aciddog.co.uk

Ok well computers are busy a lot at the moment processing maps which means lots of time to write nonsense to the universe. Lucky you.

I realised the other day that one of the things I missed from TestDriveUnlimited was the traffic. TDU got the trsaffic spot on, people indicate left and turn right, run into each other and do all sorts of random crap. Whilst I don't hope to emulate quite that degree of intricacy, I was hoping we could get a few more cars buzzing around the place on DR2. I figure by limiting the types of cars the AI can drive we might be able to create a traffic-type scenario.

So after a lot of defining centre lines and stuff we've now got cars heading round the inner ring to the link road, down there to the outer, do a lap of the outer and then back up the link road. It can get interesting when two cars meet on the link road since there's only space for one and it tends to end with one ramming the other off the side.

This was basically a test of runinng traffic over long laps and it worked so it seems that there's no reason why the traffic couldn't soon be heading over the bridge and back, and perhaps also round the other way using the other lane - currently they only go round right so the other lane is always free.

The pit is now located on the outer ring at a location which seems pretty central and easy to get to and should mean the ability to run longer sessions on the outer ring and beyond. Just popping in to get fresh rubber before hitting the gotthard pass is now a doddle ;D. If you hit esc you go back to the regular pit location. In effect this extents the range of in-game missions and since tyre-wear was a problem on the mountain runs this should be a big help.

In my (admittedly limited) experience with drifting the pit is hardly ever used so this takes something normally useless and turns it into something super useful. xD

If we could have more than one pit we could have levels hundreds of kilometers in size.

Since this now involves specific AI settings I've temporarily repurposed OD5 to run only DR2 with AIs. I'm trying to find a balance between having enough cars on the track vs fps/server slowdown and also see whcih types of cars survive the longest on their own.

At the moment for as-yet-unknown reasons some cars banzai off the cliff but now with the pits moved they seem to make their way across the desert to the pits, at which point they resume a normal lap. Go Figure!

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