toroca

---------------- On 10/30/2003 4:35:07 PM Shoe wrote:Personally, I think you should make it so that everything comes later, I mean, the requirement for stage 8 is 125K I think, when have you ever seen a city with that many people have a huge skyscraper? So I think that it should be increased across all feilds, but Res should definitely be higher. ---------------- That might be something I could do later on, after I'm sure this mod works properly. The problem with what you suggest is testing it. To properly test a mod like this, you need to start a new region and develop it to see if you can see a difference. If I made the limits as high as you suggest, it would be that much harder to be sure they work right. Sure, it would be clear early on whether or not the big buildings were being delayed, but what if you hit the appropriate limits and they never appear? You'd never know that until the population got high enough.

Dragonfire, that's exactly what this mod does. The Stage Limits/Caps are those percents you're talking about, but they're not a percent CHANCE, at least according to the Prima Guide. And they're wrong about so many other things it wouldn't surprise me if they got this wrong too. Anyway, according to them, these percents are hard and fast limits, meaning at a particular population level the game HAS to have that ratio of building stages. I've never fully believed that because for instance, if you only zone Low Density, the game should start having problems when it wants to create a Stage 4 building, since 4s can't be built on low density. And it's a little more complex than just changing the percentages, because the percentages across all eight stages have to add up to 100% at every population level. You can't just double the Stage 8 percentages and expect it to work, there has to be a corresponding decrease in percentages among the other seven stages. What I did for this mod was completely throw out Maxis' population numbers and percentages, and wrote my own from scratch, all the way up to 1,000,000 instead of their maximum of 125,267. Took me over four hours in Excel to get numbers I was happy with, and which hopefully improve the game's realism.

DaveParker, I agree wholeheartedly about Ingebretson Place. This mod SHOULD make it appear a little later, but it'll probably still be too early. At some point I'm going to take a look at it and put it on a lot family that's not Stage 5; that's why it appears so early now, it's on Stage 5 lots if I remember the files correctly. I figure it'll be better if I can find a lot family that has Stage 6 and 7 lots it fits on.

Well, here it is. You'll find the mod attached to this post. Please be sure you read and understand the included readme file before you use this mod. I still consider this a beta, because the kind of changes it makes will take days or weeks to fully test, and I wanted to get it out there for people to try. I've already played with this installed for a while, and it DOES appear to be working properly so far, and I'm not anticipating any problems, but you never know. This is a complex mod. If anyone tries this on pre-Rush Hour SimCity 4 and determines that it does work, please let me know. I think it SHOULD work, but I am by no means positive of that. There may be changes made by Rush Hour that are included in this mod and won't work without Rush Hour. Enjoy!

Yes, people could using zoning to somewhat control this, but not entirely. I'm going further with this mod to put a tighter control on it. I think I've finished this mod, and as soon as I get done reading the forums, I'm going to go start testing it out. Basically what I've done is change all the Stage Limits for residential and office. Decided not to bother with services. Office stage limits are now lower, which means the bigger buildings should start appearing earlier. Indeed, Stage 8 buildings should start appearing once I pass 35,000 office jobs instead of 45,000, and I should get a higher percentage of them too. Also, if I ever get to a million office jobs in the region, fully 30% of them should be in Stage 8 buildings, compared with the current maximum of 20% reached after 125,000 jobs. Residential Stage limits are now higher. No stage 8's should appear before 75,000 people now, compared with 45,000 before. And the maximum percentage of Stage 8s is set at 18% when you reach a population of one million, slightly less than the 20% you'd reach in the original game at a population of around 125,000. I'm optomistic that this mod will be a success, but I'm going to play with it for a while first to make sure it works before I release it.

*listens to the crickets chirping in the silence* Well, it seems there's less interest in this than I expected. I guess I'm the only one still bothered by the "downtown hole" problem in SC4. Just in case someone who IS interested happens to peek in, I'd like to mention that I decided to go ahead and make this mod. I'll release it either tomorrow or LATE tonight if I get it done. If you want details, post and ask.

Tropod, still off topic, but I had a thought about the RCI totals not matching up. Could this be due to the occupancy of the buildings? I know commercial and industrial buildings have a tendency to have fewer workers than they can actually handle, but I can't for the life of me remember if the same happens often with residential. I think it does though. Maybe the graph is reading the maximum POSSIBLE population based on maximum building capacities, not the ACTUAL population? Of course, that possibility only works if the graph shows a higher population than you actually have...

I'm not positive, but I THINK I read a response from Maxis about this once either here or on the official BBS. The problem that was cited was RAM. If you don't have enough RAM, when the game's taking the screenshot as you save, it hits a point where it's not able to continue and you only get a partial screenshot for region view. It doesn't affect playability at all, right? It's just the appearance? If so I think you're stuck unless you get more RAM...

---------------- On 10/8/2003 8:33:59 PM redlotus wrote: Reread my response that you quoted. I did suggest having a road that connected the two lanes. The only problem is that it creates another intersection that will increase congestion. Unfortunately, most people also don't realize that it is necessary on these neighbor-connecting avenues. It took me about two weeks of experimenting just to figure this fact out.---------------- It's only necessary if your design makes it so. I have never had this problem, because my designs don't allow avenues to cause a problem like this.

---------------- On 10/8/2003 1:47:28 PM cheese89 wrote: you should understand that the game probably had a ton of bugs in it, and the testers are perfectly capable of skipping over a few (by accident of course)---------------- They've skipped over some pretty major ones. Like elevated rail rendering diagonal ground highways useless. With all the new transit features in the game, testing those and their interactions should have been a top priority, but judging by the number of issues already found and fixed by the7, it wasn't.

seville, that is completely untrue. If it were true, I wouldn't be able to do trash deals the way I do. I chain them across multiple cities and the ONLY city that has any way of dealing with trash is the one at the very end of the chain. None of the ones along the way have landfills or incinerators.

Kevin, I gotta agree, it would be nice to see the actual commute time listed instead of short, medium, and long. Also, I think the bug that has been described is that once a commute time (long, medium, short) has been applied to a residence, it will not change, even if the place of employment and chosen route change dramatically... am I right on that, 7? Furthermore, I would like to request that you incorporate the7's fixes to the path files so that all forms of transit work correctly, as well as fix any he doesn't get to. There are a lot of people who refuse to use unofficial patches even when they fix what are clearly bugs, not intentional features, so unless you guys at Maxis incorporate these fixes, people like that will be out of luck.

I've made an interesting discovery regarding busses and commuting. I consider it a bug, but not a negative one. It seems neighbor connections have the ability to transform busses into cars. *LOL* I've got three cities currently. Two of them are connected directly to an industry-only city, and the third is connected to the Industry city THROUGH the largest of the three residential cities. I've got bus systems in two of the three residential cities, but not in the industrial city. Now, here's how I found this: I was expanding the larges of the three residential cities when it occurred to me that I hadn't built any bus stops in the industrial city. So, I thought this would mean that the sims could use the busses to travel to my small commercial areas, but not to the neighboring industrial city where most of the region's jobs were. Using the Route Query tool, I did notice that there were busses heading into the industrial city, so I guessed that the game was assuming I would build bus stops the next time I went into the industry city. Out of curiosity, I looked at the highway tile where it connected to the industrial city. Route Query indicated there were 608 people traveling to the industrial city by bus, and 337 by car. I saved and exited to the region, and jumped into the Industrial city. Again out of curiosity, I checked the tile that served as the industrial city's connection to the residential neighbor. To my surprise, 945 cars were reported entering on that highway tile! I immediately realized that 945 was the exact total you'd get if you combined the bus and car totals from the tile just across the border! Since I noted that, I've done some more testing, and it does indeed appear that you don't need bus stops in destination cities; the game simply converts busses into cars if there are no bus stops in the destination city. I saved the industry city, without adding any bus stops, and went back to the residential city. Bus trips didn't drop at all, so the game apparently doesn't care whether the neighbor has bus stops or not, it will send busses to the connection point regardless. If there ARE bus stops in the destination city, it appears that the game will still convert some bus trips into car trips, but my results weren't conclusive on that testing. It's certainly an interesting discovery, and a somewhat surprising one at that. I wasn't expecting it, at least.

I expect that's just a visual thing unless Maxis has fixed it from the original game. In SC4 itself, sims could get on and off highways whether or not onramps were there. If a road or street went under the highway, the sims could get on it. I assume it's still the same in Rush Hour, since a significant portion of the pathfinding engine is essentially unchanged. If that's the case, then the inability to make a left turn applies to the visual automata (cars) only, it doesn't actually have any effect on traffic, as the game will treat it as an intersection instead of an overpass. So, even though it looks like the cars can't turn left, traffic may actually be able to do so.

*sigh* I would advise everyone NOT to use bomberfan's "mod." He obviously doesn't understand some things, in particular what was being asked in this thread. What his mod does is actually slow down the COMMUTE SPEEDS of the various network types. The commute speeds in the Traffic Simulator never affected the visual speed of vehicles in the original SimCity 4, and I very much doubt they affect the visual speeds in Rush Hour either. bomberfan, next time make sure you know what someone is asking for before you toss out a mod, especially one like this that is going to seriously affect commute speeds.

If you have Rush Hour, I've read that the traffic speeds are syncronized to the speed you're playing the game at (ie, they move faster on Cheetah speed). Supposedly, there's an option to turn this off somewhere in the options.

Tyeguy, I don't think it's as simple as "Half the population is the workforce." In SimCity 3000, and presumably in SC4 too, it was the sims in a certain age range that actually worked.

How about adding the new lines to the SAME graph? I'd still like to know how wealthy my sims are. *L*

Odd8ball, I'm glad my method was useful to you. I too have noted that there are times when you must decrease the tax again to get things going, but as you say it usually has to go back up again. It's very interesting that this method results in a stable, balanced city most of the time. One additional benefit that I've seen to this method is that it actually allows R$ sims to move in in sufficient numbers. In my densest city, I've got Stage 8 Apartment Towers of all three wealth levels coexisting quite happily together in the same confined areas. And having some of each type is, as we know, better for the commercial areas, so things are going well there too.

I'm not sure there's a set population for it to start happening. If there is, I don't know what it is. Basically, I don't start lowering taxes until I can't do anything to increase demand. You'll know it's time to lower taxes if you should have residential demand but don't. That's how I discovered it. It LOOKED like I'd hit a demand cap, basically there was no demand. Building parks and such things had no effect whatsoever, and I don't even remember what else I tried. Then I lowered taxes by about 0.3% and BOOM I had demand up the wazoo. As for buses, If you're going to use them, there's no reason not to start right from the beginning. They're very cheap, and even if they get very little usage, every car they take off the roads is worth it in my opinion. When I'm not playing with Walking Speed turned off, I use busses in EVERY city I build, regardless of size. Finally, yes, you CAN set taxes to completely block R$$$ in the beginning, but in my own opinion that's uneccesary. Simply keep taxes high enough to keep R$$$ at a minimum. For instance, when I'm first starting a region, I set R$$$ taxes to 10.0%. This keeps R$$$ demand negative until your education system has become effective. Once your city gets smart, demand will slowly climb into positive territory, but because the tax rate is so high, R$$$ move in at a manageable rate. I know of people who have been overwhelmed by too many R$$$ moving in and being unable to provide everything they demand; well, that's never happened to me. Slow and steady wins the race, after all. My cities have always been stable when I use this method, with minimal abandonment and decay. I should also note that I support my cities almost entirely on residential taxes. My starting tax rates for Residential is as thus: R$ 9.0%, R$$ 9.5%, R$$$ 10.0% I'm more flexible with commerce and industry, but in general, I keep taxes on C$$ and C$$$ very low to encourage growth, and C$ taxes very high since C$ hardly provides any jobs. With Industry, I usually have a single city with low taxes on I$ and I$$, the rest have those set very high and IHT taxes set very low. As a matter of fact, it's not uncommon for me to turn off commercial taxes altogether. In my Honolulu Region, Downtown has a 0% C$$$ tax rate, because that's where I'm concentrating the regions high wealth commerce (although as commerce slowly takes over the currently residential-zoned areas, I'll have to start taxing C$$$ there to keep the city solvent). The rest of the region has a 20% tax rate on C$$$, to make sure it ONLY develops in Downtown. I've got an island with a 1% tax rate on C$$, because that's where I've put most of my medium wealth commerce. I've got higher taxes on it elsewhere, but not 20% like with C$$$. Just 3%.

Alodara, your tax settings are the same as my own, except I usually start out with them 0.5% higher. For anyone who tries that method, though, it should be noted that eventually the game forces you to lower taxes. Demand simply drops into the negative at a certain point and the only thing that will get it back up is lowering taxes.