Another neighbour connection problem

[urbietorbi 0]

Greetings. I have a problem with my neighbour connections and would appreciate some advice from a more experienced player.

 

Here is the situation: I’ve got two cities, the one is mostly residential, the other industry only; call them Res and Indi. At first, I connected the two cities via the 4-lane narrow road (i.e. a one-tile road) and the connection worked fine: cars, pedestrians, and freight trucks use the connecting road, in both Res and Indi, to get to the other city. (I used the traffic query tool to discern this.)

 

Then I replaced the 4-lane narrow road with the wider, two-tile 4-lane road (Nrd-4 with Rd-4), and placed the appropriate Neighbour Connector Pieces. The following happened:

 

(a) in Indi, only freight trucks use the connecting road to leave the city tile. No cars or pedestrians come in via that road.

(b) At first, SOME cars and pedestrians still use the connecting road in Res to get to Indi, but the number of commuters is much smaller than before. (I had about 800 commuters with the narrow road, and it dropped to about 250 with the wider road.)

© After a few Sim-months, the connecting road in Res is not used any more by anybody. Not even the freight trucks are shown as incoming (although they are still shown as outgoing in Indi). Unemployment spread accordingly.

 

I’d like to stress that the jobs, or the distance from the houses to the jobs, isn’t the problem, as far as I can tell: upon replacing the Rd-4 with Nrd-4 again, the commuters are back and the unemployment has gone away. (No abandonment either.)

I also don’t seem to have made a mistake with the Neighbour Connector Pieces as, as I said, there were some commuters (cars and not just freight trucks) at first.

 

Any and all advice would be much appreciated!

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Odd.  If you placed the connector pieces correctly, there should be no problem.  It might be worth bulldozing the connections and redoing them very carefully, but I don't normally have that problem.

 

One comment about freight trucks.  They never originate in a tile coming from another city over a neighbour connection.  Once a freight truck reaches a connection that takes them out of the tile, the go to the big bit bucket in the sky, never to be seen again.  Any edge connector or a seaport will perform this function.  You can only expect commuter traffic across a neighbour connection, but freight trucks will use it to exit the tile.

[urbietorbi 0]

Thanks for the prompt reply and the comment about the freight trucks. I re-did the connector pieces several times, to no avail. So, just to be on the safe side, here is how I do it:

 

1. Drag the lanes of the relevant RD-4 to the edge of the map, and hit ‘accept’ both times in the appearing dialog box.

2. Place the connector piece over the tiles that have the yellow arrows on them. (Orientation of the connector doesn’t matter as long as the road markings line up, right? So there are two eqully correct ways to put the piece down, not just one?)

3. Go to the ‘receiving’ city tile and place an RD-4 starter piece; then connect that to the ‘incoming’ roads.

4. Place the connector piece over the tiles that have the yellow arrows on them (again without regard to orientation).

 

Is that correct? It's what I understood from the various NAM manuals. I tried this several times, even swapped step 2 and 3. I always get the same result…

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Sounds good to me.  Maybe the NAM team would be so kind as to comment on this.

[urbietorbi 0]

Quick update: I deleted the Rd-4 connection and put some industry into the city tile where I have my residential areas. That took care of the unemployment. Then I reconnected the cities (with Rd-4) and – very bizarrely – immediately got a lot of unemployment. I didn’t delete any of the industry near the residential area; so if anything, connecting should have added jobs and not taken them away. As soon as I deleted the connecting road again, the unemployment went away.

 

Any advice from the NAM team would be very welcome at this point.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

There is something really weird going on.  You are not playing on Timbuktu by any chance, are you?  That region has been hacked to allow the tutorials to run.

[RLS0812 11]

There are many RHM road bits that are broken .

 It is advisable to run a Maxis highway in between regains if you desire multi tile highways .

 

Something "broke" in the last NAM update ( 32 ) ... I have many broken road and rail connections .

[APSMS 1,892]

Quick update: I deleted the Rd-4 connection and put some industry into the city tile where I have my residential areas. That took care of the unemployment. Then I reconnected the cities (with Rd-4) and – very bizarrely – immediately got a lot of unemployment. I didn’t delete any of the industry near the residential area; so if anything, connecting should have added jobs and not taken them away. As soon as I deleted the connecting road again, the unemployment went away.

This has been described before. I'm not sure what the problem is, or if there was a solution.

 

As an interim solution (I'll report this to the NAM devs in the meantime), you could simply transition the RD-4 to an Avenue to go out of the city, and then transition back again. It's not the most sightly solution, but I'm pretty sure that avenue connections are fine.

 

There hasn't been any NWM development over the last few dev cycles, so I'm not sure what the issue is, but a few files could have been misplaced when building the installer (this has happened before), so I'll talk to them and see if they'll have a look.

 

As a last bit, I assume you are running a patched version of the game on Windows? (version 1.1.638 or higher)

[RLS0812 11]

 

{...} but a few files could have been misplaced when building the installer  {...}

 

 That is an understatement !

{ SNIP }

[urbietorbi 0]

Thanks for your comments, APSMS.

 

As an interim solution (I'll report this to the NAM devs in the meantime), you could simply transition the RD-4 to an Avenue to go out of the city, and then transition back again. It's not the most sightly solution, but I'm pretty sure that avenue connections are fine.

 

 I had thought of that, too, and it works. But as you say, it's not very sightly and slows down the traffic a bit, I think. But it's better than nothing.

 

 

 

As a last bit, I assume you are running a patched version of the game on Windows? (version 1.1.638 or higher)

 

Yes, that's correct.

[APSMS 1,892]

 

 

{...} but a few files could have been misplaced when building the installer  {...}

 

 That is an understatement ! Let's go through these one at a time, shall we? My Answers to your Comments are in colored print.

 

Light rail is broken How? It works fine for me? What are you trying to do with it?

 

high speed rail is broke, Again, how? I know that the BTM (Bullet Train Mod) when passing over P57 is missing models, but this is the responsibility of APTX (the creator of the mod, no longer involved in SC4, and not the responsibility of the NAM, though efforts are being made to get compatibility back.) The HSRP works just fine, though.

 

neighbor connections are broke or unpredictable, True enough, though luckily I haven't noticed too many issues with them (knock on wood). Hopefully we'll be able to iron out some of the kinks with these in the future.

 

rural highway is glitched, real highway overpasses are buggy and unpredictable, tier 3 and tier 4 highways are broken, Well, RHW works well enough for me. There are quirks in the code, but that comes with the territory. L3 and L4 are only supported for 3 networks (RHW-4, MIS, and RHW-6S), and you must check the option for them in a custom installation. Overpasses with Flex pieces are indeed finicky, and take some getting used to, but only in the tightest situations, where the adjacency code runs into all sorts of problems, but this is a problem with how the game handles networks, and not the NAM's fault, although the code has been significantly stabilized in developer test versions (or so I hear).

 

tier 4 rails are broken, Wait, you have Level 4 rails? What wizardry is this? What universe are you from and can you get me some of those files you think you have?

 

real highway tunnels are broken Tunnel creation is part of the SC4 .exe, and is therefore unmodifiable according to the EULA. This is stated in the readme for the NAM/RHW (known issues), and there is nothing we can do about it. Tunnel compatibility is something that we will only be able to modify given the source code, and even then it would not be realistic to expect much, given that the source code is a wholly different code base than what the NAM devs are currently working with.

 

some road starter bits are missing, some road connection bits are missing, some transition bits are glitched or unpredictable, real highway height transitions can sometimes be unpredictable, real highway curves are very 'moody' ... that is just to name a few "gripes" . I'm not sure what you issue is with the rest of these. A lot of this sounds like it could be solved with a quick trip to either the readme or the NAM help/issues thread (here or on SC4Devotion), or both. There are a lot of known issues with the NAM that are either A.) unfixable due to being something we can't mod, B.) currently being fixed in development, or C.) awaiting fixing/fixes due to the project developers being on hiatus or busy with RL, or the implementation of the feature that's bugged is being redone, and thus fixes are pending following a restructure of the codebase. It would be best to read all the documentation and ask questions in the appropriate places rather than be frustrated with "lack" of features or living with "bugs" that are currently modding limitations and are thus beyond the scope of the NAM.

 

 

 

 I had thought of that, too, and it works. But as you say, it's not very sightly and slows down the traffic a bit, I think. But it's better than nothing.

Actually, road and Avenue speeds are the same (50 km/h, I think. Could be 30, but either way they're the same). One-way roads (OWR) have slightly faster speeds (and slightly higher capacities) due to lack of oncoming traffic (useful knowledge when building a busy Downtown/CBD), so they can help relieve congestion.

 

Also, when you have future NAM problems, the best place to post them is here or in the sister thread here on SC4Devotion. It's regularly checked by NAM devs (I'm only a NAM Associate), so you'll get more detailed/up to date answers, along with a more comprehensive understanding of the issue.

[RLS0812 11]

@APSM

This is referring to NAM version 32

{ SNIP }

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

@APSM

This is referring to NAM version 32

* The light rail ( tram ) starter bit is broke beyond usefulness - unable to drag anything from it

* The high speed rails came with NAM, not an extra download - they do not seem to function ...

* Elevation 3 and 4 do not render at all when placing viaducts ... and as far as overpasses go, any one who uses the latest version will run into real highways reverting to rhw2 ( randomly ) when running overpasses over an existing road, street, train track, any rhw 6+ , and mic --- dragable overpasses are buggy as #### !!! Short length overpasses can not be fixed once they revert to rhw2.  Sometimes the highway they are going over reverts to rwh2, and can not be fixed.

 Rural Highway doesn't have these issues - Real Highway does.

* tier 4 rail viaduct is in the 'mic transportation' menu, under "high elevated rail".

* Flex transitions can break ( randomly ) when using multi tile real highways.

 

 

 

I also forgotten to mention that single rail lines sometimes revert back to double ...

Placing flex ramps has the side effect of causing the construction noise to loop ...

1, 2, and 3: That kind of thing can only happen with RUL decoupling; you have the .dats installed for those features, but the RUL code is not included to make those features happen.

3. General deconversion will always be a problem until we can either transcend beyond manual writing of RUL2 code and have a high(er) level programming language be created specifically for RUL2 and have it catch all of the errors and holes that manual writing would normally generate, or until something happens that can greatly stabilise RHW×RHW crossings in general. Either method would currently entail writing more and more RUL2 code.

4. Nothing in the NAM is ever called "tier". Additionally, that doesn't constitute as a rail viaduct, and I consider intermixing the functionality of Light Rail (Elevated Rail) with Rail (Heavy Rail) to be cheating.

5 and 6. FlexHeightTransitions were made with what I would consider a highly inefficient and very clunky method. Those things are worth redoing from scratch.

that is just to name a few "gripes" .

Griping about a mod(pack) that people have made in their free time and for absolutely no pay whatsoever, especially on a thread that you didn't even start? Is this the thanks we deserve, or the behaviour that should be expected on ST? Certainly not, but your "griping" shouldn't be typical of normal NAM gameplay (except for RHW), and griping about isn't the way to get tech support.

[RLS0812 11]

Griping about a mod(pack) that people have made in their free time and for absolutely no pay whatsoever, especially on a thread that you didn't even start? Is this the thanks we deserve, or the behaviour that should be expected on ST? Certainly not, but your "griping" shouldn't be typical of normal NAM gameplay (except for RHW), and griping about isn't the way to get tech support.

 

 

 It is very good thing that a team of devs spends their own time and effort maintain an expansive mod pack .

 I am currently just 'frustrated' that the only response to the ( well known ) overpass glitches is "we can not reproduce this behavior" .

 This essentially breaks over 40% of functionality of the mod pack.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l39WzMzB9s

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

This essentially breaks over 40% of functionality of the mod pack.

And yet, that's fixable, even with the current public release. There's a lesser-known feature called starter bisection; place one of the starters (preferably the elevated RHW starter) where the RHW×RHW crossing should go, and then drag RHW PERPENDICULAR THROUGH the starter. What that does is it forces a stable RHW×RHW crossing using only just the starter, and the RHW-2 that bisected the starter can be overridden accordingly.

Also, those aren't FlexRamps; those are FlexOnSlopeTransitions; it's really important to get the names of things correct the first time so as to give coherent messages about the correct features. (On that token, RHM refers to a CXL mod; RHW is the correct name.) If there was anything wrong with FlexRamps with NAM 32, current NAMdev for NAM 33 would've squashed any bugs by now.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Re: NAM 33, should we start eating worms now (baited breath)?

[McDuell 301]

You can also get rid of the appendix pieces of a Flex Onslope transition and replace it with the appropriate starter piece.
 
1. Place the Flex Onslope transition piece
2. Put rail stubs directly over both (or only one, if desired) ends
3. Delete the rail stubs
4. Place appropriate starter pieces. In my example, I transition from L0-RHW6S to L1-RHW6S, and from L2-RHW6S to L0-RHW6S
5. draw out the highway.
 
 

 
 
 
For something that 'can not be fixed', this setup seems to look just fine:

 
 
 
 
 

Re: NAM 33, should we start eating worms now (baited breath)?

 
I think that the only worms we sould start to eat will be of this kind:

 

It's called 'Vermicelles' and is a sweet dish from southern Switzerland: spaghettified mashed Sweet Chestnut, butter, sugar, and Kirsch. I love it!