loveangel

Hmm. Can you be sure it hasn't already been offered? Just like the poster above said sometimes you don't get the pop ups. I have them turned off within the plain maxis settings, you don't even need the plugin in order to stop getting the popup messages. All you do is click the news ticker at the very bottom, there should be something about pilots needing more elbow room. That is the airport upgrade dialogue.

I really like having underground highway tunnels that go beneath the CBD, with small sections (sunken highway) between tunnels with just enough space for an offramp. It really cuts down on the amount of space you use, and I think it looks really cool having the highway from suburbia disappear under the skyscrapers. Not to mention that the extra variety you get working with some sunken highways for the onramp/offramp sections.

There is no need to rotate highway pieces manually, in fact, i don't understand why it was suggested (??) To answer the question that you actually asked, your highways can't have sharp corners like roads do. They need to have a 45 degree angle corner, combined with another 45 degree corner, in order to go a different direction. Just keep playing with it until you get it right, keeping in mind that you need gentle bends not sharp, 90 degree corners. Rail works in a similar way.

Having rail connections to other cities gives cap relief for industry but I don't think there is much benefit beyond that, unfortunately. The freight usage my rails get seems to come from industry that touches the rail, not from the freight station. It's almost as if sims dont want to truck their freight to the station- once the freight is on the truck, they might as well just drive to the edge of the map, no matter how much farther it is. Maybe there is a freight trip time penalty for transferring from truck to rail, or maybe it is a side effect of NAM's better traffic pathfinding. That being said, if you do have a freight station in the middle of a large industrial area that is roughly in the middle of your city, it will get some usage, but most freight will still go out by truck it seems. As for seaports, I've always had them at full capacity. Sims are lining up to truck their freight to the ships so I'm not seeing any problems there. I wish rail would get more usage, though.

where exactly are you getting your city files if not from your region folder ? If it helps any, the other region folder is C:\Program Files\Maxis\Simcity 4\Regions But thats probably of little use if you've already found your city files... but somehow they are not part of any region? the folder they are contained in should be your region's folder. This is all very confusing to me; are you sure its not a simple oversight? edit: PS if you already transferred your cities over and don't care too much for the region anyway, try importing them within the game (click on blank city tile, one of the buttons besides start new city should let you import)

Check out omnibus articles relating to residential caps if you haven't already, that could very well be your problem. With 700k population, you will need to have basically every reward placed in your city for cap relief and quite a few parks. Stadiums, plenty of educational buildings, major art museum, opera house (opera house fix might be necessary, its in the top50 downloads in the right sidebar of STEX), you might even think about cheating to place farmer's market and other harder to get rewards, if necessary. I also remember having troubles getting past 700k in one of my larger cities, but I don't remember exactly how I started growing it again... I think opera house fix played a big part.

I remember a thread recently about the railway crossing gate being down all the time. The cars can't get through, but it also bugs the trains as well, meaning nothing can go through the crossing. The cause of the problem, iirc, was left hand drive version of NAM being used on a right hand drive version of the game. If you have right hand drive SC4, try reinstalling NAM, making sure to use right hand drive in NAM installation. If that isn't your problem, I don't know what it is, unless its something obvious like the track not having a neighbor connection (freight is always shipped out of town, not within town), or section of track incomplete. and btw- they always seem to prefer trucks, but your train should have at least a little bit of activity. you can get a no truck route mod from STEX, but fix your bugged trains first

I think the OP is specifically referring to the "service area" as the max distance a sim will walk to or from the station (not how far you can bus or drive to a station). In fact he mentioned that any jobs, houses, or transit stops within that area would be within commuting distance from other transit service areas in the city. Unfortunately, the reason why this would be complicated is that there is no "radius" for walking distance. As far as I know, the sims walk along the roads, not through other zones, so the max walking distance would have to be measured along routes the sims would actually take, and the service area would obviously not look like a circle. Still, I'm sure it could be done somehow, but it would not be as simple as showing a service radius..

the robots and UFO's are just stupid imo. its fine if they wanna add that stuff but they should put normal disasters in first. After all, what major city is complete without a devastating fire or horrible flood sometime in its history? Instead we have to unleash the great car monster attack of year 78? come on.. They started on the right track with simcity classic and sc2k, with the disasters and scenarios (the non-disaster scenarios were good too), but they seem to have abandoned that for other features. I for one find u-drive it as nothing more than annoying, accidently clicking on police cars and trains etc..

I used to get constant CTD like everyone else, but I haven't had any for a month or two. The only thing I can think of is that I defragged my page file and system files (different than what the windows defrag tool does), and installed the new nvidia driver. I did both about two months ago, can't recall any crashes since. For those of you with nvidia cards, maybe give the new (oct 15 '08) driver a try. As for defragging the page/system files, I'm not sure if that actually helps; I had to do it for a different reason. I used PerfectDisc to do it, theres lots of tutorials on those geek news sites. But try the driver thing first. ps. to the person recommending that we all turn off our page files, you're being a bit misleading. Why would you claim that it "will kill if not the physical disc, then the file system" (*****??). This is just wrong, and there is no benefit to turning it off, even with 4gb of ram.

Even with no fire departments, no smoke alarm ordinance, and no water, fires usually just disappear out without causing any damage. sometimes the building turns into rubble. It seems that fires can't spread at all. The worst you can do is constantly set your nuclear power plant ablaze, after several attempts it may explode (usually the fire goes out on its own), causing much radiation and some small fires, which quickly disappear.

If your demand is exactly 0, not below, you probably have hit the residential caps (in your case, for all types of residential) You can do what simsmart said, download a census tool, you will see that your caps are at 100%. But the solution doesn't require any mods, just build more parks, or whatever other rewards you have unlocked. There are also several articles on the omnibus that go into more detail on caps and cap relief.

sorry, but that "proof" is a little, shall we say, suspect? Especially in the math, and definition of "proof" departments points for effort though ps. 2.5m is the length of a smart car

omnibus edit: nm, you got your answer

There is a very detailed guide on the omnibus (OmniMaps section). Try the sticky at the top of the thread list, the one that says start here first. or just go up a board to the omnibus forum. Here are the basic steps for a normal region: 1. create the region 2. exit sc4, save the config file to the region folder. (My) Documents\Simcity 4\Regions is default i think 3. save the map, it's probably a jpg file, I just put it in the region folder so its easy to remember 4. go back into sc4, press ctrl-alt-shift-R, select the map you just downloaded. 5. wait while it creates each city tile one by one. If that doesn't work, or doesn't make any sense, check out the omnibus guide. It is explained in more depth and has the solution to whatever problem you could possibly have. There's also guides for SC4Terraformer maps.

Your city really does have a water shortage, and the 0% usage pump is why the graph shows extra capacity (the pump's unused capacity adds to your overall water capacity but the water isn't gettting to your buildings). Demolish it (and any other 0% usage pumps) and the graph will show your actual capacity. Rebuild the pump one space over (rebuilding it on the same space doesn't seem to work), or buy more water from neighbors after you demolish the pump. hope that helps

Originally posted by: Dizastrow My system works!! Last night I started a new region and built a few cities right away. Put ONRAMPS by the connections to each city tile and ONE in your R, I, and C centers. Dont put them anywhere else. People are using my highways like crazy!!quote> And what you're suggesting is that adding another onramp will discourage people from using your highway...? The idea that adding onramps to a highway will cause a bottleneck effect and congestion in front of every ramp, slowing everybody down, makes sense in real life. But I don't think theres really any related game mechanics in sc4. highways will have a set capacity, "merging" shouldn''t necessarily slow anybody down unless it goes over capacity. Sounds like your highway is pretty well positioned, connecting several cities and going through all types of zones, couldn't that be why it's well used?

I'd like to see more technical info about RCI demand as well. I myself don't have any definite facts, but I do have some observations, all of which could be totally wrong of course. so if anybody can correct me, I'd appreciate it. Like you said, industry (incl. farms) is the first to grow. The game seems to give you an artificial head start in that area, just to get your demand moving. The presence of jobs in a city (or region) will drive R demand, but jobs provided by different "levels" of industry don't seem to correspond 100% to different levels of R wealth. This seems to be partly because dirty and ag can also provide jobs for R$$ and R$$$ sims, and HT (and Co-$$$) likely provides some jobs to R$. This is logical; not everybody who works at a law firm earns "$$$" type salary, and people who own or manage "dirty industry" can be very wealthy. For the sake of example, lets say that an industry low wealth ($) building has 60% R$ jobs, 30% R$$ and 10% R$$$. somebody with a better understanding should clarify this, I have no idea what the actual numbers are. So with that in mind, having farms in your region will create demand for low wealth sims, but it will also cause demand (but less) for R$$ and R$$$. I'm not sure what you mean by false demand; if the farms are close enough to cause demand elsewhere in your region, they will also be close enough for sims to travel to work there. Industry and commercial demand seem to be driven by residents "needs". So while having some jobs will cause people to move in to fill those jobs, those new sims will have needs (like umm..furniture and ipods and stuff), which is basically what causes industry and commercial demand to rise. This is apparently complicated by education but my theory is, sims with low education only "need" goods produced by dirty industry. As their education level rises, their needs are filled by manufacturing. Once they are very educated, their needs become high tech. This is similar, yet different than the idea that industry/comm demand grows just because sims want more jobs- because if that were true, demand wouldn't really ever stop and if it somehow did, it would never start again. Like I said, much of this is just guesswork, but if anybody can correct me or point me to a thread with more details about how RCI demand actually works, that'd be great

The 3 mil city in GTR is so nice, amazing transportation networks, but I don't understand how the population is so high? approx 3 mil for both residential and commercial but so much space devoted to greenspace, landmarks and transport, especially very large interchanges. I would have thought 3 mil residential pop would require most, if not all jobs located elsewhere in the region, but 6 mil combined RCI occupancy seems very high considering relatively little space is devoted to zoning. I guess what I'm getting at is, the GTR has 50% more population yet looks far less dense, with approx same amount of space used as the OP's youtube city (greenspace in GTR compares to water in op's city). My own similar looking cities (albeit not nearly as nice) come closer to 2-3 mil total occupancy (res+com), less than half of GTR. are mods being used that increase residential and commercial occupancy, or maybe ploppable buildings with high amount of residents/workers? edit: im calling bs on the 2 billion pop in a default region. lol. that is the kind of outrageous claim that requires screenshots unless all buildings are edited to fit 1 mil people in each house...

The best way to make your city "beautiful" is to slow down, don't build too much at once, focus on each city block as you build it. Its hard to pay attention to detail if you're zoning big grids at once. Try to plan an interesting transportation network, general areas of high density (urban) and low density (surburban), medium in between, and a natural looking skyline limited to your downtown core/CBD. But then build each neighborhood one at a time, with some unique characteristics, never lay down zones just to fill empty space.

first of all, this thread is like over a year old, and what you describe doesn't seem to be a problem with sc4, it's a vista or virus problem. Have you tried googling the error message you get? There are a lot of tech help forums with discussions on the same problem that you have, they will come up in google. It seems to be a common problem...but there are many possible solutions, good luck. and just in case somebody else has the same issue as the OP, the answer to the op's problem is ctrl-alt-del, task manager, killing process "ereg.exe" and then running the sc4 installer again (nothing to do with admin mode). again, googling the error message (ereg has stopped working) gives more detailed instructions.

You should fix the problem causing the zots. I don't understand why you would turn them off...

You didn't list a graphics card, do you have onboard graphics? A real card and more ram would help. Judging by your processor and ram, your motherboard won't support current PCIe cards, upgrading your video card might mean finding an old AGP card (they're cheaper anyway). probably 50-80$ for a decent (but older) card, it will be more than enough for simcity4. and a gig of ram probably only $50 or less. 512mb is way too low. Beyond that, set all your graphics settings to lowest, make your windows background a color not a picture, close all programs (including ones in system tray). but 512 mb RAM doesn't go a long way, you'll need to upgrade if you want the game to run much faster

That's creative but not really a solution, you shouldn't have to manually connect them like that, not to mention the rest of the game is clearly broken. why even worry about el-rail right now? To the rest of the people in this thread, does your game look as messed up as the op? Green zone showing below houses (this is NOT normal), no ground texture except the default grass, etc. Listen to cockatoo people, delete your plugins folder, uninstall sc4, then reinstall it. this is not supposed to happen in an unmodded game with a clean install, no matter what version. If that doesn't help, post your OS, game version, a couple hardware specs, maybe there are similarities. Make sure you specify whether or not you have the same problem as op (rail + textures), if your textures are fine but el-rail doesn't work, or vice versa.

Like haljackey said, if your highway runs more or less between home and work without much detour, they will be well used. Not so much if they detour around the edge of town (like the 3 number interstates in america). If you have NAM, you definitely don't need to build highways if you don't want to. I usually only build them between/around the major cities on my region (mostly for the transport map on region view, and the highway neighbor connection bonus- lol), not necessarily right through them. I never have them near CBD/downtown areas and rarely in areas of high density res zones. I just don't really like the idea of car-dependant urban sprawl, like cali, texas, toronto etc. I prefer the thought of people walking and riding the subway if they live downtown, and taking the train in if they live in suburbia