Any Futuristic train mods? (no NAM)

[Cassalett 16]

Hello! I am making a futuristic city with great transport networks. However, it seems that high and mid wealth sims dislikes the train. I don't like how the game makes trains a poor city transportation alternative. In real life, there are nice modern train systems with high speed, and many people use them. Is there any futuristic train mod? I've seen that NAM has some modern trains that wealthy sims like to use, but to be honest, i can't run NAM. My computer is just a netbook and i don't have enough space (and RAM) to install NAM.

[rsc204 21,861]

The first thing to point out is that the game as designed is based upon the US around 2000. In practice this means that by default, $$$ sims prefer to drive everywhere, this isn't an aversion to trains so much as any form of public transport. There is a group of settings for each of the wealth levels, broken down between the options of preferring to use Mass Transit, Car or the Faster Route. It's these values that dictate how likely sims are to use trains etc, I'm not entirely sure of the default values, but indeed most R$$$ and R$$ sims will prefer driving as will I believe 50% of R$ sims. You could edit these values, but that's a little tedious. Whilst you state you don't have the power to install NAM, there are two things you should consider:

1. SC4 is from 2003, a Netbook is pretty capable compared to the original minimum specs. Usually it's the GPU that's the weakest point here.
2. NAM is modular, there is no requirement to install everything, which I agree wouldn't likely work well. The basic install simply adds fixes and improvements to the original game, something I'd recommend everyone has.
   If you install this, you'll have access to the TSCT, which allows you to adjust the values for Mass Transit Usage with simple pre-sets or even to manually tweak them from a simple GUI.

As for actual trains, what we would call Automata mods, those are simply visual changes. Frankly, the in-game Monorail is probably more futuristic than anything else I've seen on that front.

[CorinaMarie 29,859]

20 minutes ago, rsc204 said:

I'm not entirely sure of the default values ...

It so happened I extracted the original Traffic Simulator (exemplar 0xC9133286) in order to create my reply. The values are:

R$ Mass Transit: 80%, Car: 20%, Fastest: 0%
R$$ Mass Transit: 30%, Car: 0%, Fastest: 70%
R$$$ Mass Transit: 10%, Car 80%, Fastest: 10%

@Cassalett IV

I very much agree with @rsc204 that you'd do well to install the minimal option of NAM which includes the Traffic Simulator Z, some mass transit station capacity fixes, and the option to install the TSCT.

In the meantime I've edited a copy of the Maxis Traffic Simulator which you could drop in your Documents\SimCity 4\Plugins folder to override the default values. I've set them to:

R$ Mass Transit: 80%, Car: 0%, Fastest: 20%
R$$ Mass Transit: 50%, Car: 0%, Fastest: 50%
R$$$ Mass Transit: 40%, Car 20%, Fastest: 40%

Should you want any of those numbers changed, just let me know what you'd like them to be and I can make a new version for you. Just be sure they add up to 100% for each wealth level.

Traffic Simulator 800020-500050-402040.dat

Ofc, if you install the Traffic Simulator from NAM you do not want my file in your plugins.

[Cassalett 16]

Thank you very much! The main reason why i can't install NAM is because space. I have my SimCity in a USB because all those windows apps and Microsoft office occupy a lot (and the drive has 14 gigs). I hope in some future i afford an external drive so i can install full NAM . 

[Tarkus 6,933]

1 hour ago, Cassalett IV said:

Thank you very much! The main reason why i can't install NAM is because space. I have my SimCity in a USB because all those windows apps and Microsoft office occupy a lot (and the drive has 14 gigs). I hope in some future i afford an external drive so i can install full NAM . 

While the download itself is 350MB, and it needs a bit more room to extract, the most basic install (detailed here) only runs about 8-9MB.  If you manually whittle that down further, the traffic simulator part isolated by itself is a mere 2.19KB.  Assuming you have Java installed, you can also install the Traffic Simulator Configuration Tool entirely on its own--it can be acquired off the developer's SourceForge page, and runs all of 876.9KB. 

We have actually discussed making a "NAM Lite" that is little more than a few basic features/fixes.  It hasn't gotten beyond proposal at this point, however.

-Tarkus

[Cassalett 16]

1 hour ago, Tarkus said:

While the download itself is 350MB, and it needs a bit more room to extract, the most basic install (detailed here) only runs about 8-9MB.  If you manually whittle that down further, the traffic simulator part isolated by itself is a mere 2.19KB.  Assuming you have Java installed, you can also install the Traffic Simulator Configuration Tool entirely on its own--it can be acquired off the developer's SourceForge page, and runs all of 876.9KB. 

We have actually discussed making a "NAM Lite" that is little more than a few basic features/fixes.  It hasn't gotten beyond proposal at this point, however.

-Tarkus

That sounds really interesting. I didn't knew that. Never paid attention to that installation option. I'm going to try and download the installer again and check it out. Thanks!

[Cassalett 16]

20 hours ago, Tarkus said:

While the download itself is 350MB, and it needs a bit more room to extract, the most basic install (detailed here) only runs about 8-9MB.  If you manually whittle that down further, the traffic simulator part isolated by itself is a mere 2.19KB.  Assuming you have Java installed, you can also install the Traffic Simulator Configuration Tool entirely on its own--it can be acquired off the developer's SourceForge page, and runs all of 876.9KB. 

We have actually discussed making a "NAM Lite" that is little more than a few basic features/fixes.  It hasn't gotten beyond proposal at this point, however.

-Tarkus

I installed the traffic simulator, and my commute times decreased greatly! It seems that my sims were actually able to get faster to work, but just wanted to drive. I downloaded a custom "El Rail" station just to see what happen, and guess what... It worked perfectly! Thank you! Now i can enjoy this mod.

[CorinaMarie 29,859]

2 hours ago, Cassalett IV said:

I installed the traffic simulator, and my commute times decreased greatly!

Yay!

Be sure to toss out that mod I made as it uses the same exemplar as NAM does. You have a much better one with NAM as it tweaks bunches more properties in said exemplar than I did for the quick fix.