London Coffee Talk Thread

[Snark]

Not so much where I am. I guess that's the blessing, or curse, of lake effect snow streamers. All or nothing: either it's a sunny day or you can't see 2 feet in front of your face.

This image taken this morning speaks for itself.

http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/imagery/subsets/?subset=AERONET_Egbert.2013328.terra.500m

[MolsonExport]

about 2 feet deep in Hyde Park (where I am living). 3 hours of shovelling this morning, just for a double driveway.

[MolsonExport]

Originally Posted by Snark

Not so much where I am. I guess that's the blessing, or curse, of lake effect snow streamers. All or nothing: either it's a sunny day or you can't see 2 feet in front of your face.

This image taken this morning speaks for itself.

http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/imagery/subsets/?subset=AERONET_Egbert.2013328.terra.500m

Wow, what a great image. The snow belt.

[MolsonExport]

London got dumped with more than 30 cm of snow

[haljackey]

Awesome pic!

Roughly 2.5 hours of shoveling for me... Turns out the snow here in the southwest side is 52cm deep.

[Simpseatles]

Wow, can't believe how much snow London got. Just a little over an hour away in Waterloo all we got was a dusting. Although looking at the satellite image I can understand why.

[Wharn]

Originally Posted by Simpseatles

Just a little over an hour away in Waterloo all we got was a dusting.

Forget Waterloo, about 30 minutes away in Woodstock there's one lousy inch of the stuff on the ground. I remember back in 2010, when London was completely shut down by that monster storm, all sorts of businesses in Woodstock and Ingersoll were wondering why their workers from London weren't showing up. The lake effect can be very confusing for people.

Originally Posted by haljackey

You mean SimCity (2013)? Trust me, SimCity 4 is 100x better. The new game should be called SimTown, due to the tiny city sizes.

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

^which is why I gave it a pass. Leave it to EA to ruin their games.

What baffles me most about that game is they really did not have to do much to keep us happy. De-fuck the pathfinding. Give us more transportation options. Full 3D. Maybe even offer a historical mode where you can build your city up throughout the ages, but keep it separate from the main game. But what we got was an idiot version of the game to try and draw in potential new players while completely alienating the old, guaranteed ones. I'm sure Molson, as a marketing expert, would not approve.

I just bought an extremely powerful computer but I feel it has been completely wasted, since I find myself playing the same PC games I was rocking in 2009.

[MolsonExport]

It wouldn't be the first time that companies commit brand suicide. Pathological, almost. It makes no sense from a business perspective. Gaming companies are terrible at listening to their hard-core customers. I recall the brouhaha ensuing from Diablo-3 launch (requiring online connection even though almost everyone was playing against AI, server busy, server busy, server busy, online auction problems, hacking....argh!).

I am back to playing SimCity4 on an old laptop (my newer hardware is all Mac, kinda useless for the good stuff).

[haljackey]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

I am back to playing SimCity4 on an old laptop (my newer hardware is all Mac, kinda useless for the good stuff).

I've been working on a SC4 video series (with mods) if you're interested: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3Yl0lRNSH1j2uClwY-RLuKD2Bee8Cd1N

Have any mods installed? I'd recommend this one as a must-have: http://www.moddb.com/mods/network-addon-mod/downloads

[Wharn]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

It wouldn't be the first time that companies commit brand suicide. Pathological, almost. It makes no sense from a business perspective. Gaming companies are terrible at listening to their hard-core customers. I recall the brouhaha ensuing from Diablo-3 launch (requiring online connection even though almost everyone was playing against AI, server busy, server busy, server busy, online auction problems, hacking....argh!).

I am back to playing SimCity4 on an old laptop (my newer hardware is all Mac, kinda useless for the good stuff).

I tell you, it's bizarre. The only sizeable game corporation nowadays that actually seems to "get" its consumers is Valve. You know you're doing something wrong when there is a stronger community for your 9-year-old games than there is for your 1-year-old titles.

As for SC4, if it were me, I'd install Windows on a secondary partition. Well actually if it were me I'd be using Windows (and Linux) exclusively. I'm pretty sure there was a Mac version of SC4, but with the elimination of Rosetta after OS 10.6.8 I doubt it would still run.

Originally Posted by haljackey

I've been working on a SC4 video series (with mods) if you're interested: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3Yl0lRNSH1j2uClwY-RLuKD2Bee8Cd1N

Have any mods installed? I'd recommend this one as a must-have: http://www.moddb.com/mods/network-addon-mod/downloads

I've been rocking the NAM since the days I was still playing SC4 on a Tualatin Pentium III. Excellent mod that accomplished what Maxis never could. Although if you modified things and set it to "perfect" pathfinding, that CPU would beg for mercy before falling over and dying. Wasn't really until the Core2Duo came out that the Sim City 4 gaming experience was perfected.

Again, EA, doesn't take much to please us. It didn't have to end this way.

[haljackey]

EA has been rated the worst company in the USA two years in a row... and that's a record!

Originally Posted by Wharn

Wasn't really until the Core2Duo came out that the Sim City 4 gaming experience was perfected.

Actually SC4 is designed to work on single core processors like the Pentium IV. Even it you have an 8 core processor, the game will only work on one of them. If you're multi-core system isn't at least 3GHZ (each), SC4 will be slow.

[Wharn]

Originally Posted by haljackey

EA has been rated the worst company in the USA two years in a row... and that's a record!



Actually SC4 is designed to work on single core processors like the Pentium IV. Even it you have an 8 core processor, the game will only work on one of them. If you're multi-core system isn't at least 3GHZ (each), SC4 will be slow.

I disagree with your assessment that SC4 will run really slow on multi-core processors, and that it was optimized for processors like the Pentium 4; this is simply not true at all.

The Pentium 4 was a heap of garbage with ludicrously high energy consumption, limited cache and a very deep instruction pipeline. A technological dead end. I remember my Dad's Thinkpad T60, with the 2.0GHz T2500 Core Duo processor, would absolutely crush my 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 desktop even in single-core operations. I found Sim City 4 generally ran far smoother on the dual-core Thinkpad (installed against his wishes of course) than the single-core Pentium 4, where it often struggled in larger cities, even with a better graphics card. And running SC4 on a modern Haswell Core i5? No contest, even on processors with clock speeds well under 3 GHz. Don't believe the megahertz myth!

[go_leafs_go02]

I bought SC4 - biggest mistake of my life.

Have an Intel Core i5 on my laptop - 2.50GHz with 6 GB or ram. Doesn't work well unless I put all the graphics down to low.

[haljackey]

In 2010 I built a PC specifically to run SC4. I made sure my processor had 3 GHZ cores (and made SC4 run on one that wasn't being used much for other processes), a SSD (reduces load times considerably, especially with a virtual CD drive) and lots of RAM.

If you use a 4GB patch (Included with the newest NAM, or Network Addon Mod), you can get it to use twice the amount of what it normally would as a 32 bit game (2GB). So if you have 6GB min that would be good for the game since you have 2GB for background processes.

[MolsonExport]

I run SC4 pretty decent on my 2009 bare-bones HP laptop. Works most of the time. Hangs every now and then.

[Wharn]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

I run SC4 pretty decent on my 2009 bare-bones HP laptop. Works most of the time. Hangs every now and then.

Even though the game itself is awesome, I have to say it's exceptionally poorly programmed. I guess it is rather complex, but it honestly falls into far too many infinite loops and/or application crashes. All Maxis games seem to have these sorts of problems to some extent, Sim City 3000 used to have big-time issues on my old Pentium III Thinkpad.

Originally Posted by haljackey

In 2010 I built a PC specifically to run SC4. I made sure my processor had 3 GHZ cores (and made SC4 run on one that wasn't being used much for other processes), a SSD (reduces load times considerably, especially with a virtual CD drive) and lots of RAM.

If you use a 4GB patch (Included with the newest NAM, or Network Addon Mod), you can get it to use twice the amount of what it normally would as a 32 bit game (2GB). So if you have 6GB min that would be good for the game since you have 2GB for background processes.

I'd actually completely forgotten about the 32-bit RAM ceiling. How does the patch get around this? Using the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE thing? The SSD is also a good idea. My new laptop is going to have a weird mini-SSD (24GB), I'm debating whether I should use that for Windows or SC4.

Originally Posted by go_leafs_go02

I bought SC4 - biggest mistake of my life.

Have an Intel Core i5 on my laptop - 2.50GHz with 6 GB or ram. Doesn't work well unless I put all the graphics down to low.

As for issues with brand new Core i5 processors, I have no idea why that would be. It runs absolutely flawlessly for me on processors that have inferior per-core performance. go_leafs_go, you may want to try and disable hardware rendering, it might be that the game is not playing nice with your dedicated GPU (this sets all rendering work to the CPU). If it really is a dual-core issue, then open Task Manager, go to the "Processes" tab, find the SC4.exe process and right-click. Click on "Set Affinity", and set it to run on only one of the CPU cores. Turbo Boost should kick in.

[haljackey]

Whew London dodged a weather bullet for the first time in a while.

I think I'd rather take 70cm of snow over an ice storm anyway.

[go_leafs_go02]

Originally Posted by Wharn

As for issues with brand new Core i5 processors, I have no idea why that would be. It runs absolutely flawlessly for me on processors that have inferior per-core performance. go_leafs_go, you may want to try and disable hardware rendering, it might be that the game is not playing nice with your dedicated GPU (this sets all rendering work to the CPU). If it really is a dual-core issue, then open Task Manager, go to the "Processes" tab, find the SC4.exe process and right-click. Click on "Set Affinity", and set it to run on only one of the CPU cores. Turbo Boost should kick in.

Oddly only seen this post now instead of when it was originally posted - I'll try this out tonight, and let you know if it works.

Cheers!

[haljackey]

Schools may close for third day

Oh come on. We must be the laughing stock of the whole country right now. How do you think people do it in places like Winnipeg and Edmonton?

[K85]

Working for the board, I agree with it.

It's bad enough trying to keep kids inside on rain days. With cold weather, it's damn near impossible. I've dealt with it once this year, would rather not again.