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From: Justisaur <justisaur@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
Subject: Re: The best walking sim ever to involve a truck
Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2025 11:11:20 -0800
Organization: i2pn2 (i2pn.org)
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On 1/6/2025 8:10 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
> 
>      [Once again I wax on endlessly about that stupid truck-driving
>       sim. Just move on to the next post. It's okay; I'll understand
>       if you do so. ;-)]
> 
> 
> 
> So, with a single key bind, I just turned my favorite driving sim into
> a walking sim.
> 
> The former being, of course, the SCS Truck Driving Simulators
> (American/European), which have kept me cheerfully engaged for close
> to a decade now.* Driving down the highways has always had a calming
> appeal. It's not a very difficult game; the default simulation
> settings are fairly mild**, distances are minimized, and traffic is
> minimal.
> 
> But what if I could make the game even easier? What if I could make it
> so my driving sim had all the challenge of your average walking-sim?
> 
> It turns out, I can, and all with a simple key-press. See, the
> developers recently added 'lane-keeping' capability to the trucks.
> Which, combined with cruise-control for speed management, means I
> barely need to DRIVE my driving game at all anymore. Just get the
> truck up to speed and in the right lane, press a couple of buttons,
> and it's hands off!
> 
> Well, not really. Lane-keeping doesn't do navigation, or avoid
> traffic. And -whether because of bad navmeshing or intentional design-
> it's not all that stable; the truck 'pinballs' slightly to the left
> and right of the lane, with the swing getting slightly wilder as time
> gets by, until finally manual intervention is required to stabilize
> things again. The truck also takes no note of things like construction
> or traffic lights or any other obstacles; it'll just happily barrel
> forward at full speed unless I suggest that maybe --just maybe--
> plowing into another truck at a crossing is a Bad Idea. So I still
> have to do /some/ monitoring.
> 


On my recent 500 mile trip I tried the lane and distance keeping cruise 
control on my 2021 real car.  It worked pretty well but some stretches 
of road it did a lot of pin-balling back and forth, and if there was 
rain or the road was wet, or the markings faded it tended to not find 
the right and would try to veer into it or the shoulder if I was in the 
rightmost.  It also complained when I had my hand lightly on the 
steering wheel.  It mostly did better than I at at detecting cars ahead 
and keeping pace with them up to the set cruise speed, but had trouble 
with people cutting me off (way more times than I could count) taking a 
few seconds to recognize that, and detecting a car to the right when it 
was veering off that way.

I seemed to get tunnel vision far less than driving with just plain old 
set speed cruise control, I was worried I'd have more trouble paying 
attention with it doing all that, but perhaps because I was monitoring 
what it was doing I was more engaged.

> Except... it does change things somewhat to the positive. For one
> thing, I can now dare to take my eyes off the road for a second. 

Ah yes, I noticed that with the fancier cruise control too, that may 
have contributed to avoiding tunnel vision since I could glance off at 
signs and landmarks much more, and also made the drive more enjoyable.

-- 
-Justisaur

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