What I have been up to lately.....
I created small maps in SIM city 4 and decided to use them in a little experiment after one of my larger neighborhoods became unplayable due to crashing. I am big on neighborhood deco and unfortunately it killed the hood in the end as it was a very large map.
I made 1 the main neighborhood and attached 3 shopping districts just to start off. So far loading is much smoother and I have had no crashing or pink flashing... I haven't built much in the subhoods yet, so that would be the second phase of my experiment, especially a downtown area... Those deco buildings seem to really be an issue. I will place only a few of them down and focus more on apartments and a handful of businesses. My aim is to see how larger hoods compare with smaller interconnected hoods, separated by loading screens as it relates to pc performance.
I also haven't added a university subhood yet and I plan on doing this as well. I am thinking of keeping that rather small, focusing mainly on dorms and living areas for the students and pretending that other campus buildings are somewhere off screen rather than actually depicting all of them, for pc performance sake.
I will update you with my findings.