NAM Traffic Simulator and Data View Help

[z]

Sometimes, after changing some capacity settings and later setting them back in the Traffic Simulator, or after installing another Congestions View plugin, I get either strongly congested networks or completely green ones which, however, are respectively reported to be uncongested or congested.

Which Congestion View Plugin are you referring to?  Specifically, what is its file name?  There was a congestion view put out with the NAM two years ago, but it was found not to work properly, as it caused symptoms much as you're describing, and it was withdrawn as of the January 2009 NAM.  At this time, only the standard Maxis congestion view (which you get without a plugin) is recommended by the NAM Team.

As for changing the settings in the Traffic Simulator, the game takes a little while to adjust to the new settings; in your case this means that there can be unusual congestion appearing until the traffic simulator first runs with the new settings, which may be up to two years after you restart your city.

[rodhunt]

Hi,

I have sorted out my problem with the congestion. I imagined that something was conflicting, giving me false congestion readings and meaning that my cars wouldn't use my RHW. On a hunch I removed a plugin for variable bus routes (meaning that a bus stop wasn't necessary for passengers to get off) and its sorted out both the congestion and use problem. 

[Tarkus]

Hi,

I have sorted out my problem with the congestion. I imagined that something was conflicting, giving me false congestion readings and meaning that my cars wouldn't use my RHW. On a hunch I removed a plugin for variable bus routes (meaning that a bus stop wasn't necessary for passengers to get off) and its sorted out both the congestion and use problem. 

Glad to hear you managed to find the issue!

Is that the file that was released on the STEX not too long ago?  It basically contains a conflicting Traffic Simulator Exemplar which reverts everything except the one property that was changed to Maxis vanilla settings, meaning that there is no capacity specified for the RHW at all, which would definitely cause what you saw.

-Alex

[rodhunt]

Yes, it was released in December - http://www.simtropolis.com/stex/details.cfm?id=23000

It came in handy, but having removed it not only has my RHW problem been fixed, I now have no congestion whatsoever on medium settings... perhaps it could be the issue for other uses seeing strange congestion patterns.

[z]

It affects congestion only on the RHW, but as you saw, it makes the RHW completely unusable.  To elaborate on what Alex said, it also silently overrides your traffic simulator with the original Maxis traffic simulator, which has many limitations.  When this plugin is installed (it's name is Variable Route Buses), your traffic simulator may be visible in your NAM folder, and you may be able to adjust its settings with the Traffic Simulator Configuration Tool, but your traffic simulator and any modifications you make to it will be completely overridden by this plugin.  For all of these reasons, this plugin is incompatible with the NAM.  This is not something that would be obvious to most users, so the NAM Team will be working to get a warning attached to this plugin's description.

It is also worth noting that this plugin does not actually do what it says.  The description says that Sims "can get off anywhere along the route," but in fact, this plugin allows Sims to get off anywhere at all, even miles away from any possible bus route.  In other words, the mod makes buses functionally identical to taxis.  If you want the functionality of taxis, there are already a couple of taxi downloads on the STEX that have no negative interactions with the NAM; my favorite is Taxi Stand New Transportation.

[Wilfried]

Which Congestion View Plugin are you referring to? Specifically, what is its file name?

It's 'NetworkAddonMod_Congestion_Data_View.dat', if that helps.

There was a congestion view put out with the NAM two years ago, but it was found not to work properly, as it caused symptoms much as you're describing, and it was withdrawn as of the January 2009 NAM. At this time, only the standard Maxis congestion view (which you get without a plugin) is recommended by the NAM Team.

This is really news to me since I'm using the plugin made for use with the 'Z-Low' Simulator...

As for changing the settings in the Traffic Simulator, the game takes a little while to adjust to the new settings; in your case this means that there can be unusual congestion appearing until the traffic simulator first runs with the new settings, which may be up to two years after you restart your city.

I'll see what I can do.

Thank you.

[z]

It's 'NetworkAddonMod_Congestion_Data_View.dat', if that helps.

Yes, that's the defective file.  Remove that, and your Traffic Congestion Data View should work properly.  That file is now in the NAM's Cleanitol list.

This is really news to me since I'm using the plugin made for use with the 'Z-Low' Simulator...

That Congestion Data View plugin wasn't connected with Simulator Z in any way; it was released about a year before Simulator Z, and was withdrawn in the same NAM in which Simulator Z first appeared.  If you're talking about the Traffic Volume Data View plugins that were matched to the various capacity levels of Simulator Z, there never was any problem with those, and you should keep using whatever one you have.  For example, the one for Simulator Z Low is named NetworkAddonMod_Volume_Data_View_Z_Low.dat.  These volume data views remain in use for the NAM Unified Traffic Simulator, which is based on Simulator Z and which released last month with the new NAM.

[Wilfried]

Okay, I re-checked it, and you've been right. So thanks a lot once again!

[z]

This post is a response to a post in CAM 2.0 Rural - Beta Testing, as the discussion there has moved off CAM and onto the traffic simulator.

Currently using the z low simulator...

Which version are you using?  Are you using the one that came with the latest NAM last month (the NAM Unified Traffic Simulator, a.k.a the NAM Simulator), or an earlier version?

Telling you this, congestion at intersection has a major impact on comute times and lag and abandoment if you ignore it.

Commute times in the NAM Simulator and Simulator Z are not terribly important, as they are not a limiting factor.  Maximum commute time is effectively infinite in these simulators.  Increased congestion at intersections will not cause increased abandonment.  It takes a very large amount of congestion citywide to cause any abandonment at all in these simulators.  This has all been verified by extensive testing.

If too many change their routes at once you get red congestion all over the place, sims get confused and you get long travels and abandoment problems in high dence cities...

The Maxis traffic simulator engine does not work this way.  There is built-in throttling to prevent large-scale congestion when many routes are changed.  Sims do not get confused, and you do not get abandonment.  I have done countless hours of tests over the last two years with Simulator Z and its successor demonstrating this.

I acctually have to cut off avenue and rail connections to inside my cities and other cities forcing sims to take the routes I want them to take and highway routes or my city to city conection get over used, which is an odd number around 65,000.

It should not be necessary to cut any connections, unless you want to force Sims to take routes that are longer than necessary.  (BTW, the volume maximum you're talking about is 65,535, which is the highest number that can be contained in two bytes.)

A: acctually no such thing as 100% perfect pathfinding, you put the setting to 100% actually has a reverse effect, not sure orf the particulars why, but it does think pod set the perfect setting at 96-98% because of this.

To the contrary, perfect pathfinding is a central feature of the A* pathfinding algorithm used by the Maxis pathfinding engine.  I recommend that you read at least a little about A* pathfinding in the reference in the next paragraph.  The perfect pathfinding used in the current NAM Simulator has been identified by extensive experiments; you can read about them here.  Where do you get the number "96-98%"?  The number Tropod used for perfect pathfinding, which was found to be incorrect last December, is approximately 52% of the number currently used.

I strongly recommend that you read A Guide to the Operation of the Traffic Simulator; you seem to have a number of major misconceptions about how the traffic simulator in SC4 works.  If you still have questions after that, or have problems running the latest version of the NAM Simulator, I would be happy to look into them with you in this thread.

[Indisguise]

using the last version of the Nam before the latest version release, tried the new version, didn't like it it caused a lot of enternal comuters issues for me. reverted back to the older version


I'm familiar with how the simulator works. This is how I'm able to grow most of the Cam building even the stage 15's, and have cities in million on a regular basis I have no problems with doing this in about 200yrs on a med size map.

Your saying to people asking , "how do I get higher stage buildings to grow?" or "How do I get the large buildings to grow?" or " why my city stalled at 100K or 500K or a million" that congestion isn't a factor or the route the sims take isn't a factor in growing a healthy city. Ignore it it it doesn'y matter. I say your dead wrong. Where the the sims go and how long it takes them to get there is a major factor in high dence cities hitting

Noticed time and time again the ones asking these question have  run their cities 1000 year long than I, and or are using high capasity Nam setting than I have but have many intersections in their cities have these issues.

I ran many cities with lots of intersection and all I get is comtue time issues, abandoment issues, the city stalling  with limited growth issues. I take out the unneeded intersections and the city thrives into the millions quickly.

I control the traffic and aviod congestion and I don't have the issues these people are having trying to get the higher stage buildings.

think were going to have to agree to disagree on this issue

[Mike1814]

Hey z, we've talked before I'm just moving the information to the right thread:

It seems like my traffic has worsened since installing NAM 2010. I'm using simulator ultra, which is acting worse than the z updated before that new NAM.

Before NAM 2010:




After NAM 2010:



Here are my files in the NAM folder:



SN: This is on imageshack right now. I apologize if the images are too big. If this doesn't work I don't know what is the problem.

[z]

I'm happy to report that yours is a simple question to answer, and that everything is working fine.  What you're seeing is the Intersection and Turn Capacity Effect, which simulates the slowdown of traffic caused by stop signs and traffic lights by artificially increasing congestion around heavily trafficked intersections.  It does this by reducing the network capacity of the two squares on every side of all road intersections.  As some people don't like this, and don't mind that their Sims zip through all intersections without even slowing down, you can reduce or even eliminate this effect by using the Traffic Simulator Configuration Tool.

Why didn't you previously see this when you were using Simulator Z?  Unless you were using a pre-release version of Simulator Z, the only explanation is that you weren't really using Simulator Z; this feature has been in the simulator, unchanged, since its first release.  You may have had another traffic simulator installed that you weren't aware of that was silently overriding Simulator Z's settings.  When you upgraded to the latest NAM, the other simulator was intentionally deleted by the NAM installer so that you could get the Ultra simulator that you selected.  The congested tiles around intersections indicate that your traffic simulator is now working properly.

[Mike1814]

I'm happy to report that yours is a simple question to answer, and that everything is working fine.  What you're seeing is the Intersection and Turn Capacity Effect, which simulates the slowdown of traffic caused by stop signs and traffic lights by artificially increasing congestion around heavily trafficked intersections.  It does this by reducing the network capacity of the two squares on every side of all road intersections.  As some people don't like this, and don't mind that their Sims zip through all intersections without even slowing down, you can reduce or even eliminate this effect by using the Traffic Simulator Configuration Tool.

Why didn't you previously see this when you were using Simulator Z?  Unless you were using a pre-release version of Simulator Z, the only explanation is that you weren't really using Simulator Z; this feature has been in the simulator, unchanged, since its first release.  You may have had another traffic simulator installed that you weren't aware of that was silently overriding Simulator Z's settings.  When you upgraded to the latest NAM, the other simulator was intentionally deleted by the NAM installer so that you could get the Ultra simulator that you selected.  The congested tiles around intersections indicate that your traffic simulator is now working properly.

Thank u. Now I just need to have that traffic man stop bugging me about it.

[z]

Thank u. Now I just need to have that traffic man stop bugging me about it.

Essentially, your traffic advisor is yelling at you because you're having your Sims stop at stop signs and traffic lights.  I'd fire that guy.  In fact, that's what I eventually did.  I went into the game options and turned off Urgent Advice Dialogs.  All the advice from the advisors still comes through the news ticker and is displayed in the news window, but they don't halt the game and shout in my face any more.

Of course, now I have to keep a closer eye on things to make sure nobody goes on strike and my nuclear power plants don't melt down.  But for me, it's worth it.

I tried to find a way to mod the advisors so that I could shut up the ones I wanted to, but I was unable to get this to work.

[HappyDays]

Z,

Greatly off topic, but hopefully you'll find use for this.

http://www.simtropolis.com/stex/details.cfm?id=21323

This is the Stupid News Ticker Mod that does almost exactly what you want. It blocks out the majority of complaint messages in the game while attempting to keep the urgent ones you want to see. It's not a perfect implementation, however: All traffic and utility messages are blocked, regardless of severity (Power plants melting down, water cut off, airport upgrades...). The education, safety, financial, and health advisor alerts are done correctly, only showing up when strikes, fires, and other critical issues arise. The city advisor's messages are untouched, apparently due to some problems that occur with rewards otherwise.

Given the alternatives, I can live with the flaws, especially since my cities are absolutely massive (Thanks to you and CAM, of course) and otherwise I'd be drowned in hundreds of messages from the traffic advisor complaining.

(Oh, nevermind...) <_<

Edit: Having compared the original utility advisor LUA script to the one that comes with this mod, I am stunned at how completely broken it is. Most if not all messages from the utility advisor don't show up with this mod, despite only a third or so messages actually being commented out. My only thought is that perhaps there's a reference file somewhere that requires all events be there or it screws up loading them and ends up preventing all messages...?

This is worth toying with.

Edit 2: Well, I've fiddled with it and found that setting a message's trigger to "0" prevents it from popping up, and keeps the other messages intact. I guess I'll go and see if it still works if I do that with the majority of annoying messages in the script file...

[z]

I did come across this mod a while ago.  The only problem I saw with it is that it completely eliminates the messages - you don't even see them in the News Ticker.  But that might be appropriate for the congestion messages, certainly as an option in the Traffic Simulator Configuration Tool.  Thanks for reminding me of this again!

[HappyDays]

I may be able to improve this mod, now that I've done some testing. For instance, the LUA script for the event when the environmentalists turn off a water pump because you've turned the water into sludge (With comments on what each function does to the best of my knowledge):

a = create_advice_utilities('ca5bdb07') - Function call?
a.trigger = "game.g_water_pollution_pump_shutdown_count > 0 and game.ga_water_pollution > 0" - Trigger
a.timeout = tuning_constants.ADVICE_TIMEOUT_MEDIUM - Time it stays in ticker?
a.frequency   = tuning_constants.ADVICE_FREQUENCY_HIGH - How often it shows up?
a.title   = [[text@4a50244a SC4_ADV_utl_Water020_Hdl Green Meddlers put the clamp on water pump]] - Title in ticker and elsewhere
a.message   = [[text@8a50245b SC4_ADV_utl_Water020_Mes Asthought the city doesn't have some real problems...]] - Ticker message
a.priority  = tuning_constants.ADVICE_PRIORITY_HIGH - Determines whether if it appears only as a ticker item or also produces a popup.
a.mood = advice_moods.BAD_JOB - Advisor mood animation?

ADVICE_PRIORITY_<Variable> is the important one, and is probably the one that should be altered. It determines whether or not those annoying popups happen when an event occurs. Ideally, one still wants the very important ones to show up (Airport upgrades, trash overwhelming city, strikes, fires, etc) while having the others just appear in the ticker. I'll have to do more testing to see what the various levels of priority do (There's low, medium, medium high, high, urgent...), but it's safe to say setting them on low keeps them from popping up.

I'll see what I can do, and if I produce something out of this I'll make a thread about it so I'm not polluting this one anymore.

[the7train]

Hi, I'm not sure if this is the right place for this (if not feel free to re-direct me) but I'm having trouble with traffic traveling between cities.  This is occurring for all road networks (Roads, Avenues, RHW with the road connector method).  In my situation, I have sims traveling between city A and city B.  In city A, it shows the sims entering and exiting on all of these road networks, however, in city B, it only shows the sims exiting from city B into city A.

I've gone in between the cities and run the simulator for years, but it does not help.  The number of sims leaving city B to city A does change, however it NEVER shows any sims going into city B even though in city A it shows them leaving.  Also, in city A, the number of sims coming from city B and going into city B does change and update.

Has anyone seen anything like this before?  Any suggestions?  If you think pictures would help, I can take some screen shots, just let me know.  Thanks in advance!

[z]

ADVICE_PRIORITY_<Variable> is the important one, and is probably the one that should be altered. It determines whether or not those annoying popups happen when an event occurs. Ideally, one still wants the very important ones to show up (Airport upgrades, trash overwhelming city, strikes, fires, etc) while having the others just appear in the ticker. I'll have to do more testing to see what the various levels of priority do (There's low, medium, medium high, high, urgent...), but it's safe to say setting them on low keeps them from popping up.

This is correct, and I even tried creating a revised set of these with different priorities.  Unfortunately, they had no effect.  My copies of the advice would not override the game's.  Perhaps you will have better luck...

Hi, I'm not sure if this is the right place for this (if not feel free to re-direct me) but I'm having trouble with traffic traveling between cities.

Yes, this is the right place.

First question:  Have you checked both commute periods?  The most logical explanation would be that the missing traffic is returning in the evening commute period.  Also note that the commute period selection for the route query tool is in a different place than the commute period selection for the traffic volume view.

[the7train]

Yes, this is the right place.

First question:  Have you checked both commute periods?  The most logical explanation would be that the missing traffic is returning in the evening commute period.  Also note that the commute period selection for the route query tool is in a different place than the commute period selection for the traffic volume view.

Thanks for your response z.  How do you change the commute period selection for the route query tool?  The only way I know how to look at evening commute is in the traffic volume view.  I didn't realize you can query evening traffic!  Once informed, I'll check it out tonight. 

Also, can you explain what you mean that they're returning in the evening commute?  Wouldn't they have to continue on their route into City B and turn around?  I can see for RHW they could just turn around in the connector loop, however this is happening on Maxis roads too.  Also, I would think I should be able to see them come in and turn around on the connector loop unless the game somehow doesn't show this "u-turn".

Thanks for your help!