tf923

Sorry to break this to ya, but grid is not the most efficient layout. Grid type layouts work well in areas where high connectivity is desired, such as where jobs are located and excess traffic is actually desired. The most efficient method is to first separate residential from commercial/industrial districts. Then use a system of dead-end roads coming off of avenue connectors for the residential areas, forming a sort of tree where avenues and highways form the trunks and roads/streets form the branches. The reason is this: Grid increases connectivity at the expensive of using more land area, but sims have no need to go to other sims' houses. They only need to get to their jobs and back. So, using grid for residential areas wastes a lot of land giving extra connectivity to areas that don't need it or want it. In addition to the land wasted to unnecessary connectivity, the grid system itself actually increases traffic flow past each lot, which increases traffic noise, which decreases the capacity of all your residential buildings. This worsens the efficiency of grid systems even further. On the other hand, commercial areas don't want traffic efficiency. They actually want more traffic than is required to service them. So grid is actually perfect because you get the increased traffic flow plus good connectivity that grid offers. The reason all the big cities use grid isn't because of efficiency. It's because all major U.S. cities were designed in the days of horses and buggies. There were no cars, and when cars came around they did not bother to smash all the buildings and redo the city layout. They also didn't bother to do any traffic studies either, until it was far too late. Today, new cities that are laid out from scratch use loops and cul-de-sacs because that system uses the least amount of land area for roads. Long straight roads are only used for collectors that connect residential neighborhoods with commercial/industrial areas. Grids are still used for new downtown areas just as they always were.

Date: 8/19/2005 12:04:29 PM Author: ryanb_sc4 tf923 - Where exactly is ' here ' ?quote> I live in Florida. But there's no state income tax here either, so the state is more budget-conscious, and simple things like road paint are often considered significant items to cut back on. I'm old though, so I do remember when they used to have only painted here. If you wanna check it out, you can load up Google Earth and check out the Tampa area. The resolution is so good you can actually see the arrows painted on the roads! I love that program.

I did some local investigating, and found they actually have stopped painting ONLY here too, mainly due to budgetary reasons. Now they just paint the arrows and call it a day.

I think there's a problem with the avenuexDiagonal road intersection. The signal lights are all facing the wrong directions. (This is US right-hand drive version.) I'm not sure if this is a known issue or not so here's a pic:

I thought we were going for realism. For the most part the local transportation departments in the US don't really care that there are people who don't speak english. All the signs in America are in english. The symbols that you see on American roadways were originally for english-speaking Americans who are illiterate, not for the [few] non-english speakers. Only reason I'd possibly avoid the 'ONLY' is because screen resolution would probably make it look more like an ugly yellow blob than a word.

I liked the one by Simcity5. It's not listed here but it was submitted so I'm voting for it anyway. Consider this my write-in ballot: TF

I was joking. By the way, I like Simcity5's the best so far. And I'm wondering why nobody uses actual road textures in the logo? Seems like that would be cool too.

I think all these NAM logos should be required to be submitted in FSH format.

Just learning to use Reader today, I figured out how to fix driveable vehicles messing up UDI menus, yay! However, two questions I can't figure out. 1) How do you set compression for a file? I can see the reader tells me whether a file is compressed or not, but there is no way to specify whether I want it to be compressed or not. 2) The directory file seems to show an index of TGIs for every file in the dat, in index order. However, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it only shows some files but not others. Does this indicate a problem with the dat file?

Yeah I did that and it doesn't work very well either. Mostly the buttons either do nothing, or generate various unhandled exception errors.

Ok one more question. Is it possible to search for all exemplar files containing property 0xE90E25A1? Seems I can search for all files by TGI, but not by any specific property they contain. oops nevermind, figured it out Well I tried out DatGen--actually several different versions of it. Apparently the main difference between DatGen and Reader is that the Reader actually works. DatGen promises a lot of neat things, but when you go to actually use them they don't work. I mean, 80% of the buttons in DatGen don't do anything at all. You push them and they do nothing. Of the remainder, half work and half just produce errors, corrupted files or other less-than-useful results. With the Reader, every single button does something useful when you click on it. I like that.

Is DatGen better than Reader? I just figured out how to do some things in Reader recently, and it's kinda tough to navigate around. I've never tried DatGen before.

I agree that the NAM should be made more easy to install, including a shorter readme/instructions file and fewer overall files. One thing that stands out to me is the sheer number of cheat mods that come with NAM. Part of the game is designing good transportation systems that work, and when you load up on cheats like 10xcapacity10xspeed it's just dumbing down the game while making the NAM bigger and more needlessly bloated. When I first got NAM I tried the 2xcapacity cheat for about 10 minutes, and found that it made the game way too easy. So I took it out. Ever since then those files have always seemed out of place in the NAM. I think they should be available as a separate mod, not part of something that is generally considered essential as NAM is.

Date: 8/3/2005 7:41:06 AM Author: the_crispbread_witch It would look much better with avenue on slope! quote> Yeah it would also have less congestion. Go to this thread to see a picture of NAM's avenue on-slope pieces in action.

For the first time today I made a puzzle piece overpass of road over sunken rail. When I placed the road-on-slope puzzle piece, it works fine but there is no sidewalk at the center square. The puzzle piece is a 1x3 section of road: One end has sidewalk with handrail, the other end looks like a normal road with sidewalk, but the center square of the piece has no sidewalk at all, just bare grass on either side. With buildings next to it, it looks awful. Am I doing anything wrong, is this a bug or do I have some kind of conflict with my NAM installation? I'm using the latest 072505 NAM.

Dude, I did it and it is beautiful! You are awesome! Thanks so much. Here's a picture of it now. The people whose homes and businesses had to be demolished are none too happy about it, but as you can see they've rebuilt [mostly] and life is [almost] back to normal. One of these days I'm gonna make a CJ and I will definitely point out these awesome and realistic overpasses.

I discovered that very long overpasses aren't as common in my area as earthen ramps. So I started getting rid of all my overpasses and replacing them with earthen ramps and on=slope puzzle pieces. I find they also look much better in my cities than the long overpasses. I can make them as long or as short as I want, connect them to the on=slope pieces and they look great, (except where you want sidewalks to appear on top, then you gotta get creative.)

Date: 7/31/2005 8:10:37 PM Author: eburress Quick question...where in the menus might I find the avenue and/or one way street 'T' onslope pieces. They don't appear to be in either of my Puzzle Pieces menus. I think I've installed the NAM correctly but unless I'm just looking in the wrong place, it looks like something's not right.quote> To get to the on-slope pieces you can use shift-tab, which goes through them backwards, which gets you there much quicker.