23 Years After SimCity 4's Release, 'Eternal Commuter' Bug Finally Fixed

"It began life just a year after SimCity 4's 2003 launch," writes the blog PCGamesN. "Now, over 20 years later, it's still going strong with the arrival of Network Addon Mod update 50." The SimCity 4 Network Addon Mod, or simply 'NAM' among the community, has long been a de facto recommendation to anyone looking to pick up the classic city builder. It's a comprehensive overhaul to the game's transportation and infrastructure networks that combines key fixes with a vast set of additional build pieces such as overpasses, intersections, on-ramps, roundabouts, and so on.... [Y]ou'll be able to place down elements adjacent to one another that might previously have needed a one-tile gap between them. Streets can be dragged diagonally, slope tolerances have been improved, and you can build tunnels with the street network.

The new version also includes a fix for the 'Eternal Commuter Loop' bug, which might sound fairly innocuous if you're not deep in the weeds. In actuality, it's a 23-year-long frustration that has plagued modders ever since launch. Essentially, it's a problem with the regional pathfinding across city boundaries in certain layouts, causing your Sims to bounce from location to location in search of work without actually taking up a job in any of them. Your zone demand is ruined, traffic builds to unsustainable levels, and the economy falls to pieces before your very eyes. Until now, the only real solution was to simply avoid building layouts that gave your commuters the chance to loop between locations. Now, by blocking specific neighbor-to-neighbor routes while allowing the rest to run as normal, the problem has been resolved...

Equally impressively, the mandatory implementation of the DLL has reduced the size of the NAM codebase "by almost 90% and by more than ten million lines, making it easier to maintain and reducing the chance of bugs."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Striek for sharing the news.

Re:

[cruff]

Wikipedia says that SimCity 4 was release in January 2003.

macOs no more?

[Tomahawk]

"Note: NAM 50 is the first to rely on the NAM DLL. As such, this release is incompatible with the macOS editions of the game, and only compatible with the digital Windows edition."

Re:

[drinkypoo]

There is a light version of the patch that only does fixes. If you want all of the content you will have to run Windows, or run the Windows version in some kind of VM. You can use protontricks or steamtinkerlaunch to install the provided openjdk and the required windows runtime and then run the jarfile installer, and copy the 4gb patch into the Apps directory alongside the game executable and run

wine 4gb_patch.exe "SimCity 4.exe"

To install the 4GB patch to a clean install.

I am running SC4 in dwproton.

Spanning Tree?

[synthe]

So is this just the mod developers discovering and implementing Spanning Tree Protocol that has existed since 1985 to prevent traffic loops on Ethernet networks?

Still going!

[sound+vision]

Glad to see someone's still working on improving this game. It's one of them that still deserve attention still after 20 years.

In my opinion it's the ultimate iteration of SimCity, and close to the peak of the genre. It must have been over 100 hours that I put into the game. Cities: Skylines might beat it, but not by much.

I just recently threw out the old CRT I used to play it on. I was still holding onto the 4:3 display partly thinking of this game. Ended up needing the space more.