BEWARE v015

Hey everyone,

v015 is here, which marks the return of the pokeys, guarding the refinery area. The new pokeys were quite a challenge to setup properly - first I thought I'd just recycle the old CarX setup from "Region 7/9" by copying the different values to VPP, but that didn't yield the expected results, so I basically had to setup and test everything from scratch - including trying to simulate the behavior of an electric engine. Which is actually fine because now I can use this as a template for all other autonomous vehicles in the game (the mining trucks don't use VPP).

As you all probably know by now, it was important to me to achieve true competent driving without resorting to any "cheating" through code or physics. The pokeys have the same weight as the player car, same tires, similar horsepower (0.5 more). They do have a slight advantage being AWD and having less air resistance. So my goal was to achieve pretty impeccable driving and generating the feeling that they are more precise and less emotional than their human-driven counterparts. When that part was more or less satisfactory, I moved to the articulated arm and front pincers setup, which confronted me with a load of physics bugs. Not only would those de-stabilize the vehicle while driving - there would also be situations where the physics were completely broken after a heavier impact.

I did manage to find a more reliable solution and, after that, I decided to take a break for a month, from this kind of work and do research and testing for an additional, post-credits, map - which will need to be pretty huge and looping (pseudo-endless). Happy to say I managed to set i up and size should be adequate too, at 38400km².

After that, it was time to return to the driving behavior which still felt too imprecise, so I implemented a new mathematical formula for correctly calculating the braking distance and made the enemies predictive steering much more robust. These changes also improve the abilities of the human-driven cars.

Concerning the pokeys, the articulated arm could still be improved and now each pokey has pincers in the front, to grab you and slow you down. No worries, you can set yourselves free with some wild steering. But I think it definitely needs more fine-tuning.

If you want to test the pokeys, it's probably best to save at camp #4,

- by bringing the caravan on top of lamp hill (middle of refinery area)

or, a quicker "hack": leave the underground parking, attach the caravan (the one with the kid's drawings), drive close to the first small power station and return to where you attached the caravan - this will add a save called "CurrentCamp"

Now open Registry Editor, navigate to

Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\OndrejSvadlena\BEWAREv015, double click "CurrentCamp" and change value data from 0 to 4. When starting the game, you should now be just in front of one pokey.

What's next? v016 will be quick: final 3D model + audio for the pokeys and adding the promised billboards (some new lore :) along the highways. To save some time, I'll skip v015VR and make v016VR - IMO, it makes more sense with the new models and environments that will be added.

After v016, I'll be switching to a new version numbering which is more descriptive of the state of development. So something like v095, which will be about adding the final versions of NPCs, starting with the goons probably. Although, I gotta admit I'm feeling under pressure as my kids are growing up. So I should record their voices (monologues/dialogues) for the game before they mutate into adult voices :D

Best wishes to you all! O)

[15.11.25] BEWARE v015b
- more work on the enemy driving behaviors + reworked "difficulty settings" In v015b's pause menu, you can now adjust braking and steering behavior:
Cautious <-- AI Behind Player Braking --> Late
Slower <-- AI Driving Style --> Normal

This has been tested with the 1st and 2nd cars in mind - feel free to test it with the pokeys too.