Comments on: Why Don’t the Cars Work Quite Right in Replay?

By: Anton

Anton — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 04:43:07 +0000

Why remembering the original navigation decisions? If you're rewinding, all you should have to do is drive forward the standard algorithm, but on the left lane, and with the car objects reversed! UK would be different… 🙂

(easier to say than to implement I guess, but just in case…)

By: vonhinx

vonhinx — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 04:29:00 +0000

Can't cars be made independent from replay mode? As in generated and moved like in a normal flight. I guess you must have considered that already.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 15:42:47 +0000

I'd guess the priority value is the time when the car will reach the end of its stretch. Just put all your cars in the structure, and look at the head of the structure to see if any need to do stuff.

By: Steven

Steven — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 12:01:25 +0000

Oh, I'm still in the unabused happy campers comfort zone. I never noticed the halted cars. I will now and start annoy myself tremendously when I see it... ;)

About the priority queue, I suspect you use the (speed*time) as the priority value? This way you can pop the cars that need to be "transferred" to next stretch of the road more easily from the list.

By: Benjamin Supnik

Benjamin Supnik — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 11:42:51 +0000

You're going to have to trust that we picked the path of least total abuse by users, which, as you have demonstrated, is _not_ the path of _no_ abuse by users. :-) :-)

One more key point: replay and pause in the sim are inherently tied together...so no replay also means no pause, which _really_ makes people crazy. That is, they hit pause and stuff is still "going".

By: Steven

Steven — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 11:39:07 +0000

Point taken.

But I still want to nag you a bit :)

In the current implementation of the cars you have "goldfish memory" issue, with the visual anomaly of the halted cars, whereas if you'd implement no back tracing capability in cars you could simply say it's a feature, no bug. Still people would complain, but I imagine thats what people do.

I view cars as (essential) visual fluff, like the smoke particles from the smokestacks, or background noise. I looks like you created yourself a problem where there shouldn't be one. However I do not implement multi platform flightsims for a living so I am hardly an expert, just an interested bystander.

Steven.

By: Benjamin Supnik

Benjamin Supnik — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 10:34:02 +0000

People notice – see the first part of the post re: getting bug reports no matter what.

By: Steven

Steven — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 05:54:28 +0000

Why do you even bother to give cars replay capability?

IMHO a few notice and even less complain when the cars are not set back.

The place where it would be noticed is on airports which have all kinds of utility vehicles running around.