Custom ferries not working properly

[vortext]

Here's an outline of the situation; I want to cross a river and not use a bridge since that's too invasive. Instead I opted for a small ferry and ran into trouble.

• two maxis passenger ferries on either side of the shore work fine, sims commute back and forth.

• two WMP street ferries and sims travel abroad, i.e. leave the tile instead of crossing the river.

• two medieval ferries and no traffic whatsoever.

Does anyone has a clue why this is and more important, what to do about it? Thanks.

[vortext]

Yesterday SimCougar posted almost the exact same problem I had with the medieval ferry over at simtropolis. Even though I've little need of a ferry at the moment, I decided to do some digging around for the heck of it. After carefull comparison of the two lots, I noticed the maxis passenger ferry has three invisible props that cannot be deleted. Here's the lot stripped of all other props beside those three.


What's more, if I move them around on the lot and save the changes made, the maxis ferry stops working as well. It even gave a 'no road acces' zot! So I took a look in the Reader and there's very little to them.



Notice their names though; ferry terminal in, ferry terminal out and ferry opposite. Also notice the prefix 'Tag'. Now I do remember reading something, somewhere, sometime ago about tag props in relation to PEGs marina I believe. In any case, I'm curious to learn what these actually do since they obviously do serve somekind of function. Hope someone can shed some light on this!

[Lowkee33]

I was never able to get a ferry I made working either.   One thing I have found, to confirm Silur's post over at Simtropolis, is that the depth of the water is very important for a ferry to work.

What is the instance of those props?  I would imagine that they are what control the ferry effect.  I've been try to write a program to edit the effect directory, but it really needs a GUI, and this is something I haven't really been able to do yet (maybe in a few years ).

[vortext]

Ha! I actually found the post I refered to earlier, it's by Swamper77. Fun quote right from the top;

1. There isn't a listed minimum depth for the ports and ferry terminals.

I beg to differ. More important however is this;

Ferry terminals have a special set of props on the Lots and properties in their building exemplars to control how traffic is converted to ferries and back within the terminal lots. I'm not going to go into detail about all of that here.

Too bad he hasn't been around for ages but at least good to know those props are important indeed. Here's the entire post.

EDIT: TGI for the three ferry props

[catty]

Swamper77 did go into alot more detail about ferries in another topic, his answer I've quoted below, the topic can be found here

http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=5561.0

There are usually 3 "gnomes" on the ferry terminal Lots. These props act as a "transit switch" for ferry terminal Lots and their behaviors are hard-coded into the EXE. Other than being props, there are no visible properties as to how they function. Apart from the name of "gnome", they should have other names associated with them, which are their exemplar names.

- Tag1x1x3_ferryopp_2C54 is placed on the edge of the Lot that is in or near the water. This prop tells the game where the ferries should dock with the lot.

- Tag1x1x3_ferrytermin_2C52 is placed on the edge of the Lot where it touches or connects with a roadway. Depending on the ferry terminal type, it converts different types of traffic to ferry traffic as they enter the Lot:
- For passenger ferry terminals, it converts pedestrians to passenger ferries.
- For car ferry terminals, it converts both cars and pedestrians to ferries.

- Tag1x1x3_ferrytermout_2C53 is placed on the edge of the Lot where it touches or connects with a roadway. Once the ferries arrive, they get converted back to local traffic as they exit the Lot:
- For passenger ferry terminals, it converts passenger ferries back to pedestrians.
- For car ferry terminals, it converts ferries back to cars and pedestrians.

Passenger ferries cannot dock with car ferry terminals and car ferries cannot dock with passenger ferry terminals. You need a pair of ferry docks to have a working ferry system. Passenger ferry systems work best if they have a bus stop or some other form of mass transit within walking distance of the terminal.

-Swamper

hope that helps

-catty