Disappearing Commuters

[Marty22 0]

I've decided to create a new topic on this issue, as it doesnt relate to the "bermuda triangle" or "twilight zone sims" described in similar topics.

Plain and simple, while 20,000 sims leave a city "A" border on a highway (bus and car) only 700 appear on the "other side" of the connection in city "B".

Similarly, thousands of sims leave the city on the train, but in the next city NONE appear to be arriving.

I have eliminated all the obvious reasons like bad connection, faulty city -tried it on many different city tiles- and yes, i let it run on fast forward for over 20 years. I saved and jumped form city to city to give it multiple chances to let the path finding engine catch up.  Nothing worked.

Nothing like this happened to me before with the old NAM, could it be a bug in the new april 08 NAM? In the previous regions i built, the amount of sims leaving a city tile always corresponded with the amount arriving to the neighboring city, but not here. Any ideas why?
Thanks

[Yeah_Right 2]

try this: leave it on day / night cycle.

in the morning, when the sims are going to work, query the route and note down the number of commuters.

in the night, when they are coming back, query the route they take home, and note down the number of commuters.

also, make sure the commuters take the same route going back and forth.

if they dont, u will have to find out what route they take, and query that one.

hope it helps

good luck

[Marty22 0]

thanks for that yeah_right. I'll do that when i get home. what is it supposed to do to solve the problem? there is only one route in and out the neighbor, so they cant possibly find another route to get home.

[Facelessman 5]

The sims need somewhere to go. If they can't find a place to work (or another connection, but be careful to avoid infinite loops-going from city A to B to C back to A), they won't show up at all in the destination city.

[tjh876 31]

hum... Wow, now you are connecting two cites in a region by what means of transportation? And maybe your sims are working the night shift.

                      edit: Made my 100th post here!!

[NetPCDoc 1]

Hello Marty22,

Just a quick thought - try running the destination cities on a slower setting for a while; on the faster settings - some of the simulators don't update as often.

-NetPCDoc

No detail is too small to be micromanaged.

[Marty22 0]

Yeah_Right: tried day/ night cycle - didnt do anything. no change. actually, i did NOT get people coming back, they arrows pointed one way only.

Faceless_man: thanks, dude. I know of the loops, and this is not the case. it's a simple A to B connection.

Tommy7777:  and others - I did and experiment. I disconnected the central city from any neighbour. Then i created a new city in a previously empty neighbouring tile and only built industry there. Buildings popped up, freight trucks started running around. I went to the main city, made sure it's not connected to any other ones, only to the new industrial. I only made one connection. HIGHWAY. i had 20+K people leaving via this connection to work in the industrial city. Saved it, went back to the industrial city, ran the simulation and 796 people (out of 20,000) reappeared in cars. so SOME did make it through. less then 5%.

I then disconnected the highway and made a train connection and again 20K+ were catching the train to the industrial, but NONE reappeared on the other side.

As you see, i minimized the potential interfering factors and still keep getting illogical results. I wonder whether anyone else has this experience?

NET PC DOC: i did, and did not make a difference.

[Hahayoudied 3]

This happened to me before twice. First time was driving me super insane, the commuters from other cities would commute to my main city. In my main city, all of them show up, however, sometime the commuters never show up, not even one, even though the commuters in the other cities were still commuting to my main city. Since all of the commuters never showed up in my city, my main city budget took a huge hit (since my main city had pay tolls on the highway connection and it had mass trainst). I even had June (or July) 2007 NAM installed.

After my laptop hard drive failed, I lost all of my SC4 cities and plugins. I restarted and everything was going fine. After my region had several cities in it, I faced the same problem, again. The same problem was region wide. I had April 2008 NAM and CAM installed.

I noticed that the SC4 traffic simulator only calculate the traffic route inside the city. As a result, the game knows their are jobs in the other city, so it ships commuter to the other city, not caring if the jobs in the other city had been taken, or how long the commute in the other is. Once the commuters leave the city, the game considers that the commuters are employed.

This program bug was purposly created by EA to reduce the game's system resource usage, since SC4 used a lot of system resource, and many computers during 2003 had trouble supporting SC4.

NAM can't fix the problem. Why? The program bug was hard coded into the game, only EA can edit hard coded parts of the game. SC4 mod creators can't edit hard coded parts of the game, since they lack the tools that EA have.

The only solutions we have right now , prevent the problem somehow, or live with it.

[Marty22 0]

thanks hahyoudied for your answer.

what you say about the hard coding of the bug makes sense, however, why does it do it only SOMETIMES not ALWAYS?

there's one more thing that i have done to the region - imported a couple of cities. i have to point out that none of them are a part of the problem though - the commuting there is fine last time i checked.

ther problem itself doesnt make the game impossible to play at the moment, as i use radical demand and money cheats, but i wanted to have a realistic and working transportation system region wide with people commuting to jobs region wide.

what's even more strange is that commuters still come INTO the main city without any problems. it's the ones that try to go out who disappear.

anyway, i'll keep working on it, and if any of you guys know anything more or had a similar issue. i'd like to hear how you dealt with it.

cheers.