CAM - General Discussions

[RippleJet]

I'll run if for a while, I've got to restructure my city centre anyway .

Once you've experienced the Eternal Commuters you will be prepared to take that malicious "feature" into account when laying out your regional transportation network!

The problem is that the number of commuters will still be left and seen as residential capacity in neighbouring cities that really isn't there...

[redguy]

Once you've experienced the Eternal Commuters you will be prepared to take that malicious "feature" into account when laying out your regional transportation network!

The problem is that the number of commuters will still be left and seen as residential capacity in neighbouring cities that really isn't there...

It won't even go (slightly) away when I fulfill that demand with jobs?

[RippleJet]

It won't even go (slightly) away when I fulfill that demand with jobs?

My experience is that it won't.
I've never seen the number of commuters go down as reported by the Census Repository Facility.

[redguy]

My experience is that it won't.
I've never seen the number of commuters go down as reported by the Census Repository Facility.

I'll just have to deal with them, don't want to begin my region again...

I changed the lay-out of a part of my commercial district, the land value went up and the air pollution down. So far my CO$$$ is about 5 times as high as before (5000 yay).

[the7train]

Thanks Nealos and RippleJet.  I actually did read about the eternal commuters in the manual which is why I tried to keep the network connections towards the middle of the cities...guess it wasn't good enough.  I suppose I'll have to zone more residential near the center of my big city, which is where most of the unoccupied commercial buildings are. 

You get more help with each number in that query by hovering with your mouse above them. Wink

duh...so simple sorry I missed that

This is your commuters coming from another city in the reigon, and thier routes may not appear.  It usually happens with 'Eternal Commuters' in a city tile with lots of unemployed people.  Read below.

So if we have two medium cities A in the northwest, B in the northeast, and a large city C south of them like so:
A | B
-----
   C
If commuters from A go to B, and C is closer than the jobs in B, the "invisible workers" will show up in C?  Basically, if workers cross two borders, then they don't show up in the route query of the third city (C in this case). 
Would workers go from one city to another to look for work if there are no jobs there?  So basically by making city B residential only, would it eliminate eternal commuters from A->B->C?

The [eternal] commuters are extremely annoying in SC4, since they never decrease in numbers.

Never?  What if you bulldoze cities?  Or less drastically, disconnect neighbor connections?

Thanks again.

[RippleJet]

So basically by making city B residential only, would it eliminate eternal commuters from A->B->C?

Yes, that would work in theory. But you always have civic jobs in a residential city as well, so it will never be 100% proof.

Never?  What if you bulldoze cities?  Or less drastically, disconnect neighbor connections?

Disconnecting the neighbour connections would remove the commuters from the route query, at least for the moment.
However, the added regional capacity that has been seen by the simulator throughout the years will still be there.
And it is not known in which cities the added regional capacity is seen, they are just added as numbers, nothing else.
Thus, not even bulldozing a city would remove the damage imposed by eternal commuters...

In fact, one of the things I've found out through testing; consider you're playing only a single city with no neighbours and no connections.
Even in that case will you still be able to get commuters coming from SimNation if you plop lots of offices but won't zone enough residentials.

Another reason not to play with ploppable buildings...

All in all, the neighbour connections are not even required to get commuters and added regional capacities...
Functional landmarks should only be built occasionally, and not more than one of them at a time (per month).

[the7train]

wow thats interesting and disappointing you can't get rid of them    I don't use ploppables or landmarks, everything grows for me, so that wouldn't affect me.

[snorrelli]

Disconnecting the neighbour connections would remove the commuters from the route query, at least for the moment.
However, the added regional capacity that has been seen by the simulator throughout the years will still be there.
And it is not known in which cities the added regional capacity is seen, they are just added as numbers, nothing else.
Thus, not even bulldozing a city would remove the damage imposed by eternal commuters...

In fact, one of the things I've found out through testing; consider you're playing only a single city with no neighbours and no connections.
Even in that case will you still be able to get commuters coming from SimNation if you plop lots of offices but won't zone enough residentials.

Here's one I've been wondering about - what if you save your cities, re-render the region, and import the old cities into the new region? Will you be able to clear the slate for commuters?

[RippleJet]

Here's one I've been wondering about - what if you save your cities, re-render the region, and import the old cities into the new region? Will you be able to clear the slate for commuters?

I haven't gone that far in trying, Patrick.
But since the the regional capacity seen is saved in the saved game file (separately for each city), I doubt re-rendering the region would have any effect...

[Kitsune]

I had the eternal commuter problem for a little while, sims went from city C to B to A then back to C using cars, trains and subways. However, once I built up up City C, 95% of those commuters took up jobs in city C, and the ones that were doing the full circle ended up taking jobs in city B or newly built City D and E, so in the end I did manage to get rid of them...

[RippleJet]

It would be great and highly appreciated if someone could do some really thorough testing on this...
...by setting up four cities as the example in the CAM manual, run the cities consequtively and see how the commuters increase.

Then bulldoze the neighbour connections and see what happens... reporting each step taken...
...including route queries at the borders and the Census Repository Facility report at each step in the testing...

[Kitsune]

I noticed a slight issue with a building today:



http://www.glidingeagle.com/images/building.jpg its located there, dont have time to resize it - sorry.
No need to resize, I just added a small code saying the width should be 960, and linked to your original picture:

Code Select Expand


[url=http://www.glidingeagle.com/images/building.jpg][img width=960]http://www.glidingeagle.com/images/building.jpg[/img][/url]

/RippleJet


The Building appears like this with the three most close zoom levels. All other zooms it appears fine. Any suggestions?

[RippleJet]

That's a texture conflict with in-game textures, which is explained here: http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=2299.0

However, since Superstar hasn't been batting for a very long time, that error is highly unlikely to be fixed.
I can only recommend to bulldoze that building and to remove the SC4Lot file from your plugins.

[Diggis]

Is it possible to re IID the textures?

[BarbyW]

Unfortunately it isn't, Diggis, as it would need doing on the original model.

[gml_josea]

I don't know if this has been mentioned already, but I noticed the CAM queries seem to conflict with the Expanded UI Mod (Here)).
When I installed the CAM and the starter packs none of the CAMelots would show the query window; I thought I missed some dependencies, but I figured out this mod would conflict, and indeed it was.
Check this out, maybe it should be added to the list of inCampatible mods =/

[RippleJet]

Equinox' RCI Query Upgrade replaces the in-game queries with his (having the same TGI address).
The CAMeLot queries are separate queries, with their own TGI addresses.

Buildings having Equinox' queries are not custom CAMeLots.
If you remove the RCI Query Upgrade from your plugins, you would notice that those buildings would have Maxis' own queries, but not the CAMeLot queries.

However, a number of Maxis buildings have been rearranged into higher stages, thus being CAMeLots.
These buildings have still got the in-game query, which is replaced by Equinox' query upgrade, if used.

If you have custom buildings growing, which you think should be CAMeLots, having the in-game query (or Equinox' query), you most probably have old stage 8 buildings growing in your city.

[gml_josea]

I tested again this and well, it wasn't that plugin causing the problem really, but I still don't know how this problem fixed all by itself =/
I guess it is fine now.

[Orange Julius]

I'm not to going to say CAM is a waste of time or anything, but what are some *true benefits* of the CAM? As in, what can you do with the CAM that you can't do with non-CAM? Don't take this wrongly or anything, I'm just curious....

[Serkanner]

O.J.

The CAM makes it possible to have 7 additional growth stages. This means that you can "spread" your city in a more natural way before the real big guys start growing. Also ... these new growable stages together with the to be released PIM-X will balance out custom lots that are now using unbalanced stats presented by the Maxis PIM. In theory all custom content can be re-calculated by PIM-X and integrated into what is CAM now. The result will be a fully balanced simcity4 as Maxis has created it BUT with 7 additional growth stages.

If you only like to plop then CAM is not of interest to you.