CAN-AM Tutorials?

[John doe29 4]

Are there any good CAN AM tutorials out there that any of you would recommend? 

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

I'm not aware of any guides at the moment and that is likely because there was/is a bug in the included Lua code for the Canal Boat generator. That has been solved and this part can be found in my Cori's Coded Solution to the Canal Boats Creation Issue post. You'll want to be sure to use my modified controller in case it hasn't yet made it into the official version.

Hopefully I'm wrong about there being no guides and other peeps know of them and will post linkys.

[rsc204 21,808]

12 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

I'm not aware of any guides at the moment and that is likely because there was/is a bug in the included Lua code for the Canal Boat generator.

That could be a factor, but my general understanding is that CAN-AM was never particularly well received as NAM add-ons go. A lot of people dislike that as a network it has absolutely no slope tolerance, something which is the result of a game limitation that applies to all such Canal pieces, not specific to the NAM addons which simply make them functional.

As for no tutorial, indeed I don't know of one either, it was going to be part 5 of my NAM tutorials series of videos on YouTube, I've even got the rushes (raw footage) on my HDD, I just never got around to the tedious part of editing it all. I do still hope to finish that one day, but for the moment, the best I can offer is a run down of how it all works.

I find it best to decide on the pathway of your canal before doing anything else, using the Road tool drag out the route you want the functional canals to take. Note that only 4 basic pieces are supported, so your Road can only include Straight, a 1-tile 90° curve and T & + junctions. Next you should add the CAN-AM stations where you want them to be. After that, select the CAN-AM item in the Misc. Transit menu, hover the piece over a straight segment and click to place, which converts the Road into Canal Water. Continue until every straight tile has been converted, then press TAB to switch to the second CAN-AM piece, the 90° curve and repeat the process until all the curves are converted. Press TAB again and repeat for all T Intersections and lastly after pressing TAB once more, the + Intersections. Whilst not required to make things functional, you should now fill in all the canal edges/pieces to make a coherent complete canal system. Don't forget too that ensure a valid road-based transit network touches directly to any of the stations you plopped earlier.

CAN-AM also includes a number of other pieces you can use to make crossings, which support the following networks:

• 15m Road Overpasses
• 15m Ave Overpasses
• 15m OWR Overpasses
  Note the above three interface easiest with the original Puzzle-Piece based Road Viaducts, rather than the newer Draggable ones.
• L2 (15m) Viaduct Rail Crossings
  Note like the road-based crossings above, this older network connects easiest with the legacy Viaduct Rail pieces.
• El-Rail (L2)
• Monorail (L2)
• Maxis Highway (L2 - If installed, converts to MHO)
• FLUPs interface (Compatible with any NAM FLUPs network)

All of these crossing types include both an Outside and Inside piece. If using them, they should be built before the main canal sections. Of course, you can delete and modify existing sections to include them too. Now seems like a good time to mention, using the Road tool just helps get the main canal segments into place and speeds things up building larger sections. It's absolutely not required to make things functional, so don't fret if you find you can't connect them all up at any stage of the process.

Back to the crossings, it should be fairly self explanatory to place them, the Outside ones replace the Outer canal pieces and the Inner ones cover the tiles in between the outer ones. You can use more than one inner piece if you want to have wider canals, but the main CAN-AM paths don't necessarily need to connect up with more than one such piece, provided there is at least one complete path connecting the whole. Also, make sure you build such crossing pieces, BEFORE you build the surrounding networks that connect to them.

It's really as simple as that, if you are familiar with general use of Puzzle-Piece based legacy NAM content, you should find it familiar pretty quickly.

One last tip, whilst it is true that you need to have an absolutely flat area to make the canals, all three released NAM CAN-AM styles have Lock pieces in their respective canal sets. You can use those either singularly or grouped together to traverse different height levels, so you don't have to keep everything at one level. Of course those pieces are not functional, so will lead to breaks in your functional canal system, with a little creativity and correct placement of Stations, that doesn't have to be a huge problem. 

[matias93 7,535]

What about making lock lots that are modded as bus stations? They should be able to allow sims to transfer between both levels, as canal boats are repurposed buses. For cargo, I don't know how it's modded, but if cargo canal stations were possible, the same exemplars should work with locks.

All the same, locks could be modded as ferry stations to allow sims to go from a canal to open waters.

[John doe29 4]

4 hours ago, rsc204 said:

That could be a factor, but my general understanding is that CAN-AM was never particularly well received as NAM add-ons go. A lot of people dislike that as a network it has absolutely no slope tolerance, something which is the result of a game limitation that applies to all such Canal pieces, not specific to the NAM addons which simply make them functional.

As for no tutorial, indeed I don't know of one either, it was going to be part 5 of my NAM tutorials series of videos on YouTube, I've even got the rushes (raw footage) on my HDD, I just never got around to the tedious part of editing it all. I do still hope to finish that one day, but for the moment, the best I can offer is a run down of how it all works.

I find it best to decide on the pathway of your canal before doing anything else, using the Road tool drag out the route you want the functional canals to take. Note that only 4 basic pieces are supported, so your Road can only include Straight, a 1-tile 90° curve and T & + junctions. Next you should add the CAN-AM stations where you want them to be. After that, select the CAN-AM item in the Misc. Transit menu, hover the piece over a straight segment and click to place, which converts the Road into Canal Water. Continue until every straight tile has been converted, then press TAB to switch to the second CAN-AM piece, the 90° curve and repeat the process until all the curves are converted. Press TAB again and repeat for all T Intersections and lastly after pressing TAB once more, the + Intersections. Whilst not required to make things functional, you should now fill in all the canal edges/pieces to make a coherent complete canal system. Don't forget too that ensure a valid road-based transit network touches directly to any of the stations you plopped earlier.

CAN-AM also includes a number of other pieces you can use to make crossings, which support the following networks:

• 15m Road Overpasses
• 15m Ave Overpasses
• 15m OWR Overpasses
  Note the above three interface easiest with the original Puzzle-Piece based Road Viaducts, rather than the newer Draggable ones.
• L2 (15m) Viaduct Rail Crossings
  Note like the road-based crossings above, this older network connects easiest with the legacy Viaduct Rail pieces.
• El-Rail (L2)
• Monorail (L2)
• Maxis Highway (L2 - If installed, converts to MHO)
• FLUPs interface (Compatible with any NAM FLUPs network)

All of these crossing types include both an Outside and Inside piece. If using them, they should be built before the main canal sections. Of course, you can delete and modify existing sections to include them too. Now seems like a good time to mention, using the Road tool just helps get the main canal segments into place and speeds things up building larger sections. It's absolutely not required to make things functional, so don't fret if you find you can't connect them all up at any stage of the process.

Back to the crossings, it should be fairly self explanatory to place them, the Outside ones replace the Outer canal pieces and the Inner ones cover the tiles in between the outer ones. You can use more than one inner piece if you want to have wider canals, but the main CAN-AM paths don't necessarily need to connect up with more than one such piece, provided there is at least one complete path connecting the whole. Also, make sure you build such crossing pieces, BEFORE you build the surrounding networks that connect to them.

It's really as simple as that, if you are familiar with general use of Puzzle-Piece based legacy NAM content, you should find it familiar pretty quickly.

One last tip, whilst it is true that you need to have an absolutely flat area to make the canals, all three released NAM CAN-AM styles have Lock pieces in their respective canal sets. You can use those either singularly or grouped together to traverse different height levels, so you don't have to keep everything at one level. Of course those pieces are not functional, so will lead to breaks in your functional canal system, with a little creativity and correct placement of Stations, that doesn't have to be a huge problem. 

CAN AM stations? Where do I find those?

[Tarkus 6,932]

30 minutes ago, John doe29 said:

CAN AM stations? Where do I find those?

The NAM includes a basic CAN-AM station now, a recent addition from CasperVg.  If you're looking for more, pretty much all of the ones available were released by BarbyW on the LEX at SC4D.  Note that these do have dependencies--using the LEX Dependency Tracker will help quite a bit in gathering those (click the green "Supports the LEX Dependency Tracker" button to access the tracker).

BSC CAN-AM Lots NAM: https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=2110

BMD Venetian Terminals and Lots CAN-AM BSC: https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=2235

BSC Terminals for the Diggis CAN-AM Mod: https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=2214

(Note that the last one is intended to work the Diggis CAN-AM Multiple Canals Mod: https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=2213)

-Tarkus

[Gwyain 95]

On 8/17/2020 at 5:35 PM, matias93 said:

What about making lock lots that are modded as bus stations? They should be able to allow sims to transfer between both levels, as canal boats are repurposed buses. For cargo, I don't know how it's modded, but if cargo canal stations were possible, the same exemplars should work with locks.

All the same, locks could be modded as ferry stations to allow sims to go from a canal to open waters.

I actually just started working on the latter canal lock to ferry transition you're talking about, though given I'm new to SimCity modding and have to learn as I go, progress is rather slow. Once I actually get everything figured out and made to my satisfaction I'd love to get it up on the exchange since it seems I'm not the only one interested in that sort of thing.