September 10th, 2021
Jace Talk: Changes to Vehicle Automation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh3lVrBdjFE&t=98
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Jace
So those are the updates to that.
Now, the meat and potatoes of this video is actually changes to some people want vehicles to maybe be quicker or more powerful or something here and there.
We haven't made any changes to the vehicle's tuning or anything like that yet, but we've made a ton of changes
to the automation system with the vehicles and specifically to make them more reliable as extensions of your factory essentially.
So let's go through those changes one by one.
So first issue that some people had was that you would spend your time recording a path and the vehicle then would not actually follow that path exactly and sometimes get stuck.
It might fall off a cliff or run into some trees or some bushes or something like that and just get stuck there because it didn't follow the path that you
specifically recorded.
So we've made some changes to the way that vehicles now follow waypoints, so that they're now more true to your recorded path.
They're not exact, they're not 100% exact, but they're much, much more accurate to the path that you recorded as the player.
Previously, the way that the vehicles worked is they kind of didn't take future waypoints into consideration, they just looked at their next waypoint, they drove at it, once they hit it, they then looked at the next waypoint and just drove straight at that.
Now we're using these things called splines to smoothly connect the wave points.
And what a spline is, is it's essentially a line that smoothly connects points together.
And so you can see here in this sort of like little behind the scenes little look here, there's the purple line, which is the spline connecting the waypoints.
And there's a purple box, which is the vehicle's target, essentially the ideal target for the vehicle.
The vehicle is just following that purple box along the splines.
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.