Something to watch out for, possibly?

[novapaddy]

I have a bad habit of hitting the spacebar to pause the game when I have a "big job" like a new intersection with lots of road adjustments etc. Yesterday I probably did it for longer periods than usual.

Today I tried to open up my savegame. Usually it opens quickly. Today, very slow, hesitant and struggling to open, but eventually it did. Corrupted game I'd guess?

When I pondered why this could be, it came to me that for a period of last night's final play, I had spent possibly 30 minutes with the game stalled, while I did lots of tidying up.

I can only guess this was the reason?

Luckily I had already decided to scrap what I had done and go back to a previous save game and develop my city in another direction entirely.

But could this be the reason why the game struggled to open? Was it corrupted?

 

[hillcf]

I am sure that the game is split into multiple tasks, so that it run across multiple processors. I have just looked at my game, which is in a 'stop' state - BUT it is using 15% of my CPU. Restarting the game and it goes to 40% CPU, and then back to 15% when I hit SPACE.

So it looks like the display is frozen but the game is not. In my case my population seems to have increased from 4900 to 5500 very quickly after I restarted it.

 

[FoodyBorris]

I am sure that the game is split into multiple tasks, so that it run across multiple processors. I have just looked at my game, which is in a 'stop' state - BUT it is using 15% of my CPU. Restarting the game and it goes to 40% CPU, and then back to 15% when I hit SPACE.

So it looks like the display is frozen but the game is not. In my case my population seems to have increased from 4900 to 5500 very quickly after I restarted it.

That doesn't make sense though. If you cut your power when paused, do lots of things, then restore power and unpause you get no indication of them having lost power. If the game kept running but not updating, you'd get different behaviour. I think the pop jump is just coincidence.

 

[hillcf]

Not necessarily, depending on how they built the code. The simulation - cims, building updates etc - can being running independently of the display. The question then is whether the SPACE stop command only freezes the display or freezes the simulation.

 

[Person012345]

The game won't corrupt from being paused. I've paused it, alt tabbed out and basically forgotten about it for hours before, never had any problems.

 

[hillcf]

It is actually the same for me, but I have had a couple of times when the close time was a bit long. Equally, on loading it is sometimes dependent on how fast it will get the mods/assets list on the right from Steam. But I have not yet got a corrupted save file.