Civic Center Elevated and Mono Rail Commercial Stations 1.0.0

Brilliant concept and really nice lotting, I like how you put these maxis models together. However, sadly the modding part of lots are fairly off. 

Please, I mean no offense, and I don't criticize, just wish to help. These more involved modding stuffs require more understanding, experience and practice.
Most of the information about creating transit enable lots and transit stations can be found in this topic:

All four of these lots are using way too low transit capacity and the Transit Switch Entry Cost (TSEC) values (which are crutial for the proper functionality of the transit lots) are not correct either.

Following the above linked tutorial:

El-Rail station versions should have the TSEC 0.0083
Mono-Rail station versions should have the TSEC 0.0043

The Transit Capacity depends on how many other services one allows for the lot. By default it usually comes with one, if you keep that, then the default formula would apply, which means all for station should have around 54000-55000 passanger capacity. Since there is visable car parking facility on the lot, it could be more (though that means extra transit switches).

So far there isn't really any properly made tutorial for how to set transit switches up properly for lots, we mostly copy/paste the working ones then adjusting them - this is something that we (NAM/MTA) are working on in the future. It's a bit difficult to explain, but for the most of the transit stations where the tracks/lanes go through on the lot (like in the case of  your station), the switches for the main networks (in this case this is the monorail and the el-rail) need to be directional instead of 4-way. So for example the El-Rail is going through on the lot horizontally (that's West-East direction in game), the switches should refer to this West-East directin instead of all four way. The Pedestrians usually walk across the station in some way, so they can have the 4 way switches. Some experiments showed us (thanks to z1) that for better performance the interaction between rail related networks (rail, monorail, elrail) and pedestrians should go with the same two way switches instead of four.  (see image below)

El-Rail with car park

Mono-Rail with car park

The real challenging part is coming if one added subway into the mix. We would recommend in that case to copy the appropriate switches from the NAM stations.

However the job is not yet done. The SC4 Tool is a really useful application to help with setting up Transit Enabled lots, but it has a bug, which only have effect on MAC systems. 

IF you don't use PIM-X (X-Tool) the only way to fix these things is with Reader. Here is how you can do that. Also you can edit and adjust all the property values (like TSEC or Capacity, Plop Cost, Occupant groups etc...)

Staying still with the modding for a bit. You shared 4 lots. I remember we (in the NAM team) were talking about experiments regarding general commerial landmark lots with station functions, but I don't know about any real tests regarding these. For stations "with jobs" usually the Demand Created property is used which gives generic civic jobs.
However if you go for the other way around with Commercial Jobs (which was actually not really explored with functional transportation stations) that requires a different modding and there seems to be some confusion how these properties are built up. The 32 Cs$ and 1200 Cs$$ simply does not seem to be good. If you have a Cs$$ purposed lot that means that the defult funcion would be Cs$$ and if there is not enough demand on Cs$$ jobs then a much higher amount of workers would seek Cs$ jobs on the same lot (this is when the lot gets dilapidated). But usually for proper stats, which would not break the game you should either use Maxis PIM (well that's not the best either) or PIM-X (X-tool) which gives way better and more ballanced stats. However these stats usually based on building models and not dummy ones (while you still can use dummy model, but that requires further calculations). With the civic jobs (Demand Created) you have more room for playing with the numbers. 

Anyhow, thanks for sharing.

- Tyberius

Grea station !This reminded me of a videowhere I saw such a station in  Chongqing region China I believe. Technical SimCity 4 game mechanics I I leave to expert Tyberius06 comment to do. Elevated and monorail statistical as ordinary rail in practice count on a less high scale to subwa or hishspeed rail. Stations Statistics need to be correct but SimCity 4 - NAM overall transport capacity if effectively distributed over the city area allways leaves enough room for sims to find there way around !

 

Sincerely yours,

Kschmidt

  Edited August 13, 2022 by kschmidt  

5 hours ago, Tyberius06 said:

IF you don't use PIM-X (X-Tool) the only way to fix these things is with Reader. Here is how you can do that. Also you can edit and adjust all the property values (like TSEC or Capacity, Plop Cost, Occupant groups etc...)

I've used PIM-X before, but I haven't been able to get it to work yet on this new laptop.  Its a lot more useful than the Maxis PM for making functional lots.

Thank-you greatly for the sensible response and detailed technical info. Modding the lots is as important as the design so I will follow the info you provided and update to Version 2.  I appreciate the NAM expertise in working the networks so I'll experiment further with this project looking more closely at the functionality. You resolved a lot of questions I had while making these lots so this page is now a useful reference.

 I got the idea for these lots while using the WIFI from an A&W in an urban commercial mall with a built-in light rail station.  This design is common now in urban development --so yes, the NAM guys should include something similarly multifunctional with a commercial mall or civic center design (a multi-network hub).  

R.

2 hours ago, urbanmosaic said:

I've used PIM-X before, but I haven't been able to get it to work yet on this new laptop.  Its a lot more useful than the Maxis PM for making functional lots.

I'm gonna send a DM if you don't mind with an installation guide for the PIM-X. In theory that should work on modern systems too. 

2 hours ago, urbanmosaic said:

This design is common now in urban development

Yepp, I had the same idea a while back, I started making urban stations using a bunch of available models from the exchanges, but then got  busy with other stuffs. In the NAM team we have only a few people who can do BATs, and recently they are quite busy with RL. We have the idea of expanding the NAM station collection, but there is a strict no outside dependencies policy in NAM, so we are working with models which we have permission to include to NAM. 

SimCity 4 is unable to handle multi-purpose RCI buildings, something which was never implemented by the original developpers. The best what we can do, is adding this Demand Created property. Maxis PIM would generate a flat R$-95 and R$$-5 (100 jobs) for all type of transportation stations from a simple bus stations shelter to a huge multi-purpose transportation hub. PIM-X has a better calculation on this one, but last year I started experimenting with new formulas, which would give more jobs for larger stations, but those experiments are still in progress. 

Anyhow, if you have questions regarding TE modding or others, just drop me a DM.

- Tyberius

8 hours ago, kschmidt said:

This reminded me of a video where I saw such a station in China Shanghai region

Thanks for including the video.  I like the idea of making a residential building with a monorail station.   There is only one way I know to plop a residential in SC4, and that is to zone a residential the same density and size as desired and wait for a growable to appear, then bulldoze the growable and plop in the desired residential.  The game assumes the function of the growable for the newly plopped residential.

Yes, Tyberius' expert detailed analysis will keep me busy  working on an improved version.

4 hours ago, Tyberius06 said:

I'm gonna send a DM if you don't mind with an installation guide for the PIM-X.

Yes please do.  Below is the error message I'm getting. IIRC last time I resolved it by installing Python, and I tried that and still getting an error so maybe its version dependent.  Notice the .dll file said to be missing is not identified, or not that I can tell. 

When I update  these train stations I'll include the graph of the traffic flow through the station.  I was wondering if pedestrians would exit the train and go to work in the commercial landmark version, and then use the train to commute back home.  I'll use your info as a basis of studying how the lots function.

 

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "SC4PIM.py", line 1, in ?
  File "SC4PIMApp.pyo", line 96, in ?
  File "wx\__init__.pyo", line 45, in ?
  File "wx\_core.pyo", line 4, in ?
  File "wx\_core_.pyo", line 12, in ?
  File "wx\_core_.pyo", line 10, in __load
ImportError: DLL load failed: The specified module could not be found.
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "SC4PIM.py", line 1, in ?
  File "SC4PIMApp.pyo", line 96, in ?
  File "wx\__init__.pyo", line 45, in ?
  File "wx\_core.pyo", line 4, in ?
  File "wx\_core_.pyo", line 12, in ?
  File "wx\_core_.pyo", line 10, in __load
ImportError: DLL load failed: The specified module could not be found.