Street congestion

[svachon 3]

In a large tile/city do you even care much about congestion?  It seems that it's always there with no real impact or am I wrong?

[TheMurderousCricket 5,042]

I never care about congestion in commercial areas because it is actually very beneficial to commerce. Much less in industrial areas, because it simply doesn't matter.

I do care about traffic near my farms, because it simply murders agriculture.

I sometimes (with limited success) try to unload the traffic burden in residential areas too, because it influences living conditions and tends to deteriorate air and desirability of the area.

I have to admit though that with NAM in place, I rarely have to worry about traffic congestion with the use of "medium" or "high" settings (I'm not sure which one I use...)

[svachon 3]

I cannot find my Traffic Simulator Tool to make NAM traffic changes anywhere.  I found it when I initially installed the NAM and changed my setting but now I can't find it. 

I'm in the NAM folder/traffic configuration tool and I thought it might be the TSCT.Jar file but it doesn't open.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,042]

In that case just redownload NAM or browse through your download directory. Maybe it's still there. 

Do note, however, that you should keep TSCT outside of the plugins folder. Otherwise, the game will attempt to load it as if it was a plugin, which is totally pointless and time consuming.

[Lucario Boricua 7,026]

6 hours ago, svachon said:

I cannot find my Traffic Simulator Tool to make NAM traffic changes anywhere.  I found it when I initially installed the NAM and changed my setting but now I can't find it. 

I'm in the NAM folder/traffic configuration tool and I thought it might be the TSCT.Jar file but it doesn't open.

Starting with NAM 45, the Traffic Simulator Configuration Tool (TSCT--the program) was discontinued. Development of Traffic Simulator Z 3.0 optimized the traffic simulator exemplar variables so much that we reached a far superior functionality of traffic behavior for the game. It turns out that many of the variables the TSCT could modify were highly critical, and shouldn't be deviated from their optimal values, which we spent about a year testing and refining very rigorously.

Now, there are some variables which are acceptable to change, as they don't affect traffic behavior. You can edit these using the SC4 Reader or iLives Reader; but these variables should be the ones dealing with network cost and transit type revenues.

Do you know which settings you want to change? Maybe there's still some room to adjust them without the TSCT.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As far as just to what extent congestion matters, it turns out it's quite critical to the healthy functioning of the city. Traffic Simulator Z 3.0 is actually more sensitive to congestion, and it's this sensitivity which helps it optimize the commute routes to a much greater degree. This optimization actually makes high-speed and high-capacity routes (freeways and rail transit) more attractive, allowing players to adjust just how much transit use they get in their city by increasing/decreasing the transit infrastructure supply. It's also why we also recommend players to use a lower capacity option compared to what they were using before. The one issue we do have is we haven't figured out how to make the Traffic Advisor complain less about the congestion that's actually meant to occur as part of the simulator's intended functionality when using the Network Addon Mod.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,042]

6 minutes ago, Lucario Boricua said:

Starting with NAM 45, the Traffic Simulator Configuration Tool (TSCT--the program) was discontinued.

Waaaat?! 

Goodness me... I can't imagine playing this game without it!

Are there any instructions on how to actually modify things that TSCT did effortless? Network capacities? Transit choice percentages?

We will all die...!  

[Lucario Boricua 7,026]

Just now, TheMurderousCricket said:

Are there any instructions on how to actually modify things that TSCT did effortless? Network capacities? Transit choice percentages?

The latest optimization of the simulator is such that you shouldn't even need to do these changes. If you do them on your own, it's at your own risk, and you might find out that, in the vast majority of cases, Traffic Sim Z 3.0 will work better than what your modification is trying to achieve.

Try and do this experiment: 

• To manipulate transit choice percentages (o more correctly, the Mass Transit Use strategy percentages), make sure to adjust just how much coverage you have for transit access--the density of transit lines and stops. Say, take an arbitrary city of your choice, and change the spacing between bus stops. Let's say you have a grid of 6x6 blocks, try first putting one bus stop every 4 blocks, run the game for some years until bus traffic updates sufficiently, then add enough stops to halve the spacing to one bus stop every 2 blocks, you'll see how transit use will dramatically increase. Taking it to the extreme, you could replicate your surface road network using subways, and put subway stops at every intersection, that's gonna result in an incredibly high subway transit use, and in a rather wealthy city developing.
• If you still think the transit use doesn't match your expectations, the only variable I'd recommend adjusting are the Mass Transit Use strategy percentages, and specifically assigning a greater share of the trips to the 'Fastest' option. This way, a greater proportion of the sims will be responsive to transit improvements, at the cost of a slow-down in traffic sim performance while it updates routes.
• As for network capacities, these have a reason of being the way they are. The idea is that the network capacity differentials help reinforce how traffic flows are allocated between networks; and there's still a good amount of flexibility if you know how to substitute certain networks for other similar networks. Say, using parallel one-way pairs in place of avenue (faster surface road travel and increased congestion resistance), or knowing when to go for subway, elevated rail, conventional rail, or monorail/HSR/Hybrid Rail for passenger rail travel.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,042]

11 minutes ago, Lucario Boricua said:

To manipulate transit choice percentages (o more correctly, the Mass Transit Use strategy percentages), make sure to adjust just how much coverage you have for transit access--the density of transit lines and stops. Say, take an arbitrary city of your choice, and change the spacing between bus stops. Let's say you have a grid of 6x6 blocks, try first putting one bus stop every 4 blocks, run the game for some years until bus traffic updates sufficiently, then add enough stops to halve the spacing to one bus stop every 2 blocks, you'll see how transit use will dramatically increase.

Hm, yes, but on the other hand I was quite convinced by the "American" and "European" presets that you guys have provided with the TSCT. I'm not sure how the current system will handle it because if we take the "American" way into account, then I believe people would not hop onto a bus, even if an entire street was lined up with bus stops.

Unless, of course, this is the underlying problem of the American transit system - the fact that it is scarce. Not that the people have some innate aversion towards using busses. 

It is a great idea to actually make the SC4 transit system more responsive. I can agree that in the vanilla game it was always extremely disappointing to put down transit stops and see that just a handful of people was ready to actually use them...

My only point is that setting fixed numbers through TSCT is more controllable than engineering mass transit use in vivo through actual city building.

19 minutes ago, Lucario Boricua said:

If you still think the transit use doesn't match your expectations, the only variable I'd recommend adjusting are the Mass Transit Use strategy percentages, and specifically assigning a greater share of the trips to the 'Fastest' option.

You mean iLives editing right? I assume adjusting it through TSCT will result in ka-BOOM...? 

 

[CorinaMarie 29,556]

On 11/2/2022 at 5:13 PM, Lucario Boricua said:

The one issue we do have is we haven't figured out how to make the Traffic Advisor complain less about the congestion that's actually meant to occur as part of the simulator's intended functionality when using the Network Addon Mod.

Is this still an issue? I believe some Lua code could fix it right up.

[rsc204 21,804]

This has always been an issue for some who aren’t happy with small pockets of congestion, whilst some LUA tweaking would shut off the related messages, it doesn’t fix anything. Not that I don’t think it would be a useful option to stop the messages related to this. But the idea is to alert users to problems, the game just can’t differentiate between a few tiles around an intersection and an entire stretch of road etc that is congested. The latter would be something mayors should take care of. But so far as I know, the trigger simply happens when a single tile is congested.

[CorinaMarie 29,556]

Ok, so it's not something we want to do anything about?

(I was thinking of a couple of options with the easy one being to simply nix any advisor comments related to congestion and then the player is responsible for looking at the appropriate data views. The other idea, but I'd have to get my extracted Lua files to check for sure, would be to make it way less sensitive, but still pop up for seriously way over congested locations.)

[Simizen 1,083]

5 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

(I was thinking of a couple of options with the easy one being to simply nix any advisor comments related to congestion and then the player is responsible for looking at the appropriate data views. The other idea, but I'd have to get my extracted Lua files to check for sure, would be to make it way less sensitive, but still pop up for seriously way over congested locations.)

If you can tie this to the NAM with the different volume levels, this could work.

But if you change the advisor pop up otherwise, I suggest tying it to the difficulty levels if possible so that those on the hardest level would only get them at the extreme amounts (or even not at all depending on your setting). Would help make the hard mode feel quite a bit more difficult imo, cause I've seen people burn through hard mode pretty quickly and are able to stay on top of it.

Up to you of course, but this idea in general seems really solid.

[CorinaMarie 29,556]

1 hour ago, Ryuu Tenno said:

But if you change the advisor pop up otherwise, I suggest tying it to the difficulty levels if possible so that those on the hardest level would only get them at the extreme amounts (or even not at all depending on your setting).

Yep. That makes perfect sense and can easily be part of the calculation. We can also change the priority levels so most could become only a scrolling news ticker item instead of a frantic urgent pop up.

 

I'm not sure if you've ever seen my earliest Lua coding attempts, but as part of the CORI Reports we can see this congestion data:

Spoiler

The one with the H is the highest percent of a single piece of the network. The other is the average for the entire network. And I believe the Connection ones are counts.

Street congestion tile count = 155
Street congestion H = 495.71
Street congestion = 19.29

Road congestion tile count = 2
Road congestion H = 119.43
Road congestion = 5.79
Road connection congestion H = 1

Avenue congestion tile count = 0
Avenue congestion H = 9.83
Avenue congestion = 0.35
Avenue connection congestion H = 1

Bridge congestion tile count = 0
Bridge congestion H = 2.54
Bridge congestion = 2.5

Rail congestion tile count = 27
Rail congestion H = 116.67
Rail congestion = 12.23

Subway congestion tile count = 39
Subway congestion H = 338.67
Subway congestion = 64.08

Elevated rail congestion tile count = 0
Elevated rail congestion H = 25.53
Elevated rail congestion = 25.53

Monorail congestion tile count = 93
Monorail congestion H = 307.8
Monorail congestion = 245.98

The Advisors use  If Greater Than  code logic to decide what they are going to complain about. That code can have multiple conditions. So, if they are flagged to pop up when one of them goes over 100%, we could set that to 200 for Easy, 300 for Medium, and 400 for Hard mode. (Or anything else we want.)

We can base it on a combination of tile counts of congestion, the average for the network, or the highest amount of any single piece for any values we want and in any combinations that would make the most sense.

Or, tell them to shut up completely no matter what's going on.

[Simizen 1,083]

That's absolutely incredible. Glad to know that adjusting them is fairly simple.

Now I'm kinda wondering if it's possible to put in some adjustments for CAM due to the fact that CAM's hard mode would effectively be "Expert" if SC4 ran up to 4 difficulty levels. Though, something tells me that the flags needed for CAM to function would end up being a bit more complicated (and likely running into DLL modding).

Still, this is wonderful to see

[CorinaMarie 29,556]

5 hours ago, Ryuu Tenno said:

Now I'm kinda wondering if it's possible to put in some adjustments for CAM due to the fact that CAM's hard mode would effectively be "Expert" if SC4 ran up to 4 difficulty levels. Though, something tells me that the flags needed for CAM to function would end up being a bit more complicated (and likely running into DLL modding).

Anything related to what the advisors say and the criteria they use to evaluate it is handled in the Lua code. Within the .exe that code has to make variables available for Lua to see. As long they are already visible to Lua (or a DLL can push them over) we can work with them and make IF / THEN / ELSE choices for what we want the advisors to say, who'll say it, when it'll happen, and how urgent it'll be.

So if there are adjustments needed for CAM, I can prolly help and we can discuss that in an appropriate thread later on. For now, I'm still catching up with two year's worth of posts and also don't have the game or any tools. I will be getting N++ installed soon which is what I use for Lua coding. CB has already sent me a copy of all the Maxis Lua I extracted long ago into separate text files. (This allows me to do multi-file searches to be sure to find every instance of what transpires under the hood.)

 

Back to this topic: The congestion coding is something I can start on soon. Will you have cities where you can create various levels of congestion in which to test the code?