SimRayRay

Well if an admin with 9000 posts doesn't have the answer, I don't think my strategy of eliminating future problems by careful planning is ever going to be effective. I think Ill just have to grow a city organically and see where that takes me. A picture paints a thousand words. The problem with Google-FU is a lot of old threads no longer link to images, the posts often assume the reader knows things already, and I'm not even sure some of the info is still relevant in the most recent NAM of fixes that I am using. What I do know is you are here and helping me, and that is comforting

Wow thank you! So it seems, streets, OWR, and roads all allow pedestrians to cross. Effectively they are not a barrier at all, infact they can be used as creating pedestrian access in the case of a junction with an avenue, or under a highway, or over rails. I read the NAM documentation and it says Pedmalls need to be all linked together and need a mass transit adjacent to one of the linked tiles. But if pedestrians can use roads and streets, then why cant pedestrians use a bus stop, cross the road, walk down a few cells, then enter a pedmall chain? What is the point of a pedmall-over-road-bridge, if pedestrians can just cross the road? Is there a difference between a Plaza plop and a Pedmall plop? Can pedestrians cross a plaza? Can a plaza be used a pedmall link? Other than aesthetics, there seems very little advantage to Pedmalls over simple dead-end roads with plazas/parks. Apparently pedmall traffic is much lower than roads and therefore provide less commerical or industrial desirablity from traffic. From YIMBY perspective, plazas and parks might do a similar job. I didnt mean to make you test stuff for me, I was hoping people already knew and could just explain the differences. I havent actually created a city yet, so I dont have a stable environment for testing, but I guess I should go do that.

OK questions about Pedestrians, Subways, Buses, and Pedmalls Pedestrians: Will they cross streets, OWRs, roads, avenues, highways, RHW, railways Will they walk under elevated highways, elevated monorails, elevated roads, any sort of bridges? Will they walk to a subway in the middle of a NAM roundabout? Will they cross a road roundabout? Will they walk across two plazas diagonally opposite each other? Subways: Can a station be linked to a subway in any of the four adjacent squares? What about diagonals? Does the arrow on the station's plopper need to be facing a underground subway tile? Or does this not matter? How does a station link into a diagonal subway line? Buses Does the arrow matter? Pedmalls: Are there any Pedmalls that don't have underground connections to rail and subway? They make a mess of my underground subway network Does the arrow matter?

So how do residents living right next to a neighbouring connection point ever find a job in the centre of the same city? The distance to connection is far closer than the city centre. Will residents along the outskirts of a city (and close to a connection point) always decide that the next city is closer? What happens when I make the evening commute extremely long? Say I had a city called R1, entirely of residential and no jobs. I have only a single connection going out of R1 - a two-way avenue connection to a neighbouring city called J1, entirely of jobs and no residents. I immediately split the connecting avenue in J1 into dual OneWayRoads. I peel the incoming OWR directly into the nearby job district. The only way out of the job district is another single OWR. I send this exit OWR all the way around the circumference of J1 (and possibly into other neighbouring cities) , finally hooking back up to the connection avenue in J1 leading back to R1. Can I create workers that go to work quickly, but goes through several regions to artificially boost evening traffic and commercial traffic desirability, before coming home? Can I trap the worker in an endless commute after going to work, and never going home? I've been designing and changing the road networks for hours and keep on changing my mind about how best to structure it. Maybe I should do less planning and more playing.

Thank you @CorinaMarie. Very interesting about the bug where: buildings set with any two values the same for R$, R$$, or R$$$ groups will create demand for such groups but not employment for the higher of the two wealth groups, which affects all I-HT, medical clinic, solar and nuclear power plants. So in order to get the Census Repository I need BSC Essentials and BSC Textures Vol 1? In order to have BSC Essentials, I need BSC MEGA Props - Misc Vol 2 and BSC Textures Vol 3? What exactly does the CrimeDoesntPay do to crime levels, apart from making them controllable? For now I am making decision on overall transport strategy, and I have yet to actually forward time Do commuters look for nearby job based on straight line distance, and only then do they attempt to path out journey time? If the journey to work is viable, they will get the job? What happens if the journey BACK from work is very long - will they still work there? Full clover leaf highway intersections allow cars to turn around 180. However the highway intersection stack does not. There are also variations I can customise using RHW. Are these just visual things, or do they have a real effect in the game. This would allow me to design highways that force residents from another city to take a longer route before finding another city exit point, preferably a route that goes through job areas such as commercials, so to avoid the endless commuter. However this would also create a big discrepancy between commuting to and from work for residents that live and work in the same city. If journey time back from work is not that important, and I deliberately send them back through long winding routes through my commercial ares in the evening, does evening traffic increase desirability of commercial plots the same as morning traffic?

Thanks for all the advice! I will take some time to explore these links. Perhaps I should have given more information on my playstyle. I want to deviate as little as possible from the original game, except for NAM (which seems universally approved). But I do want/need to play around building cities and learning how the game works, without using stuff that changes the dynamics of the original game. For this reason, I have downloaded the extra cheats plugin dll, and simply stuck that file in my plugins folder. This makes money not an issue for building...I can still try to balance my budget without the pressure of going bankrupt. I have also edited the config file with MSPaint to setup my region to my liking. I am wary of using CAM, at least until i have an understanding of how buildings develop and have reached the point where I want to extend that. After trying a few ploppable buildings, I'm concerned about how to organise my plugins folder... its going to be a mess. Also, I'm concerned about deleting the plugin and leaving a permanent effect on my region. For example, I downloaded the Neutrino Power Plant thingy. It came with some dependencies (some cars, fences and textures). If I plop the power plant in, run the game a while, then bulldoze it, then also delete the plugin and the dependencies.... will this have a lasting effect on my city? my region? my game? Will there be cars without visuals? What are the restrictions to moving plugin files around? There seems to be .dat, .sc4lot, .dlls files. Can they all be moved into subfolders? I want to start with a general regional transportation plan. I'm aware of the endless commuter phenomenon, and understand the tree/dendrite regional connections approach to prevent this. However I'm not sure what roads/rails to use. Dual One-Way Roads seem superior to avenues in almost all aspects, other than ease of connections at intersections and to other cities. Real HighWays seem superior to highways in flexibility and capacity but not in simplicity of use. Do RHW also allow zones to develop? If i start with simple Highways, how much space will I need to later change this to RHW? It seems that intersections need a vast amount of space for RHW Can OWRs join RHWs for intercity connections? I understand that freight disappears between cities, but commuters don't. If I build railways exclusively for freight and monorails exclusively for commuters, how easy would it be to keep the two networks separated, to avoid the endless commuter and still keep multiple freight city connections to allow short freight trips? How do I prevent freight from using monorails and subways? How do I prevent commuters from using railways

Hi this is my first post! I have a million questions, I don't know where to start. It's taken me a while to get going but here I am. So far i have managed to: Install SimCity Deluxe with discs Patched to B638 Patched again to 640 night and day Downloaded and installed NAM36 Created a cmd target file to load secdrv before running SC4 and added in parameters to restrict CPUcount:1. I can now play!!! Woohoo. I've racked up a few hours messing around and have some initial questions: So the Network Traffic Configuration tool that comes with NAM36.... I just run that once, save the default setting, close it, then run SC4? Simtropolis and SC4Devotion are to the two main websites for downloading plugins? Simtropolis's are called STEX, and SC4 Devotion are called LEX? What sort of things do I have to worry about from compatibility perspective, before I start filling my cities with stuff that breaks other stuff, and cant be undone later? With this in mind, what are, say, the top 10 things to download that will fill my choices of RCI buildings and utilities etc, that also come with accurate descriptions.... For example I don't want to download a new power plant if it doesn't tell me what it's running costs are and how much power it provides. I like aesthetic cities, as well as organised transport networks, and structured zoning. What are all main differences with all the new road networks that come with NAM? Should I just choose the type with the largest capacity and speed?