New Discovery on Car Spawner Speeds

LAST EDITED ON Feb-15-03 AT 03:35 PM (EDT)

Fed up with slow-moving traffic on your highways?Then I've got good news for you. Even though the Route Editor limits car spawner speeds to 25.0 "min/sec" (whatever that is), you can set this value as high as you want by hacking your world files!Open any uncompressed world file and look for car spawner entries. They should look something like this:CarSpawner (
UiD ( 299 )
CarFrequency ( 20 )
CarAvSpeed ( 40 )
TrItemId ( 1 1081 )
TrItemId ( 1 1082 )
StaticFlags ( 00000100 )
Position ( -149.18 296.232 -497.242 )
QDirection ( 0 0 0 1 )
VDbId ( 4294967295 )The "CarFrequency" parameter is the average time (in seconds) between cars, and "CarAvSpeed" is the average speed (the aforementioned "min/sec" value).Using a value of 40 for CarAvSpeed, I was able to achieve a mix of speeds ranging from 45-60 mph, with the occasional speed demon doing about 90. In other words, just about right for a typical 2-lane state highway.Here are my suggestions for speed settings:20-25: City streets (a value of 25 is approximately 30 mph)
30: Major city streets, rural roads
35: Major rural roads
40: State highways
45: InterstatesEven though RE limits you to 60 seconds (max) between cars, I've been able to increase this by hacking the world files. I've used values up to 100 with no problems.Happy simming!Bruce Bridges

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RE: New Discovery on Car Spawner Speeds, brucek, Feb-15-03, 03:54 PM, (1) RE: New Discovery on Car Spawner Speeds, Railfan727, Feb-15-03, 06:23 PM, (5) RE: New Discovery on Car Spawner Speeds, brucek, Feb-15-03, 11:48 PM, (8) RE: New Discovery on Car Spawner Speeds, Railfan727, Feb-16-03, 09:25 AM, (9) RE: New Discovery on Car Spawner Speeds, Coonskin, Feb-15-03, 05:52 PM, (2) RE: New Discovery on Car Spawner Speeds, Railfan727, Feb-15-03, 06:04 PM, (3) RE: New Discovery on Car Spawner Speeds, Coonskin, Feb-15-03, 06:16 PM, (4) RE: New Discovery on Car Spawner Speeds, METRAUP, Feb-15-03, 06:28 PM, (6) RE: New Discovery on Car Spawner Speeds, heffed, Feb-15-03, 09:39 PM, (7)

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Quote:- Even though the Route Editor limits car spawner speeds to 25.0 "min/sec" (whatever that is),...."It's 25 metres per second!As 1 m/s = 2.237 mph, then 25 m/s = 55.925 mph.Which just happens to be pretty close to the posted highway speed limit (100kph) in this part of the world. (Freeways are 110 kph).Bruce.

AustRail

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Unfortunately, the cars don't move at the speed indicated; 25 m/s results in a maximum vehicle speed of roughly 30 mph.

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Did you time them over a known length of road?Bruce.

AustRail

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I set up spawners on roads parallel to the track, and ran a train to match the speed of the cars. I made several trials to get a good estimate of the vehicle speeds. With a setting of 40, most of the cars were moving between 45 and 60 mph, with the occasional speeder.

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Hi Bruce,Neat find. Thanks for sharing.Question: Are we only allowed ONE choice on speed/spacing for ALL spawners?If so, I'll need to go with a rural setting and just let the traffic on the one interstate scene be moving a bit slow.Andre Andre

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You can set each spawner individually. You can even have the left lane moving faster than the right if you want.

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Excellent! Thanks for the input.I've yet to reach the point that I'm placing spawners, so I try to read all the posts about them. Guess it's only the traffic MIX that we're stuck with system wide.Andre

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Does this mean you could have different carspawners for different tiles? Could you make a file called carspawner2 with a different assortment of cars and then change the world file to carspawner2?Thanks!
METRAUP

The "Metra Man" David Kuntz, 14 year old Simmist
Formerly davidpagesweb

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I'm assuming it's just a glitch, but I've seen some cars moving pretty fast. Scale speeds of over 100mph if I was to guess.-Jeff

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