Which traffic mod should I use?

[Assur]

I know, this question gets asked a lot and I want to thank all modders of all traffic-mods for their dedication and hard work. But the plethora of different traffic-mods, their development (or lack thereof) and the different feautres really confuses me. Doesn't help, that I didn't follow most of the discussions here either.


As far as I can tell, right now, there are mostly these mods on steam:

Traffic Manager+Impreved AI:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=498363759&searchtext=traffic

This is the one I used so far. Haven't had much of an performance issue and it worked fine. But since there is a lot of new stuff around, I just want to see, if it is still the right choice for me.

Traffic++ V2
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=626024868&searchtext=traffic

Seems to be developed quite fast, but apperantly has some problems with performance. I'm running an Phenom X4 955 CPU with 8Gb of ram and don't plan on upgrading any time soon. I guess the perfomance hit would be quite substantial?

Traffic Manager Presidente Edition:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=583429740&searchtext=traffic

I've heard that ohne mentioned quite a lot in recent times. As far as I can tell, it also allows for changing traffic-lights. A feature Traffic++ v2 seems to lack. How is the traffic AI? Better, worse than Traffic++ v2 or is there no difference?

And how does the Network Extension Mod fit into these mods?

Oh, and I don't have a problem with starting a new city. Usually I play till about 70k-90k population and than start anew.

Edit: And are the [ARIS] Enhanced Hearses and Garbage Truck mods still necessary?

 

[Turjan]

In principle, I have no problems with making bigger cities (400k inhabitants) and only vanilla roads and vanilla traffic AI.

As you ask about NExt, that one's actually very neat, as it gives you road options that make dealing with traffic much easier. Keep in mind that it will use lots of RAM if you overdo it. It's fully modular though, so you can just pick the highlights (national roads, avenues with turning lanes and without traffic lights, alternate lane numbers on highways) that really help with traffic. I don't need any traffic mod when I use NExt. Some of the newer NExt roads came from the original Traffic++ and only function properly with the new version of that mod, so use those only if you intend to use T++v2.

Traffic++ never ran properly on my rig (it's an i5). Not sure how the new version runs.

I hear nothing but good things about Traffic Manager President Edition. I don't use it myself as I solve issues via road layout. I had been using the original version, but found it to be unnecessary. I never thought that the ARIS mods were necessary.

 

[Michaelschort]

Network Extensions just adds more roads to the game. Traffic Manager and T++ are helping you with traffic management.
I run with NeExt & Traffic Manager President Edition, and it's working absolutely fine on my 100.000+ City. President Edition does have a lot of AI improvements, where most of them are seperately configurable.
I had installed Traffic++ v.1 on an older City and it was slowing down the Simulation a lot. Even with an i7. But the Network Extensions Team had recoded a lot of the T++ code to make it run better, and use less recources. So you could give it a try. as far as i know T++ and Traffic Manager are Compatible with each other.

 

[Turjan]

Network Extensions just adds more roads to the game. Traffic Manager and T++ are helping you with traffic management.

My post was exactly about the point that adding more kinds of roads helps tremendously with traffic management. In fact, using these different kind of roads makes traffic mods unnecessary, as you can just make the vanilla traffic AI work this way.

That doesn't mean those mods won't give you a few more tricks to use, but if your game performance isn't great, there are different ways to achieve the goal.

 

[Vimes]

I have started using the Traffic Manager PE edition mod along with the Network Extensions mod. The number of additional roads the latter adds might be enough to not need the TMPE mod but perhaps the "better" AI might be useful...? I did use the Toggle Traffic Lights mod but as that capability is built into the TMPE mod I do not need that anymore. I can't use the "beta" road options as I use the TMPE as my road mod and not the Traffic++ V2.

There is also an updated traffic report tool which I use.

I have started to look / try the "Rush Hour" mod and whilst it is not just a traffic mod what it does seems to have implications on the volume of traffic and the time of day that the traffic builds up, as well as other features.

However, probably due to me not fully understanding the RH mod, I have found that my RCI demands do not work as I would expect them to when playing a game over the vanilla type I'm used to and in fact I'm struggling to get much C and I demand to appear at all. I might be tempted to leave that one for now, although I do like the better use of car parks and the idea behind the mod.

 

[Assur]

Thank you all for the responses. I'm sorry that I didn't answer earlier, but real life hit me hard this last few weeks and I simply forgot that I had an ongoing topic here. I think I'm going to use TMPE and see how it works.

@Vimes: Thanks for the hint for Traffic Report. Do you mean Traffic Report 2.0, this one I'm already using. Or Directional Traffic Report Tool by fadster (http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=500131810)

 

[Vimes]

Yup indeed the Traffic Report Tool is the one I use

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=500131810

 

[Assur]

Thanks, I will give it a try.