Rail commute

[Harry's Place 918]

1. I want to connect 3 or 4 cities but only by rail, no roads connectios. Would my sims still commute from one city to another ?

2. I know that farms use rail, but will the farmlands use the rail if there is no railstation, the track is passing through the middle of the farmlands?

3  I usualy plop the railstation like in picture A. Is there any difference between A and B that affects the rail commute? Wich one is the best?

4. What is the best end for a rail track C or D. I use D but again wich one it's best for traffic?

 

 

 

[JJogurt 18]

1. They would.

2. The farmhouses will have to be right next to the tracks for this to work. I'd still recommend you to use a freight station.

3. They're both fine. However, "A" will get you a more accurate passenger statistic when you click on the station.

4. I doesn't matter at all.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

No problem except you can't make garbage deals.  Garbage goes only by road.

 

Stations are so cheap, that I'd put them in on spurs as needed.

 

A puts the station on a siding.  You would be better off to put it on a spur if you need the station stats.

 

============== main line ===============

|

s

p

u

r

|

station (terminal)

[Harry's Place 918]

Thanks!

[infamousjbe 592]

Be careful of 'B', some custom freight stations are not set up to allow through passenger trains. 'A' avoids that situation all together.

[AcronShinra 60]

Be careful of 'B', some custom freight stations are not set up to allow through passenger trains. 'A' avoids that situation all together.

 

But it can be quickly&easily edited with SC4Tool.

[Harry's Place 918]

Thanks again, one last question,as my plugins folder just reached 7GB increasing the virtual memory whould make it run smoother?

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Maybe, but remember that the size of the files has little to do with the size in memory.  I'd set your virtual space to at least 2 GB per processor core. 

 

My system uses a swap partition, so I gave it my smallest one of about 20 GB.  My dual processors hardly use any of this even with a browser, the game, and the rest of the system flying along.  The big problem is CPU cycles because the game is so doggedly single threaded.

[APSMS 1,892]

Be careful of A; an improperly modded station will have trains diverting along the side track because the game treats commute time through TE-lots as zero (so it can be a shortcut if improperly modded).

 

Spurs are a better way to prevent this since there's no thru-traffic. I tried to change the station stats (capacity and TSEC) on some GLR stations, but after modding them they kept crashing the game, so I've resorted to spurs in high traffic situations.

 

Increasing the Virtual Memory will likely prevent crashes (if you're using Windows) but it's unlikely it'll do anything for speed. My old laptop had 3 GB of RAM (a friend gave me a 2GB module a few years after I got it), as well as a 3GB pagefile (Windows equivalent of Virtual RAM). The catch, of course, is that I was running 32-bit Vista, so the extra 2GB of pagefile weren't really doing much. Mainly the extra space allows the computer to pretend you have headroom and simply shuffle stuff around as you need it (from what I understand, anyways). Since it has the headroom, it doesn't resort to having to dump the current files and reload new files from your Hard Disk, but instead simply pulls from your RAM (or pagefile) which is usually faster, though pagefiles are limited by the speed of the hard disk.

 

Also, the game won't try to load all 7 GB worth of plugins at once. I have a similar amount, and have maxed out at 1.6GB of RAM usage (SC$ only, that is) on my 8GB RAM machine. The total being used was around 3.8GB for the whole system, but it's still nowhere near the size of the plugins folder you actually have on the machine.

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

Be careful of A; an improperly modded station will have trains diverting along the side track because the game treats commute time through TE-lots as zero (so it can be a shortcut if improperly modded).

An even worse scenario than that would be a station where driving through it would be the equivalent of having an extra thousand tiles of network to travel, rendering the whole rail line useless due to the extra distance; scenario A would (mostly) prevent that, but scenario B would kill the entire rail line. This is actually how the default Monorail station was broken.

 

This is all due to the TSEC value, not so much commute time. What you described is referred to as "shortcutting" where a TSEC that's too low would be the equivalent of driving through a building to get to work, as opposed to around it like a civilised driver; this leads to unrealistically low commute time numbers. The other end of the spectrum is the aforementioned "extra thousand tiles" scenario, where the TSEC is too high; this would lead to unrealistically high commute times if abandonment weren't a factor.