iller

Greetings, I'm not having any issues with this Mod as far as I'm aware atleast. I just wanted to offer my findings so far incase feedback was being collected (hopefully my examples are of a proper scale to get something out of them) ...as well as give details to other prospective users as to what they could expect from it b/c when I read these threads before downloading it, I didn't find examples were yet available and it frankly left me feeling a bit lost. Prior to this I was playing 100% vanilla(non-patched) 1.0 SC4 deluxe and all I really wanted was a boost to my "Sims"'s commuting range. As this photoshopped image of my newly created region demonstrates, I had hit the proverbial wall on inter-city travel: I had bus-stops everywhere and 2 or 3 transport lines for every Suburb, and mayor ratings > 60 ... However: Larger buildings weren't continually developing, and when they did, they quickly became unemployed Upper-Wealth "Sims" simply stopped going to work b/c they refused to get on Busses/Trains/Monorails My southern-most and northern-most areas weren't developing at all. My main highway to the Commerce center was crowded over with roughly 4,000 cars and 12,000 bus-riders who looped all the way around and "stole" jobs from Sims on other networks ...while nearly all other transportation lines couldn't seem to get over 1,000 sims. And even though R-C-I demand was kept balanced or even in favor of R & C throughout the region -- The actual travel simulations were adjusting so slowly that I was eventually UNABLE to make alterations to my infrastructure have any meaningful & timely effect which quickly lead to a downward spiral of "insatiable Industry demmand" and massive abandonment of 75% of my R & C zones. The worst part was that I had already anticipated for this sort of situation and THOUGHT I had my zones partitioned up carefully enough to avoid it. Infact I tried to keep each "class" of Sim traveling no more than 1 City's length to their respective "jobs". This really made this brand new Concept-Region into something I was beginning to dread loading up each day. ...like a really pretty painting with all the right colors, perfect composition, but your classic female subject in the foreground has a big ugly MUSTACHE. Then I registered here to DL NAM and I un-checked all other addons in it that I could (no roundabouts or lightrails or anything else I might be tempted to use...) ...just "Simulator Z" set to "LOW" and Automata set to "Radical" (non_24). The changes were incredibly dramatic: Instead of making traffic less-challenging to manage, all the bus-riders quickly spread out and overwhelmed nearly all of my Avenue Intersections so... I had to switch from LOW to SimulatorZ_MEDIUM ...as well bulldozing a whole string 4x4 low-income Tenements in my central city (Folley) It only took about 3-5 years to totally reverse the industry problems I was having earlier... ...and the faster pathing/tracking made it much easier to convert entire industrial blocks from "Dirty" industry into "Hi Tech" which meant a lot more High/$$$ residents started finding those jobs sooner. Zones in my southernmost city started developing so rapidly that it OCTUPLED in occupancy Even farm and power plants far beyond intended "reach" started finding workers Only a few tiny portions are still lacking employees which is likely due to a small housing shortage right now. Infact the R-C-I demand bar is having trouble just keeping up with the new Pathing now. I still can't seem to increase the density of my Central "Junction" city without fears of epic traffic congestion but that's okay because it fits with the concept of the region and that makes it more interesting. A totally unexpected and hard to explain side-effect to all of this is: ...Bizarrely --> the game actually seems to be crashing LESS now than the original Maxis 1.0 vanilla install was. Somewhat more expected: a huge increase in Multithreading by my Dualcore despite my O.S. only being XP-pro instead of XP-x64 For comparison, my water-cooled CPU usually runs at about 83°f but wouldn't go beyond 88° with Vanilla-SC4 on any of these cities. Last night it hit 101° which is only 2° below the highest temperature I've recorded from running TeamFortress2 at full graphics on a full 34-man Server. From this, I can extrapolate that I was basically "cheating" in Vanilla SC4 by cramming so many sims onto Busses that funneled through a single series of Avenues. This has forced me to think in new ways and eventually I hope to be able to build around the Lowest capacity settings ...but that will likely take a lot of trial and error with these new Pedestrian Widgets. I think this also reveals that some users really would need a computer upgrade to run this Mod at its maximums. My specs are as follows: Mobo (includes 700mb ATI card), CPU, & RAM. ...and at this rate I might actually need a Memory upgrade. In closing, A HUGE THANK YOU to the creators of these algorithms... they rescued my concept from failure. ...Those who say it's the most crucial "Patch" available for this game, aren't embellishing one bit The only thing I can think of that might improve this could be some sort of additional Mod that paths $$/$$$ Sims through airports to adjacent cities with airports, or for more challenge: "utilizes" 2 spread-out Landing Strips in the same city (or other such flight centers) to in-effect... instantly "Teleport" Bussed & Railed sims from one side of a city to the other Airstrip and cancel out all the travel time in-between to simulate "shuttle flights" ...or in my case, allow me to bridge Via'_mass-transit, parts of my city that are separated by huge Cliffs that a Monorail cannot be realistically built over.