I've been plugging away at Simcity 4 for about a month. It started as a project to clean up my plugins collection and create sets of plugins whose contents are somewhat thematically related.
Having mostly completing that I moved on to testing the game's behaviour on a massive map I had created last winter. At one point I ran a rail line along the side of a canyon that treks through several cities. Once I cleared the canyon I decided that I wanted the tracks to cross over to the other shore. Given the relatively tight space I was working in I decided to build a diagonal bridge. That's where I ran into some difficulty as I wasn't able to build the bridge at the desired location. So I decided to play around with and experiment with the tool I was using for this task, the Network Addon Mod (NAM) Diagonal Bridge Enabler (DBE).
The base version of Simcity 4, and it's updated versions - Rush Hour and Deluxe, don't allow players to build diagonal bridges. The DBE is an ingenious solution where the game mechanics for building bridges are triggered by lowering the water level in a city to the point where no water is visible. In addition, constraints are placed on the building of roads and railroad tracks so that they have to be flat. If they are built over land that is at a lower elevation than their start point then a bridge or retaining wall system is built. The icing on the cake is that these structures are added to roads and railway tracks built in a diagonal orientation on Simcity 4's X/Y axis arranged cities.
The DBE is a relatively old piece of software. If I'm not mistaken, when it was released the NAM was at version 32. Today, the NAM is at version 47. So there is the danger of the DBE not working as intended when it was first released. It would appear, from glancing at some posts in Simcity 4 forums, that it is stable and working as expected.
So...here are a few oddities I've encountered in my experimentation with the NAM and the DBE....
First we have the bridge which, after a bit of mucking about, just couldn't be straightened out. I had attempted to use some DBE components to change the cosmetic appearance of the bridge and messed it up.
Then we have the game confused as to what elevation to lay road at. I had wanted to lengthen the short stubby road and found that the game was going to elevate it by a few metres. I suspect the game was using the elevation of nearby tiles to determine what the elevation of the road extension was going to be.
Then there is this oddity where I tried to build a straight railroad bridge while the DBE was active. Once the DBE's effects are removed, the water level in the city would return to normal levels and the railway bridge would be submerged and overtly unusable. I guess I could label this as "A Bridge Too Low".....
The above oddity is tied to this problem I ran into with the DBE. Railroad track seems to be laid according to the default game parameters instead of those supplied by the DBE. The latest and greatest of the railway system in the NAM seems to ignore the DBE at times. The DBE patch for the NAM railway system is 7 years-old and perhaps something has gone amiss as the NAM evolved into its present form. The shortcoming manisfested itself in this scenario where a diagonal bridge would be drawn out for a road but not for railroad track....
Here, if I were continue extending the road to the other side, the game would build a bridge under it.
I used the same start location when laying railroad track and the game dropped the track to the ocean floor.
