NAM Issues Thread - PLEASE POST YOUR NAM QUESTIONS AND PROBLEMS HERE

[dare2go]

I don't really know if this belongs in here... (I first searched for "NDEX Parking lot problems", but couldn't find anything relevant).

I'm having a multitude of _(small) problems right now, all of which I believe are somehow connected with pathfinding issues.

In a new-ish suburb buildings get abandoned en masse due to "Commute Time" complains, although there is (or at least should be) plenty of work near-by. I then checked pathfinding for a number of residents in that area and found many abnormalities, eg. many Sims trying to travel right across town (the same happens in other suburbs of the same city) despite suitable work much closer to home.

The other issue is that many are trying to take the 'wrong' public transport or longer routes than needed, although overall my average commute time seems to be well within the acceptable range (~40 minutes). Eg. in the suburb with "Commute Time" complains the Tram-GLR is underused, yet it connects from three residential stations to two stops right at high-tech industry, the following three stops are centrally located in a mixed commercial area = the longest trip of 7 stops should connect the majority of people with work. Yet most are driving by car or are using bus instead.

The final issue, which I had noticed in previous trial cities as well, is the weird usage of NDEX parking lots, the strangest ever I found in this graphic: trip started on foot (to next bus stop), then three buses (why there is a need to change I can't figure, but then SimCity bus routes never were logical), then a walk to a vehicle, drive into parking lot, walk across this, and then drive off to work on the other side of the city. 

Every logical commute should, if at all, start by car leading to a parking lot near transport, and then change onto a bus (or tram/train), not the opposite:


See enlarged view of parking lot path in top middle of picture

Is there something wrong with the NDEX parking lots?
Or could I have a plugin which affects the NAM path finding?

[j-dub]

Is there something wrong with the NDEX parking lots?
Or could I have a plugin which affects the NAM path finding?

I don't know what traffic simulator your using, but use of park and ride or not affects desirability cars versus buses. They are both used in any event, just one is greater then the other, depending on what your using. As for a plugin that affects path finding, the only way is if you downloaded something else by someone else, as another transit/traffic mod, otherwise your going to have to look at the dat files in your plugins if there is anything weird.

I have used parking lots that can connect to road networks, and I have seen some weird stuff too, but it is not just NDEX, I have not built more parking lots this year.

One more thing, if the paths in the road are broken or don't line up, that could also be a reason why they get in their cars, then get back out, and get in their cars on that other part.

[z]

I'll answer as many of your questions as I can here.  If you have further questions related to the traffic simulator, the place to continue this is the NAM Unified Traffic Simulator and Data View Help thread.

In a new-ish suburb buildings get abandoned en masse due to "Commute Time" complains, although there is (or at least should be) plenty of work near-by. I then checked pathfinding for a number of residents in that area and found many abnormalities, eg. many Sims trying to travel right across town (the same happens in other suburbs of the same city) despite suitable work much closer to home.

There are a couple of things here.  First of all, Sims are not required to take the job that is closest to them; adding this requirement to the traffic simulator would make it work much harder (and your game run slower) as it would have to fill jobs in a way that all the Sims got the jobs closest to them.  The traffic simulator simply makes sure that if there is a suitable job for a Sim, the traffic simulator will find it.

Second, it's not at all obvious whether or not suitable jobs exist.  You have to look at businesses with the route query tool to see how many Sims are working there; however, Sims are counted for each route they take, so they often end up being counted multiple times.  You have to figure out what these multiples are and eliminate them.  Then you subtract this number from the first number of jobs you get when you query the building; that will tell you how many jobs are open.

But not every Sim is qualified for every job.  Each building has its job openings divided not only into wealth levels, but into education levels within each wealth level.  See the tutorial Workforce and Occupation Demands (Drives) for information on how this works.

What this means is that determining whether a given building has job openings for a given Sim can be a painstaking process.  A building may have plenty of job openings, but none that are suitable for Sims who are actually looking for jobs.

Instead, it's generally easier to see what the overall job picture is.  You need to make sure first of all that all your demand types are positive; this is easily checked in the RCI Demand Graph.  If they are, you can get more information by learning about and using the Census Repository.

The other issue is that many are trying to take the 'wrong' public transport or longer routes than needed, although overall my average commute time seems to be well within the acceptable range (~40 minutes). Eg. in the suburb with "Commute Time" complains the Tram-GLR is underused, yet it connects from three residential stations to two stops right at high-tech industry, the following three stops are centrally located in a mixed commercial area = the longest trip of 7 stops should connect the majority of people with work. Yet most are driving by car or are using bus instead.

Calculating the time of paths is actually rather tricky; to do it precisely, you need knowledge of the internal workings of the traffic simulator, as you need to apply the Congestion vs. Speed curve at every step.  But if you use the route query tool, you can see what routes the Sims are taking, and you can get a decent estimate of the times of the routes.  You may have a fast form of transit such as the tram, but if it's not going where the Sims want to go, it's not going to help them.  Sims don't base their job choices based on commute times, but they do take the fastest routes to their jobs.

Speaking of commute times, your commute time graph says that your average commute is .4 minutes, or 24 seconds - not 40 minutes.  This is inaccurate, and I encourage people not to use this graph, but in your particular case, it means that one-way commute times to work are almost exactly one minute long.

The final issue, which I had noticed in previous trial cities as well, is the weird usage of NDEX parking lots, the strangest ever I found in this graphic: trip started on foot (to next bus stop), then three buses (why there is a need to change I can't figure, but then SimCity bus routes never were logical), then a walk to a vehicle, drive into parking lot, walk across this, and then drive off to work on the other side of the city. 

Is there something wrong with the NDEX parking lots?

Yes; like many transit-enabled lots, they have a transit switch entry cost of zero, when the value should actually be 0.064.  TE lots should never have a TSEC of zero (although all the Maxis ones do); when TE lots have a TSEC of zero, especially big lots like parking lots, then strange things such as what you observed can happen.

As for the three buses, that's just a single bus ride.  There are actually neither buses nor bus routes in SC4.  There are just Sims acting like buses as they travel between bus stops.

[k808j]

@Z

From reading your latest post are recommending to change the transit switches in the TE transit lots to .064 if it's zero (ie: STEX lots)?(If one knows where to look)

[z]

Not quite; the full rule is this:

The formula for the transit switch entry cost for any station is .96/speed, where "speed" is the speed of the fastest travel type that is designed to pass completely through the station at normal speed (excluding subways).  If the travel type passes next to the station instead of going through it or if there is no through travel type (such as in parking lots), the pedestrian speed should be used in that formula.

If this formula is not followed, you get one of two problems:  If the TSEC is too low, you get excessive pedestrian shortcutting.  If the TSEC is too high, mass transit usage can be affected adversely.

It's not just stations on the STEX that are affected.  Many stations on the LEX and other exchanges do not have the proper TSEC, either.

[meks89]

G'day all,

I've been using the latest NAM without incident(haven't placed any ferries yet). One small issue. Why have the textures on my rail changed? Am I missing something?

[Andreas]

Those heavy rails with the el-rail supports might be a remnant from an outdated plugin - they looked that way before ArkenbergeJoe created the Rail Viaduct models.

[Floydian]

Nobody even cares about little ol' me
I've uploaded an image to show my problem. Once again, old region, new install of simcity, deleted the folders of and reinstalled NAM, TULEP and RHW.


I want my RHW!

[z]

Is there any chance that an older version of NAM or RHW exists in files that you've DatPacked?  (Or anywhere else, for that matter.)

[meks89]

What z said. That was my problem an old Nam file the was DatPacked. Running the uninstaller doesn't work you have to do it manually.

[Floydian]

I'm not sure what datpacking is. I just install them to my plugins folder. I deleted the old folders and reinstalled the files in the same place. It seems to exclusively be the textures for RHW. TuLEP and NAM work perfectly fine.

[Blue Lightning]

Looks like you're missing RealHighway_Textures.dat at the most basic... more files probably too though.

[six9nc]

Has anybody created an el over sunken rhw. If so I would like to see it done cause I have to cross my sunken downtown artery with an el.

[j-dub]

Has anybody created an el over sunken rhw.

What do you mean by El, do you mean double height Elevated Rail? I did not see something like that for RHW's 6 and up. There at least should be double height El Rail crossing over OWR and Avenue to substitute those spots of RHW.

[dragonshardz]

I think he means a 15m El-Rail over ground-level RHW.

And to answer your question, six9nc, El-Rail can pass over all RHW networks, IIRC.

As for double-height El-Rail, it would only be needed to overpass ERHW, but it's just simpler to convert from El-Rail to GLR and back.

[six9nc]

Thanks guys I've got a 3 day weekend and I plan to dive deep in to 4.0.

[medit84truth]

Not sure if this is the correct forum to post this, but I searched for 30 minutes trying to find an adequate one that would address my issue, but had no luck.

Problem:
I tried uninstalling the nam and it wiped out 90% of my plug-ins folder before I could stop it. It even deleted the back-up plug-ins within the SimCity 4 subfolder in my docs. The funny thing is it didn't even uninstall the nam. Most likely because I have a z in front of that folder and the deletion was going in alphabetical order. Also, I had a folder called Simcity4 stuff in my documents with a subfolder containing the nam 2010 setup installer and that's gone as well (not the entire folder, just the subfolder with nam setup).

I go to the recycling bin and none of the items that got deleted are in there. What in Gods name happened and how can I get my S%$# back?!?!?!

Will system restore do anything the fix this? Doubt it, but just wondering....

[z]

I just took a close look at the uninstaller code (which is quite simple), and I don't see any way to explain what you experienced.  It's certainly never supposed to do that, although I understand that that's of no comfort to you under the circumstances.  The only thing I can think of is if you had a mount point somewhere in your NAM folder, so that your NAM directory was no longer a simple tree.  Is that possible?

A straight system restore will not restore the files.  However, in Vista and Windows 7, System Restore also keeps copies of changed files.  If you right click on a folder that used to have your files, you'll see a "Restore previous versions" entry.  You can try that; I'm not sure if that will get you versions of files that have been completely deleted.  You might want to Google for additional ways of using this feature.

Above all, please institute a regular backup system.  There are so many ways that files can be lost, and from time to time, they eventually happen.  Only a good backup system can save you then.

[medit84truth]

I do appreciate the response. What exactly is a "mount point"?

I forgot to mention that I did have a back-up folder with "all" my plug-ins and it deleted the contents of that folder as well. To save space in my main plug-ins folder, I created a folder for plug-ins I didn't need at the moment......It deleted that too. It probably deleted some other folders because my Simcity4 folder in my docs looks much smaller, but there's no telling.  From what I can gather, it looks like it deleted more than 7 GB of files.  I've had cities I've worked hard on go bad before, but this for some reason has me more frustrated than that ever did. I know I can research my download history on SC4Dev and Simtrop to download everything again, but golly! Oh, and the foreign sites are gona be a dandy to revisit.         

Oh well, thanks for the suggestions.

-Peace

[z]

I do appreciate the response. What exactly is a "mount point"?

I forgot to mention that I did have a back-up folder with "all" my plug-ins and it deleted the contents of that folder as well. To save space in my main plug-ins folder, I created a folder for plug-ins I didn't need at the moment......It deleted that too. It probably deleted some other folders because my Simcity4 folder in my docs looks much smaller, but there's no telling.  From what I can gather, it looks like it deleted more than 7 GB of files.  I've had cities I've worked hard on go bad before, but this for some reason has me more frustrated than that ever did. I know I can research my download history on SC4Dev and Simtrop to download everything again, but golly! Oh, and the foreign sites are gona be a dandy to revisit.         

Oh well, thanks for the suggestions.

A mount point is basically a folder that actually points to another folder and all of its subfolders.  You have to go to some work to create one, though (other than the system ones); it's not something that would happen by accident.

I really have no idea what could have caused that disastrous deletion.  I'm very sorry that you lost so much.