NAM Visual Guide?

[ultramegatiny 25]

Firstly, I sincerely apologize for resurrecting a two month old thread and secondly, I also apologize for the length of what I'm about to write.

Okay. I first began "playing" sc4 when nam 32 was released. In fact, hearing about the complexity of the nam and the wonderful modding community was what drew me to the game. Due to many RL ups (mostly ups, btw, got married, bought a house) and downs, I've been away for a while. Tonight I decided to catch up and now I'm super excited about nam 33. I've been reading all the threads about it in anticipation of downloading the prerelease. I wanted to watch all the youtube teaser tutorials and inform myself on all the details of the update before downloading it.

You wanna know why I'm doing this? Why I'm spending hours just reading about it before I even consider installing it?

I'll tell you why.

BECAUSE IT'S AN ENORMOUSLY COMPLEX THING AND I KNOW THAT I HAVE TO TAKE MY TIME WITH IT OR I WILL BE OVERWHELMED. 

Sorry for shouting.

But seriously, jeez oh man! I understand how overwhelming this all is. I just got into it around February of last year! I'm a total n o o b!! It never even occured to me to complain about it being too complex. I saw that there is a wonderful community of very knowledgeable people who are here on this forum every day who want to help newcomers. That's another thing that brought me here! I've always taken it upon myself to find my own answers in the nam documentation. If, and only if, I really, really didn't understand something, did I come here to ask for help. And every single time I've come to these forum, I've found that my question had already been asked and answered. The fact that it's so complex is actually one of the things I love about it.

And I do love it! This "game" has provided me with not only countless hours of fun, but also dearly needed and deeply appreciated escape from my stupid real life. I go to work. I earn my pay. I spend time with my loved ones. Other than that, I find this planet to be an extremely annoying place. This game and the wonderful community it's spawned have acted as a pressure valve for me. And I thank you all.

Reading Tarkus' first response on this thread really upset me. Tarkus, to you and the whole nam team, I say THANK YOU. It's amazing to me that all the years of effort you've devoted here could be so thoughtlessly underappreciated and dismissed. Your work has and will always have a very special significance in my life and I THANK YOU. In my daily grind, I'm nobody. But when I use the tools you developed for SC4, I'm the king. I make little happy worlds full of little happy people. Worlds where there is no war, no poverty, no horror or pain. It may not sound like much to most people, but to me it's a wonderful escape. 

Above all else: THANK YOU!

  Edited September 8, 2015 by ultramegatiny  

[rsc204 21,822]

What can I say, you can't satisfy everyone, I too have not been so long at this whole SC4 thing, but I realised this wasn't going to be something I'd get good at overnight. It's easy to see what others are doing and jump to the conclusion that anyone can download a bunch of mods and end up making the same things, but it simply doesn't work this way in reality. It takes time to really learn how to get the best out of such tools, I've committed a lot of time to trying to give something back for all the wonderful knowledge the community has given me. Without the sites here and at SC4D and the former SimPeg along with all the helpful community members, I simply could never have unravelled the inner workings of the game.

I've recently started with some video tutorials (presumably that's visual enough) to show in-depth how to use the NAM. If I'm honest the number of views is a little disheartening to see given how many people complain about the lack of them. Currently I've spent longer creating them than the grand total of viewing time, yes it's early days but I'm sure some can appreciate how that does make it hard to be motivated to continue, I mean I'm not doing this for the kudos or my benefit. Here's a comment I found on one of my mods yesterday "waste in time, this road NOT menu! 1point! :@". Whilst I'm not 100% sure what this users problem is, I assure you this mod works flawlessly, yet now it has a 1 star rating because some idiot who couldn't be bothered to ask for help assumed it's useless. Then others make statements like the NAM is "semi-decent", I don't think that's an informed or justifiable thing to say personally, these things make my heart sink a little. The lack of appreciation for the mammoth efforts made by a few is truly sickening some days. I wonder if the people making such rash comments, many of whom probably can't even comprehend the amount of work and dedication that goes into creating, realise that some of us have feelings? Whilst I know I should suck it up and move on, sometimes it makes me really quite angry and I feel very underappreciated, I know I am not alone here.

In that regard it's refreshing when someone comes out of the woodwork and takes the time to thank those who strive onwards despite the ungrateful, I can only say how I agree mostly with what seems to be a level-headed appraisal of things.

We all have problems, I know my path in the beginning was not easy, many failed regions, a complete lack of understanding of the NAM and a total mess of a plugins folder all conspired against me in the beginning. But I never once felt that these things were someone else's fault or responsibility to fix, the more you understand about the game the more you realise why things are as they are. I just persevered because I was inspired by the quality and uniqueness I'd seen in a number of CJs and wanted to do something in a similar vein. I still feel of all the games I've ever played of this kind, SC4 simply blows the rest out of the water in terms of the possibilities, I'm in it for the long haul so whatever it takes in terms of workload to make my ideas come to life is worth the effort.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I've been a user of this game for a very long time, since it came out, in fact.  As things progressed, I took advantage of many of the advances.  For example, if you look closely at my signature animation (a *.gif) you'll find it shows an early example of GLR.  I made this when GLR was free standing.  I no longer have any of the old images I used to have of my success with early RHW, but I did use it.

I am probably not a good example of a NAM user, yet I find I can't get along without it.  Somewhere in there the RHW, GLR and now RRW teams got merged into the NAM team and a great deal of very good work was done to harmonize all this while at the same time making vast improvements to things like the installer and the transit stations.

RL got in my way when my wife passed away, and things were in the usual turmoil after such an event.  During this time, the RHW turned into a multi-level set of concrete spaghetti, and my assessment was that I could either join in that and learn all the new acronyms, or just skip it.  Being retired from the computer game since 2003, and not feeling much like learning what amounted to a new computer language, I decided to skip it.  At the same time, what I wanted to get out of the game changed into a more rural scene, mostly because I moved into a real life rural scene.  It occurred to me that I no longer had any use for GLR.

RRW on the other hand, peaks my interest, and after it has settled down in a release or two I'll be giving it a whirl.

However, here is my current assessment of the NAM.  It is the ne plus ultra of addons.  I don't use a big chunk of it, but it really can't be denied.  The transit networks fixes alone are sufficient to justify it.  When I build my NAM configuration now, I omit RHW, and GLR because I am not doing interprovincial highways, nor am I building cities that need trams.  If things get dicey downtown, I use subways.  I do use a lot of surface heavy rail, and while RRW may seem ideal for this, my testing shows it is at best a release candidate, and not really ready for production use, even with Rivit's fixes.

Note that my learning curve for this, along with the game has taken something like 12 or 13 years.

I sympathize with the OP.  However, it is a steep learning curve for the complete NAM, along with the game, and to make matters worse, there are other important packages that are nearly as onerous (SPAM for example).  With the downfall of the Lord of the Packages (Pegasus) and the subsequent rescue efforts, there are some legacy things around that can keep one tied up for a year or more just getting everything working to your satisfaction.  I've become fairly proficient with the PEG CDK3 Seaport package, but there is still more to do, and yet I can create stuff like this:

And yes, I took some time to label this screen shot.  Sorry about the spelling errors.  But I digress.

The fact is that as Archimedes said to Phillip of Macedon when he asked if there was a quick way for Alexander (the Great) to learn geometry, "There is no quick road to learning".  Now that was over 3,000 years ago, and as a teacher I assure you nothing has changed in that regard except methods, which have improved considering that at the time they only had sand tables.

So, as far as learning the NAM is concerned, the best way is by experiment.  To that end, you need to create a region called "Sandbox" which takes about 10 seconds.  Use the cities in the sandbox to try out things in the NAM.  Select stuff in the NAM by using the custom installer.  There is no point in cluttering up your menu system with stuff you don't intend to use at the moment.  One of the best things about NAM is that you can run the installer as often as you like, adding and subtracting things.  The custom installer surveys your current installation and reminds you of what you currently have.

Good luck, take it slow and steady, and win the race.

[rsc204 21,822]

On 08/09/2015 at 7:00 PM, A Nonny Moose said:

I do use a lot of surface heavy rail, and while RRW may seem ideal for this, my testing shows it is at best a release candidate, and not really ready for production use, even with Rivit's fixes.

Indeed RRW as of NAM 32 was released as such. Since then myself, Rivit and others have made a huge effort to tie up the loose ends, as of NAM 33 you should find it's complete. Rivit is also planning on an update to the RUM package to omit any duplicates and cover any textures that might not make it into the final release of 33. Right now I have a complete uniform set of RRW textures, and developments like this are afoot:

So if you do spot anything missing after NAM 33, please do let either me, Rivit or the team know about them, we can get a patch out very quickly in such a scenario.

[markussaage 762]

Firstly, I sincerely apologize for resurrecting a two month old thread and secondly, I also apologize for the length of what I'm about to write.

Okay. I first began "playing" sc4 when nam 32 was released. In fact, hearing about the complexity of the nam and the wonderful modding community was what drew me to the game. Due to many RL ups (mostly ups, btw, got married, bought a house) and downs, I've been away for a while. Tonight I decided to catch up and now I'm super excited about nam 33. I've been reading all the threads about it in anticipation of downloading the prerelease. I wanted to watch all the youtube teaser tutorials and inform myself on all the details of the update before downloading it.

You wanna know why I'm doing this? Why I'm spending hours just reading about it before I even consider installing it?

I'll tell you why.

BECAUSE IT'S AN ENORMOUSLY COMPLEX THING AND I KNOW THAT I HAVE TO TAKE MY TIME WITH IT OR I WILL BE OVERWHELMED. 

Sorry for shouting.

But seriously, jeez oh man! I understand how overwhelming this all is. I just got into it around February of last year! I'm a total n o o b!! It never even occured to me to complain about it being too complex. I saw that there is a wonderful community of very knowledgeable people who are here on this forum every day who want to help newcomers. That's another thing that brought me here! I've always taken it upon myself to find my own answers in the nam documentation. If, and only if, I really, really didn't understand something, did I come here to ask for help. And every single time I've come to these forum, I've found that my question had already been asked and answered. The fact that it's so complex is actually one of the things I love about it.

And I do love it! This "game" has provided me with not only countless hours of fun, but also dearly needed and deeply appreciated escape from my stupid real life. I go to work. I earn my pay. I spend time with my loved ones. Other than that, I find this planet to be an extremely annoying place. This game and the wonderful community it's spawned have acted as a pressure valve for me. And I thank you all.

Reading Tarkus' first response on this thread really upset me. Tarkus, to you and the whole nam team, I say THANK YOU. It's amazing to me that all the years of effort you've devoted here could be so thoughtlessly underappreciated and dismissed. Your work has and will always have a very special significance in my life and I THANK YOU. In my daily grind, I'm nobody. But when I use the tools you developed for SC4, I'm the king. I make little happy worlds full of little happy people. Worlds where there is no war, no poverty, no horror or pain. It may not sound like much to most people, but to me it's a wonderful escape. 

Above all else: THANK YOU!

I agree with you and say loud: THANK YOU! to the whole NAM Team. For me SC4 isn't playable without the NAM. I never missed a documentation and I like to test something in a sandbox city.... It's kinda challenging... and fun... and surprising even after years... That's what SC4 is all about. And what's wrong to spend some time to finally learn something?! I'd say: nothing...

Kind regards!

[matias93 7,535]

Personally, I think on the NAM as an extra difficulty level for SC4: it gives you a huge load of new possibilities and tools, but you have to learn to use by yourself. To have everything resolved from the beggining is like cheating in a game; instantaneous satisfaction at the cost of transform a good and complex game into an absurdly easy tour (I think everyone of you that have played The Sims will know what I mean).

In a game that is all about experimenting, the NAM is not only wonderful because of the unleashed possibilities, but also because of the new complexities to resolve.

[clif9710 1]

Being a newbie, NAM is overwhelming. I've watched tutorials and invariably the presenters will intend to do something, it won't work, and they will say something like "oops, that can't work here, so here's what you have to do" and then he works some magic to come up with a solution that will work. The detail is overwhelming. My favorite interface was in World of Warcraft, where one could decide on the things one wanted to use frequently and place the icons for immediate access. The not-wanted did not appear on screen, you could forget about them. When in battle, a sequence of icons could be hit and the results were as smooth as if it were all one action. 

Unless I am using it wrong, it appears the NAM always requires scrolling through what seems like a huge number of selections, most of which are not what one is after. The next time the item is needed, it's scrolling time again. I don't believe one can leave a menu in a scrolled position - you always have to start at the top. I found, for example, that the bus station had moved down the scroll list. Going through this scrolling over and over is tedious.

None of this is to belittle the incredible amount of work that obviously went into NAM.

 

[markussaage 762]

Being a newbie, NAM is overwhelming. I've watched tutorials and invariably the presenters will intend to do something, it won't work, and they will say something like "oops, that can't work here, so here's what you have to do" and then he works some magic to come up with a solution that will work. The detail is overwhelming. My favorite interface was in World of Warcraft, where one could decide on the things one wanted to use frequently and place the icons for immediate access. The not-wanted did not appear on screen, you could forget about them. When in battle, a sequence of icons could be hit and the results were as smooth as if it were all one action. 

Unless I am using it wrong, it appears the NAM always requires scrolling through what seems like a huge number of selections, most of which are not what one is after. The next time the item is needed, it's scrolling time again. I don't believe one can leave a menu in a scrolled position - you always have to start at the top. I found, for example, that the bus station had moved down the scroll list. Going through this scrolling over and over is tedious.

None of this is to belittle the incredible amount of work that obviously went into NAM.

 

Well,

unfortunately there is no way to add more menus to the game because the menus we know are hardwired in the source code.
So we have to live with it. It's that easy... You don't like it?! You're not alone...I personally started 3 years ago to add plugins to the
menus in my own order using iLive's Reader. But... That's another thing and overwhelming for beginners...

Playing SimCity 4 is a journey. At the beginning you just wanna play... You'll find the thousands and thousand of plugins you can add and
you'll get excited. Then you'll hit a point when the game gets nasty, crashes over and over again... You don't wanna play it anymore...

You'll have to make a decision here... Quit playing the game or dig deep into it and learn what to do... and learn to accept the fact that this
game has a lot of bugs and deal with it. In the meantime I know where my plugins in the menus are, because I placed them there...
And everytime I add something new it gets its own place...

The good thing is here that playing SC4 gives you a learning curve if you want. And this forum here is the best place to start learning the game.

Overwhelming? Yes! Wanna learn something? Good! Be open and learn and enjoy the game!

King regards!

[T Wrecks 10,209]

My favorite interface was in World of Warcraft, where one could decide on the things one wanted to use frequently and place the icons for immediate access. The not-wanted did not appear on screen, you could forget about them.

That's the difference between the following two things:

1. an interface that was designed by the publisher themselves, a global multi-billion dollar enterprise, and formed an integral part of the game concept from the get-go, and
2. a custom add-on written by some hobby folks who don't have acccess to the game's source code and need to use what little possibilities the game offers them to make ends meet against all odds, all that somehow attached to a game whose concept was never meant to incorporate it.

I understand your wish for such a nice and polished interface as the one for WoW, but you can clearly not draw a valid comparison between that and the NAM interface.

[clif9710 1]

Thought I haven't played them, it's apparent from what I read that the successor simcity games haven't met expectations and as a result SC4 continues. I wonder what kind of information was gathered to drive the development of the later versions, such as Skylines. You'd think that the characteristics of SC4 (and NAM) that make it endure would at some point be put into a new version...

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

While you may not believe this, a new game of the scope and power of SC4 Deluxe may never come into existence.  As it stands, the existing game with its orthographic projections instead of 3D graphics remains a kind of "state of the art" mostly because it manages to run a pretty powerful stochastic simulation in the background while maintaining an acceptable frame rate until things reach the limits of the hardware.  Even with the newest of GUI thinking and GPU toys, there really has been no improvement in the operation of this program.  The Maxis guys at the time were running about a decade ahead of the state of practice.  They were (are) brilliant.  The team that replaced them at Maxis Studio were not of the same calibre.

If you look up the various references on wiki as to the state of the art now, and especially the logically next bandwidth jump to 128-bit memories and so on, you'll find disclaimers that state that as far as speed is concerned, the 32-bit decor is as good as it is going to get with the x86 architecture.  Single bus, synchronous processing is at the end of its capability.  So it would appear that faster processors are out.  This is amply demonstrated that the CPU guys didn't give you a bump in speed, but opted for multiple cores instead, and left it to the programming side to try and fix things up with multi-tasking.

From what I've seen so far, this has not been a grand success.  I've been involved in multitasking since the 1970s, before the microsystem architecture was invented, and it is no easy job, even on an asynchronously based main frame.  I don't think it would be very expensive to adopt such a system to the micro world, except it hasn't been done except in a bench test in the skunk works at General Electric Company at Phoenix and was lost when the Computer Division was purchased by Honeywell, who later folded the large scale division.  We actually had a GE635 on a small set of boards that fit on a desk and didn't need more than small fans to cool it.  Well, them's the breaks.

So, enjoy the toys kiddies.  And especially the tablets and phones that're running Android or Android derivatives.  Giggle.  Android is a version of Linux, so who sells more machines now?  The interesting thing is that they are also running RISC architecture, which means you have to go ever so fast just to do a multiply without a multiply instruction.  Reminds me of the old PDP-8 which only had one arithmetic instruction: TCA Twos complement add.  Believe it or not, you could use that instruction to subtract, multiply and divide.  The algorithms were not small.  The PDP-8 has a 3-bit order code which means only 8 instructions and one of them is halt.  Fun, huh?

If you really want to know about the asynchronous architecture model, PM me.  We'll have a nice chat about the CDC6600, the IBM7000 and the GE600.  We could also talk about how IBM recovered from one of the biggest disasters that has ever fallen on a company when they were forbidden to build the 7000.

[matias93 7,535]

I don't understand why a game designer now wouldn't do a 2.5 D game with a robust simulator and as few hardcoded parts as possible (basically, a game for modders), except, of course, money.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Because that's what you have now.  The problems arise from undocumented features (bugs) that were never ironed out in Q.A. as a result of the rush to the market.  I hope you realize that no program is ever fully debugged and at best a released program can only be considered to be a "release candidate".

[Lot Creator 304]

Coming back to the thread, I believe the problem with NAM as it stands is not the "Do this, don't do that" philosophy, it's mostly about the theme of things. For example, an American city wouldn't ever look like a European city, and an Asian city wouldn't compare to both of them either. It's been of a massive debate and hardship for myself to build on a theme that I have no idea other than assumptions and some occasional Gmap viewing. I am per say, someone too lazy to be bothered to go look up city planning but at the same time am forced to think in a manner unlike my own.

So, what I believe you should do (and what future tutorials should do as well) is focus on what specific planning is generally accepted or what type of traffic system would you aim for. True it is hard to establish something like this, but it is how it works in reality. Primarily I am someone who builds on top of mass transit system wrapped along a gridded system. Should you ever take the monumental task of building a large city(or a region in general), I would suggest to view how high capacity interchanges are built and what governs capacity.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

There is a slight problem with this kind of general planning.  The game has an overriding algorithm that takes the Sims to and from their job.  I don't think other traffic issues are considered no matter what kind of eye-candy concrete spaghetti you manage to create using RHW.  The goal is still R <--> Job.

The simulation is not powerful enough to consider other algorithms, and as AE is finding out in his efforts with Citybound, this is not exactly trivial.  If you haven't looked at this indie project, it is a general city simulation.  While a lot of preparatory work has been done, I think they've just done a restart to enable multitasking.

[rsc204 21,822]

Coming back to the thread, I believe the problem with NAM as it stands is not the "Do this, don't do that" philosophy, it's mostly about the theme of things. For example, an American city wouldn't ever look like a European city, and an Asian city wouldn't compare to both of them either. It's been of a massive debate and hardship for myself to build on a theme that I have no idea other than assumptions and some occasional Gmap viewing. I am per say, someone too lazy to be bothered to go look up city planning but at the same time am forced to think in a manner unlike my own.

So, what I believe you should do (and what future tutorials should do as well) is focus on what specific planning is generally accepted or what type of traffic system would you aim for. True it is hard to establish something like this, but it is how it works in reality. Primarily I am someone who builds on top of mass transit system wrapped along a gridded system. Should you ever take the monumental task of building a large city(or a region in general), I would suggest to view how high capacity interchanges are built and what governs capacity.

In short the NAM is just an additional set of tools for the game, how they work is defined by the game itself.

Just as before installing the NAM, you are free to make whatever you like, within certain parameters. In fact, even when the game says no, you can often still make things appear as you want them too, even if the functionality is lost in the process.

In some respects I can see how the NAM might appear to favour US or European building. But then, you could say the base game is really only useful for US building here too. The content in the NAM was not brought about by committee, but by the desires of those creating. If people come along and want to add other region-styled content, that's fine with the team, it's just that mostly EU and US make up the team so that's the content that tends to get made.

If you want tips and advice on how to build, feel free to start a thread here, a wealth of advice, discussion and debate can be opened up this way. I don't see the NAM team officially getting into this area though, it's really outside of our remit.

[T Wrecks 10,209]

Yes, the root cause lies in the game itself. It wasn't until a visit to the US (and the sight of a typical US suburb) that I realised how US-specific SimCity actually is, and how much more sense many design decisions make if you view them from a US-American perspective.

If anything, the NAM has contributed to alleviating this US orientation by offering structures like roundabouts or even an entire traffic network like the tram, both of which seem to have been considerably more popular in Europe so far.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Yes, the root cause lies in the game itself. It wasn't until a visit to the US (and the sight of a typical US suburb) that I realised how US-specific SimCity actually is, and how much more sense many design decisions make if you view them from a US-American perspective.

If anything, the NAM has contributed to alleviating this US orientation by offering structures like roundabouts or even an entire traffic network like the tram, both of which seem to have been considerably more popular in Europe so far.

Yup.  The game is based on an expression of U.S. individualism - the motor car.

[Naomi57 2,985]

I'm new to the NAM, and I think the NAM is absolutely wonderful .... thank you NAM team!!!  

However, I can also sympathise with SimCity 4 players who are struggling with NAM features, so on the subject of a NAM Visual Guide, here follows my first post on exactly that!  I come from a software development background, and have lost count of the number of times I've produced software application documentation for corporate clients, so I'm hoping this will be the first of many pieces that can be used to supplement the NAM documentation.

If you think of the NAM documentation as a pantry full of interesting ingredients, this post is an actual recipe!     
Aside from creating a ferry loop road, this tutorial also covers:

1. 45 degree bends with the OWR-4.
2. OWR-4 intersections.
3. Creating an L1 Road Viaduct over the OWR-4, given FLUPs and Road Overpass features don't integrate with OWR-4 road networks.

A similarly visual explanation can be found in some very excellent YouTube videos, like this one on the MGB NAM YouTube channel, but video content often goes by too fast for new players.  Static screenshots allow new players to absorb and reflect on what they are seeing, and bookmark or copy whichever steps they need for later.  The techniques for 45 degree bends on the OWR-4 are also a wee bit different to the 45 degree bends for AVE-6 , RD-6, and TLA-7, which MGB NAM covers starting at 11 minutes into that same video.

This post covers doing 45 degree bends with the OWR-4, one of the more challenging features from the Network Widening Mod (NWM) in the NAM, with detailed instructions and screenshots.  The example it uses is a moderately difficult one, producing an octagonal loop road, with an L1 Road Viaduct into the centre of the loop.

Of course, the same basic techniques of 45 degree bends, intersections, and L1 Road Viaducts are necessary in all sorts of situations.  In most cases, mastery of these tricky little basics, are critical to whether OWR-4 can be utilised at all.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

This particular configuration could also be used as a ginormous city centre high capacity roundabout, with RCI access on all sides, but I'm using it to milk ferry traffic for maximum C$$$ growth in adjacent commercial lots, exploiting the "Eternal Commuter Bug" to develop a tourism based economy centred around my ferry terminal areas, as described in this other post of mine.