Eclipse99

Thanks Mandelsoft, that did the trick, looks much better now. I spotted another couple of things that have appeared since I switched to 31.2 (apologies again if this is already known): 1. MIS intersecting with NWM(RD-4) only seems to create a uniform junction when I drag it out the other side, otherwise I'm getting slightly mis-aligned textures with a small yellow line in the middle. 2. When I fork the MIS, i'm getting some yellow texturing at the fork.

Hi everyone, Just been testing out 31.2, and have been having some euro texture issues (yellow bits of texture on some of the ramp pieces). Can anyone tell me if this is known NAM issue or i'm doing something wrong? Here is an example of some of the pieces where im getting this.

Tried it out and it seems to work excellently. As far as I can tell from using the traffic query tool everyone switched over from using the bus to using their cars to commute across the city boundary. The remaining bus users are just those going to the stop in the same city in the commercial zone. Now all I need is a re-textured version of the bus blockers using the euro-textures so that they dont look odd in my city A Highway/RHW compatible bus stopper for the MIS ramps, etc. would be great too but I can probably work around it by designing my road transport carefully. Thanks to everyone who helped. If only all games were as moddable and had such awesome custom content creators as SC4, the videogame world would be a better place. I'll carry on experimenting and see how things go. An extra side questions: Would these bus blockers or something similar be worth including in the NAM in future? even if it was just the road/avenue/street ones (assuming original authors permission, etc). Before/After pictures using the bus blocker:

Thanks, I haven't seen that before. Will give it a go and see if it works with the NAM and report back shortly.

If you do the math, you see that there is a limit - it's simply extremely difficult to reach it. In the NAM, Sims have ten hours of commute time (the reasons for that number are complex), and they walk at 15 kph. So they can walk 150 km before running out of commute time. Since the distance from one large tile to the opposite corner is 8 km, in practice, they never do. But if you have roads weaving back and forth across the tile, up one row, down the next, it's possible to create a path over 1000 km long in a single large tile. In this case, walking Sims (and even driving Sims) would run out of commute time long before they reached their destination. Thanks for the info, another lesson learned. I guess my plan for city centre buses supported by inter-city rail will have to remain a pipe-dream for now. Am I the first person who tried this? If I thought of trying it I'm sure someone more knowledgeable has already had the idea.

Just for fun, I did another test, and it seems like theres no limit to the walk distance in this case. See below a picture of sims walking the whole map from the bus stop. Now thats job commitment. I'll probably never build the best looking city or the biggest, but at least I encouraged my citizens to get plenty of exercise :kitty:

Indeed it is perfectly reasonable in reality. It just seems odd because i've never seen a sim be willing to walk such a large amount of tiles in game. What I was originally planning to do on a larger scale was to have rail and road connecting my cities across the city boundaries and confine my bus routes to heavily populated downtown areas. Unfortunately it seems like theres no way to prevent the buses from trying to cross into another city, even if there are no bus stops there. Since I've got no idea what happens to those sims that get 'the bus to nowhere' in that situation I wouldnt be confident that using bus for intra-city and rail+road for inter-city is a viable option. Is there any way to limit how far a bus searches for another bus stop (or the city boundary) when its dispatched from a bus stop? i.e. if I could limit them to a 50 tile radius I could avoid placing any bus stops within 50 tiles of the city boundary and so stop the 'bus to nowhere' from ocurring? Otherwise it looks like I'll have to rethink my transport idea.

Well, I found another interesting 'feature' that I found slightly amusing. I divided the industrial into the second city into two seperate blocks and placed a bus stop at one but not at the other. This seemed to result in all the bus commuters leaving the first city going to the single bus stop in the second city. This seemed to be fine (the number of people using the cross-city bus were almost identical in both cities), but then I noticed that alot of the sims were walking a large distance from this bus stop to the second industrial group (which doesn't have a bus stop). Here is the result (I didn't think sims could walk this far - around 50 squares???). I suppose if they are on the bus it makes sense that they dont have any choice but to get off at the designated stop and walk for miles...

Thanks for the quick answer, glad to know that my city layout wasn't the problem (this time ) A couple of follow-up questions: Will the fact that the bus isn't being pathed anywhere in the second city cause the residents in the first city on the 'buses to nowhere' to end up with 'no job' zots above their houses, long commute times, or any similar problem? If I place a single bus stop in the second city will the functionality and numbers tally or will things still be a bit dodgy e.g. first city shows 400 people using bus, second city will show 400 coming in but all going to the single second city bus stop, even if that bus stop is next to a single factory offering 10 jobs? Would it be a useful exercise if I could do some tests perhaps? Is the ferry behaviour hard coded or is it something that could be done with a custom bus stop? (Im guessing if its possible someone would have done it by now).

Hi everyone. I've started using buses in my city and i've noticed an interesting quirk. I set up a small test as follows: One city has residential and commercial (with a seperation of 15 squares or so). I also made a second city which has just industrial. The two are linked using a highway from the RHW mod (im using the old version 30 NAM with RHW v5 for the moment). All was going well, with cars going to/from the expected places across the city boundaries. I then placed two bus stops in the first city connecting the residential and commercial zones. The buses go between the residential and commercial carrying commuters as expected, but when I use the traffic query tool, it's telling me that bus traffic is also going across the city boundary to the second city, despite the fact that there are no bus stops there. When I switch to the second city and use the traffic query tool on the highway no bus traffic is showing (as to be expected) Am I doing something stupid with my setup, or is this a known SC4 quirk or a NAM/RHW issue? Screenshot of what I mean is below:

Hi all, I had some difficulties recently getting SC4 to work on my machine without graphical issues. As a result of this I had to do some hunting around to find a range of different possible solutions from various threads/sites. I thought it might be useful to create a consolidated thread that lists a number of possible fixes so that people can try them and see if it fixes their problems, as it seems to be a fairly frequent topic. Hopefully this thread will be useful to newcomers and also those who are having trouble running SC4 after upgrading/replacing their machines. You may need to only do one of the fixes below to get SC4 to run without problems or you may need to do several of the fixes. Anyway, here are a few things you can try if you are having graphics/crashing issues: [Fix 1] Update the game with latest patches. How: Download and run the update files. There are various places you can get them. Here is the link to the EA Page. 'Download Patch' links are at the bottom http://www.ea.com/simcity-4-deluxe [Fix 2] Use DirectX 9.0c. SC4 has been around a while now, and sometimes has issues with the later versions of DirectX. How: Go to Microsoft website, download and install. I got mine from here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=34429 [Fix 3] Alt-Tabbing - Switch applications and return to the game. This is one of the fixes that I found to stop flickering in game. How: a) Run the game. b) Press Alt & Tab key to minimise the game and go to another application/the desktop. b) Click on the game in the task bar or press alt-tab again to return to the game. [Fix 4] Run the game in 'Software Rendering Mode'. This can potentially fix a number of graphical issues. How: a) Run the game. b) Click on the 'Graphics Options' icon. c) Under the 'Render' heading Select 'Software'. d) Restart the game [Fix 5] Run the game in 'Windows Compatability Mode'. Sometimes fixes problems running the game on newer versions of Windows than XP. How: a) Find the Simcity4.exe file As an example mine is located in E:\Installed Programs\SC4 Deluxe\SC4 Deluxe\Apps. I believe the default install path for SC4 on Windows is C:\Program Files\Maxis b) Right click on the file, then click 'Properties'. c) Select 'compatability' tab d) Tick 'Run this program in compatability mode for:' e) Select Windows XP (Service Pack 2) from the drop-down box f) Run the game [Fix 6] Run the game using 1 CPU core only. This can prevent some Crash To Desktop (CTD) situations. How: a) Find the SimCity 4.exe file. As an example mine is located in E:\Installed Programs\SC4 Deluxe\SC4 Deluxe\Apps. I believe the default install path for SC4 on Windows is C:\Program Files\Maxis b) Create a shortcut to the .exe file. c) Set the 'Target' Property of the shortcut to include -CPUCount: 1 For example mine looks like this: "E:\Installed Programs\SC4 Deluxe\SC4 Deluxe\Apps\SimCity 4.exe" -intro:off -CPUCount:1 -r1680x1050x32 You can also add other arguments here. The ones I have used in the example above are: -intro:off Turns off the annoying 'EA Games' intro -CPUCount:1 Forces the game to use only one CPU. -r1680x1050x32 Sets resolution. The last argument is the colour depth (16bit or 32 bit) d) Run the game using the shortcut [Fix 7] Modifying the Graphics Rules.sgr file. This can fix some problems where the game doesn't render properly during scrolling (e.g. missing shadows/trees, etc) How: a) Find the SC4 'Graphics Rules.sgr' file. This should be in the root installation directory of the install folder. For example mine is in E:\Installed Programs\SC4 Deluxe\SC4 Deluxe b) Open the file with a text editor (I used Wordpad) c) Find the line that reads property noPartialBackingStoreCopies true d) Change the true to false e) Save and close the file f) Run the game [Fix 8] Disable all your plugins How: a) Go to the SC4 plugins directory in your 'documents' folder For example mine is C:\Users\X\Documents\SimCity 4\Plugins b) Copy all the files within the plugins folder to a different safe location on your system c) Delete all your plugins from the SimCity 4\Plugins folder d) Run the game Additional Notes: The following resources may also be of use if you have problems running the game: [1] The "Crash To Desktop - Look Here First" thread at Simtropolis: [2] The recently released 'SimCity 4 Launcher' by Logic_Bomb which provides various start-up options for SC4 File Link: Support Thread Link: [3] This thread covers modifying the Graphics Rules.sgr file to improve compatability with newer AMD/Radeon cards: If anyone has any changes/additions for the thread let me know!

Couple more texture anomalies circled in red.

First, I would like to say thank you to all of the NAM team for the release and all their hard work to date. My apologies if either of these two issues have been posted already, or are a result of my incorrect use of the new NAM: Im using euro textures, LHD and the extra UK textures. 1) Texture alignment with diagonal road to RHW-2 2) Cross road-RHW-2 Intersection in centre of picture - solid white 'stop line' (assuming thats what they are) should be on the left side of the junction to match LHD traffic

Great work!! finally an option to have stoplights on the left to go with left hand traffic. I remember when I first noticed that they didn't change with the traffic direction in the default game, I thought it wouldn't matter but it turned out to be more annoying to me than I realised I'll be using the LHD option to do a city, I Hope you dont mind if I bump the thread with any questions/bugs spotted? (first one below) Setup Layout Style: European Variation 1 Left Hand Drive Stoplight Post Set: France Signal Model: UK Small Description On avenue-avenue intersection only the set of lights corresponding with the turning lanes seem to be facing the right direction, the other two overhead light sets and the set at the bottom of the stoplight pole seem to be the wrong way around. Pic:

May i suggest you to read this thread too, sir >>> http://www.simtropol...abandonment-r31 It'll help you a lot in understanding the RCI. Thanks, I couldnt see anything specific there about if the indicator was per city or for the whole region though. i'm just trying to balance between the two cities at the moment, but having the demand bounce from a big + to a big - when I switch cities is confusing me a bit, i'm not building or zoning anything extra in either so im not sure whats going on exactly :|