Avanya]

Hmm, the fact that it runs fine with -noWorkshop but has the problem with -disableMods is unsual. I wonder if it's related to memory use, since assets causing issues like this is extremely rare (and I don't think I've ever heard of this particular issue caused by an asset).

How many assets are you subscribed to? If you have the Loading Screen Mod installed it will show you how many assets you have as it's loading.

[romeomgolf]

Hi Avanya

I have approx 6,600 assets. I did wonder if it was a "too many assets" problem, but nothing changed since March other than the game update and it was working fine then. Thanks :)

[Avanya]

I would definitely try to reduce the amount of assets significantly - either by unsubscribing or just disabling to test. 6000 assets take up around 64 GB of RAM. The free patch included some new assets, so it might simply have pushed you over what your system was able to handle well. If you got the DLC as well, you should expect to remove 3-400 assets to get down to the amount you were at before.