Traffic

[freeborough]

To both make the city feel more alive and give the player some less-static things to avoid, we want to have other vehicles driving around the city.

[freeborough]

I think there's two basic ways this can be achieved:

1. We define "rails" (splines) in each lane of each tile. The vehicles will then stick, as tightly as we like, to those rails. Tiles can have more than one rail in a given lane, e.g. one that turns left and one that turns right, and the vehicle will randomly pick which it's going to follow. Obstacles are avoided by having the vehicles just slow down and stop when something is in their way.
2. We use navmeshes but keep the navmesh itself limited so the vehicles don't stray too far from the center of the lane. We then dynamically give the navmesh agent waypoints determining which way it goes at junctions. This might lead to a bit of chaos at junctions, but would also allow small obstacles to be driven around.

Not sure which would work best! My gut says rails will be easier to implement in a controllable manner, but I honestly don't know either way.

For both, I think maybe having a vehicle stop dead if it's collided with in any way will then let it be smashed into and become a physics object, and then not having to deal with the complexities of getting it going again.

[freeborough]

I'm having a play - Unity has an official Spline package now so that might make things easier.

[freeborough]

The traffic system needs fleshing out, specifically the traffic vehicles need:

• Rigidbody's so they can interact with the player.
• Script adding so when they're hit they turn off kinematic (might have the script already for this, I can't quite remember), react to physics, and stop.
• Trigger collider at the front so they can detect if they need to slow down.
• Concept of acceleration and braking rate.
• Slow down than than instantly stop when they detect things in their way.
• Accelerate up to top speed when unobstructed.
• A second trigger collider at the front if they need to slam on the brakes and beep their horn!

Then we can make the traffic look way better by implementing traffic lights at crossroads:

• Block lanes with invisible colliders that the cars will detect and come to a stop.
• Have which lane is blocked on a junction cycle over time.
• Add traffic light models (already in assets).
• Have the lights of the model link to the sequence.

Then we need to interact with the review system:

• When jumping a red light.
• When having a near-miss.

[Youngsie1997]

Put me in coach !