Neighbourhood screen flashing to black
jlkeal:
Occasionally, just using the auto configuration on my monitor will work (sometimes it takes a couple of times). Other times, I have to minimize the game to my desktop, wait several minutes, then bring the game back up. Usually my graphics card will try to readjust itself. If those two ideas don't work for me, I just shut the game down and wait a couple of hours. I've been meaning to call ATI this week about this problem, since my card is still in warranty. I've only had it for a few months. Maybe they'll have a better idea.
Or maybe I'll hear the tech groan again after I told him what game I was having trouble in with the last card. :-\
Eleonora:
I'm sticking to my story, it's too many trees.
Of course, the trees could merely be a symptom, with an overworked card as the cause. I used to have this problem quite often, until I stopped using certain terrains, and only used those with no decorations whatsoever on them. It seems to have done the trick, I can have as many lots as I want to, and never get the flashing thing.
Recently I did get some flashing when I tried to add Maxis' original Downtown and Bluewater Village to a hood, I fixed it by using terrain surgery on them. So it's definitely something to do with decorations or trees, since after surgery I had the same lots but nothing else and my subhoods ran fine.
Halouja:
cwykes - way back when I installed the Seasons patch, I had exactly the same problem with one of my neighbourhoods - the neighbourhood view screen would never load, the screen would just keep flashing all the time, but with careful
mouse use you could find and enter the lots, which all played normally, and if you could get into them, the sub-neighbourhoods loaded and played fine too. I found sometimes that if you entered a lot, moved one of the garden trees and then saved and exited back to the neighbourhood, then the neighbourhood view was back to normal, but often it wasn't. Even if it was, if you exited the game and then reloaded, the flashing was back. At the time I had an ATI Radeon 9200 128 MB AGP graphics card which functioned perfectly well, apart from being unable to see fishes in ponds and fish tanks, the enhanced pool reflections or the x-ray snow cursor.
I searched around the various forums that I belonged to at the time but I've only ever encountered one other person who experienced this problem, and he was as mystified as I was. It was most frustrating - all the other neighbourhoods were absolutely fine. Eventually the flashing became too much to bear and the affected neighbourhood was deleted. I've never experienced the problem again and never came close to finding out what caused it.
jlkeal:
I talked to the ATI tech and he said if Nvidia is having problems with the game as well, it does sound like the game is causing most of the problems. He said until they come up (EAxis) with a patch to fix the problem, what I had been doing would be his first suggestion. Yes, I did tell him that a patch to fix that will most likely never happen.
He said in my case, my biggest problem at the moment could be that my processor can't keep up with my graphic card's speed, which will also cause graphic corruption. I have an ancient processor (AMD 1.7) and my card is a higher end card so yes, I need to upgrade my motherboard. I've slowly upgraded everything else, and was planning on my next purchase of upgrading the MB and more RAM, anyway. I SHOULD have done that a long time ago. ::)
cwykes:
Halouha - Interesting that you got it first with the seasons patch same as me and the simmer one of the other posts I found..... I'll have to move a tree and see if that helps. I'm sure Eleanora will say it fits her tree theory!
Jlkeal - I don't think we know for sure that this particular problem does happen with Nvidia. You, I and Halouja all have ATI cards. Eleanor didn't say. Checking back on those links, I think the other sufferers either had old ATI cards or didn't say.
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