NAM Issues Thread - PLEASE POST YOUR NAM QUESTIONS AND PROBLEMS HERE

[Tyberius06]

Unless I'm missing something, Hybrid Rail and HSR don't seem to connect...

I can't drag roads out of the single-tile roundabouts, but I can drag streets out of both. I think it might be to do with LHD but that's my best guess. Roads are strictly forbidden, it seems.

You can connect the GHSR with the Hybrid Rail. It won't transform nicely, just like on your image one is ending the other is starting, but both UDI and automata can pass through on the transition. In UDI mode you would see a slight elevation on the engines/cars when they pass the transition. This is due to the different height (of the GHSR). I tested automata, UDI and traffic routing on this transition it's perfectly funtional.
I'm not sure if there is any other GHSR-HRW transition planned, since HRW supposed to be a mediator between RRW and the future RHSR.

About the roundabouts. On the RoadxRoad and StreetxSTreet T and + intersection you can use the Rail tool by clicking onto intersection, which will give you the single tile roundabout. The menu flex items only support the Street-Road transitions.

- Tyberius

[Wiimeiser]

So I'm guessing the Road Roundabout isn't working correctly?

So HSR will be getting an overhaul... If only Monorail and HSR were at the top of the menu... And Monorail doesn't even have a hotkey... Am I the only person bothered by the fact that the El-Rail gets a hotkey while no other transit station does? (Besides the ferries, but they're basically a whole network unto themselves)

[Terring7]

There is no hotkey for the monorail at all. The picture below has most of the hotkeys of the game.



Yes, some hotkeys are missing, like the key 6 for the closest zoom level. However there is a mod that shows the keyboard shortcuts at the menus during the game as a quick reminder, and you can get it from here.

[Tyberius06]

So I'm guessing the Road Roundabout isn't working correctly?

So HSR will be getting an overhaul... If only Monorail and HSR were at the top of the menu... And Monorail doesn't even have a hotkey... Am I the only person bothered by the fact that the El-Rail gets a hotkey while no other transit station does? (Besides the ferries, but they're basically a whole network unto themselves)

Ok, I can confirm, that on LHD set-up the singletile roundabout FLEX pieces are not working as they should be. They are perfectly fine with RHD set-up, though. There were plans for readjusting the menu icons and the base items like El-rail, Monorail, Rail would go to the top of the menu. Eventually it will happen. Sooner or later.
The hotkeys are base game related features and NOT NAM.
Sadly there is no hotkey for Monorail, Dirtroad/RHW and OWR. CasperVG was experimenting with DLL based hotkeys before RL has hit him hard, but as far as I know he didn't manage to get them work. These 3 would be essential, but there are some hardcoded stuffs in the game exe which prevents these stuffs.
I would be happy if these networks had hotkeys, since I'm mostly using them all the time instead of clicking always in the menu.

[Wiimeiser]

Then would it be possible to change the order for the Monorail and HSR buttons? Or are those hardcoded too? I don't want to have to modify 200-odd lots just to change one value...

[Tarkus]

The current menu button system ordering is, IMHO, a trainwreck--particularly the Rail and Misc Transit menus.  The actual base network tools are buried about 20 items deep in some cases, and those should near or at the top.  It's on my list of things to investigate further.  There is an "Item Order" property in the icon exemplars that does handle this,  Given that some of these things that are on the menu (particularly stations) were non-NAM items that were added in during the Monolithic Era and have conflicting Item Order values, it's going to take some effort (and possibly some trial and error) to straighten the mess out.

The current HSR is basically "dead plugin walking".  It's received no real updates since 2009 (aside from crosslinkage with the RHW and NWM), and has been planned to be replaced with RealHSR (RHSR) for quite some time now.

I'll also note that as the long-term "FLEXification" efforts cover more items and go further into effect, it'll likely result in the option to have fewer menu buttons, for those willing to do away with the Legacy Puzzle Pieces.

-Alex

[Wiimeiser]

I know a lot of PEG stuff appears right at the top for some reason, as do some old viaduct pieces...

[Andreas]

Usually, the Item Order starts with 0x00000000 for the topmost icon, but you can also add "negative" values that start with 0xFFFF.... or something. I guess that's what PEG used to move some of his work to the top of the menu, even overriding the Maxis stuff.

[matias93]

has anybody else have had problems with MHO after installing NAM 38? The first time I did I didn't find the entry on the installer, so not getting it was reasonable, but I reinstalled putting attention on it, and still doesn't appear. Also, some additional pieces for the conventional MHW don't appear either.

[Synthael]

Hello guys, thanks for keeping this wonderful masterpiece alive 

After 5 years I decided it was a good time to update the NAM (played the same region with old plugins, just copy-pasted to new installation due to windows or some other stuff) after some instabilities with RHW intersections were annoying me a bit xD

After update, due to having to rebuild some of the bridges, I noticed RHW-6S bridges have to be dragged the opposite way traffic is going through them to be oriented correctly (verified it using drawpaths cheat).

I'm using Origin version (just upgraded my old copy through customer support) with LHD traffic and Euro textures (more-less full NAM installation with custom controller).

[Tyberius06]

has anybody else have had problems with MHO after installing NAM 38? The first time I did I didn't find the entry on the installer, so not getting it was reasonable, but I reinstalled putting attention on it, and still doesn't appear. Also, some additional pieces for the conventional MHW don't appear either.

Hi Matias!

I didn't have any problem having the MHO. For me it's essential, it's one of my favourite additions. I think the problem is with your installation. The MHO can be found under the Maxis Highway option. See attached image. You need to choose the second circle-"box" to have that. With that one it automatically will switch off the original Maxis Highway contents and install the MHO. One of the main reason why the NAM 37 cycle took so long, because there were major changes in the NAM structure. MHO used to be an override network of the Maxis Highway, it was dependent from that, but with NAM 37 MHO is now more or less a separate entity, just like RRW.



- Tyberius

[Wiimeiser]

So, uh, this particular Flex piece is still broken. No idea why, or how the Euro texture (I think) is getting in there, but I think the next step might be either relocating it to a new ID or even just scrapping it outright at this point...

[EdwinFox]

Greetings! 

First, the lore; next, the specs & details. Word effects for text skimming.

It's been a while (almost a decade actually) since I last played SC and found out the NAM, that precious gem of urban planning. I can't recall which version was it back then, but I do remember I played it on a Windows® and smooth it went, out of the box.

For me, SC4+NAM is the real spiritual successor of the original SimCity franchise.

So, this week I decided to get back to SimCity! I got the GoG copy in Linux, slapped it into a Wine32 prefix built in PlayOnLinux (POL) and tested it before installing NAM. It worked pretty fine. Then, I installed NAM and I read thoroughfuly all the installation guide, FAQ, and other instructions available on how to make it run. I followed every step and got no installation errors during the process. I couldn't run 4gb_patch.exe though, Wine refuses to run it either native or under (POL).

The game loaded to the Region screen, but after clicking on any plot (of every size) the game goes to the plot loading screen; after about 30 seconds, the loading message changes a couple times and then the game idles/freezes: the reading process halts at 8% memory processing, taking 192 bytes of memory, and the music goes on a 4-5sec loop.

I debugged the process in POL. Despite still running but apparently frozen, the POL debug window displays no errors, nor bugs, neither crash.

One of the possible solutions I found on the internet was to change the default simcity 4/plugins folder from the native home/user/SimCity 4/Plugins to a similar path under the wine prefix SimCity was installed. I tried that, but the problem remained.

What could be causing the NAM to freeze the game session? Did I miss something in the guide, or is there some other step for Linux users?

Thanks for your support (and your existence! It cheers me up to see how still wide and active are the SC and NAM communities ) 
---------------------------------------

Specs & Details

Details:
PROBLEM => NAM idles/freezes up SC4 @ loading plot after 30 sec
PROCESSING => 8%
MEMORY => 192 bytes
GAME => GoG version


OS
Linux Mint 19 Tara 64bit
Kernel Linux 4.15.0-20-generic x86-64
MATE 1.20.1
Wine 5.16

PC
Intel i5-4670K 3.40GHz x4
8Gb RAM

[Tarkus]

So, uh, this particular Flex piece is still broken. No idea why, or how the Euro texture (I think) is getting in there, but I think the next step might be either relocating it to a new ID or even just scrapping it outright at this point...

It appears to be limited to the US LHD support file for the RHW--it's a remnant of the earlier IID assignment issues that once existed with that piece.  The US RHD, EU RHD, and EU LHD versions are all fine.  I'm fairly sure I fixed that one at one point with US LHD as well, but it appears my fixes didn't make it into the file (the date on it appears to be June 22nd, so that's before NAM 37 was released).

Here is a full-on replacement for that file.  It'll replace the version that's in Network Addon Mod\7_Texture and Drive Side Support\US_LeftSide.

EdwinFox, welcome to SC4 Devotion, and thanks for the kind words!  Unfortunately, we're not all that fluent with the process of running the NAM on Linux (which, per our last user poll, actually has a larger segment of the NAM userbase than macOS does).  I have heard of some other users having difficulty with getting the 4GB/Large Address Aware support in place on Linux, but have read/heard differing solutions.

I did find a recent thread over at WineHQ on the topic.  Some folks on there seem to be using Proton, others have set WINE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE=1 as an environmental variable (which apparently causes Wine to read all 32-bit Windows applications as being Large Address Aware).

Hope that at least provides a good starting point--if you're able to get things working solidly from there, we can incorporate the findings into the next revision of our documentation, and possibly into a future revision of our installer.

-Alex

[EdwinFox]

So, uh, this particular Flex piece is still broken. No idea why, or how the Euro texture (I think) is getting in there, but I think the next step might be either relocating it to a new ID or even just scrapping it outright at this point...

It appears to be limited to the US LHD support file for the RHW--it's a remnant of the earlier IID assignment issues that once existed with that piece.  The US RHD, EU RHD, and EU LHD versions are all fine.  I'm fairly sure I fixed that one at one point with US LHD as well, but it appears my fixes didn't make it into the file (the date on it appears to be June 22nd, so that's before NAM 37 was released).

Here is a full-on replacement for that file.  It'll replace the version that's in Network Addon Mod\7_Texture and Drive Side Support\US_LeftSide.

EdwinFox, welcome to SC4 Devotion, and thanks for the kind words!  Unfortunately, we're not all that fluent with the process of running the NAM on Linux (which, per our last user poll, actually has a larger segment of the NAM userbase than macOS does).  I have heard of some other users having difficulty with getting the 4GB/Large Address Aware support in place on Linux, but have read/heard differing solutions.

I did find a recent thread over at WineHQ on the topic.  Some folks on there seem to be using Proton, others have set WINE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE=1 as an environmental variable (which apparently causes Wine to read all 32-bit Windows applications as being Large Address Aware).

Hope that at least provides a good starting point--if you're able to get things working solidly from there, we can incorporate the findings into the next revision of our documentation, and possibly into a future revision of our installer.

-Alex

Thanks for the swift reply! Since the problem seemed to be the patch, I just got an old toaster running XP and got the exec updated there. And it worked! 

Now, I have another question regarding that old bug that makes SC4 crash when handling with NAM tiles over other tiles. That's something I ran into a long time ago. Is that fixed in NAM38? Or, in case it isn't fixed yet, is there a way to prevent the game from crashing?

[mgb204]

Now, I have another question regarding that old bug that makes SC4 crash when handling with NAM tiles over other tiles. That's something I ran into a long time ago. Is that fixed in NAM38? Or, in case it isn't fixed yet, is there a way to prevent the game from crashing?

Actually this was never a NAM issue, rather a bug left behind in the game's code. We thought it could never be fixed, but Simmaster07 came along and did just that, one small problem, it's a .dll based mod and you'll need to somehow get Linux to handle that. For Windows users the fix is native, if it's inside Plugins (best the subfolder in the Install DIR for .dlls), a method for Mac users, the "MacInjector" was created to enable .dlls to be used with the Mac version of SC4. I've honestly no idea specifically what you need to do, but it figures since you're running the Windows version through an emulator, it may just work with Wine or whatever you are using.

You might want to take a look over here.

[Terring7]

Hmm, I have a questions about FLUPs. Can we use them to build city connections? I'm trying to build an underground connection by road but the puzzle pieces can't be placed on top of the road connection. Do I miss something?

[Tyberius06]

Hmm, I have a questions about FLUPs. Can we use them to build city connections? I'm trying to build an underground connection by road but the puzzle pieces can't be placed on top of the road connection. Do I miss something?

Hi Terring7,

RHW DisConnector is your new best friend. Make a regular road NC (city connection), then use the DC on the last tile. The arrow will remain, but you will be able to place FLUP puzzle piece on the top of the last tile.
See the picture below for functionality.



I hope it helps!

- Tyberius

[Terring7]

It works! Thank you very much

[Wiimeiser]

1-tile X 3-tile FTLs are broken, the outer parts of the intersection are mirrored. This isn't just the visuals, either, paths are affected, rendering them unusable. Going by the attached image, they seem to be rotated/swapped around.