Creating large cities without crashing
Hi all!
Ive been using the software for overland and city mapping for an RPG campaign I run. One thing I have run into is that one of the more ambitious city maps I’ve done repeatedly crashes when trying to zoom in close to work in detail, or export in higher resolutions. This happened on my old computer and I chalked it up to low performance, but on my newer machine the same thing happens. The city is ‘good enough’ as mapped so Ive left it as is.
I think the issue is the number of individual buildings and other entities, and possibly their resolution - perhaps the file is too big for CC3 to swallow? But I haven’t been able to narrow it down. I have similarly scaled cities that don’t have the problem, but they I think have fewer buildings.
Im planning at the moment to tackle mapping the biggest city on the continent, about four times larger than the one that crashes at the moment (roughly the size of Ancient Rome) and I want to avoid the issue. Right now I am considering doing a very basic overview map and then mapping individual districts separately but I would love to have one big mega-map (however impractical)
So, how do you map large cities without running into this issue? Is it about limiting the number of entities, their resolutions, or certain effects?
Any help is appreciated!
Comments
The two level mapping is probably the best idea.
You can (if you don't find it too awkward constantly hiding and showing different layers) do largish cities in one map by putting each district on it's own layer and only having the layers you are working on visible.
Sue's advice is correct - it is what I used for Dun Fingolfin - is your city bigger than that?
https://atlas.cdn.monsen.cc/atlas/peredur/hi/dun%20fingolfin.png
The city I am currently having the issue with is much, much smaller than this. The one I want to build would I think be about this size…Makes me think I have messed something up rather than running into limitations of the program?
Do you mean you worked on the districts as different layers and then did the final export with it all turned on?
Yes, that is exactly what i did. The FCW is available on the Community Atlas page (go to Browse Maps>Peredur>High Kingdom of Fionnuala>Dun Fingolfin) if you want (the FCW is too large to attach directly to this thread). I also used bitmaps, not vector houses, as vector takes longer to redraw. And you do have to wait for redraw often, though the length of waiting does depend on your machine specifications.
If you send your FCW, I may be able to help.
And here are the Layers that I used to do each district separately.
Thanks for this! I haven’t done much with Layers, mostly just doing things on the appropriate sheets and largely ignoring the layers.
I will try and send the FCW when I am on my PC.
Here is the FCW file. Only 2.32 mb, so not huge! If there is anything sticking out in the settings or anything as problematic I'd appreciate feedback!
The crash tends to happen when I zoom in on areas of dense buildings, or when I try to export at higher resolutions ( I have been able to export at acceptable res for what I need).
PC Specs for what its worth:
Windows 11
Ryzen 5 7600 processor (stock, not overclocked)
32 GB DDR5 RAM (stock speed, not overclocked)
Nvidia RTX 4070 12GB graphics card
1440p Monitor
From what I recall, Profantasy runs only on single core processor and can only use up to 4GB of memory as it is 32 bit. If there is by some chance a setting in the program to better utilize resources I would love to hear it!
Using Count All in the Info menu, you can see there are over 100,000 entities in this drawing. That is because most of the buildings are House entities laid down in Streets. That's fine, but you can expect things to be a little slow.
If you hide the buildings there are only just over 8,000 entities - less than 1/10 of the total. The map also zooms and pans much faster.
So putting different districts on different layers as described in detail by Quenten above, you should find it a lot more maneagable.
I didn't have any trouble with CC crashing. Did you mean crashing to desktop, or just giving you a green screen within the map window? The green screen shows when CC uses all the available memory to calculate the new display, rather than trying to show you all the stages between then and now, and is quite normal on maps with this may entities.
Thanks for taking a look at this!
CC3 was crashing to desktop, no green screen at all. I would zoom in, the map would start redrawing, hang, and then immediately close.
Is there a less resource intensive way to lay down large number of structures other than houses using the streets tool?
Using the Street tools is the only fast way of doing it. Using the set bitmap symbols for the style would cut down the number of entities, but you only have a limited selection of those and they would take far longer to place than the House entities with the Street tool.
I wasn't able to reproduce your crash situation. Maybe someone else can?
So the houses created with the Streets tool take up more memory than the same number of bitmap symbol houses? I know it would take forever to place that many bitmap symbols, but maybe tools like Draw Along would help.
It’s too bad things can’t be on more than one layer. It would be helpful to be able to put something like an Inn on both a BLDNG (INN) layer as well as one named for the neighborhood it’s in.
You have to choose whether you want to group buildings according to where they are, or what they are. My preference is for where, rather than what, since it's easier to avoid putting things on top of one another if you have all the buildings in the block you are working on visible.
Thanks again for checking.
I just checked a bunch of my other city maps, they tend to have between 25000 and 50000 entities (again, lots of houses/streets to populate areas). Individual areas of these maps have as much density as the problematic one. They don't crash at all.
I can consistently reproduce the crash by zooming in in the Shelf area with buildings on - but only by using the mouse scroll wheel (I am so used to using the mouse wheel at work for all kinds of zooming in and out that I almost never use the actual zoom tools, so I never thought to mention that bit!). If you zoom in really close with the zoom box tools, no crash. With buildings off, no crash. With everything except buildings off, and only buildings visible, mouse wheel scroll, crash.
In other areas of the map, zooming in does not crash it. It doesn't seem to matter if sheet effects are active or not. Watching the task manager, CPU usage spikes to 80-90% when redrawing in other areas, and goes all the way to 100% when redrawing in the dense area before a crash. I tried adjusting the bitmap quality drawing and it makes no difference.
So I guessed the dense area, when zooming in to render, is overtaxing the CPU and triggering the CTD.
BUT! I opened Quenten's lovely map of Dun Fingolfin and, as long as I gave it time to open and load, I was able to zoom all the way in with no crash, even when the processor was being maxed out. His map has 381000 entities compared to 100000 for mine and is way (way-way) more complex, and despite the computer chugging hard to load the whole thing, no crashes. It was a good stress test for the CPU, which never got above 60 degrees celsius despite apparently going flat out.
I tried to stress-test in another map by taking the very large map template I wanted to start working on for my truly big city and just covering it with random streets until I got 100000 entities, many of them overlapping and just as much of a mess as I could make it. I wanted to see if it was some general setting in my map files that caused it. Zooming in all over there with the mouse wheel does not crash it. So it does not appear to be a general setting in my program!
I do get a app crash report in windows event viewer. But its all Greek to me.
So after all this, I have to conclude that there is something specific in this area of the map that, when incrementally zooming in via the mouse wheel, causes a crash. Its been like this on two completely different computers with different motherboard, ram, hard drive, cpu, gpu and OS. Its annoying that I can't find the cause to fix, but at least it appears to not be a general issue with my setup.
I also use the mouse wheel a lot, even though it's actually slower than the zoom tools.
However, I was trying your map with the mouse wheel and still couldn't crash it.
I'm hoping that one of the others will try it and be able to reproduce the crash, but since it's New Year's Day it might be a while before anyone else tries.
Thanks again. We’ll see if anyone can reproduce. I will also send it in to tech support with the crash dump and see if they can make anything of it.
I can tell you of an alternative approach.
When I was doing the Forgotten Realms Interactive Atlas project I had one map that would alway crash my machine when I would zoom in.
No one could find a fix, or replicate it.
So I would go in and shut off different sheets. Eventually I found a layer that when shut off, the map would function perfectly.
I believe it was some kind of distorted poly, on the bad sheet, deleted that and the map returned to being fully functional.
This was on Windows 11 with a really strong laptop as well.
I may take a stab at that. It would have to be on the Buildings sheet since if that one is off it never crashes.
My advice is to show only all the buildings by hiding all sheets without Buildings on them, then dividing the buildings into various districts suing layers. Then hiding all building layers except the district you are working on. And the more bitmap symbols you use, the better - i know it takes longer, but the map will actually look better as well as run better.
Here is your FCW with the buildings divided into 5 separate layers - North, South, East, West and Central. You can hide those layers except for the district you are working on. I suggest you use bitmap buildings for at least 20% of the buildings you have in the map - just delete a few houses here and there and use bitmap ones instead.
Incidentally, I had no trouble or even much of a delay in redrawing the map with all buildings showing, with Sheet effects on.
Thank you everyone for all the help! I am going to start chipping away at my Ill Advised Mega City and all the advice is going to come in handy.