DATpacking the Network Addon Mod, the Official Way!

Excellent tutorial, thanks. It came to me at the right time, I'm jumping from 36 to 42 and I'm dealing with the positive differences of this evolution. 

Very nice idea to leave the "traffic simulator" folder out of the packaging so that I can change them in the future, making the packaged NAM more flexible, so there's no need for repackaging. 

First question: thinking about it, could I leave the "4 Automata Controller" folder out too? 
I put the "BL Radical", but I imagine that with big cities, this demands too much from my hardware, and it would be better to put a more standard automata.

Second question: what would be the purpose of leaving the controller folder out too? Is it common to have users changing the controller?

4 hours ago, carlosmarcelo said:

Excellent tutorial, thanks. It came to me at the right time, I'm jumping from 36 to 42 and I'm dealing with the positive differences of this evolution. 

Very nice idea to leave the "traffic simulator" folder out of the packaging so that I can change them in the future, making the packaged NAM more flexible, so there's no need for repackaging. 

First question: thinking about it, could I leave the "4 Automata Controller" folder out too? 
I put the "BL Radical", but I imagine that with big cities, this demands too much from my hardware, and it would be better to put a more standard automata.

Second question: what would be the purpose of leaving the controller folder out too? Is it common to have users changing the controller?

If you intend to change the automata controller, that's also an option. Interestingly enough, this folder contains one file.

 

My recommendation for your particular case is to avoid the radical automata controllers, those increase the amount of visible automata over the game's default numbers. Standard, persistent and 24-hour, and their different combinations are less resource intensive options. 

Thanks for your Tutorial dude!

I've just Datpacked NAM43 folder and I've got 1 minute of loading time. Does it is a reasonable loading time considering that i have a 1.10 GB folder of NAM43 after datpacking? @Lucario Boricua @Tarkus???

3 minutes ago, ohdude said:

Thanks for your Tutorial dude!

I've just Datpacked NAM43 folder and I've got 1 minute of loading time. Does it is a reasonable loading time considering that i have a 1.10 GB folder of NAM43 after datpacking? @Lucario Boricua @Tarkus???

Yes, that sounds accurate. My game takes about 4 minutes to load from starting to the region view; and I have about 5x in total file size in my Plugins folder. Many of said files could be packed more efficiently, but this is enough for me when playing.

Glad to know it's helped improve your gameplay experience with faster loading!

@Lucario Boricua Thanks for your fast answer.

I forgot to tell you that i had 800 MB of very ordered plugins folder that took 15-20 seconds to load. So i'm a little doubtful why the loading time of the ton of NAM43 hasn't been less time. Maybe it is because of the complexity of NAM folders by itself.

19 minutes ago, ohdude said:

@Lucario Boricua Thanks for your fast answer.

I forgot to tell you that i had 800 MB of very ordered plugins folder that took 15-20 seconds to load. So i'm a little doubtful why the loading time of the ton of NAM43 hasn't been less time. Maybe it is because of the complexity of NAM folders by itself

The NAM itself has a highly complex file architecture, with multiple nested folders featuring textures, network models, transit station models and lots, network paths, exemplars to control traffic-related content (traffic simulator, traffic data views, automata controllers), and various types of code to control transportation networks (INI and the various RUL code files). The game takes a long time to load mods which consist of numerous small files and folders (spends more time checking each and every folder and file to decide what to load), plus some of the NAM files are really large. By DATpacking, you reduce drastically the number of files and remove the irrelevant files; which drastically improves loading times.

@ohdude, most likely, I'd probably chalk it up to the NAM Controller.  That's the thing that requires the 4GB Patch in order to load--it's a hefty file, and among its subfiles is one (the RUL2 file) that has millions of lines of text in it.

-Tarkus

Thanks @Tarkus and @Lucario Boricua, Now i have a clearer idea of what must be happening. But i have a last question: Why the NAM Controller folder is not DatPacked?? What would happen if we datpack it?

Hi there! @Lucario Boricua and I did a DatPacking for Dummies tutorial which includes DATpacking the NAM. Hope it is useful!

 

 

Lucario,

I followed your NAM rename and restructure subdirectory directions.  But I should note that I packed the entire plugin folder, not just NAM44.

I found absolutely zero performance difference.  Tested were:

* Load of game.  ~10s

* Load of built up large tile.  ~100s

Here my config:

i7 OCd to 4.3GHz

32Gb RAM

2Tb SSD with memory disk cache

WIN10 Pro 64

I timed the second load in each benchmark.  This should not any boost from caching.

Once in the game after the first region load (100s), I found other region loads only take 2-3s.  Needless to say, compared to most large footprint games and mods, the performance is excellent.

Since I am a noob, I only have about 300Mb of mods besides NAM44 (1.2Gb).  I don't think I will go beyond 1Gb of mods when adding more assets.

Even if I could get tile load down to 0.50s from 3s, I don't think it is worth it due to the diminished flexibility in easily testing mods.

---

Have I done something incorrectly?  Or is my hardware bandwidth just making it irrelevant.  The packed size is almost the same as unpacked.  Therefore, the only area for improvement is the number of file reads.  For a mechanical disk, seeking is the longest part of reading, but an SSD and cache has no mechanical overhead to address data.

Thanks.

9 hours ago, MarkShot said:

I only have about 300Mb of mods besides NAM44 (1.2Gb).  I don't think I will go beyond 1Gb of mods when adding more assets.

In your case, it will make very little difference. I believe DatPacking is more suited to peeps with multi-GB plugins and/or tons of ploppable content (which slows menu opening if not packed).

18 hours ago, MarkShot said:

Lucario,

I followed your NAM rename and restructure subdirectory directions.  But I should note that I packed the entire plugin folder, not just NAM44.

I found absolutely zero performance difference.  Tested were:

* Load of game.  ~10s

* Load of built up large tile.  ~100s

Here my config:

i7 OCd to 4.3GHz

32Gb RAM

2Tb SSD with memory disk cache

WIN10 Pro 64

I timed the second load in each benchmark.  This should not any boost from caching.

Once in the game after the first region load (100s), I found other region loads only take 2-3s.  Needless to say, compared to most large footprint games and mods, the performance is excellent.

Since I am a noob, I only have about 300Mb of mods besides NAM44 (1.2Gb).  I don't think I will go beyond 1Gb of mods when adding more assets.

Even if I could get tile load down to 0.50s from 3s, I don't think it is worth it due to the diminished flexibility in easily testing mods.

---

Have I done something incorrectly?  Or is my hardware bandwidth just making it irrelevant.  The packed size is almost the same as unpacked.  Therefore, the only area for improvement is the number of file reads.  For a mechanical disk, seeking is the longest part of reading, but an SSD and cache has no mechanical overhead to address data.

Thanks.

DATPacking the NAM with a small collection of mods doesn't provide a large performance benefit, but it does when working with large mod collections. I at least did get a 3 minute performance gain when pairing DATpacked NAM with another 5GB worth of mods, and it does boil down to the number of tiles the game must load when it comes to launching the game from an SSD. There are, however, other benefits, such as decreasing the loading times between data views, especially the subway view and the Zones + subway data view. These are especially significant in large cities.

Thanks, Lucario.  I have the downloaded the utilities (I prefer the JAVA packer) and bookmarked the thread if I should feel the need into the future.

Thanks, Lucario. Served me perfectly with NAM 45 using JDatPacker.

Hi, Luc, thank you so much for this detailed tutorial!
It helped me a lot, and I always point out this post to others looking to datpacked their NAM or just gain some performance boost.

A little feedback: seems like there's a slight jump from steps 6 to 7, where you mentioned moving the contents inside the folder "2 Additional...", but then jumped to showing all the contents of NAM folder already in the root of the Plugins folder. You did mention "Select them all ...", but I thought it was just the folders inside "2 Additional...". So, maybe you can improve/add more copy to explain it.

Also, this one is really minor, but some of the pictures with 2 windows side-by-side, where the one that matters is only the left side, confused me too. Because I thought I had to do the actions from the left window to the right window. Maybe adding a slightly darker overlay will help with this.

Just to be sure, the process is the same for newer versions of the NAM right? as the NAM has no z_nam and the Aditional networks folder has more folders and different names for them. Is there an updated version?