Newbie question. Traffic lights missing, solutions?

[UM1fan 0]

Many moons ago, I used to play the original Sim City quite regularly, got turned off because of lack of variety (for everything), far too much repitition. About 2 months ago, a friend introduced me to SC4, interested me enough to start playing again. I began to experience the same problem.....then I discovered sites like this. I was in heaven, this is exactly what I wanted more of everything. But be careful what you wish for, right? Because I am fairly new to SC4, all my plugins and updates are (to my knowledge) the most recent available including NAM, RHW, NWM, CAM, RLM and SPAM.

I have been playing around with creating a nice main street to 6 lane highway interchange. What I can't figure out is how to create the actual intersection for the off-ramp. There are no traffic lights. I have this same problem elsewhere but this the area of my focus right now. Fix one problem at a time, right? Is this a bug issue or am I just not educated enough?

One other pet peeve right now is traffic is very sporadic. All vehicles appear on the screen for maybe 3 seconds and disappear and when they are there, driving is very erratic, all over the road with no rhyme or reason to it.

Also, I downloaded the Coca-Cola transport truck file and now my cities / towns are flooded with them.

Any solutions or video tutorial links would be extremely helpful to any of these issues. Here is a pic of my problem.

Thanks in advance for your efforts to ease my frustrations.

UM1fan

  Edited October 2, 2012 by UM1fan  

[UM1fan 0]

I don't know what happened to my picture. Can't seem to put it up now either. File too big to post twice (397Kb).

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

For your first problem, post a picture* of what your "six-lane highway" looks like, because right now, that could be anything: 6S, 6C, RD-6, AVE-6, TLA-7, MHW, EMHW...

Your second problem sounds like an automata problem, which could be solved by installing a different automata mod. It could also be a traffic simulator problem. First, when you installed the NAM, did you select the option for one of the NAM's traffic simulators and did you also select an Automata plugin?

* - And when I say post a picture, I mean upload to Imageshack (or imgur or Photobucket or some other image-hosting site) and put a link to the picture.

  Edited October 2, 2012 by Ganaram Inukshuk  

[jdenm8 362]

The Coke truck will be spamming because there are comparably few vehicles to choose from, the Maxis ones repeat a lot.

Your best bet will be getting some more diverse Automata. Have a look on the STEX for Mikeseith's sets and download all of them. The bias may shift toward Volkswagen Combi vans, but at least they don't stick out as much as a bright red coke truck.

There are also a bunch of other creators who have worked on automata as well, do a STEX search for "Automata" or "Cars" and the STEX gods may bless you with relevant results (for once).

If you don't want cars to degenerate as quickly, you might want to look into the Persistent Automata Mod, just make sure it's installed exactly as the instructions say. It can end up with some rather funny traffic jams and highlights the game's largely broken traffic light system.

As for the traffic lights, not all of the intersections actually have lights. None of the intersections with RHW-Based networks can have working traffic lights (It's a limitation of the network, One Way Road suffers from a similar issue) so we usually don't bother with them.

The FAD-44 and FAD-22 puzzle pieces also don't have any T21s out of the box either. They were a late addition to NAM30 so aren't 100% up to spec (From memory, the textures don't match up properly on the FAD-44 unless you're using ShadowAssassin's TuLEPs Cosmetic mod).

If you're using any of the non-One Way Road networks in the NWM, we may be looking at a bug or unintentional omission.

  Edited October 2, 2012 by jdenm8  

[UM1fan 0]

Here is the picture I tried to attach before. I set up an Imageshack account with a direct link as instructed.

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/405/traffica.jpg/

Thanks again.

UM1fan

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

Here is the picture I tried to attach before.

Alright then...

Same thing as JD stated: Not all crossings have traffic lights, and that's one of them.

[UM1fan 0]

How will the traffic react when approaching this intersection? Act as a 4way stop? invisible (perceived) light? I'm not gonna have a free for all, accident prone intersection, am I? I guess that's my only real concern, that traffic will still flow normally.

[jdenm8 362]

Traffic will just continue through the intersection. You won't have accidents until the intersection itself becomes congested (Automata is only a vague representation of congestion) and those accidents are only to indicate that the intersection needs upgrading.