Switch Edition occasionally crashes when population count is near 253K

[tom_mai78101]

Hello,

On the behalf of another person, it was reported on a different forum mentioning there are occasional crashes when the game has hit the upper limit of 250K on the Nintendo Switch. The player in question has plateaued the population to around 253K, and has unlocked 7 out of 9 grids in total on 1 map.

It is unsure what could cause the crash, except for the fact the player is not able to progress through the game without saving every 5 to 10 minutes of gameplay. The player did say they were sometimes lucky enough to keep playing for more than 10 minutes if the camera isn't moving too often.

Another report was made here on ResetEra, going by the nickname MikeNeko:

https://www.resetera.com/posts/13805492/

He mentioned the crashes are happening and are nuisances after going past the limit of 190K population.

I would like to ask if in the future, this issue will be addressed, or will be acknowledged, so we can avoid the game crashing if we reach a certain point of our population count?

Thanks.

 

[MikeNeko]

Hey there
Thank you for posting this on my behalf.

Indeed, the crashes have become even more frequent. They are now happening in undocked mode as well. All tiles are bought, and almost the whole map is filled.
If i zoom in or out during a save, the game crashes, if i happen to do anything much under save the game crashes with around 80% chance.

The game crashes as well outside of the saving procedure, but in that case graphical artifacts happen.

furthermore, the crashes are linked to construction spread: i hit a population plateau despite increasing zones, however under this regimen of constant population, by spreading construction, the game started to crash in undocked mode, whereas before i could play almost reliably in this mode.

The game has become ALMOST UNPLAYABLE .
The rate of crashes is about 10 times per hour now when i am in heavy construction duty (destroying existing infrastructure, burrowing roads, mass re-zoning etc.
A workaround for saves, to halve the risk of crash, is to use the electic pole construction before switching to bulldoze, that way the map uses an almost-no-textures mode, allowing enough memory for the save process.

I understand i may be the only one pushing the switch version this way, but It saddens me because it still is a great experience to have such a gem on the go.

Hoping for a fix of these memory management issues.
Regards,
MikeNeko

Population:

My City (crashes started much before):

Population plateau:

Artifacts preceding a crash:
chevrons appearing around roads and other elements:

Vertices pushed to the ceiling:

Holes in the ground + vertices to the ceiling:

Zones textures offset+rotated overlaying construction:

 

[Bomli]

Very nice report! I really hope the developers are actually checking this forum, there has been no official communication about the Switch version at all, at least nothing I could find anywhere. Tantalus seems to be responsible for the Switch port, but I am not even sure if they even check these forums - not even their Twitter account is particularly active. The last post there is a retweet of the Cities Skylines Switch release.

Paradox has apparently mentioned to Eurogamer that they would "continue optimising" the Switch version, but that was apparently said during Gamescom in August, so there has been no official communication since then, other that the game was released. Silence is never a good communications strategy, so either there are no plans to do anything because the Switch version did not sell well, or Paradox/Tantalus are just extremely bad at PR. If I was planning to improve performance of a game that was panned for exactly these problems in pretty much every review, I would properly announce that as well to help increase sales. There are some rather obvious mistakes in handling draw distance, LOD and shadows on the Switch version, so unless the game code is a complete mess and impossible to be improved without a complete rewrite, there should be things that can be changed to improve performance and stability - removing the video recording feature should be a trivial change for starters.

 

[E81]

Agree 100%
I'm playing in handheld mode all the time and the game was the first 80 hours a lot of fun. But when the city was really big with a lot of buildings the game starts crashing quite often - approximately every 20 minutes.
As mentioned from others IT DOESN'T MAKE FUN ANY MORE but I don't want to start with a new city!!!!!!
Please fix it as soon as possible!!!!
Greetings from Austria

 

[cherryghost]

It would seem RAM buffer is maxed out from what I can see. I can reproduce similar circumstance removed 12GB ram from my 16GB PC. Loading a game with pop of 300k I get very similar results as above.

The only 'fix', and I wouldnt call it a fix as such, is to extend RAM capabilities by removing video recording (or at least providing an option to remove). Similar problem on Fornite and disabling video recording fixed it. However afaik RAM usage is only couple hundred mbs, so the 'fix' is really just 'it will crash at a larger population instead' thing.

Really sad this is the outcome, I havent reached this limit on the switch yet, but knowing I'm going to be severely limited to playability of my city later on just makes me question why I should even bother playing the game anymore.

How can I get a refund if the game doesn't work as intended?