TE lots and blocking access to adjacent zones

Shadow Assassin · June 17, 2007, 03:08:40 AM

Topic split from "Upcoming SFBT creations"

Quote from: Andreas on June 12, 2007, 04:10:48 PM
Good thinking! I'm not that good with textures though, but maybe somebody could give me a hand? I'm also thinking that I could add bus stop properties to the lot, since it's intended as a space-saver. Oh, and I should mention that you have to be careful with adjacent zones. As with every TE lot, it will block road access from the zones over a span of three tiles, so some carefull zoning is advised.

Hmm, isn't it just residental that gets blocked by a transit-enabled lot?

Otherwise, it looks good. I'd suggest widening the avenue even further, but it seems that's not really possible, unless you had the station to the left or the right of the avenue with the track using one tile, and the avenue using the rest of the space. That'd be too complicated (but still possible) to do. Daeley's SC4Path tool (along with SC4Tools) should make the pathing and TEing of it a breeze. Actually, speaking of that, I wonder where it's disappeared to... hmm.

Andreas · June 17, 2007, 06:27:37 AM

I haven't used that many large TE'd lots in a situation like this, but I guess it will also block commercials if their front is completely blocked by the lot. I already thought about modifying the avenue textures in order to make the center portion wider (and leaving only a very narrow sidewalk), but obviously this requires some texture and pathing work, which I'm not very familiar with. For the moment, the station is more of a "proof of concept" anyway - I mainly wanted to know how it can be made, and if it's functional.

Shadow Assassin · June 27, 2007, 02:35:47 AM

QuoteI haven't used that many large TE'd lots in a situation like this, but I guess it will also block commercials if their front is completely blocked by the lot.

It won't. If you place a on-road mass transit stop in front of a 1 tile wide commercial building, people can still access the building just fine. But if you did that with a residential lot, you'd get a no-access zot. It's mainly because commercial lots only have their routes calculated TO them, rather than FROM them, like residential lots. Industrial lots are a different matter entirely - their routes are calculated by the block, so it wouldn't matter with them anyway.

Here's to hoping your proof-of-concept works!

cammo2003 · July 17, 2007, 06:29:00 AM

This is what I've found - for a commercial lot with a TE lot in front of it, route querying the commercial structure will not show any routes. The building will not, however, abandon. The station looks great, if a bit small. It'd never pass safety tests here, put it that way.

Shadow Assassin · July 19, 2007, 02:20:36 AM

cammo2003: It also depends on how the lot is configured. If access is limited to two sides (which the road passes through), then the commercial building will abandon, because pedestrians and vehicles cannot enter the lot from the side that has been 'blocked' (where the I/O exemplars for that side of the lot are deleted to prevent access. This also prevents vehicles 'jumping' to parallel TE lots. Extremely useful if you want to create busways.)

Say there's a lot with four entry points - A, B, C, D. A and C are where the road goes through. B and D are 'blocked'. If a road is parallel to the road passing through A and C, cars cannot jump across to the parallel road, because the only access point, B is blocked. The same principle applies to zones. It's also why residential lots don't like having transit-enabled lots in front of them unless there's another way out. You'll notice if you put a TE lot in front of a 1x2 corner residential zone, that zone doesn't have any problems because there's another way out (through the side).

Also, the reason why residental zones abandon when they have a TE lot in front of them and no other way out is because they generate the route query, but don't have any additional data coming in. Commercial doesn't generate route queries, they only act as a endpoint for a route. A route between A and B is generated by meeting specific criteria - point A is always residential, point B is always commercial or industrial. Transport types don't matter. But for industrial, point A is the block/clump/cluster, point B is the edge of the map (this only applies to freight).

Actually, that's given me an idea regarding how to get residential lots to grow behind a transit-enabled lot. Maybe I should look at how the game deals with these, to see if a particular configuration of transit-enabled lot is required.

Hmm... I'm not sure if puzzle pieces can have a capacity exemplar added (and the important values - Transit I/O), because if they can, that's solved our transit-enabling problem. (residential lots are fine with puzzle pieces, if I recall) I think it is possible to give a puzzle piece stats that allow it to behave much like an ordinary TE lot, but allow traffic movements between residential and otherwise. I think I'll have to talk to Tarkus about this. It's just an idea.

Sorry for hijacking your thread, Andreas!

(think I'll move it to the NAM forum in a minute)

Andreas · July 19, 2007, 02:43:43 AM

I'll see what I can do in order to split this topic - this is a very insightful discussion after all. I don't think that you can add transit properties to a puzzle piece, though. A puzzle piece is defined in the RUL file, and maybe linked to a T21 exemplar file that provides the network lot layout, so you could make it look like a station, but most likely, it won't be functional.

Shadow Assassin · July 19, 2007, 04:35:29 AM

Oh, lookee, you split the topic. Awesome!

Hopefully this should make for a great discussion.

Didn't the ped malls use to have a park effect? I think the transit capacity properties actually fall into that same area... so maybe it's possible.

cogeo · July 19, 2007, 11:51:27 AM

Commercial lots do develop behind TE lots, don't display the no access zot (if the station is built after the lot has developed), and the number of jobs shown is OK. But no traffic paths are displayed, so it's indeed unknown if they really employ any sims.

Making puzzle pieces working like stations is raher impossible (at least to me), take also a look in this post. See also memo's reply below, he has tried a technique of plopping TE lots on puzzle pieces.

RippleJet · July 20, 2007, 06:19:04 AM

Quote from: cogeo on July 19, 2007, 11:51:27 AM
Commercial lots do develop behind TE lots, don't display the no access zot (if the station is built after the lot has developed), and the number of jobs shown is OK. But no traffic paths are displayed, so it's indeed unknown if they really employ any sims.

This is one of the funny parts of the simulation in SC4. Commercial and industrial buildings don't need to have any workers.

The numbers displayed in the queries are only capacities (actual capacity / maximum capacity).
The actual capacity is dependent on all desirability factors, but not on the number of workers.
The only way to check the actual number of workers is to use the route query.

However, even if there are no workers, the building still contributes to the tax income.

I often have industrial buildings close to my city borders.
Since they are located far away from residential areas, it is quite common that nobody works in them.
Nevertheless, they do generate freight and provide tax income!

Lack of workers is not affecting the desirability of commercials and industrials...

However, lack of traffic (customers) does affect the desirabiliy of commercials.