RHW/NAM piece images

[mrodgers 1]

Hey all.  Question on RHW pieces.  Wondering if there is a site that has more than just a list of the components available.  I'm looking for images of the individual pieces and puzzles. 

 

While I am tabbing through the options, because I'm on a small laptop with a 14 inch screen and only an Intel 2d graphics card for now (work laptop, shhhh.... ) the pieces I see while scrolling through looking for what I want or might want is difficult.  My graphics are no where close to as crisp and clear as what I see others' photos show (all Maxis options maxed).  Also as I scroll through, the pieces are faded out so I can't see them very clearly until I put them down.

 

As I hunt for tutorial stuff on RHW/NAM and not finding a whole lot other than videos showing stuff being built at supersonic speed, I am having trouble figuring it out.  I was being yelled at by my hugely expensive "highway to nowhere" by the dudes in the game, lol.  I had an elevated highway crossing 2 rivers and traversing through the entire city tile.  Somewhere there must have been breaks in the highway, I am guessing at the bridges as I haven't figured out yet how to make a bridge high enough for water traffic without a 70° slope from ground level.  I ended up completely demolishing it with about $4000 left in funds and rebuilt using Maxis Avenue road minus the bridges until I had the money to finish the 2 bridges to reach a residential area on the south end of the city isolated from everywhere else. (Residents were very patient as they waited access to their properties to build, LOL.)

 

 

[Indiana Joe 1,752]

The NAM readme guides contain a lot of pictures, but no, there's no "visual database" of all the NAM pieces.  I think you would find it a pain to have to ALT + TAB away and reference it anyway.

 

A 14 inch screen should still be enough to at least be able to see the game, as long as you have set the resolution to match that of your screen.  If you have it running at 800x600 then of course you won't be able to see anything.

 

Make sure you experiment around with the NAM quite a bit in a blank region before trying to use it in your proper regions.  I think that's the best advice I can give anyone; no matter how many tutorials you look at it's something you have to practice with.

[cromabianca 158]

13" MacBook Air here... and yes: it's a pain!!!

I usually set zoom to level 5 when I'm working with puzzle pieces, though!

[Whte_rbt 1,431]

Alternate take: If you've got a tablet, load the NAM/NWM/RHW readme's n PDF's onto it. Saves me having to Alt-Tab out mid-build.

[Tarkus 6,933]

We're also trying to kill off a lot of the puzzle pieces, in favor of FLEX or draggable implementations.  That's been a work in progress for some time now, and the dust probably won't settle for a couple more releases.

 

-Tarkus

[cardiomonkey 32]

I have a test region where I try out NAM pieces for the and rail. Getting it all to work first time is very hard, so being able to practice first is essential. Watching tutorials or city building can help with inspiration too.

Essentialy trial and error is the best way to learn.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

My friend, I suggest editing that post to say what it is you mean.

[cardiomonkey 32]

My friend, I suggest editing that post to say what it is you mean.

Thanks Nonny. The joys of little time posting and bad predictive text on phone, I really should learn.

[.anonyman 28]

We're also trying to kill off a lot of the puzzle pieces, in favor of FLEX or draggable implementations.  That's been a work in progress for some time now, and the dust probably won't settle for a couple more releases.

 

-Tarkus

 

I would love to have draggable tram-in-road and tram-in-avenue, since that's my favorite network. Great idea!

[mrodgers 1]

Wow, while at work I had searched for the manual to read through while my equipment runs.  Kept coming up with posts in threads asking about this stuff referring to the intensive manual that I found very lacking.  I didn't realize I only had the NAM manual.  Found the actual RHW manual to look through.  There's all the pictures and descriptions!  Ha!  I never looked in the download file at home because I thought I had already looked through the manual.

 

No wonder all I could see was a list of components and no more information.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

One of the things that was lacking in the NAM 32 release was an up-front section in the general readme listing what's new in this release, including the addition of the SimCity 4/NAM Auxiliary Files folder.  Much good stuff in there.  Simply calling out the installer should mention that directory containing all the documentation.  One line, pause for <enter> key would do it.

[mrodgers 1]

Wow, I just spent 4 hours working on something as simple as the following.  I couldn't figure out how to attach the overpass to the Avenue on the sloped tile.  I think I cycled through every single option in the roads menu.

 

 

The good thing is, after figuring that out, it only took about 5 minutes to build this...

 

[img}https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/57899348/SC4/WPA%20CJ/City%20Journal-2015-jan-30-008.jpg

 

 

 

That said, shown in the 2nd image above is one problem I mentioned when first starting this thread in how the previews of the pieces are really faint and difficult to see.  How am I suppose to figure out what to use when it looks like that?  LOL.  Is this a problem with my graphics card I'm guessing?  I'm on a really crappy laptop, AMD Sempron 1GB Ram with an ATI Radeon X1250.  Ancient stuff, but I'm currently stuck on my work laptop since I'm trying to save up some cash to replace my 2005 desktop that broke over Christmas time (hopefully a Win7 Pro, i5, 12GB Ram laptop is getting ordered tomorrow, depending on how much the quarterly bonus is....)

[Indiana Joe 1,752]

Wow, I just spent 4 hours working on something as simple as the following.  I couldn't figure out how to attach the overpass to the Avenue on the sloped tile.  I think I cycled through every single option in the roads menu.

 

You can do all of that by dragging now too by the way.  

 

Best thing is practice, as you found.  4 hours down to 5 minutes is pretty significant, don't you think?  All the NAM stuff follows similar patterns, if you got the hang of the rest of the game nice and quick it won't take that long to learn the NAM.

 

Also avoid an Intel HD 4000 series video card in the new laptop if possible.  They don't like SC4.

[MushyMushy 3,618]

Also avoid an Intel HD 4000 series video card in the new laptop if possible.  They don't like SC4.

 

 I can attest to this. My laptop has one of those cards (or a model very similar to it). Even though my laptop is fully capable of running the game at high speed and can boot up my 4.5GB plugins folder relatively easily, the dumb Intel graphics card makes it impossible for me to play on Hardware mode because I get like 3 FPS when I do; I only switch it to Hardware for screenshots.

 

Avoid those cards at all costs.

[mrodgers 1]

ot 

You can do all of that by dragging now too by the way.  
 
Best thing is practice, as you found.  4 hours down to 5 minutes is pretty significant, don't you think?  All the NAM stuff follows similar patterns, if you got the hang of the rest of the game nice and quick it won't take that long to learn the NAM.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

The answer is get a desktop, refurbed, from some store. 

 

<rant>

You don't have to have SC4 on a portable machine.  I too have the problem of faint pieces in hardware mode, and it only takes a few moments to switch to software mode to eliminate that problem (I have scripts for all three rendering modes).  The "now" generation don't appreciate the idea of having a machine that doesn't walk around with them.  Too bad!  I grew up when computers as powerful as this one took up an entire floor of an office building.  I have only used portable machines when I needed a portable machine.

</rant>

[rsc204 21,866]

Well for starters let's dispel the myth that Intel integrated graphics aren't very good, that's simply not correct, some of them outperform mid-range GPU's that'd cost around $200 if bought separately and this comes for free with the CPU, which in turn uses way less power to run making your PC running costs cheaper.

However, there is a problem with Intel's drivers in that they don't work very well with SC4 due to some old Direct X features being unsupported by them which SC4 needs to utilise. It's really not so surprising that Intel who neither specialise in Graphics, nor were they even making GPU's when SC4 was released, may not work with such an old game optimally. However for newer games and running Windows you will likely find it's pretty decent, in reality that is what over 99% of users would prefer support for, we are actually quite a niche if you think about the bigger picture here.

If you can live with software rendering then SC4 will still work, it's just usually most users (myself included) can not get Direct X hardware rendering to work with Intel graphics, some users report success with OpenGL, however I've yet to achieve any success here personally. When using software rendering overall performance is reduced and you won't be able to use any 'HD' mods, so if those things don't bother you, it's not something you need to worry about.

If however you want to try and ensure Hardware rendering would be possible, you could also consider a Laptop using an AMD chipset which would normally come with ATI graphics on board instead. The problem is that I've also heard many users of ATI cards and even NVidia cards having the exact same problems, it may be before too long that support for SC4 with new systems is gone altogether. This happens with PCs, if you insist on playing an 11 year old+ game and using a brand new PC then you may need to do some work in order to get a better playing experience (or any at all) sometimes. You could dual boot your PC with a Windows XP partition to play SC4, or even run it as part of a virtual O/S within Windows, there are plenty of options available.