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Aelflaed's Notes regarding portals and spotted flamingoes

portals are usually at values of something-point-five. Whole values are
possible, don't know if it makes any difference. Not that I can see.
Inge's Flamingo shows the position of portal markers, but moving a marker doesn't seem to move the actual portal consistently.

Most / all of my original rotated lots came out with the markers in the
buildable area of the lot, not on the roadway or path. Some of these lots
appeared to be functioning perfectly, except for the service vehicles using the carpool lane and vice versa. After moving the markers into the right places, the lots still function.

Andi's lots had the markers in the right positions parallel to the road, but
some were a long way off the edge of the lot. Don't know why. Maybe so the cars didn't fade out in that ugly way at the edge of the lot? I don't think they do that on Maxis lots, but it's a long time since I used one!

Andi had negative values in some places - one on the RL lots, and two on some of the community lots (by MaryLou?). When I left negative values in my portals, those portals failed to appear on the comm. lot (1x3 vertical) at all.
Andi may have altered the instances (is that possible?) so that 1 - 6 are the
portals, since he stated that 3 - 8 were normally used by Maxis portals, but
none of the Andi/Marylou lots I have been using reflect that. All have the
portals in 1 - 6.

When markers were re-instated on the lots where they were missing, they tended to appear piled up on each other in the back left corner of the lot.

Vehicles don't halt in a consistent spot relative to the appropriate marker. On
different lots, the taxi stops with the rear wheel on the marker (3x1), the
front wheel on the marker (2x1), with the whole car well behind (1x1), or
centred on the marker (2x1). This may be affected by the size of the lot in
question - the lot where the car stops before reaching the marker is a 1x1. Why the middle-sized lot should allow the car to centre on the marker, I dunno. On each single lot, the stopping place is consistent.

I have had pedestrian portals functioning ten squares into the building area,
because that's where the SimPE value was set, although the marker was in the correct place on the footpath.

Moving the markers in-game did alter the SimPE values on the lots, although not always as in the lot just mentioned.

Vehicle portals need to be set right next to the median line on the appropriate side of the street.

Moving the portal markers DID fix the lane chosen by the vehicles to match the Maxis standard. Changing the values alone in SimPE did not.

I haven't yet modded a fresh lot with my latest experiences in mind, but I will. I'm thinking to move the road in SimPE, use the flamingo and moveobjects cheat in-game to fix things up, then go into simPE again to see what happens to the values. At this stage, Inge's flamingo is VERY helpful in checking the portal placement and getting the cars onto the correct lanes, but you'd still probably need to use SimPE to tweak things.


Following are the values for different-sized lots in the orientation

U10 = 04, U11 = 02,

as correct as I can make them. I'm hoping both values and markers in my rotated lots reflect these numbers! Horizontal means the lot is wide along the road frontage, Vertical means the width is towards the back of the lot. (I think this is the same as Marylou's method).

1x1

1 Service Start (1.5, 15.5)
2 Service Stop (6.5, 15.5)
3 Car Start (8.5, 14.5)
4 Car Stop (2.5, 14.5)
5 Pedestrian 1 (8.5, 10.5)
6 Pedestrian 2 (1.5, 10.5)

1x2 (Vertical)

1 Service Start (1.5, 25.5)
2 Service Stop (6.5, 25.5)
3 Car Start (8.5, 24.5)
4 Car Stop (2.5, 24.5)
5 Pedestrian 1 (8.5, 20.5)
6 Pedestrian 2 (1.5, 20.5)

1x3 (Vertical)

1 Service Start (1.5, 35.5)
2 Service Stop (6.5, 35.5)
3 Car Start (8.5, 34.5)
4 Car Stop (2.5, 34.5)
5 Pedestrian 1 (8.5, 30.5)
6 Pedestrian 2 (1.5, 30.5)

2x1 (Horizontal)

1 Service Start (1.5, 15.5)
2 Service Stop (14, 15.5)
3 Car Start (18.5, 14.5)
4 Car Stop (7.5, 14.5)
5 Pedestrian 1 (18.5, 10.5)
6 Pedestrian 2 (1.5, 10.5)

3x1 (Horizontal)

1 Service Start (2.5, 15.5)
2 Service Stop (16.5, 15.5)
3 Car Start (27.5, 14.5)
4 Car Stop (11.5, 14.5)
5 Pedestrian 1 (28.5, 10.5)
6 Pedestrian 2 (1.5, 10.5)

This is doubtless disorganised and incomplete, but maybe it's helpful in some way.