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Showing results for tags 'eternal commuter'.
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Hi all, So I play SimCity4 to grow my cities naturally, and I've been happily creating highways with NAM 47. I've built up about 6 cities in the New York region to total about 230,000 sims. Each city was about 30-40,000 sims, except for one larger one at about 70k. Unfortunately, I built a pretty comprehensive interconnecting network of rail, subways, and highways before I noticed strange behavior. Hundreds of busses were filling my highways, some of my railway tracks were overwhelmed with 10,000+ commuters, subways were becoming overloaded. Commute times in the graph in all of my cities kept rising to above 60 minutes, when before they were much less. No matter how many times I tried to alleviate the strain of rail, subway, and highways being overloaded, the more regional connections I made, the worse it got. Looking around the forums for solutions, I realized I had developed the Eternal Commuter Loop, possibly across all 6 of my cities. Reading these forums was instructive about the issue and how it developed. But most suggestions discussed how to avoid the issue in the future. I wanted to solve it for my cities now, and end the loop permanently. So I developed a solution and stumbled across an interesting idea. Basically, what I did was load each city up, bulldoze ALL of its neighbor connections, and run the city for two years to reset that city's internal job search/commute pathfinding. For the most part, cutting off all connections to neighbors did not impact the cities too much since they were relatively small at about 30-40,000 sims each. They retained their population and basically hummed along as if nothing happened. However, commute times absolutely dropped to nearly zero. And the traffic amounts also crashed. Internally, sims were locked into finding jobs only within their city tile, since no connections existed. So if there were enough native jobs in the city tile, the city was fine. And after running the game for 2 years, I'd save it and move to the next city to do the same thing all over again. In two of my larger cities, however, the cities took a lot of help to recover from having no neighbor connections, probably because they did not have enough jobs on their own to maintain the populace. One city experienced a significant drop in R$$ sims due to a lack of jobs, and significant dilapidation occurred. In order to fix that, I added high-density commercial and industrial zones (as demand for those skyrocketed due to the need for jobs) and eventually the city balanced itself out, with significantly more R$ sims and the R$$ sims recovering a bit. New, high density skyscrapers grew that held thousands of jobs. In my largest city, the resulting lack of jobs required me to plop several CO$$ lots that had about 4,000 or 5,000 jobs each (which I was planning to do since it's NYC anyway, up to this time all jobs were grown naturally). After adding those, the city recovered and actually went to above 80,000 sims, even better than before the loop occurred. I have no neighbor connections now in any of my cities, and the rails, subways, and highways all still exist. I still build them as I was making a connection, but DO NOT MAKE ANY NEIGHBOR CONNECTIONS (at least for now). They only serve to move sims within the city itself. Honestly, given the way the game treats jobs outside the city, where it's just a draw for sims to commute out with little benefits for the "exporting" city as well as the "importing" city, I wonder if there's a need for a neighbor connection at all. The jobs outside of the city end up reducing demand within the city, and demand inside is better than demand out. While the concept of a central commercial district or city is part of some strategies, I fear that the risk of an eternal commuter loop is very high. Alternatively, even if I make a neighbor connection, it will be limited to ONE or TWO per city. Certainly I'll never create multiple connections as I did in the past, with at least 4-5 avenues, 4-5 rail, 5+ subway, and at least 2-3 highway connections per city. The risk of a loop is just too great. And with the ability to plop buildings that have thousands of jobs, I can manage internal demand for now. Maybe if the city gets to be very populated, I'll have to create a central business district or a city full of jobs, but that will need to be heavily managed to avoid a loop. At most, I might create one or two neighbor connections with a highway or rail, to better manage where the sims end up. So in summary, to solve the Eternal Commuter Loop, eliminate all neighbor connections in each city and try to manage the demand for jobs within the city itself. Neighbor connections across a large region run the risk of an eternal commuter loop and actually don't seem necessary for the health of a well managed city with enough jobs.
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Subway junction - Commuters make a 45⁰ sharp turn in subway junctions
navyou14 posted a topic in SC4 Modding - Open Discussion
Recently stumbled upon a very annoying thing when dragging subway tunnels through my dense city. When building my subway tunnels I tend to create junctions/switch as seen in the first picture. I've created a junction so that a single subway line can be split into two different lines/branches. I want this to work as a regular switch similar to how rail switches work when two separate lines can be created from a switch, allowing trains to continue in separate directions resulting in two different transit lines. This doesn't seem to work when working with subway tunnels in SimCity 4, as subway trains tend to divert in a unrealistic way as seen in the pictures below. A sharp 45⁰ turn is made and the inbound trains head outbound when they're only supposed to continue on the merged single line while heading inbound. On the contrary, junctions can be created perfectly when creating transit routes like El-Rail, GLR, Heavy Rail and Monorail. Is there any way to fix this? I use latest NAM. I am not a professional programmer but is it possible to change the way this commuting route is normally displayed in the preferred way in the Traffic Simulator? Note: In the second picture, the problem can be seen where the commuters who are supposed to ride the subway inbound from point B to A. However they instead divert in a sharp 45° turn, going from point B to C. what is seen in the first picture works perfectly fine when working with GLR, El-rail, Heavy Rail and Monorail as I mentioned before, is there anyway to modify this so that they're only restricted to commute in the way that's seen in the first picture?- 7 Replies
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Ferries, network speeds and the infinite commuter loop
monkeywater posted a topic in SimCity 4 General Discussion
I have pretty much neglected ferries the entire time I have had this game. A few questions: Are infinite commuter bugs possible with ferries? For example 4 separate islands, each on their own tile. Is it possible for ferries to set up an infinite loop between the islands What is the speed of the ferry network vs other networks? I have been unable to find many ferry terminal lots. Do these exist? Thanks -
Possible (Maybe Not) Solution to Eternal Commuter Problem?
Eusebio Ptolomeu posted a topic in SimCity 4 General Discussion
Let me first adress the very important fact that I'm not a programmer and I don't know if this solution would be viable at all, so perharps someone with a deeper understanding of the game can correct me here. We all know about the eternal commuter problem/loop in SC4 (otherwise, you can easily find about it here in Simtropolis). For some people, it's just a minor bug. To others like me, it's a headache. I've seen lots of ways to deal with this problem, ways which I highly recommend to anyone trying to solve it. I have a suggestion for a mod that, if feasible to make it, could solve or at least reduce this problem. The idea is based around SC4 path-finding algorithm, which prioritize the time of a trip over it's lenght. A Sim would favor a long route if it was faster than a short one, for example. So, with this in mind, my idea would be to simply penalize sims for switching over cities. In other words, the act of crossing the border alone should account for an added extra time to the route. This way, a sim would think twice before looking for a job in the next city. Now, I'm know that this idea would bring some problems: 1- I don't even know if such modding is possible in SC4. I'm trying this suggestion because, after seeing what the NAM is capable of, perharps this idea is not that impossible. I don't know myself, so anyone with a better understanding of the game can answer here. 2- An amazing thing about SimCity 4 is it's regional playing, where a Sim can live in a city and work in the next one. This mod should no prevent this from happening, it should only prioritize work within the same city 3- Is it possible for the simulation to separate sims of the city from those ones which came from the border? If so, perharps we could code a mod that prevents these sims which arise from the connection to ever consider another connection too. This would limit Sims to, at best, look for jobs in the next city, and never beyond.- 45 Replies
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Does this mod exist: Fill all jobs in current city before commuting to neighbour
Ben1220 posted a topic in SimCity 4 General Discussion
I've been getting frustrated with having to structure my networks in unnatural ways in order to force sims traveling from city A to B to take jobs in B instead of heading express to C simply because the path to C is slightly quicker than taking a job in B. I was wondering if anyone has ever edited / there is a way to edit the traffic sim in order to force sims to take a job in the city they're in if one is reachable, and THEN use neighbor connections for those sims who can't find jobs in the current city. Another idea that might be even better: Would it be possible to add a constant to the distance for all sims using neighbour connections? The constant could be customizable, chosen by the player (perhaps different for each map) or perhaps a reasonable "average" of what you'd expect the travel time in the next city from the border to a job. This could be as simple as using different values of the constant for different map sizes and connection types (road, rail, pedestrian ect) This would make the simulation a lot more realistic and only requires a very small amount of extra computation from a theoretical CompSci point of view. I know it's a very hacky solution and there would be heaps of situations where it doesn't fix the problem but I think it's a good compromise between what we have now where the border itself is considered an endpoint, and running shortest paths between the cities (which I know is probably impossible since the game doesn't know much about neighboring cities while they're not loaded) also given that the latter would be computationally very difficult. Both of these tweaks could also "fix" the eternal commuter bug, or at the very least they would minimize eternal commuters to only be "remainder" sims who can't find jobs in the current city. The first idea of forcing sims to take jobs in their cities as a priority could cause some unnatural behavior though, with sims near a border doubling back and traveling to the other corner of the current tile map instead of stepping over the border, thats why I like the second solution better since, if a suitable constant was chosen, this problem could be minimized. I hope I explained my ideas clearly! I assume that if this were possible to do someone would have already done it or maybe there's an issue with this I'm not thinking of that makes it worse than what we have now, but I thought I'd share the idea anyway just in case.
