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jeffryfisher

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Everything posted by jeffryfisher

  1. Got a quick SC4 question?... Ask here!

    jeffryfisher replied to City_Slider's topic in SimCity 4 General Discussion

    Not all is lost -- There is detailed analysis out there explaining exactly what part of SPAM (everything) is incompatible with what part of CAM (only the high-ranking, special-purpose national parks etc that nobody ever developed any lots for). End result: Unless you desperately need a very special lot mod that utilizes CAM "farm" level 7 or 8 (does any such thing even exist?), you can happily inject both CAM and SPAM as long as CAM loads before SPAM. I've been doing so for over ten years (also with reconciled IRM & NAM).

  2. Natural Growth Philosophies / Mindsets

    jeffryfisher replied to Daeris's topic in SimCity 4 General Discussion

    Remember that 'C' thrives on traffic volume, so set your traffic map to *volume* and zone accordingly (only when a road or avenue turns from blue to yellow-green or better). As for industrial, please "upgrade" to the mod that sorts dirty from clean (I think it's IRM). After that's done, then restrict industrial (other than farms) to bands along heavy rail.

  3. Natural Growth Philosophies / Mindsets

    jeffryfisher replied to Daeris's topic in SimCity 4 General Discussion

    Oooooh... I've been lurking for a few years, but I just can't resist such a juicy academic socio-economic topic... In the time-frame of SC4 (19th century forward) and the context of city-building, more than anything else we're looking for factors that move people to this city (we don't need to grow our own food). Yes, advances in agriculture allow more non-farmers globally, but... I think you're asking for what causes one city to boom while others remain static in a large country that might produce its food surplus somewhere else in "SimNation". There are both drivers and bottlenecks (caps) -- and to really boom, one must have one or more driver(s) without being capped by any bottle neck. In my lifetime of reading about "big cities", the biggest driver I've seen again and again is being a seat of power -- a national or imperial capital. You can almost measure the authoritarianism of a nation-state by comparing the population of its capital to the population of the whole nation -- So I'd love to see a new civic building and/or monument that creates seat-of-power population appeal. The number two driver is trade -- being able to bring together diverse inputs to produce outputs -- So port cities grow industry that then drives population (if the imperial capital will allow it). Seaports should be given *much* more pull -- There are dozens of examples where overseas trade makes the difference between dull 50k town and burgeoning multi-million pop metropolis. Bottlenecks -- The number one bottleneck is water -- People can't live without water. The number two bottleneck is transportation infrastructure -- being able to bring in everything else after water (including food). For the purposes of SC4, we can assume that food produced somewhere, so we just need to move it. So to grow a big city (logically, on the scale of an SC4 region), we need water, seaports, connections (both rail & highway), and maybe some civic buildings that set our city head and shoulders above others in SimNation. For an extreme example of trade trumping food (and even water), study Singapore. Better yet, build Singapore in SC4. [ Jeff straps on his flame-retardant underwear and dives back into his lurker-bunker to hide from Marx's hellhounds ]

  4. NAM RRW

    jeffryfisher posted a topic in NAM & Transit Networks

    I recently installed NAM 35. I am trying to figure out where to find the real railway; I'm not even sure if it installed. In what subfolder would I find it? I see a RAM subfolder inside my NAM35 folder under plugins, but that's supposed to be the precursor to RRW. In-game, the rail menu doesn't offer anything labeled as RRW. If I somehow missed RRW during the install, is there a way to add it without repeating the whole installation?

  5. Power Supply Problems

    jeffryfisher replied to tails2489's topic in SimCity 4 General Discussion

    I've just run into this myself. Since @tails2489 started each new city by conducting power around the edges, the power grid got confuzzled by the distance. In my city, I wasn't even using a wind generator (I had a neighbor connection instead). The power could travel about 2.5 sides of a large sector (maybe 640 cells). I completed the loop so the power never had to travel more than two sides (~500 cells), and the dead zone cleared up. @CorinaMarieThis power transmission limit should be easy to demonstrate to yourself my creating one large power source and then zoning / building transmission lines around the edge of a large map until the power just refuses to go any further (it'll even stop in the middle of the span of a transmission line).

  6. (Mod) AMPS Development Thread

    jeffryfisher replied to RobertaME's topic in SC4 - Custom Content

    That's my feeling; in my RL neighborhood, the local transformer pad takes up all of 16 sq ft (a square about 4 feet on a side), so it hides neatly near the sidewalk between two yards. That's a lot less real estate than the 2x2 lot I see in your diagram, so I'm inclined to treat all zones as if they include such transformers in the price of zoning, but I could be misunderstanding what's what. And of course, if most other players want these local distribution points to be as large as middle-class houses, then I'll just have to pick and choose among your mods options. I'm mostly interested in neighbor connections and balancing peak vs baseline power anyway (in my region, a few dirty cities supply power and garbage service, and industrial jobs for all the others).

  7. (Mod) AMPS Development Thread

    jeffryfisher replied to RobertaME's topic in SC4 - Custom Content

    Aha... In that case I'll be patient and await the tutorial with pictures that will assuage my worries

  8. (Mod) AMPS Development Thread

    jeffryfisher replied to RobertaME's topic in SC4 - Custom Content

    I guess it's those 30-60 residential units that look tedious to me. I don't mind paying for them, and I don't mind seeing them in my neighborhoods, but I don't want to give up 30-60 residential lots to make room for them, and I'm not sure I even want to click 30-60 times to manually place them in my city. What I am hoping for is a way for the mere dragging of a road or street (or the zoning of a bunch of lots) to automatically create and pay for as many residential transformers as needed. I guess I like SC4's way of having zones conduct power, though I can completely understand that zone power is qualitatively different from high-voltage, long distance power-line power. Could your mod involve plants, power lines, the high-level stations and maybe neighbor connections, but still let zones transform local power (i.e. subsume the 25-50 kVA transformers)? In other words, can you see in the zoning of a block of lots the necessary and automatic creation of some number of local transformers proportional to the number of lots?

  9. (Mod) AMPS Development Thread

    jeffryfisher replied to RobertaME's topic in SC4 - Custom Content

    How important to you is it that all these power nodes appear on the surface and take up valuable real estate? Would it be okay (if its even possible) to hide the transformers (at least the most local level anyway) underground so that a player need only make the simoleon investment and connection without losing street frontage? Larger scale, higher voltage substations are the only sites I'd expect to occupy lot-sized space. Alternatively, perhaps the mere presence of a street can imply that the power infrastructure has been installed. In that case, we could look toward a sidewalk or street texture mod that would sprinkle a few electric props along its length (e.g. at corners). It would be fun if streets all conducted residential-level power even without Cori's power-line trick.

  10. Screen Is Pushed Over To Left

    jeffryfisher replied to simcitynate's topic in SC4 Bugs & Technical Issues

    Then your browser could eat memory, but it would probably run on a different CPU (and if you're a power user, you can research how to force that). Text info is trivial, so if somebody posts a list of steps to accomplish something, there's no harm in having a plain text version of that open. My approach involves multiple computers. I play SC4 on a dedicated legacy-game desktop that uses my best monitor, and I have a separate laptop to the side with its own screen where I can open up the Guide, forum threads, You Tube videos, spreadsheets etc whenever they'd be helpful. As for colors, if you sort your graphics card, its driver, and SC4's recognition, then you should be able to enjoy nearly all of the advanced features -- shadows being the possible exception.

  11. Screen Is Pushed Over To Left

    jeffryfisher replied to simcitynate's topic in SC4 Bugs & Technical Issues

    SC4 was made long before such wide monitors were popular, so you could find happiness using windowed mode and an SC4 resolution of 1280x1024. That will again use only part of your monitor width, but you'll be able to move it. You'll also be able to use the rest of your monitor for other windows (like SC4 guides, NAM manual, Simtropolis in browser etc that can be useful during play).
  12. Is it important to you that the road be visible all the way up? Or do you just need the transport between bottom and top? (i.e. Is this a visual exercise or a functional exercise?) If you need only the function, then you can try tunneling. If you're willing to edit your slope mod (temporarily, then put back the unedited version), you can exaggerate your road (or avenue) tunnel tolerance so that you can tunnel into a low berm at the top and then emerge at the bottom. It would look like you had a vehicle elevator, and the tunnel end points would function like teleporters. If you don't want to edit your slope parameters but can still get some height difference through tunnels, then you could try tunneling back and forth through the long axis of the butte. You'd just need some terraforming for the turnarounds where the tunnels emerge from the cliff faces at various heights. And I agree that starting at the top to work down will be less destructive (provided there's nothing important built close to the base at the bottom).

  13. BSC Funtional Seaports headache

    jeffryfisher replied to Drphroggy's topic in SC4 - Custom Content

    Do you have any other port mods? A competing controller could really screw things up. Accidentally leaving out the BSC controller could nerf them too. BTW, Which version of BSC Functional Seaports do you have? Be sure it's the latest.
  14. If a power-supply goes bad, then anything taking power from it can fail (or seem to fail). Therefore, if multiple components fail improbably, and if they're all powered by the same supply, then it's time to suspect the supply (and possibly resurrect "failed" components by attaching them to good clean power).

  15. (Mod) AMPS Development Thread

    jeffryfisher replied to RobertaME's topic in SC4 - Custom Content

    Issues can be addressed, so after you get the alpha version working in the new-city scenario, maybe we can look at what happens in an existing city and see if the effects can be reported / managed before any damage is done. Questions: Where will neighbor connections/deals fit into your grid with its substations and transformers? How will imported/exported power affect "Base Load, Intermediate Load, Peak Load" balance?

  16. Hard Drive Failure and PSU Discussion

    jeffryfisher replied to jeffryfisher's topic in General Off-Topic

    You must have misunderstood what I was trying to say. I'm not talking about cascading burn-out but rather symptoms that rise in one component because of weakness in another. Also, I'm speaking from personal, hands-on experience with desktop PCs like I have for legacy gaming (more than once in the last ten years). My wisdom may not extend to laptops. My legacy gaming rig is built from used components (3-8 years old), and it runs an older version of Windows. I've given it a graphics card that's a bit more powerful than the original system might have expected, and it has some extra HDDs as well. When I upgraded that graphics card, the generic power supply, as calculated, handled the load... for about a year. So when I started getting system error messages, I initially took them at face value. I first thought the graphics card (bought used) had died, so I downgraded to the previous one that happened to draw less power. Then a couple months later, I thought the system HDD was failing. Fortunately, at that point I cottoned to the possibility of aging power-supply, so I upgraded it to both higher quality and greater power. Then I was able to reinstall the more powerful graphics card, it and the hard drive both magically springing back to life -- I had resurrected two important components (and recovered all my data) by buying one relatively inexpensive refurbished power supply. That PC has been rock solid since. Analysis: As a PC's power supply ages, its capacity to deliver steady, in-spec voltages gradually declines. As that capacity titrates down toward the existing load, marginal/unsteady voltages can trigger system messages that look exactly like some component is dying, leading to misdiagnosis and unnecessary data-loss, expense etc. Further confusing the issue, removing any one component (e.g. the one that complains first) can reduce load enough that all errors go away, possibly tricking one into deciding that the removed component was the problem when it was only the messenger. I believe that many such messengers have been "shot" this way without their owners ever learning that their "dead" components were still perfectly good. Other users here have similar legacy rigs, so they could run into the same problem, so I stand by my wisdom: Before you give up on a hard drive that seems to have failed (unless it's smoking/squealing), investigate the power supply. For a desktop PC anyway, it's a quick, easy step that could avoid painful expense and/or data-loss heartache, so please don't dismiss my personal experience as if it can't help anyone else.

  17. Modding the power plant capacities

    jeffryfisher replied to TheMurderousCricket's topic in SC4 Modding - Open Discussion

    "Neighbor Deal Mods" by Cogeo

  18. Industrial Cap & Desirability

    jeffryfisher replied to andrew13511's topic in SC4 Bugs & Technical Issues

    You mentioned both PEG ports and BSC ports. If you had both in the same city without *very* careful custom modding to use only the BSC port controller, then you may be experiencing the port controller conflict crash. The removal of ports could have screwed up your caps, especially if you changed their modding between when you placed them and when you deleted them. Sadly, without better knowledge of all your past steps, my best recommendation now is that you straighten out your plugins to what you want going forward (resolving the PEG vs BSC ports), and then reset the affected city.

  19. Industrial Cap & Desirability

    jeffryfisher replied to andrew13511's topic in SC4 Bugs & Technical Issues

    First, do sanity checks on power and water coverage. Second, did you stick a working Ind building somewhere with thousands of jobs? Third, have you recently installed or uninstalled destabilizing plugins? Finally, do some route queries on freight to see that loads are reaching connections / ports.

  20. How to Make Pedestrians Contribute to the Traffic

    jeffryfisher replied to Propfam's topic in SC4 - Custom Content

    What we really need is a way to count customers, noise and congestion separately. Then we could do wonderful things with both pedestrians and buses.
  21. Freight goes through my FLUPS (using the puzzle pieces). Are you using something new based on subways? Subways, like light-rail, do not carry freight, which was why heavy-rail to subway ramps were problematic. What I haven't seen in FLUPs yet is pedestrian traffic.
  22. If not placed purely for looks, landmarks are usually placed for their boost to commercial appeal. So many tables, guides and tutorials list Landmarks with their plop prices, monthly maintenance costs, commerce bonus & radius. However, I'm now in a situation with my experimental mandatory-vaccination ordinance where I want to buy myself some mayor rating, and I am thinking that a landmark or two could be just the ticket because... I've seen mentions in a few threads that most landmarks also affect mayor rating over some radius (presumably affecting only tracts within reach, which are then averaged with all residents in a city). From these, I've gathered that the Pyramids are awesome-sauce and Alcatraz is negative. Unfortunately, all my site searches and Google searches for a comprehensive list of landmarks' Mayor effects have come up empty. Does anyone have a linky to a landmark table that includes columns for +/- mayor rating and radius? Thanks!
  23. I'm amazed that the return of water doesn't destroy the road and rail stubs around the connections. I wonder what else can be built down there that can survive being inundated. Maybe my big functional airport complexes should be off the coast rather than hogging valuable real estate.

  24. Underwater Connection

    jeffryfisher replied to City_Slider's topic in SimCity 4 General Discussion

    Don't worry about freight; it never appears on the other side of a connection, so you need only drop it at a functional port and it's gone. Now pedestrians on the other hand -- It would be a pretty nifty underwater route if sims could survive such a long swim
  25. Those are some fantastically steep transition roads between upper and lower! For those liking a mountain slalom aesthetic, might I suggest zig-zagging? With just a little space between switch-backs, one can even zone efficiently.
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