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Cities XXL Plaza Effects

Discussion in 'Game Play Support' started by ronrn, Apr 1, 2016.

  1. ronrn

    ronrn Governor

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    All throughout the "The Inlet, City Building Contest" thread, I could not help but notice folks having very similar lag and crashing issues as their cities grew in size.
    In my case, playing XXL(2015), I built/completed my city up to about 1.2 mil population with absolutly no lag or crashing.
    But....I intentionally left out any plazas, forest and such until the very end.
    When I finally started adding plazas and forest fillers, I immediately began having lag problems and crashes.
    I have many plaza mods, most of which are XL mods, including some that I have edited myself to work in XXL.
    In order to complete a city, I am forced to reducing plaza mods to default game ones and those that are only in the XXL resources.
    Even then, lag is serious and crashes are often. For taking contest screenshots, I had to plan my camera position, decorate only the area in view, take the shot, remove the plazas, and then repeat the entire process for the next screenshot.
    I generally understand why/how plazas, especially trees and some furnitures, can be demanding on a graphics processor.
    I'm confident to rule out my pc as the main problem, as I have a strong desktop machine.

    To the point (finally):rolleyes::
    Is it the game engine or issues with the plaza mods?
    What can be done to address these issues?

    As you know, XXL is in need of many more plaza mods. No city is complete without the "icing on the cake".
    Thank you for your time and
    Lastly, my thanks go out to the folks that have worked so hard to create all the great mods we now have.:)
     
  2. skullz613

    skullz613 Administrator
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    My XL 2012 is solid as a rock and never crashes. I use the modifications I have posted over the last year or so and some that other modders have made.
    Think the ones that have helped the most are the delete shader cache and autosave time change

    If some of the changes for XL were done in XXL, I wonder if it would make it a bit more solid. I have not had the time to dive into XXL and do what I did to XL regarding tweaking but I will eventually.

    If you look at my screens for the competition, you will see I have gone mad with trees and plazas. What I found is the game will make large areas of trees disappear at certain zoomed out levels. The trees that disappear were in the plazas and not the individually placed trees.
    This helped a bit with the game but I had a lot of lag when I bumped up the settings to take good screenshots.

    There is a change I think in the plazas for XXL and I have to rework my XL plazas yet to make sure they are OK in XXL.
    I can't remember what change is needed so if someone could point it out I'd be grateful.
     
  3. ronrn

    ronrn Governor

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    There are a couple of edits I discovered through comparison of working XXL plaza class files to XL plaza class files, and a little trial/error.
    The first, to prevent game crashing during/after the plaza was placed, was to lower the expand width number in the class file 40 or less.
    Someone else, I forget who, suggested as low as 15.
    <SurfaceOperation>
    <ExpandWidth>40</ExpandWidth>
    I have a general idea, but I will not claim to know exactly what this operation does.

    The second was to lower the dig depth.
    This allows the plaza to be placed with airport components, and prevents overlapping the components.
    <Placement>
    <Terraform>
    <DigDepth>0</DigDepth>

    These edits seem to work well enough but do not prevent crashes 100%.
    I am sure there are other edits that could be made to further improve their performance.

    note:
    I can understand why you guys stay with XL(2012).
    However, i.m.o...... if XXL(2015) had all the missing features and the mods available for it's predecessor, it would ...:censored:... absolutely secure the position of the #1 city building game in the world. (y)
     
    skullz613 likes this.
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