SC4 Devotion Forum Archives

The NEW Traffic Plugins

Simulator "A" written by JPlumbley
Simulator "B" written by Mott

Please remember only ONE of the NAM_Traffic_Plugin files must be installed at one time.  These are intended to replace the old NAM_Traffic_Plugins, the ones that are:

2x, 5x and 10x Capacity, 2x, 5x, 10x Commute Time and 2x, 5x 10x Speed.  The installer will automatically remove the original files.

What are NAM_Traffic_Plugins intended to do?

Well, there are two Central "cores" named A and B for lack of a better identifier.  These two Central Cores have both been mathematically designed to re-balance the structure of the Simulators.  With new information discovered by Mott from investigations he preformed the previous Simulators have been found to be harmful to the game in some cases.  Not only were the old NAM Simulators found to be flawed, but also the Vanilla Simulator from MAXIS was found to have flaws in it as well.  These two Cores have been designed to limit and/or remove these flaws, as well as expand on ideas MAXIS had that simply were not implemented or not implemented properly.

What is the Difference between Simulator "A" and Simulator "B"?

These Simulators have been designed to do two different things. 

Simulator "A" has been designed by JPlumbley to extend the original travel distances set by the MAXIS Simulators.  For example in the original game the MAXIS Simulator allows the Sims to walk up to 7 tiles, but with Simulator "A" the Sims will walk upto 43 tiles to get to work.  This change in travel distance is due to the calculations used to allow Car Traffic to travel one full distance of a large city tile (512 tiles) on Avenues. 

Simulator "B" has been designed by Mott to work with the original travel distances set by the MAXIS Simulator.  For example in the original game the MAXIS Simulator allows the Sims to walk up to 7 tiles, therefore in Simulator "B" the Sims will walk upto 7 tiles.  Simulator "B" has also been re-calculated to be more balanced and provide better pathfinding overall.

Other modifications to both Simulators include changes to the follow properties with minor variation:

Congestion to Accident Probability - Revamped the probability curve.
Congestion vs. Speed - Made use of this, not used to full potential by MAXIS.  Sims will now look for better routes if the network is over congested.
Trip Length to Minutes Display Multiplier - Used in calculations for time displays on Commute Time Graph.

What is the Park and Ride Mod?

The “Park and Ride Mod” is a mod that will make it so that cars cannot reach their destination.  So, what this forces you to do is place parking lots near transit systems, or in you CBD so that Sims can park and then walk or ride the rest of the way to work.  These are the Simulators named with a P after the Simulator Type like so:

NAM_Traffic_Plugin_AP_Easy

What do the different difficulties mean?

The only difference between the different difficulties is the Capacity of the networks.  All have been altered from the original MAXIS Simulator.  Road, OneWay Road and Avenue have all been equalized in speed and capacity in preparation for the Network Widening Mod.  The following is a list of the Network Capacities for each difficulty:

Easy Difficulty
Street:	2250
Road / OWR / Avenue:	5600
Highway / El-Highway:	10800
Rural Highway:	10800
Subway / El-Rail / GLR:	13500
Monorail:	13500
Rail:	13500

*Note: The Easy Simulator was used during testing and was able to perform with astonishing results in a Medium City Tile with 1.8 Million Sims and counting.

Medium Difficulty
Street:	1500
Road / OWR / Avenue:	3750
Highway / El-Highway:	7200
Rural Highway:	7200
Subway / El-Rail / GLR:	9000
Monorail:	9000
Rail:	9000

Hard Difficulty
Street:	1000
Road / OWR / Avenue:	2500
Highway / El-Highway:	4800
Rural Highway:	4800
Subway / El-Rail / GLR:	6000
Monorail:	6000
Rail:	6000

What effect will the different difficulties have on my play style?

The Simulators are designed to help your game calculate proper pathfinding situations for your Sims to find their way to work.  Now, the Network Capacities have an almost equally important role in the way the Simulator works as the Maximum Commute Time and the Speed.  Some people will say that Capacity isn’t important and can be set to anything.  Well this is only a half truth, while Capacity "can" be set to any setting it is not wise to set the Capacities too high.  If the Capacities are too high the Sims will never look for another route beyond the shortest path because your networks will never become congested.  If the networks are never congested no speed will be lost and Sims will only take the shortest physical route.  Now, if the Capacity settings are set appropriately the pathfinding will act more realistic.  In Real Life roads become over crowded and then people look for other routes or new roads are built.  Having lower capacities will force you to design your networks more dynamically, plan ahead and provide more of a challenge.  But, if the Capacities are set too low, it will make the game too hard from a transit standpoint and prevent large cities.  If you have CAM, and a network capacity is set too low, one building may cause over congestion on any network if you are at some of the higher stage levels.

It is advisable that you choose your difficulty based on the size of the city you are planning to build or what stage you are in building your city.  Some general findings during testing find that for existing cities the Difficulties best perform at:

Hard Difficulty for cities up to 250,000 population.
Medium Difficulty for cities 200,000 population to 1,000,000 population
Easy Difficulty for cities 750,000 population and greater.

*Note: These are not set population values just estimates on where they should best perform at.

Of course there are differences for existing city sizes.  If you are starting a city from scratch, it is advisable to start on Hard Difficulty because it will allow you to build a city with a very well optimized traffic system.  If the city becomes too large your Simulator may benefit you moving down to Medium Difficulty.  But if you design your network from the beginning to be optimized for Hard Difficulty, you may never need to get to Easy Difficulty.

What is the NAM_Traffic_Data_View Mod?

This file has been uploaded in a separate file but has been included with the NAM Simulators because it would be a good idea to use this while using the new NAM Simulators.

This is a modification to the Congestion Data View.  The original Congestion Data View is very skewed, what most people may not realize is that the Congestion Data View doesn’t report Congestion in the way one would expect.  In fact, you will not notice the on the Congestion map that your networks do not start becoming yellow with congestion until they reach about 175% to 200% and don’t actually reach red until they are over 300% capacity.  This is not very accurate portrayal of when your networks start suffering consequences from over congestion.  Your networks will still end up having a speed reduction when the network becomes over 100% capacity, but you will never notice it until the network is more congested and beginning to become yellow.

Due to this inconsistency, the Congestion Data View has been edited to show signs of over congestion sooner rather than later.  This will not only help you avoid the consequences of Congestion and give you a more accurate reading of when the network starts to suffer the consequences.


Color Ramp

(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg227.imageshack.us%2Fimg227%2F9092%2Fnamtrafficsimulatorcongpk5.gif&hash=4571ab2db439888ccb14ac0cb9cfc17254c25317)

Released:

Windows:
http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1493 (http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1493)

MAC:
http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1492 (http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1492)

Want to understand more about the Traffic Simulator?
Understanding the Traffic Simulator (http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=3907.0)

Which file is it in the lex?

-Crissa

They're not up yet, Crissa, but they will be quite soon. jplumbley is just getting things in place.  ;) 

-Alex (Tarkus)

Great work Jason...   &apls

With the park and ride, there was talk of being able to add parking to existing lots.  I assume that the simulator hasn't had any modified lots included.

Hey JP, do u know how far sims are willing to drive to work before they move out all together?

Can't wait for there to be more realism in the game.  ;D

Quote from: Starmanw402007 on January 30, 2008, 06:50:24 AM
Hey JP, do u know how far sims are willing to drive to work before they move out all together?

That depends on a number of things, which Simulator you have installed is the most important one.  But based on the Simulator there are a number of variables including the amount of congestion, type of route selection (street, road, ave, highway, MT?), etc.  I cannot say exactly how far a sim will drive before it chooses abandonment, but I can tell you with Simulator "A" the sim in optimal circumstances will drive upto 512 tiles (1 large city tile) on an Avenue.  Obviously, if there is any % of that on Streets it will shorten the distance, etc.

Question:  Will Sim A have the shortcutting problem of commuting traffic between city tiles that sometimes would happen?  (IE, the shortest distance to a job might be the next tile over instead of a job in this city tile)

Also, thank you for the lex link.

-Crissa

Quote from: Crissa on January 30, 2008, 04:06:53 PM
Question:  Will Sim A have the shortcutting problem of commuting traffic between city tiles that sometimes would happen?  (IE, the shortest distance to a job might be the next tile over instead of a job in this city tile)

Also, thank you for the lex link.

-Crissa

I use Simulator A and do have regional commuters.  Currently, I have not reached a point where I can tell you if they will cause commute circles or not.  IF you have commute circles they can be avoided by creating longer routes to the neighboring borders.  In testing the Simulator A was tested by several commute circle aware members and they did not report any commute circles while testing.

Great work folks.Not sure what it is but I like the principle of it. :thumbsup:

The only time I've seen Sims leave the city for work was when there weren't enough jobs available, or if the Res zone was right at the neighbor connection, or a transit station is right at the neighbor connection, creating a quick escape route. I wouldn't recommend linking the subway systems between cities though, unless you want them to work in the next tile. I don't use highways, so I'm not sure the impact on those.
And JPlumbley, make that a medium tile with 2.5million Pop.  :thumbsup:

This looks great! I have two questions though... How does this affect the CAM? Also, you mentioned that when you get to a certain population you should change the difficulty level of the city... I thought you couldn't change the difficulty level after you start a city?

-- John

John, what jplumbley was referring to was not the game's difficulty, but the different "difficulties" of traffic simulators that are available in the new package, in terms of their varying capacities for the networks.

-Alex (Tarkus)

John, I never play without CAM. And I don't think I'll be playing without SimulatorA_Easy anymore either.
I have had to alter my playing style a bit, but it has me zoning a lot smarter now, which is really kicking CAM into high gear.

Oh okay, that makes more sense now that I think about it. :D Thanks for the clarification, and I'll definitely download this now.

And just so you know, the zip file for the windows version has Mac in the name, that might confuse some people.

EDIT: Oh, one more question. Do I need to remove the traffic plugin that came with the CAM? Just wondering, since the file isn't listed in the cleanitol file and I want to be sure.

-- John

Hello Jplumbley and all  :)
Thank you for good balanced mod files !

Please ask one my simply question. ;)

Quotewhat this forces you to do is place parking lots near transit systems, or in you CBD so that Sims can park and then walk or ride the rest of the way to work.

What is CBD ??  ()what()
Sorry to my worthless question... :-[

Thank you.

Mas-san, I believe it's the Central Business District. Basically the downtown commerce section of the city.

Quote from: DFire870 on January 30, 2008, 07:45:41 PM
EDIT: Oh, one more question. Do I need to remove the traffic plugin that came with the CAM? Just wondering, since the file isn't listed in the cleanitol file and I want to be sure.

I'd recommend it. :)

-Alex

Definitely remove the CAM traffic plugin.
(What are you guys doing making a Cleanitol without me?   :P)

@xxdita san

Quote from: xxdita sanit's the Central Business District.

Oh! I see !! :)
Thank you for reply quickly xxdita san !!
I udnerstand it well !  ;D

-Mas'71

That's very great! Wonderful work on it! And I will use it... ;) (Thanks)

For of all

YOU COST ME $1m

$1m in fixing a inner core highway system that was built pre rush hour days and did not have a major overhaul until now  :P

So for that you get the Palpatine  :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: for allowing the arteries to be cleared and Solaria to breath easy again as commuting takes a more realistic and managable approach.

In saying that I have to play around with 1000km of subway way now  %wrd

Great work  ;D ()stsfd()

This is the first time I've posted here (or at Simtropolis for that matter), but I've been a big fan of the NAM since the Jan 2007 release. I was poking around the simulator files  while cleaning up some of the other mods I have installed and I noticed a problem:

In at least Simulator A on easy (non-Park and Ride), the OWR capacity is set to 13500 instead of 5600.  I haven't checked the other files, so it might be worth a look into them as well.

Thanks for the great work on these simulator parameters, they're making the game a lot more playable for me!  :thumbsup:

When I read about this file I really want to install it, however I do have one question. Will this file conflict with the Road Top Mass Transit (RTMT v350) also available on the LEX?

Just wondering, has anybody noticed a slowdown of the automata on the RHW system after installing the new simulators?  It seems that it was the only network effected.  Heck, the traffic on a nearby street is moving faster than the traffic on the RHW, and that is messed up.  Oh, and this was with Simulator A_Easy of Jason's.

yea I've noticed that..."Warning Science Content" It makes me think, are we seeing cars that are going close to the speed of light with respect to the cars? Note: As you approach the speed of light, the surroundings seem to slow down with respect to you.

Quote from: jondor on January 31, 2008, 01:29:48 AM
This is the first time I've posted here (or at Simtropolis for that matter), but I've been a big fan of the NAM since the Jan 2007 release. I was poking around the simulator files  while cleaning up some of the other mods I have installed and I noticed a problem:

In at least Simulator A on easy (non-Park and Ride), the OWR capacity is set to 13500 instead of 5600.  I haven't checked the other files, so it might be worth a look into them as well.

Thanks for the great work on these simulator parameters, they're making the game a lot more playable for me!  :thumbsup:

Thanks I made the fix and reuploaded it... So anyone using the "Easy" version of any of the Simulators, you must re-download and re-install.

Quote from: capo on January 31, 2008, 04:36:29 AM
When I read about this file I really want to install it, however I do have one question. Will this file conflict with the Road Top Mass Transit (RTMT v350) also available on the LEX?

RTMT v350, Ive never downloaded it myself.  But it will not conflict with the Simulator.  However, it is not the greatest thing for a proper Simulation to have RTMT.  The reason is they are TE Lots.  TE Lots are Stations, and whenever a car enters a TE Lot the Maximum Commute Time "clock" gets reset and starts causing more and more issues with your physical pathfinding.  Not to mention, these lots probably have not been given a Transit Switch Cost which accurately reflects what the actual Transit Switch Cost should be to prevent "short-cutting".  I cannot stop you from using them, but they are not the greatest thing for your Simulation.

Quote from: rickmastfan67 on January 31, 2008, 05:23:48 AM
Just wondering, has anybody noticed a slowdown of the automata on the RHW system after installing the new simulators?  It seems that it was the only network effected.  Heck, the traffic on a nearby street is moving faster than the traffic on the RHW, and that is messed up.  Oh, and this was with Simulator A_Easy of Jason's.

That stuff is controlled by the Automata, not the Simulator.  The Traffic Automata Exemplar, is a separate mod.  But it would be named something like "NAM_Automata_Plugin_Standard"... You may have had the 24 hour one installed, I have the Standard one, but it has nothing to do with this.

Quote from: jplumbley on January 31, 2008, 09:11:41 PM
That stuff is controlled by the Automata, not the Simulator.  The Traffic Automata Exemplar, is a separate mod.  But it would be named something like "NAM_Automata_Plugin_Standard"... You may have had the 24 hour one installed, I have the Standard one, but it has nothing to do with this.

Then you should alert people the cleanatol file tells them to eliminate them. :P

Since parking is needed for more of these simulators; is there road pieces parking garages/lots that we can build or grow to fit the needs?

I recall not finding that many garage options aside from 'cheater' super-garages on the stex...

-Crissa

@Crissa, I will try to make a set of low capacity parking lots.... But it wont be for a bit of time.  There are those "cheater" lots and I think there are a few others out there, but I have not started using the parking lot mod until I physically have time to build the lots I feel are good for myself and then I will release them to the public.

I'm using gshmail 1x3 parkings and NDEX parkings
However the NDEX one are used as shortcuts by the simulator, so I plop them in specific locations where I'm sure this won't happen

You'll may also need some rural parking by PEG for your farmland

And you only really need them if you're using the Park&Ride option

Quote from: rickmastfan67 on January 31, 2008, 09:35:31 PM
Then you should alert people the cleanatol file tells them to eliminate them. :P

Yes - actually I wondered if it was necessary for the automata plugin to go as well. The Cleanitol file does remove it along with the pathfinding/capacity/speed plugin...

What's up...

hey i have a question... Which would you recomend me to install... when i load the installer... how can i get it to work at its best?

let's say "traffic sim A"... and the "Park n Ride A" should i install both... or just one of them... cuz i installed just the "traffic sim A" in easy... and it doesnt seem to work... or is just me :-[

Quote from: el_cozu on February 01, 2008, 07:43:53 AM
What's up...

hey i have a question... Which would you recomend me to install... when i load the installer... how can i get it to work at its best?

let's say "traffic sim A"... and the "Park n Ride A" should i install both... or just one of them... cuz i installed just the "traffic sim A" in easy... and it doesnt seem to work... or is just me :-[

First off you should only have one Simulator File installed that is why only one is selectable in the instller.

I am not sure what you are looking for in a city.  If you want to go with the Park and Ride Version you must remember that installing this will require parking lots near your jobs otherwise your sim will be forced to walk the entire distance or take MT.  I have started a new city myself and I have choosen to use the "Simulator A - Hard" because it will be more functional at lighter densities than the "Simulator A - Easy" due to the physical amount of congestion, that and it will allow me to start building a much more stable network while my city grows before I change the capacities to "Simulator A - Medium".  IF you start with "hard" in a new city and get a half decent population of about 250k Sims I would say your doing pretty darn good and learning to build a fairly stable network system.  For older cities, that have a large population of over 1 million I would suggest just starting with the "Easy" and fixing the areas that are causing congestion issues.  Remember you are also installing my new Congestion Data View Color Ramp which portrays a more accurate Congestion map.  Everything kind depends also on what you had your previous NAM_Traffic_Plugin set at.  Essentially, "Easy" would probably be equal to an effective 6x Capacity for Mass Transit Networks and 3x Capacity for Road based networks, but more efficient so they work better as a whole.

thanks for the advice...

I have some kind of proyect about not modular but intersection puzzle piece in highways...

I'll make my drawings then post them... and maybe some of you might be interested in this proyect i have in mind...

I started to think this since the MIS is kinda hard to use... then why not using puzzle pieces at intersections...

like... U turns... right turns, Exits... so you can actually combine between Stacks and Cloverleafs... maybe half-half or... 1 leaf cloverleaf intersection... the other 3 stacks... i hope you know what i mean... I'll make my designs and hopefully someone gets interested by this...

Just zoom in Los Angeles in Google Earth... and you'll see lots of different highway intersections... not just cloverleafs and stacks... but combined

Hmm... I think this new traffic simulator is working a little too well for me. 

City size: ~3 million

Before:
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg504.imageshack.us%2Fimg504%2F60%2Fimageah5.jpg&hash=68fe4b05eba749439b0dea8b522cb60db9eb5503)

After:
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg137.imageshack.us%2Fimg137%2F8427%2Fimage2br8.jpg&hash=6e327330970222f1fc5d46951d24bf70034271b7)

As you can clearly see, the simulator has created an unrealistic traffic flow/capacity for my city streets.  Traffic volumes for each type (car, pedestrian, etc.) have not changed significantly. 

Just as you recommended me to do at Simtropolis, jplumbley, I downloaded Simulator "B", set for "easy", with no "park and ride" installed.  I have also removed the plugin I was using when I was doing testing for you.  Prior to this, I used the standard NAM traffic plugin, and I do not have the CAM.

Would there be any way I could make this more "realistic"?  Or are my networks "all green" with the new traffic data view?  Should I try simulator "A" or a different difficulty setting?

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Best,
-Haljacley

Quote from: Haljackey on February 01, 2008, 01:30:03 PM
Hmm... I think this new traffic simulator is working a little too well for me. 

City size: ~3 million

Before:
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg504.imageshack.us%2Fimg504%2F60%2Fimageah5.jpg&hash=68fe4b05eba749439b0dea8b522cb60db9eb5503)

After:
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg137.imageshack.us%2Fimg137%2F8427%2Fimage2br8.jpg&hash=6e327330970222f1fc5d46951d24bf70034271b7)

......
Best,
-Haljacley

Can I ask what's that yellow spot on the first image... the one on the right almost bottom of the picture... looks like some kind of huge transit building

Quote from: Haljackey on February 01, 2008, 01:30:03 PM
Would there be any way I could make this more "realistic"?  Or are my networks "all green" with the new traffic data view?  Should I try simulator "A" or a different difficulty setting?

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Best,
-Haljacley

Not that I really know too much about it, but it's my understanding that Easy increases the capacity of the transit networks to well above the Maxis standards.

The "A" and "B" simulators seem to allow for longer commutes...I don't think that would necessarily have a direct effect on congestion (though I could be wrong).  And the new DataView mod makes your congestion more apparent, so if you have that installed and all you see is green, then your streets are less likely to be congested.

With the "Easy" plugin installed, your capacities are WAY higher than normal, so it would take a lot more to actually congest your roads.  If you want more congestion, I'd get a higher difficulty level.

Again, that's just a suggestion based on observations...

<Edit> Took out the capacities chart.  They're on the top of the page...;)

el_cozu: That is the WTC (Word Trade Centre) lot.  Other than being a large building, it is also a large pedestrian mall, and contains a subway station at the core.

Masochist: Thanks for the help, but I already know that!  :P

My city has around 3 million residents, and jplumbley recommended me to install simulator B at easy over at Simtropolis because I wanted the new simulator to represent the old standard simulator in the NAM as best as possible.

I am thinking of switching to "medium" difficulty, because, just like you stated, my capacities are WAY higher than normal.  For a city of that size, traffic congestion should occur at least SOME parts of the city.  I just wanted to know what I should do before I make my next move.  Thanks anyways!

Best,
-Haljackey

@Haljackey... I do know exactly which mod each person should install on a case by case basis.  If you would like to see more congestion, I would suggest going to one of the harder difficulties.  I have not suggested one Simulator over the other because it really doesnt matter they are both balanced properly.  Simulator "A" will allow your Sims to drive further which may give you more congestion but allow your Sims to go further.  Simulator "B" will keep your Sims travelling at the same distance the original MAXIS Simulator had, which is short compared to Simulator "A".  I myself prefer Simulator "A", since I built it.

It also depends on what Simulator you had installed before.  You said you had the Standard NAM one, this is pretty impressive because most people use one of the higher capacities to get a 3 million large city.  The closest thing to your Capacity levels are the "Hard" settings.  You have already created a suitable Network System for the "Hard" version, not many people have been able to do that.  The Capacities of "Hard" are still higher compared to the Standard version,  Streets have 1000, compared to 100, all the MT line have 6000 compared to 2000.  So your Network System will benefit in these areas, especially if you have alot of MT.  If an MT line is under used, the Sims may start to use it more and take away from the car traffic.

wow... now that you've resumed the whole purpose of the simulators... i finally seem to understand it... i think I'll go with "B" since the sims use more mass transit than their own vehicles...

however... traveling more distances would also help sims since they can get to work further away than the original traffic simulator, instead of just decide not to work at all  ???


wa.... :'( now i don't know what to use... both are great!!

anyway.... thanks again for your kinda "resumed" tutorial of these traffic simulators... now..... onto the highway interchange project  :satisfied:

jplumbley: Thanks for the feedback!  As you may or may not know, I go a little crazy with my road, highway and MT networks.  Infrastructure is the best part of SC4 in my opinion, and with crazy infrastructure comes crazy results! (as long as crazy means a good thing!)

Because of the high-density of my city, installing simulator "A" would mean a lot more people would walk to work rather than drive or use MT due to the close proximity of the buildings.  Thus, I will try the "hard" version of version "B" and see how it works in my cities.

If you are interested in the progression of the transit simulator in my cities, I have a City Journal (CJ) at Simtropolis running where I showcase my infrastructure and how the city uses it on a day-to-day basis.  I also have it as a Mayor's Diary (MD) here, but the CJ is well ahead of the MD, making the MD out of date.  There is a link to the CJ in my signature.

Anyways thanks for the reply and I will try out Simulator "B" on "hard"!

Best,
-Haljackey

Well, if anyone can link to parking lots, I'd love some.  Maybe I should put a begging thread somewhere else?  I never had luck getting settling ponds before... Hum.

Anyhow, eventually I'll put things back together and rebuild my city.

-Crissa

Since different cities in the same region can require uique traffic solutions, based on tile size and population, I would recommend downloading the MAC version instead of the Windows installer, then choosing either Simulator A or B, with or without Park & Ride, and switching out the plugin as needed, going from Hard to Easy to alleviate congestion. Just keep the files not in use in a folder outside of your Plugins. (Not sure how StartUp Manager would handle these as I don't use it.)
This will also allow you to compare between Simulators A & B, to see which one suits your playing style.

Another option is to use the SC4 Start Up Manager (SUM) by the SFBT team (JLP2) and set profiles for each city tile. To do this you will have to place the files in their own folders though.


Does the installer for the new LEX setup check for and remove the old beta files? Or do they just overwrite them? or what?

I think I know another reason for Haljackey's symptom...

He's basically given every sim in his city a GPS unit with traffic updates.  So they drive better.

But the city was built under the old simulator:  So people live closer and more efficiently to work than was required.

But that's changed.  Everyone is suddenly better at getting to where they're going.  They're not making the mistakes of the previous simulator.  So no lumps of traffic!

Hehe.

By making the sims smarter, we've almost made it unrealistic, because we'd adapted to the previous stupidity of the sims... Which was stupider than reality, we now have to make cities that are 'tougher' to navigate - like in real life - so that they can make more realistic mistakes.

-Crissa

Hey I'm having a problem with the congestion data view.  I already had the NAM congestion file installed, which I forgot (it's not in the cleanitol) until I installed the new sim.  Since then the data view is broken -- everything is green, regardless of congestion.  IE a rail station over 100% capacity is full green.  I've removed one, the other, then both of the congestion data view files and the result is the same.  Any ideas?

Edit:  clarification -- the congestion view is fine with the new (and old) data view file.  It's only when I install the sim file itself that the view appears to show zero congestion across the board.  The sim doesn't increase the capacity of stations, does it?  I thought only the network tiles themselves were affected  Is it possible I have a barely corrupted file?

Hi all.

First thanks for the fantastic work done here. I really can't wait to try it.

However, my understanding of interactions of different mods is a bit limited.. So I would like to know what shoud I exactly do in order not to have CAM and this new simulator interfer. I'm using "promote walking" FWIW. What files should I exactly remove from my Plug-Ins ?

Sorry if this question seems a bit stupid, just like myself - I've searched through this thread and didn't find a complete enough answer for a noob like me.

Thanks a lot,

From your Network Addon Mod folder, remove any files named NetworkAddonMod_Traffic_Plugin_(whatever).dat.
Then in your z_CAM folder, remove NetworkAddonMod_Traffic_Plugin_BetterPathfinding_CAM_PromoteWalking.dat.
Then just install the new Simulator.

So let me get this straight: We still need an automata plugin with this mod?

Is it possible to get ones with mott's speed and lifespan tweaks?

There is no replacement for the automata plugin with this, so I'm not sure why that's listed in the Cleanitol.
Your best bet, to find any outdated NAM traffic plugins you have would be to copy & paste the code below into a new txt file then run it through Cleanitol. It would be safe to use if you've already installed the new mod, becuase of the naming structure.

QuoteNetworkAddonMod_Traffic_Plugin*.dat

First thx to such great mod :)
But I have mentioned that the monorail-pollution bug has come back.
I encountered air pollution on the monorail track which has a flow over 1000.

Well is there anyone also encountered this problem?

my spec:
SC4Deluxe with all official updates <-chk twice
NAM2008, NO CAM, NO High Speed Rail

Old traffic controller removed: Better pathfinding 2x capacity
New simulator installed: A-medium withOUT Park&drive

Quote from: spartan air on February 02, 2008, 05:25:59 PM
Hey I'm having a problem with the congestion data view.  I already had the NAM congestion file installed, which I forgot (it's not in the cleanitol) until I installed the new sim.  Since then the data view is broken -- everything is green, regardless of congestion.  IE a rail station over 100% capacity is full green.  I've removed one, the other, then both of the congestion data view files and the result is the same.  Any ideas?

Edit:  clarification -- the congestion view is fine with the new (and old) data view file.  It's only when I install the sim file itself that the view appears to show zero congestion across the board.  The sim doesn't increase the capacity of stations, does it?  I thought only the network tiles themselves were affected  Is it possible I have a barely corrupted file?

Please remove one of the Congestion Views, they are the exact same file, maybe this is causing an issue.  The Simulation file itself only contains the Traffic Simulator and should not cause any physical problems you are describing with the Congestion View.  I did see a problem like this yesturday in the ST forums, but I dont know if this person had my Simulator files installed or not.

Through testing this issue has not come up across the many city types and playing styles, meaning different plugin setups.  It could be a conflicting file, but I dont know of any other than the NAM ones.  No person other than Mott and I have really played with the Congestion View.

Could you please take a picture of the issue you are having and a picture of where your Congestion View and your Traffic Simulator are in your plugins folder.  Maybe something will catch my eye.

Quote from: kassarc16 on February 03, 2008, 04:13:55 AM
So let me get this straight: We still need an automata plugin with this mod?

Is it possible to get ones with mott's speed and lifespan tweaks?

This is in the Automata Exemplar, which is not included in my mod.  I made a mistake in the cleanitol file by including the Automata files on the list (everything in the NAM files looks soo much alike, lol).  I have just looked at Mott's A03 file and it does not have that Automata Exemplar which means he did not do any edits to it.  If there is a separate file that you know of that I have missed, please give me the link to it and I will extract the Automata Exemplar and get it uploaded.  I am myself working on the Automata Exemplar but it will be a little bit of time before I get through it.

Quote from: xxdita on February 03, 2008, 05:38:31 AM
There is no replacement for the automata plugin with this, so I'm not sure why that's listed in the Cleanitol.
Your best bet, to find any outdated NAM traffic plugins you have would be to copy & paste the code below into a new txt file then run it through Cleanitol. It would be safe to use if you've already installed the new mod, becuase of the naming structure.

Thanks for your help answering questions bud!

Quote from: gtaki on February 03, 2008, 05:57:24 AM
First thx to such great mod :)
But I have mentioned that the monorail-pollution bug has come back.
I encountered air pollution on the monorail track which has a flow over 1000.

Well is there anyone also encountered this problem?

my spec:
SC4Deluxe with all official updates <-chk twice
NAM2008, NO CAM, NO High Speed Rail

Old traffic controller removed: Better pathfinding 2x capacity
New simulator installed: A-medium withOUT Park&drive

I have just looked through the Simulator Plugin again to make sure, but there is not property that deals with Monorail Pollution.  The thing that may deal with Pollution would probably be in the Automata Exemplar, silly me with the Cleantitol again.  My guess it you had the Radical Automata Plugin installed.  Anyways, it is best to re-run the NAM installer and physically delete the NetworkAddonMod_Traffic_Plugin_*.dat file that you have installed, when you re-run the NAM installer to get back your Automata Plugin if you ran my cleanitol file.

There is a property in the Utilities Simulator Exemplar that handles the air pollution generated by traffic:

Traffic Air Pollution Factor 0x69501944 Affects how traffic density equates to air pollution.

Other than this property, I can't seem to find where the pollution by transit type is set.

-Swamper

Quote from: Swamper77 on February 03, 2008, 10:57:04 AM
There is a property in the Utilities Simulator Exemplar that handles the air pollution generated by traffic:

Traffic Air Pollution Factor 0x69501944 Affects how traffic density equates to air pollution.

Other than this property, I can't seem to find where the pollution by transit type is set.

-Swamper

Thanks Swamper.  I had never come across it and have not dealt with it before.  This is obviously not in my files nor should my files had anything to do with it.

Quote from: jplumbley on February 03, 2008, 09:38:41 AM
This is in the Automata Exemplar, which is not included in my mod.  I made a mistake in the cleanitol file by including the Automata files on the list (everything in the NAM files looks soo much alike, lol).  I have just looked at Mott's A03 file and it does not have that Automata Exemplar which means he did not do any edits to it.  If there is a separate file that you know of that I have missed, please give me the link to it and I will extract the Automata Exemplar and get it uploaded.  I am myself working on the Automata Exemplar but it will be a little bit of time before I get through it.

Mott had his tweaks in the Realtime mod in this post (http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=2665.msg83692#msg83692). The only thing I found wrong in it was that there weren't enough cars spawned. But the lifespan and the speeds were spot on, and his tweaks to keep busses and trucks off streets were great.

Hey, I have a question. Im working on a suburb right now with a rural highway that runs basically through the middle of it. My problem is that my sims will take a side street and cause horrible congestion when they could easly drive like 5 tiles down the road and get on the highway. Will this mod help fix that so the sims will use the highway? Most of the commuters work in a larger neigboring city so they have to get on the highway anyways. They just use the side street to get to an onramp that is closer to their destination.

Also, my suburb is about 15,000 residents right now. Can anyone suggest which one I should use? Thanks.

-Metropolis

Quote from: jplumbley on February 03, 2008, 09:38:41 AM
I have just looked through the Simulator Plugin again to make sure, but there is not property that deals with Monorail Pollution.  The thing that may deal with Pollution would probably be in the Automata Exemplar, silly me with the Cleantitol again.  My guess it you had the Radical Automata Plugin installed.  Anyways, it is best to re-run the NAM installer and physically delete the NetworkAddonMod_Traffic_Plugin_*.dat file that you have installed, when you re-run the NAM installer to get back your Automata Plugin if you ran my cleanitol file.

Not directly (labeled) there isn't, but it's there. Property 0xA92356B4 in the Traffic Exemplar actually affects this, *if memory serves*, even for pedestrian types I believe. Edit: Monorail is the last value in the list *scratches head*.

EDIT: it's one of those items that Maxis decided to tie in with more than one thing.
The problem with 0x69501944 is that it's not Network/transit specific.

Re-installing the entire NAM isn't necessary to replace the files removed by Cleanitol. These have been placed in your Docs/SimCity 4/BSC_Cleanitol/DATE_# folder, for safe keeping. So all you would have to do to restore the automata file is simply move it back to your Network Addon Mod folder.

Metropolis - If that route gets congested, this mod will help your Sims find an alternate route a lot faster. For a city that size, I would recommend either Hard or Medium (depending on how much growth you expect).

Metropolis- I encountered that problem as well, however there is a simple solution.  The pathfinder finds the shortest distance to a point, therefore they use the side street, which is horribly unrealistic.  Make your on and off ramps for your RHW shorter and make sure you have proper connectivity.  I did tis in my city, at first no one used it, simply because of my ramp design, now over 1000 commuters use it.  Hope this helps   ;D

Quote from: xxdita on February 03, 2008, 02:20:04 AM
From your Network Addon Mod folder, remove any files named NetworkAddonMod_Traffic_Plugin_(whatever).dat.
Then in your z_CAM folder, remove NetworkAddonMod_Traffic_Plugin_BetterPathfinding_CAM_PromoteWalking.dat.
Then just install the new Simulator.

Hmm.. I note this information is not included in the simulator downloaded with the new LEX files. It is not included in the cleanitol file either. Does this mean this requirement is no longer a problem? The first part is included it looks like to me, but no CAM info is included.

Hmmm.. now I look at the doc's it seems the uninstall instructions are inadequate also:

(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg516.imageshack.us%2Fimg516%2F9373%2Fsimulatoruninstallyl1.jpg&hash=3c6eabc1dfcc1d5a97c70ade84cc0c80c441875c)

I just thought of another item. We ran into it on the JP test thread. It probably should either be included or documented as it will not allow the simulator to properly run as installed. If anyone is using the HSRP (High Speed Rail) it also modifies some if not all of the transit settings (or maybe "resets" them is the proper phrase.. hehe)
I think JP is digging into this, but I think the file in question is the HSRP.dat file.

The traffic plugin-ins available as options with the CAM installation were based on now outdated NAM traffic simulators. These files were almost certainly missed while making the Cleanitol because they were not included in an official NAM release, only packaged with CAM1.0.
However since it is installed into the z_CAM folder, will override any other traffic plugin you may have.

After testing the new traffic plugins, I would highly doubt the need for one to be one included with the next CAM release.

The uninstall directions are fairly clear. This of course will not re-install previous simulators, but that seems common sense. This is why the easiest way to remove outdated plugins is to Back Up using Cleanitol (copying the info I put on the previous page to a new text file and running it through) as the files are safely stored outside of your Plugins folder, just in case you need them.

Aha! So the CAM traffic plugin should go too! Makes sense, given the increase in capacities/distances here, which was the goal of the CAM file. Should have realized...

Quote from: xxdita on February 04, 2008, 09:23:11 PM
The traffic plugin-ins available as options with the CAM installation were based on now outdated NAM traffic simulators. These files were almost certainly missed while making the Cleanitol because they were not included in an official NAM release, only packaged with CAM1.0.
However since it is installed into the z_CAM folder, will override any other traffic plugin you may have.

Sounds very ..umm... succinct.. but the CAM 1.0 IS still the current CAM.. lest we forget. At least that is what I find in the CAM thread and on the LEX.

QuoteAfter testing the new traffic plugins, I would highly doubt the need for one to be one included with the next CAM release.

Good point.. but we aren't shipping the "next CAM release"

QuoteThe uninstall directions are fairly clear. This of course will not re-install previous simulators, but that seems common sense. This is why the easiest way to remove outdated plugins is to Back Up using Cleanitol (copying the info I put on the previous page to a new text file and running it through) as the files are safely stored outside of your Plugins folder, just in case you need them.

Its pretty clear that it probably wasn't even looked at.. Looks like boiler plate to me. Course I could be wrong.. ;)

CAM 1.1 is closer than you might think.  ;)
Now that RippleJet is home from holiday, I will contact him regarding updating the CAM install directions on the download page and on the Welcome And Manual + Download thread, recommending that no traffic plugin is selected during the CAM install.
But repackaging the current version of CAM when it is bound to be locked in a matter of time seems a bit much, and would no doubt delay the release of 1.1.

And you seem to be missing the bottom of the ReadMe:
Feedback and Support
Please visit the NAM General Discussion forum for any feedback or support issues. We will attempt to answer them to the best of our knowledge, and as quickly as possible.

Well you can always take two approaches.. make the docs wrong then put your manpower on the task of "setting it straight" .. or just make it right to the best of your ability the first time.. or at least take feedback willingly and in the spirit in which it was offered..

I have little interest in makng this a poiint of arguement.. I've made a simple observation of fact.. I assume it will be factored in by the folk who do the work and they can address it in whatever manner they find appropriate. I have nothing further to say on it.. :)

Does this mod require more reparing the roads, or is it just doing whats intended?

I've been spending a load, reparing every road, from a bump that turns into a pothole causing crashes all over my city. When I installed this mod, I noticed, number 1, I now have these weird ugly black smudgy things, we've been debating what they are, potholes, oil slicks, to dead flattened bodies? Its more noticable how these work in UDI. I noticed for example, when a semi goes over them, the trailer breaks off, and the cab breaks down, then CRASH! Cars drive over them, and seem to wreck. I understand there was going to be some sort of automatic traffic flow determination, where this new simulator would limit semis, and pick a spot where it would do it. But it doesn't make sense why I now get these on train tracks. All I know is I never have had to repair all my networks until I dl-ed this mod. Number 2, this is weird, the games more strict with how my networks are laid out. I've actually had to now use more Roads than Streets. For example, I made some new dead end streets, that later had to be roads, but I'm only talking about a 4 tile long network. The house that was on the end of the road, stays forever, and says commute: short, but the 3 out of 4 houses, closer to the main road, say commute: long, this doesn't make any sense, their closer to the exit point to the main road, and then they just abandon. It would seem it takes really long now for the game to recognize changes in the network now, it finally gets it on tripple speed. I actually had to get rid of a hwy ramp junction, and replace it with a plain avenue intersection, just so people noticed to take the hwy to exit the city. I notice building R$1 is harder now. It doesn't want to do it, even when using the building plop cheat. Clearly C$1 still builds and so does industry, but it still says long commute for residential. The very least, I am getting alot of busses up the wazoo, and I have never seen my trains so clogged up before.  I clearly installed the easy version of this mod, wether or not its easy. 

Potholes appear if you underfund your network.

I really think you should read the manual that came with the game, and which you can also download here:
http://simcity.ea.com/coolstuff/manuals/index.php

The following is an extract from said manual:

Quote from: SC4 Manual
If you lower funding too far, though, your lovely network may end up in dispair and trains tend to derail, which can adversely affect traffic conditions. Look around. If you notice a sudden epidemic of potholes, you may want to increase your road maintenance funding. In fact, if you have let things really deteriorate, better increase funding above 100% to cover for the costs of repairs. That hurts!

The NAM traffic simulators have absolutely nothing to do with budget funding and potholes.

I thought I should re-post my results after installing another traffic plugin.  I tried Simulator "B" this time, on "easy".
Other important notes:
-City size: Large
-City population: over 3 million residents and 2 million jobs
-"Park and ride" not installed
-CAM not installed

Traffic congestion views:

Standard NAM traffic plugin.
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg504.imageshack.us%2Fimg504%2F60%2Fimageah5.jpg&hash=68fe4b05eba749439b0dea8b522cb60db9eb5503)

Simulator "B", on easy.
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg137.imageshack.us%2Fimg137%2F8427%2Fimage2br8.jpg&hash=6e327330970222f1fc5d46951d24bf70034271b7)

Simulator "B" on hard.
(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg210.imageshack.us%2Fimg210%2F3980%2Fdowntownfeb141981202422ks9.jpg&hash=0e9380f3a4d78c52baa8453ee80ed94bec1abb12)

As you can see, congestion has reached a more realistic level, with some areas and arteries very congested, while others are in good shape.  I think I will continue to use Simulator B on hard unless anyone thinks a better one will be more beneficial.

Again, thanks for all the hard work put into this.  Anything that helps the good old traffic jam is appreciated!

Best,
-Haljackey

@RippleJet, so thats what they are. I don't know why though, I have the funding for that to the right of white line, it only goes so far to the right. Good to know its not this doing that.

Quote from: j-dub on February 07, 2008, 02:01:07 PM
Does this mod require more reparing the roads, or is it just doing whats intended?

I've been spending a load, reparing every road, from a bump that turns into a pothole causing crashes all over my city. When I installed this mod, I noticed, number 1, I now have these weird ugly black smudgy things, we've been debating what they are, potholes, oil slicks, to dead flattened bodies? Its more noticable how these work in UDI. I noticed for example, when a semi goes over them, the trailer breaks off, and the cab breaks down, then CRASH! Cars drive over them, and seem to wreck. I understand there was going to be some sort of automatic traffic flow determination, where this new simulator would limit semis, and pick a spot where it would do it. But it doesn't make sense why I now get these on train tracks. All I know is I never have had to repair all my networks until I dl-ed this mod. 

The Simulator has absolutely nothing to do with your roads becoming potholed.  There are two properties in the Simulator that deals with degradation of your networks, that are both left at the MAXIS Vanilla Values...  So I have no clue what you did.

QuoteNumber 2, this is weird, the games more strict with how my networks are laid out. I've actually had to now use more Roads than Streets. For example, I made some new dead end streets, that later had to be roads, but I'm only talking about a 4 tile long network. The house that was on the end of the road, stays forever, and says commute: short, but the 3 out of 4 houses, closer to the main road, say commute: long, this doesn't make any sense, their closer to the exit point to the main road, and then they just abandon. It would seem it takes really long now for the game to recognize changes in the network now, it finally gets it on tripple speed. I actually had to get rid of a hwy ramp junction, and replace it with a plain avenue intersection, just so people noticed to take the hwy to exit the city. I notice building R$1 is harder now. It doesn't want to do it, even when using the building plop cheat. Clearly C$1 still builds and so does industry, but it still says long commute for residential. The very least, I am getting alot of busses up the wazoo, and I have never seen my trains so clogged up before.  I clearly installed the easy version of this mod, wether or not its easy. 

I cannot comment on this without pictures or know what Simulator you have installed.  But I know the Simulator does as intended and actually can work much better than most may think, as Haljackey has shown with a City of over 3 Million Sims and a fairly green network on "HARD"...

For streets, both Simulators have a Capacities equal to what I have stated, which on "HARD" are 10x the MAXIS Vanilla Value at 1000 cars.  So, IF, you have "HARD" installed your streets will be able to handle 500 cars there and 500 cars back before they start having Congestion Issues.

Maybe, you are using Mott's Simulator "B" which bases commute distances off of the MAXIS Vanilla game.  IF, you had any of the old NAM Traffic Plugins and had 10x Speed, 10x Commute or any other combination of those you maybe have designed your network system so that your trips were further away than what the Vanilla game "allowed" for.  Which means, your Sims are going to report long commutes and abandon due to the physical distance they must travel.  If this is the case I suggest using Simulator "A" which allows your Sims to drive much further for thier commute.

A problem with most people is when they build a highway, they build it in a "bypass" type situation.  Meaning it is not the phyiscal shortest distance to the city core.  This is one of the physical limits of the Simulator, which I have attempted to give some flexibility to, but it still occurs.  The mathematical basis of the Simulator will find the shortest physical distance is generally the shortest mathematical path.  There is no physical way for me to say Roads are preferred over Streets, Avenues are preferred over Roads, etc.  This means, you have to be aware and make your streets have a longer path than roads, road have a longer path than avenues and avenues have a longer path than highways... Its all in your physical layout.  The Simulator is very smart, but in your eyes it will still act dumb in certain circumstances.  You have to realize that there are limitations of what it can do, and what we have done with our research and implementation into this is provided the best usage of all the properties we could within the Simualtor.

Hey Jp, the refence guide is very helpful, good work on it.

Too bad it doesn't count 'distance' by counting tiles, with each tile having a different value, than all having the same value...

-Crissa

Hmm.. the more I use the simulator, the more I think that STREETS should be proportionately lower capacity than roads (and possibly roads vs avenue and ave vs highways) .. but for sure the streets.. I think the current ratio (I realize this was carried over from SC4 and not "your thing") is just too close.. What the exact amount should be I don't know.. Maybe others have thoughts on this

They are already less that half the capacity of a road.  What more to you want?  ()what()

And as for road vs highway, an avenue carries twice as much as it is 2 lanes in each direction.  Makes sense to me.

:) .. if the street in front of my house carried half the traffic of the road a block away, then entire neighborhood would be gridlocked.. and similarly if it carried the traffic of the larger road about 4 blocks away, it too would be totally gridlocked.. My opinion is that the streets are something of a special case intended for neighborhoods, not for arteries of any sort.. but again, opinions are like  *holes .. everyone has one.. ;)

I've simply observed that in light of the exploratory work of using the "congestion factor" in helping guide pathfinding, that a lower capacity would be beneficial. As it stands, the streets run pretty much like roads.. with a major path tending to be the rule, not the exception.. just like in the "old days"

Quote from: SC4BOY on February 19, 2008, 01:04:49 AM
:) .. if the street in front of my house carried half the traffic of the road a block away, then entire neighborhood would be gridlocked.. and similarly if it carried the traffic of the larger road about 4 blocks away, it too would be totally gridlocked.. My opinion is that the streets are something of a special case intended for neighborhoods, not for arteries of any sort.. but again, opinions are like  *holes .. everyone has one.. ;)

Well, DUH!  Thats RL.

But, this is a semi-compromise for those who want it at Standard settings and those who want it higher.  I cant please everyone with everything all the time.  This is something that will make streets still usable in high density areas (allowing for use of SAM ;) )...  But it will also keep the traffic in check to some extent.  If you dont want sims to use Streets as arteries design them so they are a longer route than the main routes you want.

... and after all, it's not that hard to use Traffic Cop, SC4Config or another modding program to change the values yourself. ;)

Sounds great.. got a link to a "how to" on NAM "adjustments"?

I'd suggest sc4config. Try playing around with the settings a little. It's much less complcated than Reader. Though you'll still need Reader to trim the excess baggage.

I have just released another Information Guide into the Traffic Simulator which may help some people understand this mod a little better.

Understanding the Traffic Simulator (http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=3907.0)

Is there any difference between avenue and road? They appear to have the same capacity and the same speed.
Am I correct? Why would one use an avenue over a road? Only for aesthethics?

Quote from: anandus on March 01, 2008, 02:13:27 AM
Is there any difference between avenue and road? They appear to have the same capacity and the same speed.
Am I correct? Why would one use an avenue over a road? Only for aesthethics?

Because it is 2 tiles wide...  Capacity is based on a single tile... so effectively Avenue is equal to 2 side by side roads.  Therefore double the capacity.

Quote from: jplumbley on March 01, 2008, 02:27:20 AM
Because it is 2 tiles wide...  Capacity is based on a single tile... so effectively Avenue is equal to 2 side by side roads.  Therefore double the capacity.

Ah, like so :)
I thought the capacity was only about the lenght, didn't know width mattered. Thanks :)

Edit:
So the capacity for the highways is also twice the amount in the list?

Hi,
I just installed the NAM traffic simulator (version Feb 2008) and was wondering if it's working properly in my game. Is there any way to check the road capacities to verify that the mod is installed correctly? I noticed that my toll booth on a highway has a maximum capacity of 4800. Does it imply that the highway only has a maximum capacity of 4800? By the way, I'm using simulator A (easy) on SimCity 4 Deluxe.

Quote from: moolynx on March 23, 2008, 11:38:24 PM
Hi,
I just installed the NAM traffic simulator (version Feb 2008) and was wondering if it's working properly in my game. Is there any way to check the road capacities to verify that the mod is installed correctly? I noticed that my toll booth on a highway has a maximum capacity of 4800. Does it imply that the highway only has a maximum capacity of 4800? By the way, I'm using simulator A (easy) on SimCity 4 Deluxe.

There is no definitive way to really find out "if" you have it working in the sense of looking for an exact number.  What you should notice is a change in the Commute Time Graph.  Do not compare the Commute Time Graph to an older Simulator, the old ones do not have the same scale, it should look different than when you didnt have Simulator A installed.  Another way to see if it is working is look for roads you know are almost or at maximum capacity, if they max out at around 200% of the stated capacity of the Simulator you are using, it will tell you that it is working.

Hi,
Thx for the reply. Anyway, I uninstalled the NAM simulator and had a look at the traffic data, and the map was mostly orange or red instead of green when I was still on the simulator. When I reinstalled, everything went back to green. However, I did notice that the commuter time increased when I installed the NAM simulator. I take it that they're just taking a path that is less congested but has longer commuter time. Thanks for the help!
Cheers

Quote from: moolynx on March 24, 2008, 12:41:56 AM
However, I did notice that the commuter time increased when I installed the NAM simulator. I take it that they're just taking a path that is less congested but has longer commuter time.

You cannot in any circumstance compare between Traffic Simulators the change in the Commute Time Graph.  Due to the differences in the way they are designed, they Commute Time Graph will not display the same even if the Sim is taking the same route.

There is a property called the Commute Time Graph Multiplier.  In all of the original NAM Traffic Plugins, it was never edited.  Due to the changes in speed, max commute time, etc they never really portrayed an accuratce Graph that could possibly help you.

With Simulator B, the Commute Time Graph should look very similar to the Vanilla one made by MAXIS, because the speeds and the multiplier were not changed. 

But with Simulator A, there was a minor change to the speeds and the multiplier was calculated to provide you with a scale you could understand.  With Simulator A, the Max Commute Time has been set to allow a Sim to travel 512 tiles (1 large tile) on an Avenue.  I have scaled the multiplier to display a commute of 512 tiles on Avenue to show either 60 or 90 minutes on the Graph I cant remember off hand at the moment.  Essentially, IF you have a Graph displaying 90 minutes your average Sim is commuting 512 tiles by an Avenue.  By doing a simple calculation based on the different speeds you can find out what the average distance your Sims are driving, walking, taking the train, etc.

But under no circumstances can you compare 2 different simulators to each other because there is no mathematical comparisions you can do to derive the common denominator.

hi all
I'm back at SC4 after a while playing other games and am very happy to see a new NAM sequel. Marvelous work, once again...
I am a bit of a realism fanatic, so the new park&ride thing made my cry of pleasure...  ;D (for this reason, I also chosed simulator B, since I think people are too lazy to walk 7km (16m*43) )
I have some questions about the technical makability of some realism tweacks:

I don't know how things are in the US, but in Europe there are some things that go at the contrary of the park&ride:

- in small towns and low to mid density areas, workers can with no real problem park their cars in nearby streets thus having no real need for parking lots

- most heavy industry factories have huge "internal" parking lots for their workers

- a non-negligible part of middle-sized offices have also a parking (mostly underground)

- a good part of high-density offices offer parking lots for their upper ranking workers

Is there a possibility to work on this, or the way the game is designed make it totally impossible to tweak?

Quote from: Pharaon-Kheops on March 31, 2008, 12:43:34 AM
- in small towns and low to mid density areas, workers can with no real problem park their cars in nearby streets thus having no real need for parking lots

Unfortunately, the way Park and Ride works... you have the choice to either allow cars to "reach destination" or not.  In Park and Ride, the cars are not allowed to "reach destination".  So its an all or nothing situation.

Quote from: Pharaon-Kheops on March 31, 2008, 12:43:34 AM- most heavy industry factories have huge "internal" parking lots for their workers

Quote from: Pharaon-Kheops on March 31, 2008, 12:43:34 AM- a non-negligible part of middle-sized offices have also a parking (mostly underground)

Quote from: Pharaon-Kheops on March 31, 2008, 12:43:34 AM- a good part of high-density offices offer parking lots for their upper ranking workers

As for lots that in RL that have parking but dont in SC4...  Parking Lots in Sim City are Transit Enabled Lots (TE Lots), there have been some experiments that have prooved that TE Llot properties are able to be added to common growable lots and function.  But... there have been some issues that arise aswell.  When these "TE Growables" grow... they will never upgrade into a better building.  If the lot requires a connection it will complain to you in the News Ticker until it gets a subway connection or rail connection, whatever.

So this is expected to be possible but not likely to become a common effect.

a great thank you for such a quick and clear answer....

by the way, RL is giving me some time now and after so long taking, I would be glad to give a bit to the great SC4 community.
I am a total artistically inept, so I can't help at all for any texturing things or the like, but I am involved in local politics and so, familiar with demographic/economic/traffic maths... though, I know quite nothing about the game's mechanics so I'll have to "try and learn" a bit.... Is there a "must have" tutorial (or several....) around that could spare me hours and hours (and hours and....) of experiments before I could be sentient enough to be of some real help?

Quote from: Pharaon-Kheops on March 31, 2008, 07:08:53 AM
Is there a "must have" tutorial (or several....) around that could spare me hours and hours (and hours and....) of experiments before I could be sentient enough to be of some real help?

Well, it kinda really depends on what you want to do.  There are lots of things you can do, even if your not asthetically talented (I know Im not).  Transit Modding is a group effort.

If you want to get involved with Transit Enabled Lotting or dealing with the physical Traffic Simulation these are 2 threads you need to read:
Understanding the Traffic Simulator by JPlumbley (http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=3907.0)
TE Lots, Transit Switches and You (http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=2763.0)
There is also some good information about TE Lots currently going on in this thread:
HSRP (Starting Pg 14) (http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=2089.260)

If you want to get into adding props to networks this is the thread you need.. (props are things like stoplights, trees, etc):
T21 Exemplars (Network Props) by Swamper77 (http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=70.0)

If you want to start RULing, this is the easiest RUL to start with and is more of a gateway to the others:
RUL 0x10000002 by JPlumbley (http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=2500.0)

Quote from: jplumbley on March 31, 2008, 07:45:21 AM
If you want to get involved with Transit Enabled Lotting or dealing with the physical Traffic Simulation these are 2 threads you need to read:
Understanding the Traffic Simulator by JPlumbley (http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=3907.0)
If you want to start RULing, this is the easiest RUL to start with and is more of a gateway to the others:
RUL 0x10000002 by JPlumbley (http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=2500.0)

Talk about shameless plugs...  $%Grinno$%

Quote from: jplumbley on March 31, 2008, 07:45:21 AM
There is also some good information about TE Lots currently going on in this thread:
HSRP (Starting Pg 14) (http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=2089.260)

...which the shameless Jplumbley moved into his own thread: ::)
Transit Switch Entry Cost - Discussion Thread (http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=4272.0)

Thanks, Jason! :thumbsup:

just one question: how does SC4 handle, in term of commute time, people going to a neighbor city? I suppose people who reach the border are considered as having reached their job and so their comute time is equal to home-border time. Is that the right thing?

Quote from: Pharaon-Kheops on April 02, 2008, 12:21:57 PM
just one question: how does SC4 handle, in term of commute time, people going to a neighbor city? I suppose people who reach the border are considered as having reached their job and so their comute time is equal to home-border time. Is that the right thing?

In short: Yes :thumbsup:

And in the neighbouring city they will start looking for a path to work as if they just stepped out of their homes.
At this point you don't want to find another border crossing closer than any available jobs though, as that would be the start of having eternal commuters, going around the common border point of four neighbouring cities and doubling themselves for each full commute circle.

another one, just for pleasure   ;)

how does the game manage neighbor connections? are they traffic switch lots, or only properties of the connecting network tile?

I've actually gone searching for the neighbor connection properties quite a bit, and still haven't found it. So I can only assume that region play of any sort, including neighbor connections, is encoded in the exe itself.

too bad.... this means we have no way to give neighboring commuters a "time penalty".... (I am currently trying to figure out how it would be possible to have real scale speed.... as there are numerous real scale maps...)

That was one of the main reasons I was looking for it.  $%Grinno$%
Probably the best thing to do would be to put a modified toll booth just before the connection, to control commuters a bit better.

one of the only thing, that is sure.... but one of the best.....  ::)

the problem, there, is what happen if you forgot but one of these lots? My bet is.... something odd...  $%Grinno$%

I think we are condemned to use some unrealistic variables and then use some conversion to go back to realism....
the way Maxis has intended region play to be is definitely a big problem... most buildings have an accurate scale, but cities don't...

therefore, commute time should not be a matter for anysim living and working in the same map be it a big one..... nor should it be for somesim working on the immediate neighbor map.... but what about going 5 maps away? (that's "only" 20km... wich is about the mean distance a vast majority of parisian commuters cover every day morning)

Quote from: Pharaon-Kheops on April 03, 2008, 11:43:55 AM
one of the only thing, that is sure.... but one of the best.....  ::)

the problem, there, is what happen if you forgot but one of these lots? My bet is.... something odd...  $%Grinno$%

I think we are condemned to use some unrealistic variables and then use some conversion to go back to realism....
the way Maxis has intended region play to be is definitely a big problem... most buildings have an accurate scale, but cities don't...

therefore, commute time should not be a matter for anysim living and working in the same map be it a big one..... nor should it be for somesim working on the immediate neighbor map.... but what about going 5 maps away? (that's "only" 20km... wich is about the mean distance a vast majority of parisian commuters cover every day morning)

Sim City was originally designed for a single city tile with some "neighbors" randomly generated in the original game in the Sim City line.  MAXIS has not changed this ideal in the Region, they just allowed you to create those "neighbors".  Each city is in itself an entity of itself.  It gets information from neighboring cities about what number of jobs it has, number of sims, etc.  But it doesnt go beyond the bordering cities.  This is where the problem comes into play that SC4 isnt a "regional" game.  It is still a "city" game.

When you try to get Sims to travel multiple tiles you are breaking the natural balance in the way the game plays...  Simply it just doesnt work and it will inevitably mess up your game play.  Here would be the most efficient structure for a 9 tile region:

R  C  R
I  R  I
R  C  R

By not "mixing" jobs with residents you create zones for travel between job and home.  If you were to "mix" this allows for Commute Circles to start messing with the Simulation of your game, depending on how you design your cities.  Essentially, the best things to do is to try and make sure all each city is sustainable in its own and not think of them as a collective whole, more like individuals fighting for a space.

I do, of course, agree with you (I also have played all the SC "line"). But all the great work modders have done and are still isn't intended to bend the rules?

A non-negligible part of the NAM itself would be usefull if we stick to this... I specifically think about highways interconnections... They take monstruous space, and if you are to make your city autarcic you definitely will not want to spend so much tiles for unproductive "buildings"....

To my opinion, the point of what you and many others have done for years now is precisely "how to make more and more realistic a game that, at start, is not?"

But, indeed, the situation you describe IS realistic! Communities in a conurbation ARE antagonists, they fight each others for space, jobs, residents, money,............ but they are forced to also function as a collectivity. They are an "organic system" and together constitute the metropolis (on this point, this "organic system" is quite different in North America and in Europe).

I think it is possible to make a quite realistic multi-map metropolis with some limitations. Of course, due to the eternal commuters problem, it is not possible to recreate suche a thing as an accurate-scale New-York City, but by restraining the downtown-center on one map and making a radial network plan in order to avoid commuters circles you could have a real viable community.

Toward this goal, projects like NAM and CAM are utmost. Nam because the network is a key feature here, since it could also be the most "destructive". CAM, because by enlarging the spectrum of building levels it greatly contribute to stick to real life situations (with exception of NYC, no city has hundreds of skyscrappers... in most cases, the downtown skyline is constituted by 12-15 big buildings surrounded by 20-30 of more modest size, but this "hard block" shelters several thousands CO jobs... SC4 wasn't allowing that, CAM does!).

Well, I'll stop here because it is 2 AM here in Paris and my eyes have unilaterally decided to abolish my free-speech right....   ;)
But I am sure  you do understand what is my point.

Quote from: Pharaon-Kheops on March 31, 2008, 12:43:34 AM
hi all
I'm back at SC4 after a while playing other games and am very happy to see a new NAM sequel. Marvelous work, once again...
I am a bit of a realism fanatic, so the new park&ride thing made my cry of pleasure...  ;D (for this reason, I also chosed simulator B, since I think people are too lazy to walk 7km (16m*43) )

Hi Folks,

I´m bringing this message back to life again as I notice an important mistake. 16x43=688m, not 7km. This is less than 2 laps around a football (americans: soccer) pitch. I would agree that fat, rich sims would not walk that distance to go to work, but normal & poor people easily walk a larger distance to reach work in real cities. I am using simulator A because I think the distances travelled for sim to work are more realistic than in Maxis vanilla or simulator B cases.
Cheers,
Bap

EDIT: fixed the whole message quote - JP

oops.... my bad.... didn't remember I was drunk when I wrote this post...  $%Grinno$%

Indeed, this make much more sense, 500m being roughly the walking distance real people tolerate before asking for a bus line.

Sorry for that probably too quick post...

Excellent work on the NAM, I like the ideas of the Simulation A & B, there are some clever people out there!

My only problem using one of the new simulation types is monorail pollution. This was eradicated in earlier versions (and is still eradicated in the  Simulation D plugins) but with the new A & B, monorail pollution is back and as most of my cities rely on monorail for long distance transportation I have been reluctant to use it. Fortunately looking back in the forum I discovered that the property to adjust in the traffic plugin exemplar is Travel type generates traffic (maybe misnamed by maxis and traffic should read pollution?) However setting the last parameter to false solves the problem if anyone out there is in a similar boat. I will do extensive testing now to see if it does cause unexpected problems and will report back if I find anything.

keep up the good work

B

The "Travel Type Generates Traffic" property is used by the game to determine whether or not the particular travel type will add to the congestion of the networks. That is why you can have thousands of buses on a street and not have any congestion at all, or at least minimal congestion at intersections.

Since buses are recommended to cut down on air pollution caused by cars and have it set to "false" for that transit type, it is reasonable that it setting the property to "false" for a particular travel type removes the air pollution for any transit type that has it set to "false".

-Swamper

Now I know thanks!!

B

Hello,

I like very much how these new traffic simulators are made to work.  Except for one thing: the transit network capacities.  Overall, even in the hard level, they are set ~5-10 times higher than MAXIS defaults!  Here is my current "setup":

Simulator "C" with 2xCapacity
No CAM
NAM April 2008 with GLR installed
Currently building a city on a large tile; pop as of now is about 25K

So basically, my question is, is it possible to make this simulator with lower capacities?  Perhaps with capacities equal to the 2xCapacity simulator?  For example, Simulator A Extra Hard?  Thank You.

Quote from: sffc on May 09, 2008, 10:16:37 PM
Hello,

I like very much how these new traffic simulators are made to work.  Except for one thing: the transit network capacities.  Overall, even in the hard level, they are set ~5-10 times higher than MAXIS defaults!

Network	Hard	MAXIS	Difference
Street:	1000	100	x10
Road:	2500	1000	x2.5
Avenue:	2500	2500	x0
OWR:	2500	2000	x1.2
Highway / El-Highway:	4800	4000	x1.2
Rural Highway (ANT/Dirt Road):	4800	2000	x2.4
Subway / El-Rail / GLR:	6000	3000	x2
Monorail:	6000	3000	x2
Rail:	6000

3000

x2

You will notice from the comparision above that the Capacities of "Hard" are fairly comparable to that of your x2 Capacity Simulator.

-  Streets are the only one that is out of whack so to speak with a x10 Capacity because the MAXIS settings for Streets in many peoples opinions was way too low.  This also allows people to use mods such as SAM more effectively without having Congestion problems because they want a certain look.

-  Roads, OWR and Avenue have been set to the default Capacity of Avenue because the NWM is on its way and when it is released you will have the option to draw 2 and 3 tile wide Roads the will look like an Avenue.  With the old Simulators this would be substantially under capacity compared to drawing an Avenue.  So to make this more effective and useful, these 3 networks have been "equalized".

- The Mass Transit Networks are set to x2 Capacity, because even though a Station Lot has a Max Capacity of 2000, the network itself should be able to hold a higher capacity.  We have been designing some much bigger stations with monster capacities, but those stations would never see such a capacity being met without the network having a comparable setting here.

-  Dirt Road/ANT (RHW) has been given the same capacity as a Highway since we have developed the network to be a Highway.  The x2.4 really shouldnt count in this situation.

-  Realistic calculation....  a normal car is generally 4m to 5m long or so.  A rule I was taught was on the highway there should be a 3 second gap between you and the car in front of you  100 km/h = 83m in 3 seconds.  So, if everyone drove how they I was taught (which noone does) there should be approximately 90m between cars.  If you are travelling at 100 km/h then there can be a capacity of 1111 cars per hour per lane.  The MAXIS Highways have 3 lanes, so there is 3333 cars per hour...  I felt that this capacity was a little too low, so I multiplied by 1.5 which in this case gives you 4999.5 or 5000 cars.   I did the calculation a little differently last time, and got about 4800, but you can see how for highways I got a capacity of that.

Hmmm...  That has me thinking.

Highways = 1111 per lane = 3333 (6666 for two tile width total)
Road = 1063 per lane = 2126
Avenue/OWR = 1090 perlane = 2180 (Avenue for two tile width total 4360)

Trains = 100 per car, 12 cars per train = 1200 x 6 Trains per Hour = 7200 

So... It seems that for something other than Mass Transit, MAXIS had it fairly close to a Real Life Capacity.  With Variations in calculations we easily see that my quick calculations here and the MAXIS ones were similar to what is possible in Real Life for 1 hour.  Of course, there is a to and from commute and that would mean that everything should be x2 for there and back in 1 hour Commutes.

You may hear that some 3-lane highways handle 150,000 commuters a day... Well, thats because gridlock is so bad that the Rush Hour is not 1 hour there and 1 hour back... its more like 5 hours of rush hour each way giving 10 hours come Capacity commute a day or more.  So, 1111 per lane with traffic going both ways is 6666 per hour x24 = 159,984 cars capacity per day....  Of course people dont follow the 3 second rule and probably only give 1 second or less and of course people speed, which make capacity higher.  But, in those peak hours, capacity is lower because of the slowdown of traffic.  Therefore, 160,000 cars per day is not out of line with what SC4 has in the simulators.  But, we must remember, SC4 doesnt include those commuters who are going to shop, going to a hockey game or going to the night club....  It only simuates going to and from work, which is probaly only half of the daily commuters.

Wow, thanks for that response.

I guess when I said 5-10x MAXIS values, I was thinking mainly about streets.  One of my "pet peeves" in SC4 is people trying to "cut through" streets rather than taking the road/avenue that is one block further, even if the road/avenue is not congested.  But now that I'm thinking about it, I suppose that maybe the speed on the arteries has a more major part in this than I thought.  I do not know what the default MAXIS values are, but the car speeds in this simulator for streets and roads are 40 and 60, respectively.  Where I live, the average speed limits are 25 mph and 45 mph, which is about 33:60.  But, let's demonstrate the 40:60...

(https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg31.picoodle.com%2Fimg%2Fimg31%2F4%2F5%2F10%2Ff_demonm_42dc7e4.jpg&hash=d44cfa2281d4b8bc49845afd4fcb0e549df6ecc8)

Assume you have a car coming from point "A" and going to point "B".  Black lines are roads and gray lines are streets.  Let's say that blocks are 4x8 tiles.  So, you can either take the road like so:

4 tiles + 8 tiles + 4 more tiles + 2 tiles for the 2 intersections (not counting speed reduction by intersections) = 18 tiles / 60 = .3

Or the street:

8 tiles / 40 = .2

So, assuming that there is no other traffic, taking the street would be calculated as faster.  However, in real life, they would take about the same time on each artery, because turning at a stoplight would be faster than turning without a stoplight (in most cases).  Thus, with such high speeds and capacity, streets can almost be used as a substitute to roads, even though they should, for the most part, be arteries used only at the very beginning and end of a journey.

Again, I do not know how this plays out with MAXIS defaults.  But, with such high speeds and capacities on streets, situations like this will likely happen much more often using this mod.

You have two reasons for the high-capacity streets: they allow for more realism with some SAM textures, and the capacities were set too low to begin with.  While the second reason does have some truth, it seems to me that most of the SAM textures would actually make speed slower: there are 2 dirt roads, a gravel road, a parking lot, a cobblestone street and 2 streets of brick.  All of these, in real life, would have lower speeds.  The only texture that would have increased speeds versus the MAXIS concrete streets is the asphalt street.  Based on the SAM Additions thread, most of the new additions being developed (ex. the new cobblestone street, that bluish green stone street, and the cracked concrete street)  would also have reduced speeds.

Also, one more thing that I noticed regards the two different types of highway (regular and "rural").  Though the rural highway has only two lanes versus three lanes for the regular highway, their capacities have been set equal.  Just something I noticed, though this won't bother me very much.

Other than the street capacity and speed, I like most every other improvement in this new simulator.  After rethinking it, I might replace my "C" simulator with the "A" simulator :) Thanks for all the work you put into it, as it is much appreciated over the SC4 community!  The NWM/TLA will make this even more true!

Quote from: sffc on May 10, 2008, 03:44:29 PM
Also, one more thing that I noticed regards the two different types of highway (regular and "rural").  Though the rural highway has only two lanes versus three lanes for the regular highway, their capacities have been set equal.  Just something I noticed, though this won't bother me very much.

Well, the reasoning behind that is similar to the Road/OWR/Avenue equalization for the NWM.  The RHW capacity had been disproportionally low to start with, and it was necessary for making the Wider RHWs (i.e. the RHW-8) have a higher capacity than the Maxis highways (as they have more lanes).  In addition, the Maxis Highways have extremely narrow lanes. ;)  (They're completely out of proportion with RL and with all the other "vanilla" networks.)

-Alex (Tarkus)

Quote from: Tarkus on May 10, 2008, 04:07:00 PM
The RHW capacity had been disproportionally low to start with, and it was necessary for making the Wider RHWs (i.e. the RHW-8) have a higher capacity than the Maxis highways (as they have more lanes).

Yes, but the RHW-8 would be 4 tiles wide, right?  That means that the 4800 would be doubled anyway.  It seems to me that a capacity of about 3600 would be more realistic.

Quote from: Tarkus on May 10, 2008, 04:07:00 PMIn addition, the Maxis Highways have extremely narrow lanes.

So, three narrow lanes have the same capacity as two wide lanes?  Also, there are several textures in the NWM that have 3 lanes squeezed into 1 tile.  Are those lanes wider than the highway lanes (perhaps because of the highway medians)?

Thanks for the response.

Quote from: sffc on May 10, 2008, 03:44:29 PM
You have two reasons for the high-capacity streets: they allow for more realism with some SAM textures, and the capacities were set too low to begin with.  While the second reason does have some truth, it seems to me that most of the SAM textures would actually make speed slower: there are 2 dirt roads, a gravel road, a parking lot, a cobblestone street and 2 streets of brick.  All of these, in real life, would have lower speeds.  The only texture that would have increased speeds versus the MAXIS concrete streets is the asphalt street.  Based on the SAM Additions thread, most of the new additions being developed (ex. the new cobblestone street, that bluish green stone street, and the cracked concrete street)  would also have reduced speeds.

Well, the Street network was probably set low by MAXIS in the first place to make it so that the Street network would be at a disadvantage by becoming "over congested" much earlier.  Unfortunately, this still isnt "perfect" so to speak.

We would like the Simulator to prefer to stay on the "major" roads and avenues, but the way pathfinding engine that is used by MAXIS is designed it wont always look for the route that is the "least amount of time".  It is designed to look for the shortest possible distance first and then start looking at some possibilities that are not "too far" out of the way for comparable speeds.  I dont know how far is "too far", but I would assume that it is not set high enough for the result you are looking for.  Of course, I cannot do anything about it because there is no known property that would allow for editing something like this and I would assume there will never be one.  The problem with a property such as that, it would mean that the pathfinding engine will start comparing too many routes.  Every route is a calculation and a calculation equals time that the Processor must do.  Already with what we have the Simulator probably already makes several million calculations for a city of around 500k sims.

Basically, the best thing to do is make your Streets a longer path than your major arteries.  Grid, major arteries and try to use winding roads and dead end streets for your suburbs.

Too be honest... When I am driving through Downtown Toronto, I look for the side streets because side streets have less traffic and I dont mind stop signs.  Id rather be on a side street than get cut of by some jerk cab driver trying to get one car ahead at a stop light.

hello,
I've revently began playing sc4rh and am trying these nam and cams out.  I kind of want maybe some insight from others if I've gone with the right traffic sim.

My test!  all results are based on my sandem city... pop ruffly 750k at time of testing.  all test done with cam in full effect.  $$$ at a 11% tax base to help with job/pop ratio.  90% of test city is completely (very) with ferry, monorail, train, and especially bus/subway for mass transit.

Test 1: perfect pathfinding, 5x(max?) capacity.

results were "ok" I was very pleased for awhile.  however traffic congestion was a bit of a problem around hiway on off ramps (ave, or road didn't matter they all bottlenecked up).  strangely commute times per building were all decent (medium to short) most $$$ having long commute but few abandons.

Test 2: simulator A easy

pop drop to ruffly 710k and stuck (over course of couple years).  abandonment abandonment abandonment.  nearly every building was @ medium at best commute, long being the norm.  a few short show up on my off base island.  my city was dieing from long commute time.  lots and lots of traffic congestion.

Test 3: simmulator B easy

best results imo.  nearly every building has gone back to medium/short commute and the abandoning stoped and grew like crazy (850k by end of test).  some buildings were long commute but on a much more managable scale.  mass transit was used more frequently than that of test 2.  the farm town was not tested in the other 2 test.


after seeing some pretty happy results with test 3 I jumped to my farm town of about 400 people.  where I was told to improve my culdesac main drive to a road.

anyone else thinking that given my circumstances sim B is best for my region?

EDIT: Park & Ride was never used.   my mass transit deals with enough as it is without forcing more traffic into it.

Determining the best traffic sim for you is your own call really. Each one requires a certain amount of adjustments, to keep commute times acceptable, while trying to keep your Sims working in the same city they live in.

So you have to choose the one that works best for you. Depending on your city planning, you may have to adjust to a different traffic Sim, or at least a different difficulty, for each city.

Good to see you taking them all out for a spin though.  :thumbsup:

the thing I found oddest was I thought sim A:easy would help my largest city the most with the extended walking and driving capabilities but I was completely wrong.  which means everyone should experiment with them all.  your "guess" may not always work with your over all "plan"

also can someone help me find out how to open the new traffic congestion view?  I can't find it in the game.  I installed it but on my map overlay of traffic its still the old style

As it should be. The new Traffic View only alters the color depth, and the congestion level for each.

Quote from: flyinbird93 on June 26, 2008, 09:37:57 AM
the thing I found oddest was I thought sim A:easy would help my largest city the most with the extended walking and driving capabilities but I was completely wrong.  which means everyone should experiment with them all.  your "guess" may not always work with your over all "plan"

also can someone help me find out how to open the new traffic congestion view?  I can't find it in the game.  I installed it but on my map overlay of traffic its still the old style

Thanks for helping out xxDita!

Thanks for your feedback its always nice to know.  To be totally honest, for an existing city you should test out and find what works for you best.  When you are starting out though, it is probably best to start with either Simulator A or B : Hard.  When you start from the begining it is easier for you to plan your city to be adaptable and work with any Traffic Simulator rather than work "against" one.  I my self use Simulator A: Hard and have no problems with abandonment, so there must be a sort of city planning that you use that disagrees with Simulator A.  xxDita tested Simulator A: Easy for me in a medium city tile and was able to reach a population of over 2.5 million sims.  So, you *can* make it work with large populations.

In Simulator A, it restricts congestion much more tighter than all the other Simulators, the problem that may be occuring is that you simply have too much populations together with not enough "capacity" (routes) for them to get from point A to point B over long distances.  Meaning you probably have bottlenecks.  Simulator A, seems to allow for between 175% and 200% capacity before the penatly to congested roads becomes too great for them to be used efficiently.  One way to help your city would be to add busses and make jobs closer to home because pedestrians and busses do not add to congestion on Roads.  But, if work is too far away and there isnt enough bus support then you will begin to get abandonment due to the distances people have to walk and if the Roads are already over congested then people will refuse to drive aswell.

About the Traffic Congestion Data View.  This already exists in the game with the rest of your Data View maps.  The thing I have changed was when the colors show up.  Originally, when a road became yellow with congestion it was already at 200% Capacity and the effects of traffic in the Simulator were already fullblown.  Now, the roads show yellow when they are at between 90% and 110% capacity.  This is when your roads begin to suffer the consequences of being over capacity and it allows for the Traffic Congestion Data View to be used as a more accurate tool rather than an inadequate tool.

It is easier for you to now identify when a road needs to be upgraded or when it starts having issues.  The side effect of this is that your Roads will never be in pristine condition from a Congestion stand-point and I have obviously had to contend with some people complaining about that... But, it is what it is and this is only from the numbers that the game uses.  All I did was make it more accurate.

Thanks for the info in this thread - helps me understand how the new NAM works.

I only recently installed new NAM and found that the commute speeds x10 option had disappeared, which was the one I used.  I selected Simulator A - Hard as the description sounded the best for my style of play. 

Now reading this thread I can see that when I build a larger city then I may need to change this to the "Medium" version, or even "Easy".  My question is how do I get these versions?  Can I just download the simulator I want or do I have to reinstall NAM and tick the relevant box each time I want to change simulator version.

Thanks in advance,

Paul

Paul, you can do it by re-installing, or you can also download the Mac version, which just has the files loose, so you can just drag the desired simulator option in.

-Alex (Tarkus)

I have a question... I noticed that the capacity for road, OWR and AVE are the same... Is the avenue gonna be double the OWR capacity?... cuz it is 2 tiles wide and I read somewhere that the capacity is established by tile and not by number of lanes...

I hope you can answer this one please...

Quote from: el_cozu on June 26, 2008, 05:07:22 PM
I have a question... I noticed that the capacity for road, OWR and AVE are the same... Is the avenue gonna be double the OWR capacity?... cuz it is 2 tiles wide and I read somewhere that the capacity is established by tile and not by number of lanes...

I hope you can answer this one please...

Yes, that is correct.  The capacity is on a per-tile basis.

-Alex (Tarkus)

Hi Alex - thanks for the answer - I'll download the mac version and save the files outside of plugins til I need them.

Paul

Road / OWR / Avenue: 5600
Highway / El-Highway: 10800
Rural Highway: 10800


Wait a minute... if the avenue is gonna be double... that means the capacity for the Easy Simulator for AVE is 11200........ higher than a Highway......

but if the Avenue is 5600... i don't understand why Im using an Avenue if the road has the same capacity

Quote from: el_cozu on June 27, 2008, 01:55:00 PM
Road / OWR / Avenue: 5600
Highway / El-Highway: 10800
Rural Highway: 10800

Wait a minute... if the avenue is gonna be double... that means the capacity for the Easy Simulator for AVE is 11200........ higher than a Highway......

but if the Avenue is 5600... i don't understand why Im using an Avenue if the road has the same capacity

Actually, highway, being a two-tile network, is set up exactly like an Avenue, such that the capacity over the full span of the network will actually be 2x that amount (21600).  An RHW-2 will have a capacity of 10800, but an RHW-4 will have a capacity of 21600 (as it is a two-tile network, albeit a "separable" one). 

And Roads and Avenues do not have the same capacity--Avenues, being twice as wide as Roads, will have 2x capacity.  The advantage Avenues had over Roads before, with the default Maxis Traffic Simulator, and the old NAM Plugins, has diminished with the new Plugins, as if it were not done this way, the TLA-7 and AVE-6 that will eventually be a part of the NWM mod would actually have less capacity than an Avenue.  So things were equalized across the board--Road=OWR=1/2 Avenue and Maxis Highway=Rural Highway (which also gives one reason to build RHW-6Cs when they want 6-lane highways as opposed to Maxis Highways--higher capacity).  The new Traffic Plugins were purposely designed to allow for better functionality of the RHW and NWM.

Hope that makes sense.

-Alex (Tarkus)

-Alex

actually... it does make sense... thanks again lol  :thumbsup:

Quote from: jplumbley on January 29, 2008, 03:04:04 PM
Simulator "A" has been designed by JPlumbley to extend the original travel distances set by the MAXIS Simulators.  For example in the original game the MAXIS Simulator allows the Sims to walk up to 7 tiles, but with Simulator "A" the Sims will walk upto 43 tiles to get to work.  This change in travel distance is due to the calculations used to allow Car Traffic to travel one full distance of a large city tile (512 tiles) on Avenues. 

Simulator "B" has been designed by Mott to work with the original travel distances set by the MAXIS Simulator.  For example in the original game the MAXIS Simulator allows the Sims to walk up to 7 tiles, therefore in Simulator "B" the Sims will walk upto 7 tiles.  Simulator "B" has also been re-calculated to be more balanced and provide better pathfinding overall.

I've been staring at Simulators A and B, and I don't see where you get the walking-to-work figures of 43 tiles for Simulator A and 7 tiles for Simulator B.  Both simulators use a walking speed of 5, and Simulator B has a longer Commute Trip Max Time.  Could you please explain how you derived these numbers?

To be more specific here, I see that you get the number 43 by multiplying 5 by your Commute Trip Max Time of 17, and then divide by 2 to get a one-way trip.  But if you perform the same calculations with Simulator B, you get 60, not 7.

QuoteOther modifications to both Simulators include changes to the follow properties with minor variation:

Congestion to Accident Probability - Revamped the probability curve.
Congestion vs. Speed - Made use of this, not used to full potential by MAXIS.  Sims will now look for better routes if the network is over congested.
Trip Length to Minutes Display Multiplier - Used in calculations for time displays on Commute Time Graph.

A number of people, including myself, have tried varying Trip Length to Minutes Display Multiplier, even changing it by many orders of magnitude, and yet we never see any effect on the Commute Time Graph at all.  Do you know for sure that your number is definitely affecting the Commute Time Graph?  (I.e., have you tried different numbers and seen the scale on the graph change?)  If so, is there something special you did to make this work?

What you say about Trip Starting Cost by Travel Type for Car or Mass Transit makes perfect sense.  But once again, there's the perennial SC4 question, What units are we talking about here?  The Maxis documentation for these properties says that they're "starting overhead cost in time."  It would seem to make sense that this is the same unit of time used in Commute Trip Max Time.  The values of 1 and 1.95 for penalties then seem significant compared to the original Maxis value of 6 for Commute Trip Max Time.  But if you increase Commute Trip Max Time, as both Simulators A and B do, shouldn't you increase these penalties proportionately?  Otherwise, they lose most of their effectiveness.

Then there's the simple Trip Starting Cost by Travel Type property, which currently isn't documented here.  This seems to be a straightforward penalty for using a car; it gives the Sim time to get to his or her car, maybe clear some snow off it, back it out of the driveway or garage, etc.  This is a fixed amount of time, so it seems that it should not vary with Commute Trip Max Time.

I've been doing some closer examination of the new traffic congestion graph.  Certainly it's accomplished its main goal; network congestion starts showing up when it first happens, instead of at 175% or so.  But I've noticed an unexpected side effect.  Transit stations (of all kinds) used to start turning yellow as soon as they exceeded 100% capacity.  Now they're completely green until they reach about 175% of capacity, at which point they turn just a tiny bit yellow - just enough to see.  This, of course, is exactly the problem that networks used to have.  Very strange.  Has anyone noticed this?  You might want to look into it, as it's basically as serious a problem as the one that was fixed.

Well, there's good news and bad news about the station congestion problem.  The good news is that it has nothing to do with the new traffic congestion graph.  I took a look at the exemplar for this graph for the first time, and sure enough, it's extremely simple; I didn't see how changing numbers here can cause the problem I described.

After your recent explanation of network capacity and why the new congestion graph was superior to the old, I finally switched over to it permanently.  It was shortly after this that I noticed the station congestion problem, and since I hadn't seen it with the old graph, I thought it was associated with the new one.  I don't have many congested stations, so this problem is somewhat difficult to notice.  But when I switched back to the old graph, I did find stations well over capacity that were still showing green, just as with the new graph.  So the problem had nothing to do with the graphs.

As for what caused this problem, well, I've made many changes to my traffic simulator.  So, I slowly backed them out, one by one, and after each change I ran the game on a city where I knew where congested stations were.  I backed out the changes that were the most recent and seemed the most likely first, but none of them were the problem.  So I kept backing out changes, starting up the game, and running the city, until I found the change that made the difference.  It was the last change that I thought could have anything to do with this problem.  Sure enough, though, once I backed out that change, station congestion started showing up properly again.

The bad news is that the change is the congestion vs. speed curve.

I had been using a congestion vs. speed curve that was somewhere between yours and Maxis', though it was a lot closer to Maxis'.  Well, I reasoned, if my curve causes this problem, then your curve should cause a problem at least as bad, and possibly worse.

It does.  In fact, with your curve, stations with 275% usage still show completely green.  That's as congested a station I could find, so I think it's safe to say that with your curve, you basically can't see congested stations on the traffic congestion map (old or new).

OK, the hard part was done, but there still was the question, What about our curves triggered this behavior?  One clue that I had was that whatever it was, it was present more in your curve than in mine.  The first thing that struck me was that you have a lot of data points where the first coordinate is non-integral; Maxis has none, and I have one.  So I removed mine and tried again.

That wasn't it.

OK, you use the ability to speed in a number of data points, which Maxis doesn't do at all.  I have one such point.  I removed it and tried again.

That wasn't it.

This was starting to get puzzling.  Maybe it's a combination of speeding and non-integral first coordinates?  No.  Hmm, what's left?  The number of data points!  Good guess, but wrong.

By this time, I had regressed my curve to the point where it was almost identical to Maxis'.  There was now only one difference.  It was clear that that difference had to be the significant one, and it was.

The lowest speed Maxis uses in its curve is 0.3.  I used 0.05; you use 0.  It turns out that once you start going below 0.3, you start messing up the congestion display of MT stations.  I have no idea why.  But your use of zero most likely results in their never showing congested no matter how packed they may be.  (Also, even if you decide not to fix this problem because you feel that maintaining the current congestion vs. speed curve is more important, you really don't want to use zero as a speed, as that creates a Simgularity (sorry about that!   :'(  ).  If the Sims ever reached that level of congestion, traffic would come to a dead halt, as you have mentioned.  But with a speed of zero, there would be no way for traffic to start moving again, ever.  You would have a permanent traffic jam.  The only way to get rid of it would be to demolish the underlying network.)

So that's the story with the congestion vs. speed curve.  You can use it to let the Sims speed, you can use non-integral first coordinates, and you can use as many data points as you like, from what I can tell.  But if you use speeds below 0.3, you'll mess up the display of MT station congestion.  I don't know exactly how far below 0.3 the effect kicks in, but my guess is that it's pretty close.  One thing I can tell you is that when I changed my lowest speed from 0.05 to 0.1, it had essentially no effect.

Hope this helps...

(BTW, do you know how the games handles situations where the congestion level is between data points?  Does the simulator fit a curve to the points, does it do straight line interpolation, or does it just use the point directly below the actual congestion level?  Also, what does it do for points beyond the end of the data set?  These things would be useful to know, for obvious reasons.)

Is there a another link to download this mod.The download link said that the file was locked.I want to download it.

Quote from: Streetlight 725 on August 08, 2008, 08:11:38 PM
Is there a another link to download this mod.The download link said that the file was locked.I want to download it.

It's included in the April 2008 NAM.  Just scroll down on the Traffic Simulator options, and you'll find all the various versions of the A and B Simulators (they're at the bottom of the list).

-Alex (Tarkus)

For a while now, I've been noticing various anomalies with the new Traffic Congestion View.  Once I got the new Traffic Volume View working, I could see much better what was going on.  (If you're interested, the new Traffic Volume View is now available for download at the bottom of its thread.)  Here's the relevant information you give about the new Traffic Congestion View:


My recent research contradicts what you state here.  Looking at the original Maxis Traffic Congestion View in all my cities, I find no instances where it underreports congestion at all, much less waiting until the 175% to 200% thresholds you report.  So I have to ask, Where did you get these numbers?  The only numbers I know of relating to capacity are the traffic volume numbers, and of these, only the morning commute numbers are available.  Please correct me if I'm wrong, but neither the evening commute nor the total daily commute numbers can be directly accessed.  So not only do I not understand how you determined the 175% and 200% numbers, but I don't understand how you calibrated your color ramp.  What numbers did you use to do this?  The one thing I can say for sure is that the percentages you show in your diagram of the color ramp do not match up with what actually shows up in the game.  The reason I can say that is that my new Traffic Volume View allows me to estimate evening commute numbers within about 10%; combined with the exact morning commute number, which is available, I can get a very good idea of what the total daily volume, and therefore the congestion, is.  And it just doesn't match up using the new Traffic Congestion View.  Using the orignal Maxis view, though, it does.

Thanks for your very detailed response.  It makes it completely clear exactly what the problem is here; you've been using bad data.  As a result, your color ramp is incorrect.

First, let me try to clear up some ongoing misunderstandings and state what we do agree on here, which is what I've believed from the start:

1. Congestion is defined as the amount of traffic that a network is carrying for a one day cycle that is in excess of the network's capacity.
2. This cycle is composed of the morning and evening commute periods, but the congestion depends only on the total traffic, and has nothing to do with its distribution between these two periods.

Where the problem arises is here:



Now I see where you got the 175% and 200% numbers from.  There is an underlying assumption, most evident in the lines highlighted by you in the quote above, that each increment in the first coordinate of each data point in the color ramp is equivalent to 10% of the network capacity.  For example, in the first boldfaced line you compute the congestion represented by pure yellow with the following formula:

HEX 1A = 26 x 10% = 260% Congestion

The whole problem is that this 10% assumption is just plain incorrect.  This is very easy to demonstrate.  Look at the original Maxis color ramp.  The next color after their pure yellow (0x99ffee00) is a yellow with a slight orange tinge (0x99ffcc00).  The coordinate for this color is 0x33.  Using your formula:

HEX 33 = 51 x 10% = 510% Congestion

That looks awfully high.  But it gets worse.  The next color moves toward the orange by an increment half as much as the first; its value is 0x99ffbb00.  And its coordinate is 0x4d.  Once again, using your formula:

HEX 4d = 77 x 10% = 770% Congestion

Now this is starting to look silly.  Nobody gets that much congestion.  And we're only half way between yellow and orange.  But still it gets worse.  Much worse.  I won't drag you through all the steps, but the spacing between coordinates is pretty even, and look where we end up, at pure red.  The color is 0x99ff0000, and the coordinate is 0xff.  Once last time, using your formula:

HEX ff = 255 x 10% = 2550% Congestion

Whoops!  I seriously doubt that anyone has ever experienced that much congestion in the history of the game.  Nor do I think that you would maintain that this is the correct number.  In fact, in a recent post in response to a question of mine, you said, "[Maxis] made the congestion color ramp show red at 250%... capacity."  From what I have seen, this is about right.  It's certainly easy enough to test by doing road queries, which you did.

So if increments in the first coordinate don't represent 10% of network capacity, what do they respresent?  I have no idea.  And it's not for lack of trying to figure it out.  I thought, "Maybe they just start the graph at 100%, and each increment is 1%."  That would mean pure yellow was 126%, which sounds about right.  But pure red would be 355%, which is definitely too high.  I've thought about various other possibilities that are more likely, but there's no need for me to go into them unless you want me to.  The bottom line is this:  I've learned that the color ramps in both traffic data views are unpredictable when looked at over their entire range.  Over short spans, they do appear linear, but that linearity cannot successfully be extrapolated end to end.  At least not by me.

Your color ramp is faithfully built on the assumption that one increment in the first coordinate represents 10% of network capacity.  So it tops out at 28 (0x1c), which gives it a range of about 11% of the range of the Maxis color ramp.  Traffic volume up to 100% still shows up as green using your color ramp, which gives some credence to the argument that the color ramp actually starts somewhere around 100%, and not at zero.  But the rest of your color ramp is still terribly compressed compared to the original.  According to what I've seen, red shows up much too early, and even though you have more oranges in your color ramp than Maxis, you see far less orange using your color ramp because the scale is just too compressed.

So what do I think should be done?  All the testing I've done shows me that the original Maxis color ramp (and therefore the congestion view) is basically correct as is.  When I look at traffic volumes for both the morning and evening commute on a given route where only one network is active, I can predict with reasonable accuracy the color that will be shown by the Maxis view.  And it doesn't start turning yellow at 175% to 200%; it starts turning yellow right over 100%.

---------------------

There is one mistake I made in my earlier posts.  In your post, you said:

QuoteWhen you are querying the Road it will show you the Traffic only for what ever commute time you are on.

I was quite sure I had tried out the Evening Commute button in all three places it exists when querying roads, and I had always gotten the morning commute value.  When I saw this line, I thought, "Well, I'd better double check my facts before I challenge jplumbley yet again."  Sure enough, the route query tool does exactly what you say.  So I must have remembered wrong.  My apologies.  Fortunately, I always knew I was dealing with the morning commute number, so this didn't affect anything I did.  This will certainly make testing easier, though.  Too bad Maxis didn't synchronize the commute period between the Traffic Volume View and the route query tool - that would have made a lot of sense.

And once again, my apologies for writing so much...   ::)

Please, make sure you are keeping any criticism constructive in tone.  -Alex (Tarkus)

Hi ...

Ive been following this thread with great interest.. And both of you guys are bringing up some good points..
and its helping with my understanding all this..And I'm enjoying the learning process with it all..
With your last post Z I'm finally beginning to understand how the numbers work and the points you made
in your last posting are well taken..

   Having quite a large city now and I'm using motts' sim B on hard difficulty .. and actually visually it had
crossed my mind I'm not seeing too many yellows and oranges .. I'm playing on a large map and still most
areas show in the green.. but there is more red in the map than there are oranges and yellow which seems to
on the surface anyways confirm what you have been saying in your post.. i pay quite a bit of attention to traffic
in my games, and yes it does make sense to me that as things eventually become gradually congested you should
start out seeing more yellow and oranges.. which over time will become "reds"... Not have things jump kinda quickly up to reds... Which could indicate the colors are a bit condensed in the graph..

  But to be honest from a 'gaming sense" if this in fact the case ... and this is how i see the game . not speaking for anyone else's viewpoint on it.. I don't see it as a big problem .. Because wanting to play this aspect of the game as well as i can, I dont see the harm by being alerted by reds, which tell me that i need to make changes in my game...

  I just hope that in time we can all work together on these "issues"  and continue to improve these aspects..
and try to follow the leads of people like Mott and j plumbley whom we owe so much to for the wonderful
improvements they have made in the path finding engine of this game and their excellent traffic sims..

Thanks Brian

I've discovered another problem with the new Traffic Congestion View.  For those traffic simulators that enable the proper display of mass transit station congestion, the Maxis Traffic Congestion View starts showing station congestion at 101%, while the NAM Traffic Congestion View doesn't show any congestion at all until around 120%.  All the stations I tested were roadside stations, not RTMT.

Jplumbley,

I finally have some good news about the Traffic Congestion View.  Last night I spent some time looking at mott's original post on the subject, and I saw where all the problems have come from.  What mott said in his post was completely correct, as usual; the problem is that he stated one of his findings ambiguously, in a way that was easy to misinterpret.

First, let me say that I am just as impressed by mott's work as everyone else here; I think much of what he did was absolutely brilliant.  I have absolutely no disagreements with anything he said about the Traffic Congestion View (nor anything he said about TE lots, either, although that's a subject for a different post).  I am sorry that you got the impression that I disagreed with him, and I will do my best to correct that impression.

First, here's what mott actually said:

Quote from: mott on October 17, 2007, 11:11:38 AM
I changed the congestion graph too, and got it working with an arbitrary number of color steps at arbitrary usage.  Annoyingly, the 0-255 scale seems to be such that 0=0% and 1=100%, 2=110%, 3=120%, etc.    Things turn yellow at 100% usage, then start sliding through the oranges until they hit bright red at around 200%.  The ramp-to-red happens quickly, but with the settings we're looking at, 100%-200% is the most info-critical range.  It's in the .dat so you can play with a working one.

Mott noticed the same thing here that I mentioned in my last post, namely that the graph effectively starts at 100%.  So I think we can take that as a given, especially as a quick check of the evidence backs it up.  But then mott mentions the 10% increments that you have built into your graph.  This was very puzzling at first, as there's no question that they lead to the impossibly high numbers that I mentioned before, and therefore cannot possibly be right.  Mott's a very sharp guy; he would have known this.  So I figured there had to be a different interpretation of what he was saying.

There's only one other interpretation I could think of, but sure enough, it works out perfectly.  The 10% differences he's talking about are not per unit of the first coordinate, but are instead per cell of the color ramp.  Starting with an index of zero, cell 1 is pure green; we know that for sure.  And in his quote, mott says "1=100%".  Counting cells, the "2 = 110%" is the pure yellow, the "3 = 130%" is slightly orangish yellow, etc.  The clincher comes when mott says that bright red occurs in the chart "around 200%".  If you're counting cells, and assume a 10% difference between each cell, then sure enough, bright red occurs at exactly 210%.  Furthermore, this concurs completely with my experimental work, where I've been able to find bright red at levels as low as 216%.  Probably if I looked long enough, I'd find them going down to 210%.

So the coordinates don't need to be changed. According to mott's formula, changing the red to 0x1c, as it is in the current NAM Traffic Congestion View, would result in having bright red start at 110%.  (I've actually seen it at 111%.)  This is why the NAM Traffic Congestion View view looks so compressed.  By the same measure, 210% is the highest threshold it's possible to get for bright red, as it is represented by the highest possible coordinate, 0xFF.

This leaves just one piece of the puzzle left.  First, here are the lines from mott's post that immediately follow the previous quote:

Quote
BTW, the format of those color values is:  OORRGGBB.  OO = Opacity (00 = transparent, FF=opaque).  The game uses opacity 99 for color overlays on the Traffic Congestion data view, so they are just under 50% transparent.  So, Pure Red should be coded as 0x99FF0000, pure green is 0x9900FF00.

This is the color scheme that I had independently arrived at, and described in the "Technical Notes" section near the end of my Traffic Volume View thread.  However, it's different from what you quoted me, which using mott's convention, was RRGGBBOO.  It appears that you used this second scheme when adding some colors at the beginning of the color ramp.  If the second scheme were correct, it would gradually increase the green in the color ramp, but instead, it gradually increases the red, which does not seem to have any noticeably effect on the color.  However, what it does do is push the green part of the color ramp above 100%.  Meanwhile, by cutting the yellow coordinate from 0x1a to 0x0d, the yellow is pushed closer to the green.  So the yellow is narrowed from both ends, which is why much less yellow is seen in this Traffic Congestion View.

Using mott's numbers, with pure green at 100%, then each increase in the first coordinate of each data point represents an increase of 0.3846% (instead of the 10% you used).  This means that by adding the extra green colors, the green part of the spectrum now goes up to 103.85% instead of 100%, while pure yellow now appears at 104.61% instead of 110%.  This explains why all the different greenish-yellow shades are gone.  And with red at 110%, there's not much room for orange, either.

So what to do?  As mott said in the first quote above, "The ramp-to-red happens quickly, but with the settings we're looking at, 100%-200% is the most info-critical range."  Once again, I agree completely.  But this means that the original Traffic Congestion View was fine just the way it was, especially since it's not possible to get a higher threshold for red.  So I would strongly suggest restoring the original view, which is the only one that fulfills mott's requirements.  Your idea of adding additional oranges to the view was a good one, but it's not at all necessary, as I found while working on my Traffic Volume View, because the program interpolates the missing colors just fine.  And the indices in the color ramp are set so as to allow room for these interpolated colors.  The one change that could be reasonably made is something that I saw you suggest a while ago, which would be to add a legend showing what percentage of congestion each color represents.  The legend could also be expanded into a finer detail.  I know you're very busy, so I would volunteer to do this, if you like.  My experience with the Traffic Volume View would make this quite simple.

I have tried to make a compelling case that is internally consistent, consistent with observed data, and in complete agreement with mott's findings.  Please let me know what you think.  Thank you.

z, thank you for the detailed post on the datapoints used by the simulator.  I have been following the Simulator and DataView research going on here from a distance since mott was around . . . albeit, not particularly well, since it's not my area of expertise, and I hadn't really messed around with those too much (other than very limited tweaking for the NWM some time ago).  However, I have had a chance to look over the related exemplars some now, including undertaking a few experiments of my own.

The idea that the Congestion DataView does not allow for color differentiation until 100% is indeed a bit of a letdown--I share your and mott's frustration there.  It would effectively render the Congestion DataView relatively useless compared to the Volume DataView.  However, from an experiment I just did, I now believe that the 0x00000001 data point in the Color ramp isn't 100%.

Just out of curiosity, I took the default Maxis Congestion DataView exemplar, and changed the associated color value from the pure green (0x9900FF00) to the pure red (0x99FF0000).  The result was quite unusual and unexpected.  Every single road in the city had turned red, even if it had no traffic, and the road that was slightly over capacity was actually showing up a reddish-orange, even though it was still listed as the greenish-yellow (0x99FFEE00).  I was not able to test it with any farther-over-capacity networks, but judging by the initial results, I would tend to believe that the result would be a switch from green-to-red to red-to-green.

So, my hypothesis is now that the 0x00000001 data point serves two functions: 1) defines the color at 0% capacity and 2) defines the other colors that come after it in some way.  Whether or not the 100% endpoint for 0x00000001 can be changed, I'm not certain, though from what both you and mott are saying, it sounds like it can't.

If I am interpreting this right, it means we still do not know the associated percentage values of the other data points 

I hope that made at least some sense.

-Alex (Tarkus)

__________________________________________________
Edit as of 7:26pm US Pacific Daylight Time:

I've done some more experimentation, and I believe I have "cracked the code" with the Traffic Congestion View.

It seems that it is possible to assign a different color to traffic congestion values less than 100%, and I have figured out the formula for the data point values.

It appears it is not based on a fixed percentage rate, like 10% or 0.3846%, but rather, the values correlate to percentages by Base 16 Logarithms. 

The first clue to this was my aforementioned discovery that changing the color associated with 0x00000001 changed the color for roads that were at 0% capacity.

log₁₆1=0

log₁₆256=2

Considering that the basic definition of a percentage is that it is 100 times a decimal number, that 2 is really a 200%.  (Technically, the top part of the original Maxis ramp was 255 (Hex=FF), so its Base 16 Logarithm is actually something like 1.9985, which, for all intents and purposes, can be rounded up to 2.)

So, the issue with the original NAM graph was not that there was a 100% minimum causing it to get compressed . . . it was that the data points were too close together and the highest point was too low.

This is how the original Maxis graph was distributed.  Variable x corresponds to the datapoint.  (Decimals rounded to two significant figures)

Maxis Congestion DataView Points

x (Hex)	x (Dec)	log16x	% of Capacity
1	1	0	0%
1A	26	1.18	118%
33	51	1.42	142%
4D	77	1.57	157%
66	102	1.67	167%
80	128	1.75	175%
99	153	1.81	181%
B3	179	1.87	187%
CC	204	1.92	192%
E6	230	1.96	196%
FF	255	2.00	200%

So really, the Maxis graph has no differentiation between 0% and 118%, and the congestion coloration covers an 82% range.

Here's how the NAM Congestion Graph jplumbley designed looked with the current Data Points:

NAM/jplumbley Congestion DataView Points

x (Hex)	x (Dec)	log16x	% of Cap	Intended % of Cap
1	1	0	0%	10%
4	4	0.50	50%	40%
9	9	0.79	79%	90%
B	11	0.86	86%	110%
D	13	0.93	93%	130%
E	14	0.95	95%	140%
F	15	0.98	98%	150%
10	16	1.00	100%	160%
11	17	1.02	102%	170%
12	18	1.04	104%	180%
13	19	1.06	106%	190%
14	20	1.08	108%	200%
15	21	1.10	110%	210%
16	22	1.11	111%	220%
17	23	1.13	113%	230%
18	24	1.15	115%	240%
19	25	1.16	116%	250%
1A	26	1.18	118%	260%
1B	27	1.19	119%	270%
1C	28	1.20	120%	280%

So, the distribution there is actually quite good up until about 5 data points in, where it gets compressed, such that the points are only 1-2% apart, topping out at 120%.

I think the scale that jplumbley had originally intended is a good one, so I've begun calculating new points to closely approximate his as much as possible.

Theoretically, the way the values are formatted, as 32-bit unsigned integers (Uint32) with 8 figures, it should theoretically be possible to create 3 or more digit hex numbers, which can correlate to the values beyond 200%.

-Alex

Quote from: Tarkus on August 19, 2008, 04:12:37 PM

Here's how the NAM Congestion Graph jplumbley designed looked with the current Data Points:

still working on it . . .

I can't wait...!

Tarkus, you are utterly amazing man !  &apls

Thank you for the kind words, b22rian! :)

At any rate, I've compiled a new Congestion DataView, which is attached here. 

It does have some three digit Uint32 values assigned for the upper data points, which I didn't have the chance to test since I didn't have any networks that were congested enough to see the upper end--so I'm not entirely sure they'll work.

The data points are similar in spacing, though I tended to go for 12.5% increments on the upper end.

-Alex (Tarkus)

ok alex..

i had a chance to test this out on my big city 831 K sim B hard difficulty..

I think the yellows and oranges are working good..

But no red are showing up on networks im sure are congested enough to be red..

also i assume this one file will cover all 3 of the difficulty levels right ?

Thanks, for all the time you have invested in this today !

Brian

Brian, thanks for the test report! :thumbsup:

It will work for all three difficulties, since it's designed to report percentages of the overall volume-to-capacity ratio, as opposed to absolute capacity values (like the Volume DataView that z released).

The reds should start kicking in around 250% in theory (around 6250 on a Road using A/B Hard), though because the reddish colors are set over 200%, they have the experimental three-digit hex values, which may or may not work.  If not, it proves that the DataView can't go over 200% capacity, and I'll need to adjust it accordingly.

-Alex

Alex,

This is certainly a very interesting idea.  And it seems to be producing yellows fairly consistently in areas with less than 100% capacity - something I didn't think was possible.  Congratulations!   &apls

Three-digit hex numbers don't work, though; I had tried them before, as well as with your view, and the game just ignores them.  So it may be a Uint32 field, but the internal array is only 256 numbers big.

I should warn you of some of the experiences I've had, though.  The Congestion view will sometimes produce a wrong color, even a wildly wrong color, and this has nothing to do with the color ramp being used.  For example, in a city that I just tested, I have a road running at 50% capacity.  With the Maxis view, it shows as bright yellow.  With your view, it shows as dark orange.  Both are equally incorrect.  I've seen many other anomalies like this.  I simply mention this so that you can be careful during testing.

One thing you mention though:

Quote from: Tarkus on August 19, 2008, 04:12:37 PM
So really, the Maxis graph has no differentiation between 0% and 118%, and the congestion coloration covers an 82% range.

This is not what I have seen - I see the Maxis graph green up to 100%, and then slowly start changing to yellow.  Once again, there are anomalies, so you have to look at a lot of data points.  I found my Traffic Volume View invaluable for checking this out - I think it would speed up your testing by quite a bit.

Then there's the question of where you want to go with this.  How far down do you want the colors to go?  Which colors do you want to use below 100%?  May I suggest that you coordinate your colors with my Traffic Volume View as much as possible?  Users always appreciate consistent interfaces.  And the colors used with my Traffic Volume View have proved very popular - I've gotten very positive feedback on my STEX upload.

In any case, what you've done is quite impressive.  I'll be looking forward to hearing more results.  And let me know if there's anything I can do to help.

Quote from: z on August 19, 2008, 10:34:04 PM

Three-digit hex numbers don't work, though; I had tried them before, as well as with your view, and the game just ignores them.  So it may be a Unit32 field, but the internal array is only 256 numbers big.

I should warn you of some of the experiences I've had, though.  The Congestion view will sometimes produce a wrong color, even a wildly wrong color, and this has nothing to do with the color ramp being used.  For example, in a city that I just tested, I have a road running at 50% capacity.  With the Maxis view, it shows as bright yellow.  With your view, it shows as dark orange.  Both are equally incorrect.  I've seen many other anomalies like this.  I simply mention this so that you can be careful during testing.

alex.

I definitely had a few network lines over 250 %, that still show as orange..
But I guess this is the same thing as Z saying with the 3 digit hex numbers not working..

For the most part the oranges and yellows work pretty consistently..but i have seen the same anomalies as Z
is reporting in the above,, also..

Quote from: z on August 19, 2008, 10:34:04 PM


Then there's the question of where you want to go with this.  How far down do you want the colors to go?  Which colors do you want to use below 100%?  May I suggest that you coordinate your colors with my Traffic Volume View as much as possible?  Users always appreciate consistent interfaces.  And the colors used with my Traffic Volume View have proved very popular - I've gotten very positive feedback on my STEX upload.

I think this is a great idea.. Z's volume graph is outstanding !  &apls
But also I know you are busy with RL stuff and obviously you do so many different things with the game !!
when i saw your first posting, i was like wow !, tarkus is getting involved with this !....
We really appreciate your interest and getting involved with this and maybe Z can help you if hes not too
busy..  ?   he is really good at this stuff !! ..

Thanks a lot for the time you have already committed to this with your busy schedule..

Regards, Brian

On another note...

I was just going through the old "Commute engine tweaking for NWM" thread, which contains many of the original discussions and planning for the new traffic simulators.  I noticed that mott figured out how to get the Commute Time Graph to give accurate readings in real minutes (there's a scaling constant that can be adjusted), and he included a Commute Time Graph exemplar in an early version of his simulator (alpha 3) that implemented this fix.  In a post a little ways before the alpha 3 file, he says:

QuoteOh, don't forget to copy the graph exemplars too.  The real-time thing doesn't work without it

The exemplars he is referring to here are the Commute Time Graph and the Traffic Congestion View.  The "real-time thing" is the proper display of the commute time in real minutes.

However, although the Traffic Congestion View made it into the NAM release, the fixed Commute Time Graph apparently did not.  Not only is the exemplar not in the traffic simulator files, but the readings on this graph show it is not adjusted properly.  And mott's numbers seem to be right; when I used them to generate a Commute Time Graph for my traffic simulator, the result was commute times that looked quite correct.  So what happened to the fixed Commute Time Graph?   ()what()

I can't get one way roads to cross borders.  I don't know if this is a traffic simulator problem or not.  Can someone help me? ()what()

Hello remanh,

One Way Roads (OWR) have never been able to crass borders.  This is due to a hardcoded function that MAXIS never included in the OWR Network.  The issue that OWR border crossings is that it would make MAXIS fix alot of regional things for pathfinding.  When, MAXIS created the game and a Sim travelled to a neighboring city tile that Sim was "assumed" to return via the same tile it left in (or in the case of two-tile networks the one directly to the left of that tile).  This was done most prob ably so that they neer had to keep track of regional pathfinding beyond the current city tile you are working in.

Sim City 4 claims regional play was one of the biggest advantages to the game, but in reality each city is exactly like one of those old Sim City games where you had one city tile and a bunch of dormant computer tiles next to it.  Only difference now is you are the one controlling the growth in those neighbor cities, even though they themselves are a separate entity.

Just out of curiosity, does fact that street capacities make the rural areas more realistic, lessening the traffic in those areas? I always had a problem with traffic jams where there are only like 5 mansions. In other words, will I see less cars in rural areas?

Hello,

I am currently programming a new NAM tool (based on SC4Config) to make the configuration by shuffling plugin files obsolete. That means the program produces the configuration exemplars and saves them into plugins.

Not like in SC4Config, the user can only choose presets in the NAM tools without customizing anything (except the pathfinding heuristic if wanted and train lengths because the optimal value varies depending on the system performance).

If you want to have new simulator plugins to be included/emulated, please send me them early!

Quote from: GoaSkin on November 05, 2008, 05:52:16 AM
Hello,

I am currently programming a new NAM tool (based on SC4Config) to make the configuration by shuffling plugin files obsolete. That means the program produces the configuration exemplars and saves them into plugins.

Not like in SC4Config, the user can only choose presets in the NAM tools without customizing anything (except the pathfinding heuristic if wanted and train lengths because the optimal value varies depending on the system performance).

If you want to have new simulator plugins to be included/emulated, please send me them early!

You can download the April NAM for the latest ones.  April removed some of the older ones due to information learned last year at this time.  All the ones made by myself and Mott are included in the April NAM.