Changing Vehicle Type

[droidhacker 2]

I was wondering if there is any way to change a vehicle type.  In the futuristic city I was working on I wanted to make an elevated pod expressway similar to what is in the movie Minority Report.

I was using this mod http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=723272626&searchtext=pod as a bus and had many different routes and created elevated bus only highways with no speed limit.  However, I got huge backups in my city wherever multiple routes came together.  I believe that in a previous patch they made the transport vehicles wait longer at stops so each pod would stop for like 3-5 seconds for only 10 people!  Since they're capacity is so low you obviously have to have many vehicles.  The only way I could think to clear up the jams is to have 30+ routes.  I had planned to have many routes to begin with but with 10 routes and about 200 pods I had huge issues.  Even with IPT it would be hell to have dozens and dozens of routes.  It would get impossible to manage and would either waste a TON of money or have people wait forever as it would get cumbersome to micromanage so many different routes.  

The solution to this is to have the pods be taxis, or buses and taxis. Then the spread out traffic could still ride in the pods and using the bus pods one could make routes between critical points to move more people.  Then you could still build elevated expressways and simply allow buses and taxis only (or anything else you want like garbage or freight).  I found that the highways with the pods looked really cool and were very efficient and fast, as well as it being possible to do near vertical sections and not having issues with functionality and looks.  The only problem is when the pods get off the highway and need to pick up people, they jam up in huge lines and actually made the traffic worse!

Is there any way using a mod to change the vehicle type or make a duplicate?  Would it be simple to mod it on my own?  I have done A TON of modding for other games but not much for CS.  I absolutely hate to make a request (since I know the work that goes into modding) but if somebody could make some cool looking pods that are taxis and buses that would be great!  It would be a super useful mod since with only basic testing I found that elevated unlimited speed bus-ways worked really really well,  for the most part I didn't even need more than one lane, even though I was moving thousands of people.  Also since near vertical sections are possible, these expressways are versatile and flexible as well as cost effective.

[Ronyx69 2,413]

I see 2 approaches to make the bus into a taxi:

One would be to export the bus with mod tools or crp parser, reassemble the textures and the model into usable files and reimport the asset using the taxi template.

The other would be to import a completely unrelated asset both as a bus and a taxi, then open them with a hex editor and see what the difference is, maybe it just changes a small part so you could figure out what to change for the actual bus asset to make it a taxi.

[droidhacker 2]

ok I will look into it with the hex editor and see what I can do.  I am pretty proficient with Hex, but I've never used it on CS mods.  It would be great if somebody just made a quick and dirty mod.  I am telling you these pod highways are super efficient, to the point that I might not even have trams or trains exept for absolutely critical points that move way to many people for pods.  I will see if I can find a good model and maybe make an release one that looks cool, it probably won't be very good though haha

[Tim The Terrible 586]

I think you can just open a vehicle in the Asset Editor and change the Class with ModTools.

[droidhacker 2]

ok awesome I will try it, is there any way I could make a duplicate with said tools?  By the way I did more testing and the pod highway looks very, very cool, especially when you set the speed to over 200 mph and do vertical sections, I wish I could bank the turns and do like a sideways turn for interchanges. If you could run the roads tilted 90 degrees you could weave them in between buildings without creating super sharp turns.

I did some research and there is a mod called assetchanger and uiassetchanger that should work, unless recent patches have screwed things up, I will try it tomorrow.  In the comments people are complaining that their changed assets do not spawn, so we'll see.  My city right now isn't very good or very large so maybe when its bigger and I have a pod highway that isn't just a test version I can show you guys, but I encourage you to try it out.  I am going to see if I can create a system so good my city won't need much public transit or cars and ill just make most of the city pedestrian boulevards.

[droidhacker 2]

I tried the aforementioned mod and all it did was cause huge glitches when the vehicle tried to spawn.  I did some tests with regular cabs and found that building a large expressway system for cabs/busses would only be needed if your city was really big like 200k+ cims.  Does anybody know of a mod that reduces transit vehicle wait times?

[Igorp133 28]

On 20.10.2016 at 10:33 PM, droidhacker said:

I tried the aforementioned mod and all it did was cause huge glitches when the vehicle tried to spawn.  I did some tests with regular cabs and found that building a large expressway system for cabs/busses would only be needed if your city was really big like 200k+ cims.  Does anybody know of a mod that reduces transit vehicle wait times?

Just use this Mod. With this mod you can adjust the amount of vehicles serving the line manually and thus reduce or increase the distance as well as waiting time between vehicles.

[droidhacker 2]

I use IPT and I think its vehicle unbunching could be what is causing the long wait times.  If I end up making the system for real in my city (not just tests) I am going to really split up the lines and build multi lane stops similar to a bus hub and connect them directly to the expressway. Since near vertical sections are possible there is no worrying about taking up too much space with a larger hub.