Could someone please make a realistic traffic mod for a region?

[htmlishard 0]

I was wondering if anyone could make a mod that would allow for regional traffic flow between multiple cities on major thoroughfares.

Thank you,

htmlishard.

[cap_601 0]

Doesn't that already happen? If you've got RH try the NAM as it should fix your problem ands adds othe traffic options to the game. If you don't have RH then buy it - it is worth it.

[htmlishard 0]

I do have rush hour, but there is no realstic regional traffic. For instance, cars can travel from city A to B, but not from city A, through city B, to cit C.

[Lazamair 0]

The Game itself does go from A thru B to C, as long as the cities are close together.  As for a Mod, the NAM does have DAT files that affect the pathing.  Other than that, i cant think of anything else. 

[the7trumpets 10]

This game's commute engine is complex.  In many ways it is complex in a good way, other times it is necissarily simplified since we're not all running SC4 on a SUN serverfarm.  If you had the pleasure of reading through the 'travel time testing' thread many moons ago, you will have seen the confusion and amazement at the commute engine first hand.

 

 

The good news?  We can customize almost everything about the commute engine within one city, except for where the sim decides to work.

 

The bad news? The way the game handles intercity commuting does not necissarily result in the best routes being taken between cities, and it gets extremely buggy when more than 65535 sims (What fits in a UNIT16 variable) commute between cities on a single neighbor connection tile.

 

 

Unfortunately, I could probably write a book about twice the size as the PRIMA guide just on the commute engine, so I will attempt to boil it down to the basics:

 

 

 

From the last few years of tearing the game apart, it has become apparent that maxis attempted to create a realistic commute sim engine, then realized it would simply take too much commuting power and scaled it back.  The result is a system which limits travel distance in order to conserve CPU time used.

 

Simply increasing the distance sims will travel to get to work does work, but it does not have the desired effect.  Because of the way the intercity commute engine behaves, it is advisable to increase the typically faster methods of transit to beyond thier normal speed, and keep the typically slower forms of transit below thier typical speed.  Doing this encourages sims to get onto higher speed transit networks like train, monorail, highway, and avenues before they leave the city, thereby greatly increasing the chance that thier intercity commute route will actually make sense.

 

This is the reason that my 'realistic' version of the original pathfinding mod (pre-RushHour) did just that, to attempt to 'herd' the sims onto highways before they left the city so they wouldn't wander around aimlessly on roads and streets trying to go through 4 different neighboring cities.

 

 

 

Finally, creating a realistic traffic modd is difficult for the primary reason that most people do NOT build thier cities in a realistic manner.  Realistically, in suburban USA cities, there are residential areas about the size of two large city blocks with no commercial or industrial zones in them whatsoever.  It really is a challenge to lay out a simcity like a real city, because of the tendency to mix everything, or the tendency to separate everything based on the city squares.  The way people build thier cities makes it hard to create a realistic modd because what may be in fact a 'realistic' modd would also have to do things like increase the pollution radius from highways from 2 or 3 tiles to 20 or 30 tiles(which we can do) increase traffic noise spread (which we CANNOT do), etc.

 

Basically, it's a noble cause, and I've thought about it many times, but real life, or other sc4 projects have always taken precidence for one reason or another.  If you want to give a stab at it yourself, start by drastically increasing (x10 or x15) the speed of highways, monorails, passenger train), moderately increasing the speed (x of avenues, roads, eltrain, subway, marginally increasing the speed (x3) of streets, and increasing the walking speed a fair ammount (x10).  If you experiment with it long enough in enough cities which are truly built realistically, you should arrive at capacity numbers around 50k for highways, on down to 500 for streets.

 

 

 

The big trouble, as I mentioned before, is the neighbor connection problems.  When a neighbor connection tops 65535 sims, it see-saws between the real number (72000 for instance), and the real number minus 65535.  If you save your city when the number of sims quoted as going through each connection has dropped below the actual number, you might as well destroy the region and start over.  All the sudden, the city they were commuting into will only have that lower number of sims commuting into it, and all of your traffic patterns are ruined.

 

Kinda makes you wish we all had super computers so that maxis didn't hve to make necissary concessions, huh?

 

[andreharv 1,197]

You see guys?  THAT is why I'm glad Simcity 5 is taking so long.  Hopefully by the time it comes out, Maxis will find a way to efficiently map out intercity travel while in the regional view so that this problem doesn't arise.  Ya know, it would be nice if one of these multimillion dollar supercomputers had a buffed up version of Simcity where the cities were in their real time proportions.  That would be sweet!