Are you satisfied with the direction in which the game is developing

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VTXcnME
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Re: Are you satisfied with the direction in which the game is developing

#201 Post by VTXcnME » 07 Dec 2022 19:56

I haven't looked in the editor. But good to know it's all in there.

We already have physics for bumpy roads, I imagine hitting a snowbank to be a magnified version of that. The accumulating snow and the way it'd be moved could be problematic... that I hadn't thought of.
seriousmods wrote: 07 Dec 2022 19:06
The Alaska map doesn't have this problem. The road gradually changes to white as you go north, and by the time you get up into the hills, it could be a full on white out.

The same could apply to the game itself, but for a wider range of areas. Just have it be snowy 100% of the time up in the mountains come winter, and depending on weather, it could be snowing or sunny or cloudy, etc.
So for me, I think of being in San Diego and picking up a load toward Seattle Washington. It starts as rain in southern CA, but there would have to be transitional spaces from rain to snow where the friction coefficient changes and the precipitation changes from rain to snow. There'd be the transition where snow begins accumulating. That's the kind of stuff I think of with applying seasons.
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flight50
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Re: Are you satisfied with the direction in which the game is developing

#202 Post by flight50 » 07 Dec 2022 20:32

Snow must be dynamic........its has to build up. Mods do not work if seasons is to be part of the game. We can't have snow all of a sudden be there. Anything a mod does is static. We can't have that. Iterations is one thing but it also needs to make sense....gradual sense. Snow needs to work like dirt on trucks.........how every that works out when it comes. It must pile up in layers...it must melt in layers. It must be varied by region/locations. Season is not a simple as a mod but it can be simple enough for iterations. Every asset must be retouched to receive filters for weather pile up. Assets can be simple though. At most 3-4 inches (7.5-10cm) is a good compromise. Roads will have to be more but they are easier to pile up than other things. Roads would need a progression system but starting out, roads can already be plowed. Just pile up on the sides but have snow plow crews and salt/sand trucks.

Vegetation has to transition from full green to yellows and browns to bare trees. That cycle continues over and over. Doesn't have to be perfect right away. But to what level is acceptable. We all will see it differently. I already know that for snow, people will expect pile up the moment seasons do come. Pile up might be a 2nd or 3rd iteration and people would have to understand that. The first iterations could be more like winter mods are now. Just lay the foundations first.
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Reinhard
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Re: Are you satisfied with the direction in which the game is developing

#203 Post by Reinhard » 07 Dec 2022 20:55

flight50 wrote: 07 Dec 2022 20:32 Snow must be dynamic........its has to build up.
It has to? Seasons cold be handled as simple transition. After some time spent, another job, another season. Or after a wake-up. A dynamic transition would be much more complicated, meaning much more development time, meaning much more money to invest. Dynamic handling would be fantastic, but I guess it isn't worth the money, from an SCS economic view. If they ever decide to do something, in this regard. We'll see.
angrybirdseller
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Re: Are you satisfied with the direction in which the game is developing

#204 Post by angrybirdseller » 07 Dec 2022 21:15

Winter is different based latitude and how far from oceans you are. Minnesota you get subzero that at times are colder than Alaska and this effects how trucks run and handle. SCS has to be careful more than adding snowfall.

It's no different than west Texas where road seams crack and burst in summer from hot tempmatures. High humidity and temperatures effect how engines run. When humidity is high along with temperatures sometimes sauna or steam effect in morning hours.

Simple and incremental things is what scs should do that may frustrate some players, but don't want redo physics and effects if you can avoid it. Weather will likely be done very cautiously for this reason.
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Re: Are you satisfied with the direction in which the game is developing

#205 Post by Grizzly » 07 Dec 2022 21:48

VTXcnME wrote: 07 Dec 2022 11:03 @Grizzly You can think whatever you'd like bro.

Edit: I did the extraordinarily light lifting for you. On page 2 of the forum is this thread: viewtopic.php?t=312847

234 posts across 24 pages. Littered with hopes and dreams of what DX12 will provide. It talks about the game engine, but there was a lot of hopes and dreams in that thread re: DX12 support and all the glorious things it'd provide the game.
Ok, point made, you said it would bring everything :lol:
Optional Features
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Re: Are you satisfied with the direction in which the game is developing

#206 Post by Optional Features » 07 Dec 2022 22:03

VTXcnME wrote: 07 Dec 2022 19:56 So for me, I think of being in San Diego and picking up a load toward Seattle Washington. It starts as rain in southern CA, but there would have to be transitional spaces from rain to snow where the friction coefficient changes and the precipitation changes from rain to snow. There'd be the transition where snow begins accumulating. That's the kind of stuff I think of with applying seasons.
Yep, this map basically has that already.

This is along the Dalton. It starts off foggy, changes to blowing snow, and then the road is completely covered. I put some chains on (sadly, there is no repair trigger here) to help a bit.

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Further up the road:
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The slipperiness gets worse as the road visibly changes.
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flight50
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Re: Are you satisfied with the direction in which the game is developing

#207 Post by flight50 » 08 Dec 2022 00:32

Reinhard wrote: 07 Dec 2022 20:55
flight50 wrote: 07 Dec 2022 20:32 Snow must be dynamic........its has to build up.
It has to? Seasons cold be handled as simple transition. After some time spent, another job, another season. Or after a wake-up. A dynamic transition would be much more complicated, meaning much more development time, meaning much more money to invest. Dynamic handling would be fantastic, but I guess it isn't worth the money, from an SCS economic view. If they ever decide to do something, in this regard. We'll see.
Yes Sir, it has to. Its 2022. Simple doesn't really belong in today's games if SCS wants to keep up and gain attention. The maps are great. Use them. Build on them. No body has maps on this scale for a driving simulator. There's a limit to simple and Seasons can't be simple. Not as a finished product at least. It can start simple but it has to evolve. More money to invest? SCS has already committed to investing. They have hired almost 200 people since I started playing ATS in 2016. I have zero clue how winter works or how it is in Europe but what you describe will not work here in North America and I'll give you 2 reasons why. 1) the fan base would not accept such limitations when they see youtube and real examples of North American winters producing much much better winters. Barely covering the ground won't work well and 2) its not remotely realistic to how conditions here work per region. It doesn't have to be perfect but it does need to be better than you describe.

In order for SCS to implement dynamic seasons, there needs to be a calendar correct? There are 365 days in a year. How on can we go from from one job to another season in a matter of 1 day or even one week. Or wake up to another season in less than 24hrs. That won't make people happy. I don't know if you read the past several pages or just this last one but I explained seasons at least from by prospective. In a nutshell, Pavel is a perfectionist and he shouldn't want to do what you describe because its not remotely dynamic enough. To have dynamic seasons, I mentioned it needs to be multiples of 4. That would be 16,20 or even 24 seasons. We can't wake up and all of a sudden bammmmm, another season. I'd rather SCS keep the game as is vs doing that. Either do it right or don't do it at all. Right as in don't just slap textures on like mods are doing to indicate seasons.

When we say iterations, its not so cut and dry as you state. Iterations could be something like create each season statically.....first. This is basically like a mod would do and allow seasons via a pull down. In 2018, Pavel said they could actually do this already for like quest/missions but he knows dynamic is the way to go. Static allows the most time to get it right. No one would care how long seasons take and SCS shouldn't worry either. If it needs to be done............get her done. Seasons is just a time consuming as the Texas dlc is. Its a commitment SCS will have to face no matter what. Either do it....or don't. Start off seasons in phases (iterations)
Phase 1
Foundation. Create a progressive type system to transition from season to season. Transition Summer to Fall. This is all vegetational changes. Colors only. Leaves, grasses, trees, flowers....they start dying out and loose color. Develop particle system that can blow leaves around. Basically implement wind and show it effecting the environment.

Phase 2
Develop Fall into Winter. Trees go bare for those that loose leaves. Setup weather lines based on regions. Develop landscape filtering and asset filtering. This is what piles up snow. Snow can not stay a constant everywhere. In North Texas it sticks around for 2-3 days at the most. In the panhandle maybe its sticks around for 5-7 days (not sure honestly). In Montana, it can stick around for 6 months. So yes there needs to be a pile up system. Make it in Levels of 1, 2 and 3. 3 being the max of lets say 12-18 inches. Level 2 could be 3-12 inches and Level 1 could be 0-3 inches. There also needs to be the occasional 10 year freak weather. Prime Example, in 2021 all of Texas froze over. DFW go powder snow for the first time I can remember vs the ice pellet type snow. It was quite rare but that could be a 2% chance type snow for DFW to get level 2. Most years Texas is Level 1

Phase 3
Develop Winter in Spring. That snow filter can now thaw out and fade the opposite way it came in. Trees, flowers and other vegetation start budding and blooming. If SCS could develop water streams and puddles, this emphasizes Spring.

Phase 4.
Now its time to put it all together. Create a calendar year. All seasons are in now. The transitions should now be able to sync up with one another and run seamless. This is the last hard part but they'd have time to work it as they at least gave us season to manually use. Pressure was off during Phase 1-3 so that makes the wait for Phase 4 easier. If they allow the pull down, they can create quarterly changes (1 up to 3 months) to indicate start of season to end of season. Once you reach that last stage of the static season, that's what you get until you manually change seasons. Selecting default(current gameplay) and back to (x) season, its restarts that season if you want until they complete the calendar system to make it all dynamic.

Now of course this is just me thinking and may not even go like this. This post also does not mean this is the only way and this post does not mean SCS can do this. But its an idea like many others to toy with. I think most people would consider seasons as one of the most impactful additions to ATS. For ETS2, its probably rigids. But in North America, seasons would be the eye catcher with the diversity the landscaping is here. Seasons almost give you multiple games in one. Considering ATS is the guinea pig game, I'd expect ATS to get it first with the smaller fan base. The map size is catching up to ETS2 but considering its the same game code, less people to piss off with bugs. Seasons is a huge way to increase the fan base almost most instantly though for ATS. So if SCS is heading in the right direction, they have to figure it out and get seasons. Dev time can't be a thought. Do it or don't bother. Don't bother and they will constantly hear about it. Seasons and multi drop are possibly the top two most wanted features that are the most impactful. Call it my opinion or call it factual.....your choice. But they are the 2 features that I constantly see sprinkled into many threads just like Multi player use to be. Just like owned trailers use to be. Just like multi pivot use to be. Getting the most impactful things in the game grows the fan base.
Optional Features
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Re: Are you satisfied with the direction in which the game is developing

#208 Post by Optional Features » 08 Dec 2022 00:57

flight50 wrote: 08 Dec 2022 00:32 In a nutshell, Pavel is a perfectionist and he shouldn't want to do what you describe because its not remotely dynamic enough.
I disagree that Pavel is a perfectionist. There is little in the current game that is perfect from a realism perspective, everything from the proportions of tires and wheels, to the road and bridge designs, to the AI traffic, to unresolved bugs with cargo (multiple loads are overheight now with no intent to fix them), to the weather.

Pavel is not a perfectionist. He's a gambler (not that that is a bad thing in this sense), and he gambled that people would like a trucking game. He was correct. Now, he's gambling that SCS can sustain a long-term future on a currently single-core engine with map DLC funding future development. Time will tell if that works out.

As for snow accumulation, I can think of four games currently that support that.

Snow Plow Project: a game developed by one or two devs that is focused on snow clearing. Snow Plow Project is built on the Unity Engine, and since snow is the point of the game, accumulation is critical.
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Farming Sim (22 default and 19 via mod): a game with default tip anywhere functionality since FS17 (I believe) which enabled players to dump crops on the ground. Snow was an easy redirection of existing scripts.
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Red Dead Redemption 2: Rockstar, no further explanation needed. They go all out on stuff.
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And Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020: again, Microsoft goes all out, but I'm not sure this snow has tracks. It's just a layer on the world from all I can tell.
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I believe some racing sims have snow, but that's map based. Dakar (a new large scale offroad racing game) has it as well, but not sure about how it comes and goes. Forza has snow, but again, that's map based. And trainsims have snow. I believe Train Sim World 3 does have accumulation.

But in order for SCS to have it, they would need material accumulation. We don't have material particle systems for unloading bulk cargo (something far simpler). We have static docks that service van trailers.

Getting a functional snow system in this game that goes beyond a simple texture change would be flabbergasting. It's incredibly unlikely to say the least. We must walk before we do gymnastics.
Optional Features
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Re: Are you satisfied with the direction in which the game is developing

#209 Post by Optional Features » 08 Dec 2022 07:21

The best way to earn income for a game is to make a product that fans are excited to play. I can't imagine more people are excited to play Oklahoma than Texas or Kansas than Oklahoma. Texas's peak seems to have worn off already, and it never caught Montana's player high.

So people are going to get bored quickly when it's just deco farms and scenery towns with repetitive companies scattered about. If something doesn't spark interest, the funding from ATS dlcs is almost certain to drop off a bit.
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Re: Are you satisfied with the direction in which the game is developing

#210 Post by angrybirdseller » 08 Dec 2022 08:13

They did not build Rome in day. Any improvements will be incremental and build foundation for better weather, but scs setup the way they want it. There 10,000 page wishlist of features SCS programmers can implement ones that are workable with prism engine. Think dynamic weather and seasons is possible, but it will take long time too see it in action. Think small features to bigger features is way to get there.
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