DrFrankinStein93

With the new NAM 50 beta and its eternal commuter fix, it opens so many questions for me. - Like is there an in depth explanation of the eternal commuter in a thread in here? I know CorinaMarie shown a 20+ loop in another thread, so it can get pretty complex it seems. - Cutting off west/north transfer help with eternal commuters because you cannot form any loop anymore. But what does it mean exactly? Does this only affect input from north from output to West and the reverse (West -> North). But direct simple travel between 2 cities are unaffected? Does that mean its a sacrifice to avoid the issue, like if you have a simple 3 city group in an mirror "L" , does it mean the north city C pop will no longer be able to travel to west city B through middle city A? You need to move through other tiles to make it? (C) | (B) - (A) - And another simple question, does NAM still have an option to only include QOL options like the better traffic manager and other fixes without adding all the new content. I like to keep my game as close as the original.

Okay, I made some tests about the placement of a coal power plant and the center of the pollution radius. And the center changes following 2 things : The location and the orientation of the building! TLDR: Thin black lines represents the normal grid (1x1). Thick black lines are the 2x2 cells grid used for pollution. Dark red is the plant. Blue arrow is the orientation of the side facing street. Bright red is the pollution center 2x2 tile. My explanation: To keep things simple (I didn't do the math stuff yet), imagine the maps having a 2x2 cell grid over. Placing the power plant, the game will try to find the nearest 2x2 tile closest to the center of the building using the top left corner of the side facing the street (the side with little arrow we see in game) as the origin. If the center is a cell, it will use the cell, but if the center is between cells, the game will round up the value if it isn't a full number (1.5 -> 2)

@CorinaMarie Going on your last posts (skipping the print screens ones), if I summarize, you are asking if the tract has an impact of pollution radius and if also altitude has an impact? That could be interesting. On the first point, what happens if I put the coal mine in the center of a tract, or between 2 or 4 tracts, is the center of the radius affected? For the second point, if I put the coal mine on top on a mesa or on the bottom of a canyon, will the pollution radius be affected? And thank you for confirming the 2x2 pollution block theory.

Thank you that was exactly what I had in mind. So with this tool, I was able to confirm multiple things and find interesting discovery. Confirmation: 1) Pollution radius does seems to work as block of 2x2. Meaning radius is really 2 times bigger than the value would suggest. 2) Pollution decrease linearly to 0 over the radius. Center is 100% and 0% at the border. Diagonal distance are calculated using pythagorean theorem. New finding: 1) Pollution is not the same over the full surface of the building. If you put a Power plant, run the simulation a bit, pause and delete the building, you will see that the pollution is only at full value on the center of the building. 2) The center of the building is not always the true center. Depending on the position on the map, the center is slightly shifted from the true center. I think it is because the code divide the cells position by 2 to calculate the values of pollution with those and then extrapolate it again on true cell position. So in practice, pollution circle could be slightly off-centered. Here's a simulation in Excel of a coal power plant air pollution (Building is the cyan square, center is true center, AP: 200 R: 16). The tiny number in each cell represent the air pollution level. Simulation results shows very similar results to game values (some small rounding error in my simulation). I'm not sure if those finding is generalized to every pollution of every building since I've mostly checked with power plant (almost all 4x4 cells) but there is a good chance it is true. It would be weird to code something unique just to power plant. I think all pollution follow the same rule. PS: Best building I need was a 1x1 producing no pollution, so I used the small plaza to fill each tiles around the power plant.

Just thought about this after a night of sleep. Is there any way to see the actual pollution values with the cursor or maybe exporting the map pollution values in a file (like a CSV file with coordinate and pollution raw values)?

I decided to merge them together so it's a single dat file. Easier to handle. CoriBoom_Neutral_Marker_Lot_v1_0.dat

Pretty sure it will be linear. I don't think there is logarithmic slope in this game AFAIK. Just bunches of linear stuck one over the others. Maybe it will be something like : Range: Pollution [0, R]:[100%, 90%] [R, 2R] : [90%, 0%]

@Ryuu Tenno As far as having wind pattern and such could be a nightmare awesome, I don't think the code handles anything for that. It would have made the game performance too poor for those old Pentium3 PC 20 years ago haha. But maybe you point in something interesting by saying the base radius is almost full pollution and it lowers fast after that, but it's hard to confirm that. We will have to wait for someone to reverse engineer in-depth systems to confirm. Not by me but probably someone smarter can do it one day. BTW thank you so much for your mods (Air + Water). Those and the Aura mods are SO MUCH BETTER than the original. I skipped the garbage one because the Aura one replace it.

Thanks @CorinaMarie I'll add your markers to my ever growing plugin list of fixes and patches. Out of subject a bit:

The marker lot seems perfect for our situation. And Maxis default UI is less sensitive, but we have a similar situation! BTW, I've checked the exemplar property in iLiveReader and the radius value of the air pollution is really 16. So something happens inside the simulation.

Here's 2 coal power plant separated by 30 tiles: So barely touching but not merging together.

And it seems the 32 tiles of reach is from the center of the building and not the sides. The 64 tiles separated picture accentuate this a bit more. Like the coal power plant is 4x4, so 32 tiles away from the center is 30 tiles from the side of the building. I will try to put them 60 tiles away. The circles of pollution should touch but not merge together.

So first, 4 coal power plants in a square separated by 64 tiles (measured by the road price): And then, 3x3 coal power plants all bunch together.

Funny thing you mention that, because Prima's guide explicitly mention the pollution don't extend further than the radius. Let me test it out, I'll pop a bunch of coal power plant together if the pollution range goes more than 32, we might be into something.

Hello Simtropolis. I hope you can help me resolve my confusion. I was reading in the Prima guide and the SC4Devotion encyclopaedia that the Coal Power Plant air pollution radius was 16 tiles. So I put it about 16 tiles away in my city but I found out that the pollution was reaching way further than 16. So it got me wondering what was going on. I wanted to remove the other possible sources of pollution , so I made a new empty flatland city and plopped a new power plant and... To my surprise, it seems the radius was not 16 but more like 32. I tried with other power plant and I saw similar result. I also looked at the water pollution radius and also similar result. The radius seems to be double what indicated. So what is going on? Do we know how pollution is supposed to be handled in game? Theory time: The only explanation I saw was in the Prima guide: The explanation can still work out but it needs a little tweak. It seems the "tiles" used in pollution radius are 2x2 and not the standard tile on the map. It seems to align to what I'm seem overall. PS: I'm playing with mods but they are mostly fixes and QOL while trying to keep the rest as vanilla as possible. I use the Air Quality Index mod that changes the dataview UI but even without it, I see the same behavior.