September 10th, 2021
Jace Talk: Changes to Vehicles obstacle avoidance & getting stuck (ghosting)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh3lVrBdjFE&t=197
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Jace
So like I said, this won't mean that the recordings will be 100% accurate to what you recorded as a player, but it will be much, much more accurate and much more reliable.
Now, even though it's more reliable, it's still possible that your vehicles will get stuck, okay?
So they might get stuck on like a tree or something out in the wild, or they might, you know, be bumping on like a power pole or something like that within your factory.
And so what we've also done is we've sort of improved the handling of obstacles.
So what the vehicles will now do is that if they bump into things, they'll sort of back up and find like a new path around the object that they've bumped into and try and go around that and then return back to the recorded path.
So they're a little bit smarter when it comes to this.
This isn't like a catch-all thing.
You can't build a wall in the way.
It doesn't regenerate an entire new path.
It is a very sort of naive thing.
So it is still possible that even though...
the obstacle avoidance is a little bit better now, or the obstacle handling rather, is a little bit better now, it is still possible that things get stuck.
So what happens in those cases if your vehicle is well and truly stuck?
Like what if it falls off the edge of a cliff?
Like this vehicle here did, fell off the edge of the cliff.
So we have a new system in place for this as well.
This is the worst case scenario, last resort solution, and that is little tiny nanomachines lift your vehicle through the ground back to where they were supposed to be.
I mean, we call this like ghosting.
The vehicle ghosts back to where it was.
This is a little weird.
It's completely fine, right?
Fix it, develop technology.
It's fine.
Okay, it's fine.
Don't worry about it.
But what's more important here is that vehicles are reliable, right?
So when you record a path and you want a vehicle to do something and then you go and play the game for another three or four hours doing something else and you check on your vehicles, what's most important right now is that your vehicles do make it, okay?
And that the goods are delivered, right?
So that's what we're, you know, this is the worst case scenario here.
We would prefer this sort of like ghosting system to vehicles getting stranded out in the wild.
And I think you guys as players would appreciate that as well.
So yeah, that's another change that's coming too.