SimCity 4’s mighty Network Addon Mod has finally squashed a 23-year transport bug with its version 50 release.
According to PCGamesN, the SimCity 4 Network Addon Mod, known to players as NAM, has long been the sensible first stop for anyone reinstalling Maxis’s classic city builder. It rebuilds the game’s transport and infrastructure networks with fixes, overpasses, intersections, on-ramps, roundabouts, and other elements that stop cities from looking like spaghetti flung by a drunk planner.
NAM started just a year after SimCity 4 arrived in 2003, which makes its survival a minor miracle in games modding. More than 20 years later, NAM 50 has turned up with a sharper toolkit and a few technical caveats.
The biggest change is that NAM 50 now depends on the NAM DLL, a separate Dynamic Link Library that must be installed alongside it. That gives the modders more room to mess with the game’s innards, although macOS and old disc editions are left out.
The team says override networks are “much more stable,” and players can place some elements together without the old one-tile gap faff. Streets can now be dragged diagonally, slope tolerance has improved and street-network tunnels are part of the fun.
The tastiest fix is for the Eternal Commuter Loop bug, a cursed pathfinding problem across city borders. Sims could bounce between neighbouring cities while looking for work, never taking jobs, which knackered demand, clogged traffic and trashed local economies.
Until now, players had to dodge layouts that allowed commuter loops to form. NAM 50 blocks specific neighbour-to-neighbour routes while leaving the rest of the regional traffic system alone.
The DLL shift has chopped the NAM codebase “by almost 90 per cent and by more than ten million lines, making it easier to maintain and reducing the chance of bugs.” It brings a “huge” cut in city load times and removes the need for the old 4GB RAM patch.
NAM 50 is available now for SimCity 4 Deluxe, or SimCity 4 with the Rush Hour expansion, on digital Windows editions. NAM Lite still works on macOS and older setups, though it lacks the fancy new plumbing.
The NAM team said: “We would like to thank everyone who contributed to testing, feedback, and development of release. We hope you enjoy NAM 50 and the improvements it brings.”
