Issues with NAM

[RichardCollins 15]

Hello. I'm late to jump on the SC4 train, but better late then never. I played for the past week without NAM. I've build and bankrupted a handful of cities, but I'm doing better each time. Most of the time, traffic kills the city. Enter NAM. It started with simple street modifications and I am currently adding a highway that runs through the center of the city. I am trying to build a sunken highway, but I seem to be missing options. At first, I was missing the single-sided ramps. I uninstalled the mod, re-downloaded the newest version from ModDB, reinstalled it, didn't have it. Deleted the mod, reinstalled again, and the ramps are there. Now I'm missing the overpass pieces to let roads go above the highway.

I'm not too sure what I'm doing wrong. I installed JAVA, had no errors, and menus are showing up, but it seems there are certain options that are not there. Another one I noticed would be diggers that were specific to certain projects (sunken, tunnel, etc.) Any ideas?

[Eggman121 1,052]

Hello RichardCollins

If you can post some pictures of the problems you are having than we may be able to sort something out. Visuals are very good for bug fixing. Are there any types of networks you want to use? If so run the custom installer and check the appropriate buttons.

I am more than happy to help

-eggman121 (NAM Team member)

[rsc204 21,867]

You should bear in mind a few things here. If you are looking at tutorials online, they may not all be up-to-date. Or put another way, there may be a newer, better way of doing something. Rarely do we remove legacy content entirely, but for example RHW Height-Ramps and Exit/Entrance Ramps have been replaced with smarter variants. Find those under the FlexHeight or FlexRamp buttons. The old "depreciated" variants can still be installed, but they must be manually selected.

Similarly, by default the Road Viaducts have been transitioning to their draggable variants. Although you can still install the old puzzle-style ones too.

Auto-Destruct Hole Diggers/Raisers can be found in the Roads Menu. But the manual ones (for individual networks) are to be found in the Misc. Transit menu, under the original parking garage. Perhaps you just missed the icon?

If you are having any issues with items selected during install, but not actually being installed, we would like to know about such bugs. But bear in mind the NAM is a very large mod that's been built over 11-12 years, so it will probably take a little while to become more familiar with it. That said we're always happy to help. p.s. the official NAM support thread is here:

Feel free to ask any questions if you are still having trouble. Also, if you are a new NAM user, check out the link in my signature, I've some videos on YouTube that go over many of the basics for newcomers.

 

[CorinaMarie 29,898]

I know very little about NAM so I'll just mention one thing that may or may not be relevant. Tab rings. This is where you select an item that's similar to what you want, but isn't the exact one and then you press the Tab key to cycle the image on your cursor to other items. (Or Shift-Tab to cycle in reverse order.)

[RichardCollins 15]

14 hours ago, rsc204 said:

If you are looking at tutorials online, they may not all be up-to-date. Or put another way, there may be a newer, better way of doing something.

 

That's exactly what it was. I was following tutorials that I thought were recent. It looks like I have all the parts. It seems that they're just put into different categories and it's a matter of digging into certain options to find it. 

It's just strange because the single-sided ramps weren't there before, but when I reinstalled it without the Traffic Simulator, they showed up. I even tried to go and check as many things manually as possible and it still didn't show up until the third reinstall. 

Regarding the diggers, I guess I was referencing to ones that were in outdated tutorials. The ones they had would say a specific task (sunken, tunnels, etc) while the current ones only show meters. I had to do some searching, but eventually found that sunken highways are 15m.

[rsc204 21,867]

12 hours ago, RichardCollins said:

It's just strange because the single-sided ramps weren't there before, but when I reinstalled it without the Traffic Simulator, they showed up. I even tried to go and check as many things manually as possible and it still didn't show up until the third reinstall. 

If you mean highway ramps here, I think I may know the problem. There are three highway options with NAM installed. The regular Maxis Highways (MHY), Maxis Highway Override (MHO) and RealHighWay (RHW). That last one you can choose to install or not, but you must choose between the first two. If you select to use the MHO mod, it is intended that you use the Modular Interchange System (MIS) network, which is part of RHW, to create interchanges. As such, many of the additional ramps for the vanilla MHY, are not included if you've installed MHO. Perhaps that was the difference here?

MHO can be found in the installer under NAM Networks and Network Expansions / Maxis Highway Override.

If not using MHO, the additional ramps for MHY can be found in the installer under Additional Features and Customizations / Maxis-Highway Interchange & Ramp Additions.

12 hours ago, RichardCollins said:

Regarding the diggers, I guess I was referencing to ones that were in outdated tutorials. The ones they had would say a specific task (sunken, tunnels, etc) while the current ones only show meters. I had to do some searching, but eventually found that sunken highways are 15m.

There are two sets of them now, as I mentioned in my last post. During install, you can find these options under Additional Features and Customizations / Hole Diggers and Ground Raisers. Here are two options, the Standard Hole Diggers and Ground Raisers and the Auto-Destruct variants. If you install the first ones, I think it's those you are referring too. I prefer the auto-destruct ones myself, but you can install both if you like. The key difference with the autodestruct ones, is that you need to remember the heights of tunnels/transitions for various networks. But if you can, they are much quicker to work with than the old ones.

One last note, once you've installed NAM, do make sure you don't uninstall it when changing options or upgrading. That way, any previously installed options will be remembered when running the installer anew. If you uninstall/delete the NAM, the installer won't be able to see your previous choices.