Freeze/Crash of Simcity Cities of Tomorrow Complete Edition

[gheepremi]

I have read similar posts with no real fixes described. So Here is my attempt to describe the freeze/crash of Simcity Cities of Tomorrow Complete Edition

The game freezes completely, and permanently. The computer become completely unresponsive. Only Ctrl+Alt+Del work to help me bring up the task manager. Simcity keeps mouse pointer focus and never lets me click on task manager and kill Simcity. I thought that there was some background process going on, but the unclickable task manager shows 628 MB of ram usage and 0% processor usage. I can leave it all night long and it stays stuck at the same point.

Sometimes it happens when I start a single player scenario, it shows the messages... creating drone laws, tuning controlnet, etc etc. and then freezes at any one of these messages (inconsistent). Or it freezes almost a 5~10 minutes into the game (real time not game time).

It happens guaranteed every single time I start the game.

Game: Simcity Cities of Tomorrow Complete Edition (32 Bit with 32 bit Origin)
PC: Win 10 Home 64 Bit
Intel Core i5 6600K (Base clock - Not overclocked)
RAM: 16 GB DDR 4 (base clock - Not overclocked)
Graphics: EVGA GTX1060 6GB

Drivers for nVidia are most up to date with the driver manager installed and used to update the drivers.

Thank you for looking into this folks.

[Gorath_the_Elder]

Have you used the Origin Client "Repair" option?  If so, and it hasn't helped. in this instance, go ahead an manually navigate to the nVIDIA driver download website, and locate any relatively new driver and choose the Clean Install, follow through on it, then test the game again.  It would seem you may have corruption somewhere. 

[thesolomongrundy]

try running the game in Windows 7 compatibility mode?  Run as Administrator too?  if you want to push it, try installing any and all games outside of Program Files to avoid any Windows UAC battles?  since i mod a lot of games, putting games outside of Program Files, the default folder install (we create a new one simple called GAMES off c:\) simplifies a lot of troubleshooting.... the CTRL-ALT-DEL makes me think windows is involved someway somehow.

i have about 2% of my game loads do this where they hang on the boot, I ALT-F4 and reboot and it always comes up... this could be an issue communicating to the EA servers but since you haven't cleared the first screen it wont show the warning... all of this is questions to the questions...

- good luck, and come back with a diag if persists

[gheepremi]

No success: I tried running the game with all combinations of run as Admin and compatibility mode.

I am not sure how to install it outside program files. Origin only gave me the option of "INSTALL" and no more options.

I am not sure what you mean by come back with diags?

Thanks for taking the time to help. Any further trouble shooting will be appreciated.

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@thesolomongrundy wrote:

try running the game in Windows 7 compatibility mode?  Run as Administrator too?  if you want to push it, try installing any and all games outside of Program Files to avoid any Windows UAC battles?  since i mod a lot of games, putting games outside of Program Files, the default folder install (we create a new one simple called GAMES off c:\) simplifies a lot of troubleshooting.... the CTRL-ALT-DEL makes me think windows is involved someway somehow.

i have about 2% of my game loads do this where they hang on the boot, I ALT-F4 and reboot and it always comes up... this could be an issue communicating to the EA servers but since you haven't cleared the first screen it wont show the warning... all of this is questions to the questions...

- good luck, and come back with a diag if persists

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[gheepremi]

No success: After trying all that thesolomongrundy  recommended, I came to try out your suggestions. By the time I started going through your answers, Origin client changed on me. Not that I was very familiar with the older version either (newbie gamer), I could not find that option in the client to repair itself.

I removed the nVidia driver and all associated programs it installed. Screen looked bad after reboot (low res as expected). Installed the driver I got from nVidia's website making sure I only installed the driver and nothing else. No luck. I thought to myself that I have tried a good deal of options, why not try complete re-install on windows. Did that. Formatted the main drive and re-installed windows. This time I made sure that the driver was manually installed from same as in the previous step. I had only installed the Ethernet drivers for the MoBo and nothing else so that I could download and install origin and the game through origin. I installed Origin, and then the game... No luck. The game still freezes. The furthest I could take it was a minute maybe into the game! it is not consistent when it would happen, but it is guarantee that game game will freeze and take away focus from windows task manager. Only things that lets me have my computer back is the choosing sign out after ctrl+alt+del or shutdown/restart.

I would love to try any other suggestions you might have.

Thank you.

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@Gorath_the_Elder wrote:

Have you used the Origin Client "Repair" option?  If so, and it hasn't helped. in this instance, go ahead an manually navigate to the nVIDIA driver download website, and locate any relatively new driver and choose the Clean Install, follow through on it, then test the game again.  It would seem you may have corruption somewhere. 

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[thesolomongrundy]

still thinking through the issue -- dont hate me with this suggestion, but is your firewall allowing the program through?  it could be possible the local app boots up, simcity.exe., but then when it tries to phone home to EA it gets stuck in a firewall thing?  that would match the When for why its locking up...

re Diag:   dxdiag can be run by >>> Click on, "Start Button". Click on, "Run". In the pop-up window enter DxDiag and hit ok. The DirectX Diagnostic Tool pop-up window should appear. Click on, "Save all information".

from that diagnostic list a hardware check may help... post it here please - in another simcity thread i noticed a guy with a six year old motherboard bios, and in some ways super outdated sound drivers off the mobo can relate to bios... its a stretch but good reason to see the diag posted?

i would not think [if this isnt happening anywhere else] that your video card is at fault.  or any hardware. for me this fault is 1% of boot ups and not 100% as in your case, so i have experience it but not locking up pc completely.  i do have to almost always hit ALT-F4 to exit the game when it kicks me unexpectedly out of the city i am playing saying "lost connection to ea servers".

its that outside connectivity which makes me think firewall or similar and not hardware.   for example i would chase memory/RAM/HDD if this was in a couple of your games - locking up.

Repair is a function that appears when you right mouse button your game in My Library.  i have used that a lot for thing like this and am surprised when it finds and corrects a corrupt file...

finally in the My Library > Game Properties (right mouse on your game title) uncheck 'Enable Origin In Game for SimCity™: Complete Edition', can't hurt and mine is off...

[thesolomongrundy]

@gheepremi - i just had a case where that screen, the city loading within a region, just keeps loading and loading and loading -- after what feels too long i hit ALT-TAB getting ready to kill the app when i decided to ALT-TAB back into the game and suddenly the city screen showed and i was able to play.... weird, i dont know how or why but ALT-TAB away from the program then back in fixed it... odd?

[Mr_Burrface]

Did u ever find a fix 4 this issue?
I got the Same issue!

Please reply!

[Nicoloves9]

I have the same issue as well.. Looking for help to get back to playing the game

[bcamadin]

I fixed this issue by disabling "Enable Orgin In Game For SimCity"

1) go to your game library.

2) right click the image of the game.

3) Click Game Properties on the popup menu