Stop "Game Changes" That arent major from cancelling my run

[Some newbie driver]

The off-line jobs shouldn't be affected by a relocation of a company in the map. The job is a link between source company, cargo and destination company. Not physical coordinates are involved in that. If the company change location (let's say, a city rebuilt) that should be irrelevant from the perspective of the job completion. Jobs could be affected if the destination yard would disappear; but that's not going to happen, companies aren't removed from the game.

The main problem with the map is that our truck is located over a road sector that becomes changed on that update. That could potentially end in lots of troubles. That's why the forced teleport.

About the possibility to let users chose; from my experience is a VERY BAD idea. You could know what you do, plykkegaard could know it too, lots of people in this forum could also. Millions of players the game has don't have idea at all of what those options could mean and could perfectly chose the wrong one. That not to mention the habit ANY average user has to close any warning pop-up without even read it (still less gave time his brain to understand it). The safeguard should remain forced by developers, that's how safeguards should always work.

It's up to SCS if they want to spent a little extra time analyzing if an update really requires the safeguard instead of just let the default option to be always applied.

Regards

[Reinhard]

To check it sector-wise is possible, but not needed. With every game start, it is checked if any road segment or any traffic related prefab has changed.

Move a road segments node one centimeter, in the map editor, and the game will recompute all cached navigational data. At that point, the truck position could be tested. If the location were the truck/trailer was left isn't changed, the position is save by definition.

I understand your concern about user choice, but I don't think it is really as dramatic. If things go bad, it is always an option to use the last save, again. This is also disruptive, but I prefer one of this kind over 99.

[plykkegaard]

I understand your concern about user choice, but I don't think it is really as dramatic

It's not, it's actually worse, much worse
Users make you world go around, but always in a different direction than you have anticipated

[Some newbie driver]

Road sectors aren't moved Reinhard. Any change on the road creates a new unique ID for it (that's why any change they made marks them as unexplored). That's why the check of the truck position becomes problematic.

It could be done? Yes. It will require a lot more code to do it also (and probably more manual procedures done by mappers, what can be problematic); what it means more points of failure on something delicate (you know for sure how prone is the save game to get corrupted when people mess with the map). I suppose SCS decided time ago to go extreme to avoid any problem. That's why I don't mind the teleport itself; but I would prefer they decide to change it to a nearest workshop (so, we can resume mostly our route) instead to our assigned garage (that could be in the other extreme of the map). And then the cancellation job policy could be thinked twice too.

About user choices; I've had lots of bad experiences with users being blatantly reckless with things way more important and critical than the save of a game. I could sure you that to give us the option to chose is equal to tens of thousands of complains, claims and problems thrown to SCS every single update. And no, last save is no option here. Last save is on previous version, that means to downgrade the game first. And then we return of what I said earlier: that's not something that the average user should had to deal with. You probably had see the "knowledge level" of lots of users that end arriving here in search of help. It's perfectly normal that a lot of players don't have any idea of how to start solving a problem that ultimately had been caused by a game update. To ask your customers to make a chose for which they have no idea how to answer is a bad idea; I can sure you that. Too many years experiencing the result of that kind of bad ideas.

There's times where devs must be tyrants, and that's one of those. They know how they work the game, they know what can be safe to do in those cases. What we can request them is to reconsider if they had to be so much extreme in the safeguard chosen.

Regards

[Reinhard]

Road sectors aren't moved Reinhard. Any change on the road creates a new unique ID for it (that's why any change they made marks them as unexplored). That's why the check of the truck position becomes problematic.

Sorry, but this is not true. If you move road nodes around, for example to make some bends less curvy, the road segments will still be shown as explored, and the road segments UIDs will stay the same.

And even if that was not the case: it doesn't really matter. Even when two or three cities are reworked with an update, and those segments are indeed mostly new, 99% percent of the map wasn't changed. And if a trucks stays there in the last save, the position is no problem. This could be checked, and in most cases the test result would be: Okay, fine, no problem.

Of course I know no internals of current decision making when a reset happens. But I'm confident this matter could be improved. And people who think that this is annoying, and in many cases likely to be unnecessary, like I do, of course want that to be improved.

[johnporter29]

I too wish they could update the game without the need to cancel the job that your actually doing. I was at the tail end of a 3,000+ Km job when the game updated yesterday which got wiped out by the update.

There is no way of preventing the game from updating via Steam

[plykkegaard]

You can set update hours to zero for all games, but is a bit of a hazzle and a mess to remember

[Whiskeyomega]

Well I didnt know about the fixes. The Log didnt mention them at the time in announcements. Guess im alright with it for fixes.

[plykkegaard]

Oh, update log
viewtopic.php?f=41&t=294801&start=2670#p1546468

[Some newbie driver]

Sorry, but this is not true. If you move road nodes around, for example to make some bends less curvy, the road segments will still be shown as explored, and the road segments UIDs will stay the same.

OK, my fault here. I always understood that any change in the layout forced a new sector ID. Point is that isn't even the major problem. The part of the ID, even if it would change, is the "easiest" to solve (just the one prone to manual errors during design phase).

But the part of placing our vehicle over the surface (that must be done automatically on load time for anyone of us, because it can't be foreseen) is the tricky part that no matter how good the code could be, it can always cause problems.

I've my truck placed in coordinates X,Y,Z on a road sector when I log out. Next time I log in, an update changes that sector to make the bends less curvy (as you said as example). As a result, now the coordinate X,Y,Z on that sector are out of the road, 2 meters above in the air and with a tree going through the truck (the coordinates are always regarding the game world, not the piece of road; if the road moves, we don't move with it). More than two years ago a weird bug in the truck placement when I loaded the game make my truck fly away all the yard of the hotel where I was parked, completely breaking my truck (chassis and engine reached 100%) and forcing me to cancel the job I was in the middle. And it doesn't even was due a map change; the game just failed to place my truck in the correct position (I appeared clipped with an AI parked truck). Go imagine if I appear someday flying and impaled in a tree. It has not to be something that drastic even; it's enough the road has moved slightly and now out truck appears where the guardrail is. The problem would be the same in any case.

The only way I can think to avoid something like that is that every place would have a "safeguard spot" where we will appear when loading into the game, no matter the kind of truck driving (so the safe spot should consider space enough from bobtailing a 4x2 to the longest combo that could be driven in ATS). And in the case of roads, one of those spots should be defined per direction at least. So, whenever we will be on log out, we could be re-placed on a safe spot when log in after an update. But that means to do that work for every single independent piece of drivable surface of the game. I doubt they want to loose the manpower to do something like that.

That's why I said I understand the teleport part. I don't understand that I need to be teleport to the assigned garage. They have already done the work of define that safe spot; but had done it only on garages. Point is, there's no need then that the teleport send me to my assigned garage in the other extreme of the map. It could had sent me to the nearest garage (I mentioned workshops because there's cities that had those but not garages; so the teleport could be to a nearest part in some cases; but is a secondary consideration). They can do already that change and don't randomly send us back to the other extreme of the map.

A second question then would be if the jobs should had to be cancelled anyway or could be continued (at least in some scenarios). Of course now they have to be cancelled because the teleport can potentially sent us more than 4.000km of where we should be to continue them. If they change the way they approach the teleport; they can consider also if they change the approach about job cancellation.

Regards