NAM 38 Now Available

[roadgeek]

Can somebody post an image of a real life Highbrid Railway and Monorail? I have never heard of such a thing!

[Tyberius06]

Can somebody post an image of a real life Highbrid Railway and Monorail? I have never heard of such a thing!

Hybrid Rail is kind of a SC4 term, it is a special expansion of the game railway systems which makes them to be closer to the real life versions, since the default game is not able to provide such a dual purpose system, while in RL rail lines often has this dual purpose. In real life, specially in countries with advanced rail network systems (like Germany, UK, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain - what I'm aware of) most of the main rail lines around and through cities/towns are "hybrid, dual purpose" rail lines. They can serve the higher speed trains and the regular slower trains too on the same tracks. SC4 Hybrail Railway is this dual purpose rail line.

In Simcity 4 you have 3 different and separate rail network types as you know. The fastest type is the Monorail. During the years SC4 modders and developers choose to replace the original Maxis Monorail with more common highspeed rail networks, like the Far Eastern-type Bullet Trains or the High Speed Rail Project. Both of these projects have been abandoned for years now and in the future there will be a new approach which called RHSR (Real High Speed Rail). But these are just replacements or alternatives of the game base Monorail network.

BUT in real life High Speed Rails (not monorail based, but with the same achievable speed) often can and DO use regular rail tracks (ok, Shinkansen and other bullet train services has their own track system), although sometimes they use the regular rail tracks before they get access to their own high speed compatible tracks, specially when they running through on cities/towns.
In Europe there are many international HSR companies like Eurostar (UK), Thalys (Belgium), TGV (France), ICE (Germany), Railjet (Austria), but also there are national services, which can provide higher speed than the regular passanger trains. As far as I know trains above 160 km/h - 100 miles/h - are high speed rails.

- Tyberius

[Terring7]

Pictures of real life monorail

[roadgeek]

Can somebody post an image of a real life Highbrid Railway and Monorail? I have never heard of such a thing!

Hybrid Rail is kind of a SC4 term, it is a special expansion of the game railway systems which makes them to be closer to the real life versions, since the default game is not able to provide such a dual purpose system, while in RL rail lines often has this dual purpose. In real life, specially in countries with advanced rail network systems (like Germany, UK, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain - what I'm aware of) most of the main rail lines around and through cities/towns are "hybrid, dual purpose" rail lines. They can serve the higher speed trains and the regular slower trains too on the same tracks. SC4 Hybrail Railway is this dual purpose rail line.

In Simcity 4 you have 3 different and separate rail network types as you know. The fastest type is the Monorail. During the years SC4 modders and developers choose to replace the original Maxis Monorail with more common highspeed rail networks, like the Far Eastern-type Bullet Trains or the High Speed Rail Project. Both of these projects have been abandoned for years now and in the future there will be a new approach which called RHSR (Real High Speed Rail). But these are just replacements or alternatives of the game base Monorail network.

BUT in real life High Speed Rails (not monorail based, but with the same achievable speed) often can and DO use regular rail tracks (ok, Shinkansen and other bullet train services has their own track system), although sometimes they use the regular rail tracks before they get access to their own high speed compatible tracks, specially when they running through on cities/towns.
In Europe there are many international HSR companies like Eurostar (UK), Thalys (Belgium), TGV (France), ICE (Germany), Railjet (Austria), but also there are national services, which can provide higher speed than the regular passanger trains. As far as I know trains above 160 km/h - 100 miles/h - are high speed rails.

- Tyberius

OK, that makes much more sense. I was trying to envision a track that could support both monorail and other trains, or how a monorail could use standard tracks or a standard train could use a monorail.

[LucarioBoricua]

The conceptual issue with high speed rail versus monorail in the SimCity 4 context is that the monorail, for some odd reason, was deemed worthy enough to feature in SimCity 4 by the Maxis developers, but not the actual HSR. We gotta keep in mind that the game was developed between the late 1990s and very early 2000s, a time when high speed rail was still very niche worldwide and wasn't present in the American parlance on transportation topics. Since that date, HSR has expanded drastically beyond the pioneering countries. Nowadays in the late 2010s and 2020, high speed rail has developed spectacularly in numerous parts of the Old World, and it generally follows two models: fully dedicated lines, and HSR services in mixed traffic along conventional lines.

Examples of countries with fully separate HSR systems:

• Japan: the Shinkansen was developed separately in almost all lines, due to a mixture of capacity and technical limitations from their narrow Cape gauge network. So far there are only 3 clear exceptions: the Seikan Tunnel between Hokkaido and northern Honshu, where the extreme expense of having separate tunnels forces the freight services and the Hokkaido Shinkansen to share the tracks; and the Akita and Yamagata mini Shinkansen lines, where the lower demand and population did not justify creating fully separate lines. Their invention of high speed rail also occurred within the context of a very aggressive industrialization following the reconstruction after the WWII loss, where their neglected narrow gauge lines were being operated beyond their capacity and acceptable deterioration thresholds.
• Spain: similarly to Japan, their high speed rail network uses fully separate lines due to gauge differences, in their case with the Iberian broad gauge, as they wanted to have compatibility with the predominant standard gauge networks in Europe.
• France: they have a mixture of services, but the main lines are for fully dedicated and segregated service due to capacity and the inadequacy of some of these older alignments to accommodate the strict geometric design requirements for high speed operation.
• China: due to their really high population, rapidly growing economic output and highly restricted airspace, Chinese authorities opted to have a fully separate HSR network to ensure high speed and high volume operations, which also avoids the congestion of busy freight lines with the express passenger services.
• Taiwan: they contracted the HSR technology from Japan to build a single line connecting all the major cities along the Island's west coast, using a separate alignment. What I don't know is whether they had existing inter-city railways which were inadequate for HSR services.
• India: they're starting construction of HSR lines with Japanese assistance, and their existing Indian broad gauge railways are extremely busy and deteriorated with all sorts of passenger and freight services (these are the guys and gals who ride trains on the roofs of the cars).
• Various developing countries in Asia and Africa: in most cases they're opting for separate lines because their existing railways are inadequate either on the basis of gauge, condition or even just plain don't exist along major population corridors, especially when existing railways were developed with freight rather than passengers in mind.

Examples of countries with mixed HSR systems:

• Germany: most of their existing services use the existing rail network, but there's also selective line segregation projects being used along either very busy and/or geometrically inadequate lines.
• United Kingdom: the UK has HSR services along existing lines but these are planned to get eventual replacements with fully dedicated lines. For instance, the first phase of the High Speed 2 line just begun construction going from London to Birmingham. We also have to consider that the UK invented railways and thus their main lines have the oldest designs, meaning that it's more common for these to be created at a lower standard relative to today's expectations, but also means that their network has some of the best coverage too.
• Benelux countries: places like Belgium and the Netherlands use their existing lines for HSR services because they're geographically smaller and relatively flat, meaning that existing alignments generally prove to be sufficient for their needs.
• Switzerland: they have the curious case of developing high speed rail lines with freight as their priority. With the New Rail Link across the Alps project, they're building a series of base tunnels (rail tunnels connecting valley floors across mountain ranges) to avoid the extremely windy, steep and often single-tracked conventional lines. Austria is also doing something similar for the same reasons, but due to their EU membership they aren't as strictly focused on freight for cross-border traffic. Outside of these steep areas, their HSR services run in mixed traffic with the other passenger and freight services.
• Scandinavian countries (Sweden, Denmark, Finland): their lower population densities mean that rail lines are less congested, and thus they've been able to operate HSR services along existing lines. The geography of their developed areas tends to be flat or rolling, meaning that mountainous geography hasn't been a major obstacle for using existing rail lines.

From what I'm seeing, mixed HSR traffic seems to be a predominantly European strategy because of their more mature standard gauge networks, which reduces the pressure of developing separate lines except for very specific cases (bad geometry, super busy corridors, incompatible gauges). Meanwhile, dedicated HSR lines seem to be a predominantly Asian strategy due to a mix of very high populations, higher reliance on industry (and thus more freight rail traffic in existing lines) and inadequacy of existing lines on the basis of gauge, deterioration and/or capacity. I think that having both types of HSR systems is good in SimCity 4 because it gives more options. I also think that players who want to develop European-styled rail networks have been vocal in petitioning for mixed HSR arrangements because earlier HSR development projects focused more on the fully segregated lines based on repurposing the monorail, thus leaving their option without representation in the game.

[dyoungyn]

Ever since NAM37, I have yet be able to install/execute successfully Java on my computer.  No matter what route I take to work around this, nothing is working.  From what I can see that NAM 38 does indeed have the "coffee cup" logo.  When I execute the NAM installation, nothing happens. 

I feel as I am missing out here.  I even tried to consult with the builder "Digital Storm" with no avail as they state they do not deal with old archaic software such as Java.

My last resort is to take my AIO Digital Storm to a PC repair store to trouble shoot.

[mgb204]

Can you please clarify exactly what you mean by "Install/Execute successfully Java on my computer"?

Have you installed Java?, in which case which version of it?

If your PC manufacturer is supposed to support third part app installs, I sincerely doubt they are though, Java is not archaic, why I've just updated today to a new version. But there is nothing particularly special about installing Java over any other software. Go to the correct place on the Internet, download the installer from this link, run the installer and follow any prompts that come up on the way.

If it is installed correctly, you probably won't notice anything different, Java isn't an App so much as an App that lets other (Java) Apps run on your system. At this point to successfully run the NAM installer, there are three prerequisites:

• That the version of Java installed is compatible with the Java application you want to run, i.e. the NAM Installer.
  If your version is upto date, this should not be an issue.
• That Java has sufficient access rights both to run itself and for the App it's running.
  Trickier, but to ensure Java has Elevated (Admin) rights, see from this post (ST).
• That Java is correctly associated with .JAR files
  If it's not, double-clicking a JAR file, will not open the installer, but instead ask which app to open it with.

My hunch is it's probably the first of these, since you have the coffee cup. But you might have a legacy version that won't auto-update, for example the Sun or Microsoft versions of Java, today only Oracle provide it and they are looking to consign it to the recycle bin of history ASAP. Uninstall any current copies of Java you may have on your system, reboot your pc, then use the installer from here. If that doesn't work, we need to go through this step-by-step to help you out.

[dyoungyn]

mgb204,

I agree with everything you state below.  I did go in and deleted/uninstall all remnants of Java and NAM 37/8 on my machine.  Restated, re-downloaded NAM 38 and installed the supplied Java with no avail.  The install program executed fine, and installed fine, but nothing took hold.  I lost the "coffee cup" icon.  I went back to the NAM 38 forum and clicked on more Java software's, re-downloaded and installed, again, with no avail.  Again, like with the NAM 38 provided java, no "coffee cup" again.  I even emptied my deleted items in the trash bin. 

I am truly at a loose; before, when I downloaded from the java website, the "coffee cup" icon showed up but again, nothing happens, the NAM Installation does not execute or start.

Either my Windows 10 pro was not installed correctly or my virus scanner (Norton 360) is preventing all from working like they should.  SC4 Deluxe works and loads fine with NAM 36 only. 

I am truly at a loose here and not sure what is going on here. 

[dyoungyn]

Update,

I uninstalled NAM 36, deleted all remnants of Java, deleted all NAM files and downloads.  I re-installed Java via Oracle and now I have the "coffee cup" icon again, re-downloaded NAM 38 and still no joy.

What is happening is a whole lot of nothing, the computer tries to load the installation of "NetworkAddonMod_Setup_Version38.jar" and nothing then happens.  I am not sure what is going on. 

It must be settings within in Windows 10 pro that I do not understand that somehow not allowing Java from Oracle load the NAM 38 Installation file. 

[deanva]

Did you run the Java Runtime Environment included in the NAM 38? Also the NT Core patch? Without the first one the NAM installer will not work.

[APSMS]

I am truly at a loose; before, when I downloaded from the java website, the "coffee cup" icon showed up but again, nothing happens, the NAM Installation does not execute or start.

Either my Windows 10 pro was not installed correctly or my virus scanner (Norton 360) is preventing all from working like they should.  SC4 Deluxe works and loads fine with NAM 36 only. 

Personally I would ditch the antivirus if possible; I've never found them useful in the slightest. Every time the family PC has become infected with a virus, it was while antivirus software was running, and trying to run the software, be it Norton or McAfee, failed to find any of the malware causing the PC harm (they sometimes found lots of stuff but were either unable to remove said software or removing said software/programs/code did not solve the problem).

That being said, if you cannot remove the antivirus for one reason or another, I recommend you try adding the NAM Installation folder, and/or the .jar executable itself, to Norton's whitelist on your PC. Also check the Setup file's properties and make sure that Windows hasn't blocked it either for being from an internet source (under the file attribute check boxes, if it's blocked, there will be a note from Windows and an "Unblock" button, otherwise nothing except the hidden/archive/Advanced checkboxes). Make sure that you check the box to unblock the file (if it is), click OK, and then reopen the properties to make sure it stuck.

I would also recommend adding the "Take Ownership" option to your context menu. This is a default Windows action, enabled with a script as a sort of registry edit (for automation) that makes the current user the admin owner of the folder rather than the nebulous PC entity; this can help when trying to install some programs, but also if you have to make changes to files located in the "Windows/System32" or "Program Files" folders, it will make the process less tedious by recognizing that the current user owns the files/folders being changed. I don't recommend doing this to large directories, but it can help with specific files/folders, like, say, your Program Files location SC4 Plugins folder (for stuff like the DAMN installation and updates thereafter, for instance).

Take Ownership

FWIW, I don't believe I needed to install the NT Core patch first either. I don't recall if the NAM Installer checks anymore (I don't think it does); in either case if it did the NAM Installer would tell you upon running that it was needed; right now I think all it has is a reminder to make sure that it's done. My game was running really poorly until I reinstalled the patch, but this is something that can be done at any time, not as a preamble to installing the NAM.

It shouldn't really be necessary, but I think we are also assuming that you have already tried the "Run as Administrator" option in the right-click (Context) menu?