NAM is Total Garbage

[jboord44]

Seriously, I got this so that I could build roundabouts and have cooler looking curved roads. This is 95% useless junk that nobody has any clue how to use. There are 800000 connector pieces linking up a million different transportation networks, it's just way too confusing, you can't click and drag build any of it so you have to place individual pieces that never wanna line up correctly. I find this mod to be total garbage. It's a bunch of complicated crap that sits there clogging up the hard drive.

And none of the pieces reliably works all the time. The fractionally angled road pieces can't even have regular roads connecting to their ends, so someone please explain when you would ever use this??

I felt dumb when first diwnloading this, thinking wow, all this stuff, I'm prob the only person on earth who doesn't have a clue how to use a straight URail under Diagnal DTR Viaduct piece. But come on, you could play this game for a million years and have thousands of cities and never have any use for any of this.

I think of all the things this game actually needed and it's weird they wasted all this effort on such absolutely useless crap. I like some of the curved roads, that's a nice touch, and the street textures are cool. But I find the NAM to be 95% useless junk that I have no clue how to use or what all that ♥♥♥♥ is or does.

[Ilja]

Hello, Tarkus. It is good to see you here again and thank you for the explanation. :)

This conversation got me to break my SC4 hiatus. I have re-installed the game and slowly rebuilding my Plugins folder. A lot of things have changed. This will take some time.

[jboord44]

Thanks for the reply. However, the video did not help because my issue is connecting any elevated RHW piece to my ground road network. Your video showed building ramps to a basic rhw2 piece. That's great, Linda helpful if I ever wanna build that so thank you for that. But how do you connect any ramp to a level 1 8C RHW. I haven't found any ramp that works, not a single one. The qc pieces connect but they reverse the direction of traffic halfway up the ramp .

[jboord44]

In other words, the yellow line that j dictates the direction of traffic is different halfway up the ramp. And it's like that no matter where I put it

[jboord44]

indicates*

[TarkusSC4]

I just checked on it, and was able to build the L1 QuickChange Partial Diamond setup with an L1 RHW-8C without any reversals. Make sure you're giving the piece enough room and aren't putting it in too close of proximity to a starter piece. I did a video right when I developed QuickChange, which might also be useful.

Alternatively, the same draggable method shown in the other video actually works on the L1 RHW-8C as well. You can drag out that ramp interface, then use the FLEX Height Transition to get down from L1 to L0 and intersect the surface street. This diagram[www.wiki.sc4devotion.com] might also be useful in terms of showing all the patterns for the draggable ramp interfaces.

Additionally, FLEXRamps are basically just ploppable versions of the draggable ramp interfaces, with a bit more slope tolerance--you can also use one of those in place of the draggable if you'd prefer.

-Tarkus

[A Fat, Angry Serval]

I'm not going to say NAM is total garbage, but you REALLY need to fix that crashing issue with monorail and HSR components if you haven't already.

[jboord44]

Btw, diagonals with 3 tile RHW pieces does not always work. Making the first diagonal turn from straight to diagonal is easy. However, going from diagonal back to straight with, say, Level 1 8C RHW is a total headache. It just doesn't work properly. Whenever it actually does work it feels like I hit the lottery, that's how rare it is

[jboord44]

Ok, so to be fair to the NAM, I feel like I have to update and say I finally, after weeks of tinkering and practicing, I finally connected my level 1 8 lane with center divider real highway piece to the ground.

I used a flex ramp that was compatible with the 8C piece, and then I used a flexheight piece to connect my ramp to the ground.

So if anyone ever finds this and is struggling, don't bother with QC pieces, they are built backwards and will always have the yellow driving line going the wrong way. Use flex ramps to connect elevated RHW to the ground, with a flex height piece as a mediator

[Speeder]

VestedGamr eredeti hozzászólása:

I'm not going to say NAM is total garbage, but you REALLY need to fix that crashing issue with monorail and HSR components if you haven't already.

NAM can't fix that, it is a game engine bug, not a NAM bug.

Still, some guy DID made a dll that improve things :) look for "Sc4 third party fix" or something like that, it was made by Simmaster07

[A Fat, Angry Serval]

Speeder eredeti hozzászólása:

VestedGamr eredeti hozzászólása:

I'm not going to say NAM is total garbage, but you REALLY need to fix that crashing issue with monorail and HSR components if you haven't already.

NAM can't fix that, it is a game engine bug, not a NAM bug.

Still, some guy DID made a dll that improve things :) look for "Sc4 third party fix" or something like that, it was made by Simmaster07

The monorail and HSR CTD only happens with NAM and HSR installed, since it's entirely due to how the Monorail and High Speed Rail puzzle pieces interact with stations. Even if it is a game engine bug, NAM's network puzzle pieces at least play a part in the issue.

Even something as simple as draggable HSR and high elevation monorail segments, combined with a warning to not use puzzle pieces right next to a station, would suffice.

EDIT: I went ahead and looked up the fix to see if it did fix the NAM issue, and, well, it does. Thanks, although you might want to considder asking someone for more details about a problem. I could have been talking about something entirely different.

[MGB]

I must say I am a little disappointed by some of the comments in this thread. The NAM team works very hard to provide huge swathes of additional functionality to SC4. We don't get paid, we do it simply for the love of the game.

I won't argue that the documentation is ideal. We are working on improving things, but if you take the time, you'll see most of your questions are answered in the existing documentation. I suspect, despite the many hours poured into writing them, you may not have taken the time to actually read them?

And that's the rub here, no one ever learnt how to do anything complicated or worthwhile without applying themselves or making some effort. I hear all too often "but it's a game, it should just work how I expect it to". But if you think like that, you are part of the problem. As I mentioned, we are not paid developers, we did not make SC4, we are working within the boundaries of what is possible. Would you prefer we made everything super polished like Maxis did? Because in that scenario, the NAM would be a tiny fraction of what it is today. Not because we couldn't be bothered, but simply because the code doesn't allow us such flexibility. If you understood how things work under the hood, you'd know like I do that many of the problems that make it difficult to use, are a result of making the game do things it was never designed to do. We can't alter the game's code, so we're stuck with making the best of it.

I've taken the time to post some beginners tutorials over here on YouTube that goes through the basics of the NAM step by step. As you can see, such in-depth tutorials have proven to be really popular /sarcasm. In reality the first five videos took about 20hrs of work to produce and publish. I guarantee if you take an hour of so to go though them, you'll have a much improved understanding of how the NAM works in general. I put it to you that it would be a better use of your time than ranting on here again and again that it simply "doesn't work". It does work for the most part, but you may need to take some time to get familiar with the mod. This isn't a problem, we all have to start somewhere. Over on SC4D[www.sc4devotion.com] or Simtropolis[www.simtropolis.com] (and presumably here too), you will find many people only too glad to help you out if you are having problems. Perhaps that would help you to enjoy the NAM more than complaining would? But if your mind is closed to the idea of having to learn how to use the NAM, then there is little anyone can say or do to help you.

[Ilja]

VestedGamr eredeti hozzászólása:

The monorail and HSR CTD only happens with NAM and HSR installed, since it's entirely due to how the Monorail and High Speed Rail puzzle pieces interact with stations. Even if it is a game engine bug, NAM's network puzzle pieces at least play a part in the issue.

Even something as simple as draggable HSR and high elevation monorail segments, combined with a warning to not use puzzle pieces right next to a station, would suffice.

You should not hover transit enabled lots above traffic networks. That indeed has a high risk to cause CTD. Problem is related to how the game was made.

This is an actual problem and likely the most tedious problem in SC4, but can be avoided by planning parts of your build, or rebuild, up ahead.

I remember using quite a lot of swear words, when ever my pedestrian malls got stuck with a tunnel and game crashed to desktop. I finally learned how to avoid that though. :p

[A Fat, Angry Serval]

Ilja eredeti hozzászólása:

VestedGamr eredeti hozzászólása:

The monorail and HSR CTD only happens with NAM and HSR installed, since it's entirely due to how the Monorail and High Speed Rail puzzle pieces interact with stations. Even if it is a game engine bug, NAM's network puzzle pieces at least play a part in the issue.

Even something as simple as draggable HSR and high elevation monorail segments, combined with a warning to not use puzzle pieces right next to a station, would suffice.

You should not hover transit enabled lots above traffic networks. That indeed has a high risk to cause CTD. Problem is related to how the game was made.

This is an actual problem and likely the most tedious problem in SC4, but can be avoided by planning parts of your build, or rebuild, up ahead.

I remember using quite a lot of swear words, when ever my pedestrian malls got stuck with a tunnel and game crashed to desktop. I finally learned how to avoid that though. :p

Managed to find the third-party patch that fixes that problem.

[MGB]

Ilja eredeti hozzászólása:

VestedGamr eredeti hozzászólása:

The monorail and HSR CTD only happens with NAM and HSR installed, since it's entirely due to how the Monorail and High Speed Rail puzzle pieces interact with stations. Even if it is a game engine bug, NAM's network puzzle pieces at least play a part in the issue.

Even something as simple as draggable HSR and high elevation monorail segments, combined with a warning to not use puzzle pieces right next to a station, would suffice.

You should not hover transit enabled lots above traffic networks. That indeed has a high risk to cause CTD. Problem is related to how the game was made.

This is an actual problem and likely the most tedious problem in SC4, but can be avoided by planning parts of your build, or rebuild, up ahead.

I remember using quite a lot of swear words, when ever my pedestrian malls got stuck with a tunnel and game crashed to desktop. I finally learned how to avoid that though. :p

Fix for the TE Hover CTD[community.simtropolis.com] - this fix absolutely kills the problem dead. It's not a NAM fault, it's a bug Maxis left in the game. Yes it's possible in some cases to resolve the issue by modifying the TE lots, we actually put a lot of work into such fixes. But some pieces simply won't work any other way, with a little care, the problem was avoidable, but now you no longer need worry.

[Ilja]

VestedGamr eredeti hozzászólása:

Managed to find the third-party patch that fixes that problem.

I need to check that one out myself as well then. :)

MGB eredeti hozzászólása:

<...snip...

The SC4 community I was around (mostly in SimPeg 4 and SC4Devotion) was always quite welcoming. Peoples made suggestions and gave support. I hope it is still the same.

Forums in Steam have not gone trough the same group mentality, so peoples here are more quick to make harsh comments.

My warmest thanks to NAM team for the work they have made. I have had years of fun with SC4 and NAM has been a big part of it.