NAM Traffic Simulators

[sim_city-freak 0]

i aways wanted to ask this but Radical Custom Special in the NAM says it commute time speed and capacity increased grately but i wonder by how much.

ehich is faster bigger capcity and more tolerant of commute time 10x everything or Radical Custom Special

[jplumbley 5]

This is a quick run down of the Radical Custom Simulator from the original NAM.  You can look at the first post in this thread and follow the link in my previous post to understand the differences.

Radical Custom Special

Street: 1000
Road: 5000
OWR: 10000
Avenue: 20000
Highway / El-Highway: 50000
Rural Highway: 15000
Subway / El-Rail / GLR: 10000
Monorail: 10000
Rail: 10000

Maximum Commute Time:  120
Maximum Mass Transit Commute Time: 80

Notes: (Red = Bad, Green = Good)

- Travel Strategy has been modified so that no Sim prefers Mass Transit.  Simulation will prefer car driving over Mass Transit.  R$$ and R$$$ will behave identically.

- Traffic Speeds have not been changed from Vanilla game.  This is good for TE Lots, modifing the Speed will throw off the Traffic Switch Cost.

- Commute Times blindly modified and are too long.  At Vanilla Traffic Speeds, the maximum Commute Time to cross a Large City tile is between 15 and 25 there and back.  This is too high and will promote the Commute Circles which have been found to be a big problem by the CAM.

- Capacities are too high, they will not promote the Simulation to use other routes and it will in most cases choose the shortest route possible.  Congestion will almost never be a factor in planning your transit system.  Capacities also put Mass Transit at a disadvantage due to them being much lower than Avenues and Highways.

- Capacities at Intersections is not modified.  Vanilla game implemented this to a point where having intersections will put you Road networks at a much higher disadvantage than they should be.

[jplumbley 5]

Originally posted by: jamicha Thanks for helping me JP. I put in the new congestion scale, looked at the congestion and it was all green and good. I let it run for a good bit to make sure everything went into play. I took a screenshot of the route of one of the long commute houses. This is a house that was medium wealth and was abandoned and taken over by low wealth. The commute is considered to be long and it seems short enough to me. Is this picture something that won't be fixed by the traffic simulator?quote>

 

This has been a tough question.  Mostly, because I am not the one playing your game.

From what I see, it seems as though you have no Mass Transit in your city yet.  This means that some of your Sims will get a "penalty" towards their trip cost since they are considered as "Mass Transit Preferred" by the Simulator.  This penalty may be what is causing the "Long Commute" report, or maybe the fact that the Sims are MT Preffered with no MT to goto.  I am not entirely sure, but I would assume this is where the "issue" should derive from.

As for the building dilapidating, there can be numerous reasons as to why it is dilapidating.  If you are having widescale abandonment or dilapidation in a sector of your city, then that generally is an indication it has to do with the Traffic Simulator.  When it is a single building or a number of buildings speard out amoungst your city it tends to be something that derives from the Demand Simulator.  If you read more about the CAM - Colossus Addon Mod at SC4D, there is alot of information about the Demand Simulator and Demand Drives etc.  RippleJet has been a wonder when it comes to investigating those Simulators.

Link to the CAM Board:  https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?board=185.0

*There is information in the CAM Threads that pertain to the game as a whole that is very useful knowledge about how the game works.  You do not have to download the mod to employ some of the benefits of the information provided from explaining the mod.

[jamicha 0]

I have subways all over the place. Is that considered mass transit? I really thought that was my problem too so I've been finding houses that become abandoned and reinhabited and tried to fix their commute probs. I just find it weird when one house of high wealth people will travel across the city and it be a short or medium commute and then I have medium wealth citizens that won't go around the corner without it being a long commute. I put in the new congestion scale and I'm still at green. It's very weird.

I'll go read the CAM threads now. Do you think it could be a problem with playing on a mac instead of a pc? I know there have been different updates for them.

[jplumbley 5]

Originally posted by: jamicha

I'll go read the CAM threads now. Do you think it could be a problem with playing on a mac instead of a pc? I know there have been different updates for them.quote>

 

No, I dont think this is the case, since I do not release different files for PC compared to MAC.  They are the same files, just, MAC is in a zip folder and PC is in an Installer.

It also could come down to the fact that the Simulators are not perfect and can only go so far Simulating real life.  The will be flaws and anomolies all the time that we may never get the real answer for and this one house may just be one of these cases.

[jamicha 0]

I wish it was just one house but there are multiple ones. I'm switching things out and seeing what I can do to work with it. I'm trying to put low density lots in these spots so its not affecting a lot of people during the abandonment phase. I can say once a house is stable with a short or medium commute it doesn't change. I have some houses that go back and forth with problems and some that go to high wealth, get abandoned and are take back over by medium wealth and stay medium wealth but in the dilapidated form.

It is very weird though. Things still don't add up but I guess the simulator is doing the best it can. Do you think I should try one of the others(easy or medium?) or the park and ride?

[ChookWoods 1]

im using the new plugins... from memory... mode A with the park and go setup. i havent experienced any bugs with it, but theres one thing im wondering. what CPU requirements are expected of using this plugin? i used to be able to play vanilla simcity 4 on large maps with huge populations fine, using old name traffic plugis slowed things down, but this was only really noticable on my computer at 300,000+ population. but now, im using the new plugins and have roughly 25,000 population in a large stock map, and the game crawls along. it takes sometimes up to 30 seconds for 1 day to pass, or on average, 5-10 seconds. i have a AMD athlon 3000+ cpu, 1gb ram. id expect this to run a 5 year old game better than this. i do have a large amount of other mods installed, but the only one i could think of that may cause such slowdowns, i have already tried deleting every instance of from my city and noticed no speed up at all. so yeah, really just wondering if this is expected behaviour from a cpu of my speed, of if i have something else slowing it down to help me narrow it down. thanks.

[jplumbley 5]

Originally posted by: ChookWoods im using the new plugins... from memory... mode A with the park and go setup. i havent experienced any bugs with it, but theres one thing im wondering. what CPU requirements are expected of using this plugin? i used to be able to play vanilla simcity 4 on large maps with huge populations fine, using old name traffic plugis slowed things down, but this was only really noticable on my computer at 300,000+ population. but now, im using the new plugins and have roughly 25,000 population in a large stock map, and the game crawls along. it takes sometimes up to 30 seconds for 1 day to pass, or on average, 5-10 seconds. i have a AMD athlon 3000+ cpu, 1gb ram. id expect this to run a 5 year old game better than this. i do have a large amount of other mods installed, but the only one i could think of that may cause such slowdowns, i have already tried deleting every instance of from my city and noticed no speed up at all. so yeah, really just wondering if this is expected behaviour from a cpu of my speed, of if i have something else slowing it down to help me narrow it down. thanks.quote>

 

I am no expert on calculating System Requirements.  There are two options you can try.  First the most simple one, try Simulator A without Park and Ride to see if that helps.

Second option is a little more involved and requires you to use iLive's Reader for a 2 second edit to your current file or you to PM me with an email address to send you a second possible test file to see if it helps.

Currently the new Simulators have a Pathfinding "Accuracy" value between the "Better" and "Perfect" Pathfinding.  The closer to "Perfect" it goes the more it has an effect on your System Requirement.

IF you are confident enough to use iLives Reader to change one number follow these instructions:

1. File --> Open  "NAM_Simulator_A_***"

2. In the right hand box of the screen hit the button Fill List.  If there is no button named Fill List, it should mean there is a list of Properties.

3. In the list of Properties look for Pathfinding Huerstic, I forget how to spell it off hand.  The value will be low in the range of 0.03 or something.  The lower this value is the more Paths the game will test, and by way of a wider test bed a more accurate path, but since it is calculating more paths it will be using more processor time.  So if you want less processor time to be used, then set this value higher.  I do not know how to make this optimal for a computer setting but setting it to 0.3 and testing it may help your system overall.  If it is still too slow at 0.3 then there is something else happening and I may have to look into it further.

4. To edit the value double click on it and type it in and hit apply.

5. When finished editing the value File --> Save As "z_NAM_Simulator_A_***"  this way you know which file you have editted for your test and move the  original file out of your plugins for your test in game.

[ChookWoods 1]

thanks for you help... i edited the file. but well i saw an improvement, nothing huge, but an improvement none the less... but im thinking theres a deeper issue. when i loaded the file in ilive reader its original value was 0.009 which seems really demanding compared to your 0.03 estimate (im using original nam plugin for the "radical custom special" along with the new plugin for park and ride option A hard. i tried removing the radical custom special thinking maybe they were conflicting? but that only seemed to increase my average commute time from 3 minutes to 60 minutes so i assumed they both worked together? (and no performance increase from doing so either) i then tried the 0.3 setting for pathfinding, which still had the slow moments of 1 day ever 1-2 seconds, but it had burts of around a month - 1.5 months before slowing down to the 1-2 seconda day for a little bit. im my mind this says the pathfinding isnt the root problem, but may be contributing to it. its prob a difficult question as you dont know all the other plugins i have installed, but is there anything else you can think of? if you have the time and think it could help, i could list you all the plugins i have installed? or possibly if you can think of anything in particular, narrow it down to a type of plugin i can list what i have of those. either way thanks for the help.

[jplumbley 5]

You should not have any of the original NAM Traffic Plugins installed.  In fact if you have one of them installed it IS a conflict and will actually override the new one due to the placement in the NAM Plugins folder.

About the "change" in Commute Time Graph.  There is no way for you to really compare the Commute Time Graph from one Simulator to the next.  In NAM_Simulator_A, a 60 minute Commute Time reported means that on average the Sims are "driving" 512 tiles (one large City Tile) on an Avenue.  Due to the speeds of each network type being different it means that the average distance on the highway or the rail is a bit further than that of the Avenue.

The Commute Time Graph really has not bearing on the game.  There is a property in the Traffic Simulator, if I remember correctly named "Commute Time Graph Multiplier"... This property essentially multiplies the actual "Hop Count" the Simulator calculates for the trips and multiplies their average by this multiplier.  This property was not editted from the Standard MAXIS value in the NAM Traffic Plugins originally.  This means that they  were not scaled to be able to compare them to any other Traffic Simulator and how "effective" they were.

As for your "slowdown" issue, it really depends on your system, amount of plugins, and types of plugins.  I have heard more recently that there are complaints after NAM is installed that it takes longer to load the game and load a city tile, but I havent heard about it slowing down the game more than normal in game.  Maybe it is something we can look into, I will bring up this in the NAM Private Boards to see if we can get any ideas.

The only other thing I can think of off hand would be a conflict of some type in your plugins and I doubt that would be a conflict with NAM.  Although you may be right that it is a "conflict" that because of the system resources NAM requires that has added to the slowdown and made it more evident.

[pontypool 0]

links dont work... do all road still act the same ?

[ChookWoods 1]

ok this sounds interesting. from in game behaviour, the new plugin for mode a with park and ride is working correctly, but yet the commute times are around 3 mins average on a large city tile with some people travelling the whole way across it, which fits inline with what you described with the speed ups introduced in nam but not changing how the commute graph reflects this. the 60 minute commute sounds more fitting then, so i guess ill try deleting all my nam stuff and installing again fresh, making sure the new plugin is the only one present. also, i have tried removing the majority of my plugins, just leaving the essential ones i use most (nam, custom terrain and water, plopable trees, radius doubler, industry quadrupler and a few more) and i noticed a small improvement in performance, not to mention i changed my traffic plugin from 0.009 to 0.0175. thanks for your help ill report back if i can get any more performance back.

[doorknob60 11]

*downloads* looks really nice! I'll have to try that out soon

EDIT: Not sure if I'll keep using this actually because it improved commute times a ton, the speed on my Rural Highways is reduced to a crawl (maybe the speed of streets). Any plans on fixing this?

EDIT2: Looks like this shouldn't be happening. Maybe it just makes it look like they're super slow? Can you confirm this? I might also try messing Around and see if I did something wrong

[ChookWoods 1]

so ok i made a fresh nam install... selecting the standard traffic plugin in nam and then installed the new plugins mode a park and ride. it didnt overwrite the nam installed one so i deleted it manually. so i gave this a try... commute times were around 90 instead of 3, but this didnt seem to change anything with sims complaining about long commutes even though the majority of them were a medium - long commute. as for performance, well it seemed to start off with a burst of 2-3 months in a matter of seconds then would slow back down to the 1-2 days a second thing for another 2-3 months before doing the process all over again. i honestly dont know what is causing this. my computer isnt great by todays standards but it should handle this game fine and has in the past. short of just deleting the nam all together and trying the standard maxis rules, i think the only other thing i can try is hoping my friend brings down his new intel quad core computer this weekend so i can copy the game across and see if a modern cpu suffers any unexpected problems with it. oh yes btw, something i have been meaning to ask. am i doing something wrong in the way i am replying? i enter paragraphs in the reply window, but when i submit it comes out as just a solid block of text. the only reply button i can find is the text reply under every post and thats what i have been using... is there another button that will allow paragraphs, or is it not as simple as just pressing enter twice?

[jplumbley 5]

Originally posted by: doorknob60 *downloads* looks really nice! I'll have to try that out soon

EDIT: Not sure if I'll keep using this actually because it improved commute times a ton, the speed on my Rural Highways is reduced to a crawl (maybe the speed of streets). Any plans on fixing this?

EDIT2: Looks like this shouldn't be happening. Maybe it just makes it look like they're super slow? Can you confirm this? I might also try messing Around and see if I did something wrong quote>

 

For your problem on the RHW visually being "slow"... It is only visually slow, the actual speed of the network is the speed of the higways.  This happened when you used the Clean-it-ol file, when I was copying the file names I accidentally included the NAM Automata Plugins.  It deleted your Automata Plugin.  This will be fixed when the next version of the NAM comes out and these files replace the original Traffic Plugins in the NAM.

You can fix this by re-installing the NAM and then manually removing the old Traffic Plugin installed with the NAM.

Originally posted by: ChookWoods so ok i made a fresh nam install... selecting the standard traffic plugin in nam and then installed the new plugins mode a park and ride. it didnt overwrite the nam installed one so i deleted it manually. so i gave this a try... commute times were around 90 instead of 3, but this didnt seem to change anything with sims complaining about long commutes even though the majority of them were a medium - long commute. quote>

These Simulators are not designed to "fix" your Traffic System, they are designed to be a balanced alternative to the MAXIS Standard and implement things that MAXIS didnt tune properly or even use.  If your Transit System has faults in it, it cannot correct them it will in fact highlight some of them for you to fix it yourself and give you a more challenging experience while planning your Transit System.

btw, something i have been meaning to ask. am i doing something wrong in the way i am replying? i enter paragraphs in the reply window, but when i submit it comes out as just a solid block of text. the only reply button i can find is the text reply under every post and thats what i have been using... is there another button that will allow paragraphs, or is it not as simple as just pressing enter twice?quote>

 

There is a "Reply" button at the bottom of each Post that will bring up a reply window that will allow alot of extra formatting.  The "quick reply" at the bottom of the page is for just that quick replies.

[ChookWoods 1]

ok so ive tried removing all mods except for the essential stuff like nam and stuff i knew worked fine in the past. and tried different combinations of traffic simulators. i also tried putting the game on my friends computer which has 4gb ram and a intel Q6600 processor.

nothing changed the performance problems. the only thing i can think of, and will ask now, is i use the curved roads in nam extensively in my cities... like, VERY extensively. is it possible the pathing on these could cause the slow downs?

i even started a new city on a medium size map this time, 30k population and the slow downs are begining again.

also, sorry about the seemingly newby questions about the reply button... it seems this website isnt very compatible with opera so the text formatting options and quick reply fields never loaded.

[un1 41]

I can't wait!

[jplumbley 5]

Originally posted by: ChookWoods ok so ive tried removing all mods except for the essential stuff like nam and stuff i knew worked fine in the past. and tried different combinations of traffic simulators. i also tried putting the game on my friends computer which has 4gb ram and a intel Q6600 processor.

nothing changed the performance problems. the only thing i can think of, and will ask now, is i use the curved roads in nam extensively in my cities... like, VERY extensively. is it possible the pathing on these could cause the slow downs?

i even started a new city on a medium size map this time, 30k population and the slow downs are begining again.

also, sorry about the seemingly newby questions about the reply button... it seems this website isnt very compatible with opera so the text formatting options and quick reply fields never loaded.quote>

 

After a bit of discussion with one of the awesome Transit Modders of old, Karybdis, he has given me an idea that could be the culript of the "slowdown".

Lets, just say you arent the first person who has given  me the heads up about the slowdown issue.  I have had reports of it since before the Simulators were even released, but they started after the January 08 Update of the NAM.  It seems that we may have reached some sort of threshold (maybe) in the RULs.  Either, there are now simply too many RULs and it is causing this slowdown, or there is a line or a couple of lines of RULs that could be in conflict with each other or trying to do similar things.  The latter is probably the most likely, but is VERY hard to determine.  This will definately need to be discussed and tested further within the NAM Team but I am not sure how likely a "fix" for this issue can arise, if we ever find what the culprit is.

I can be sure that the issue is caused by the January 08 Update of NAM, and not the NAM Simulators as my first report came approximately 3 weeks before the Simulators were released publically, and reported by someone outside the Simulator test group.  I have also experienced this issue, and I didnt think anything of it at the time, but now that I think about it is was before I had the Simulators for even my testing purposes.

There were major RUL additions to the January 08 NAM, changes to the NAM Controller included RHW v20, SAM v2, Arkenbergejoe's El-HRail puzzle pieces, and a few minor things.  As it stands now, for SAM v3, there will be 200 pages (66 lines per page) of SAM RULs, thats approximately 13000 lines of RULs.  RHW has a few thousand lines aswell.  So, if the issue is in those RULs we will have to narrow it down.

[raildigga666 2]

I downloaded the new version with the 2008 april nam and the monorails still pollute.... what a disapointment. :/

[redbull75 1]

How do you apply the various traffic pluging in the 08 NAM? Whenever I select perfect pathfinding and install the NAM, i go back to see that standard is checked off. The file appears in my plugins but is obviously not being implemented in my cities...

[rebelfish 1]

I searched and didn't find an answer for this, but yell at me if I missed something.

I've installed the NAM A, on easy, which should increase the capacity of the mass transit systems, right?  Now when I query the stations, it still has the same old 2000 for subway, etc, that Maxis programmed.  Should that number change, or is it just the hidden mechanics that change?

[b22rian 153]

Hi rebelfish..,

it is the network capacities that change.. ie: the roads, the tracks , the subway lines.. which

are allowed to now carry more traffic than what you were used to before.. The stations ,

capacities are still the same as they were before you installed the new traffic Sim..

Eventually you may want to search around for stations with higher capacities on the Stex

if you feel you need them as your city grows larger...

Hope this helps you.. 

Brian

[redbull75 1]

How do you apply the various traffic pluging in the 08 NAM? Whenever I select perfect pathfinding and install the NAM, i go back to see that standard is checked off. The file appears in my plugins but is obviously not being implemented in my cities...

[rebelfish 1]

Great, thanks!

[quickymart 0]

Ahoy all,

Apologies for the thread bump. Interesting read, although I didn't go through all of it (rather lengthy). After not playing SC4 for ages, I picked up the Deluxe Edition while in America last year and installed it (previously I had purchased my SC4 here in NZ).

The game plays okay, although I think I'm due for an upgrade! Anyway, I'm having the issue of long commute times and abandoned buildings. I'm a guy that likes to do things a little differently; I have Residential, Commercial and Industrial, all on one map. I lay out mass transit right from the beginning, and before I place anything, I separate the residential/commercial from the industrial by something, usually a hill, so the pollution doesn't spread. I have rail, motorways and subways connecting the aforementioned zones, mostly through tunnels (although some rail goes over the hill).

I find that my Sims have an extremely low tolerance for commuting to work, despite me having puh-lenty of transport options available other than their cars!

I used to use the NAM that had best pathfinding capacity and 10X commute capacity (from memory). I've installed the new NAM, and selected what I thought was the best, the 5X increase, but I'm getting buildings abandoned all over the show. My industrial seems quite slow to develop too (unless that's normal?)

I'm at a bit of a loss at to what to do, as everything worked really well with the old NAM, but the new one doesn't seem to be helping commute time/pathfinding issues, it just seems to be making them worse.

If any screenshots or version numbers are required, I'm happy to post them (can't do so currently as I'm at work), but if anyone has a suggestion as to what I should be using instead based on what I've explained above, please feel free to comment.

Thanks in advance

[packersfan 666]

I went into iliveReader and edited the maximum commute time in minutes on Simulator_A_easy...it was 17 (mins)...what does this exactly mean? I turned it up to 400 just to see what may happen.