A thought on Truck Traffic...

[Doc Savage]

As many players do I ponder about Traffic quite a bit. As one of the fundamental aspects of game play it's one of those things that needs to be right more so than not. Like many, I lament proper roads vs streets, different styles of roads, Y intersections and the like. I know these will come eventually, so I don't worry.

This weekend I took a little trip to see my sister for her birthday which required a couple hours on the NYS thruway. It wasn't much of a stretch to start making connections with traffic behavior as we motored along.

It was so painfully obvious once I saw it. Trucks just don't go as fast as cars. Well 90% of them don't, at least not now. I can remember in my youth seeing many a truck hauling along making time, but now a days many are fleet trucks with governors to limit speed to conserve fuel and win safety awards.

The trucks in the game should be made to behave this way.

There has been talk of speed variance between cars and that it wasn't feasible, and I get that. However taking the entire truck class and making it slower would be better than nothing, it would at least help with the illusion and give cars a reason to use the center lane.

Another thing that bugs me are the 100 kph farm tractors... They shouldn't be on the highways at all. I can see farm tractors and their wagons for local delivery, but not on highways. Maybe that's a European thing, but tractors around these parts are slow...

Don't know if it's possible to just make trucks go slower. Don't know if cars can be taught to pass them either. But as a simple way to make traffic that little bit more interesting and life like it would be a solid first step.

Cheers..!
_

 

[Sotrax]

Fully agree with you!

 

[Shiggs]

lol. Tractors on the highway going 100kph. I guess I need to see that for myself! No that is not a European thing.

I think it would be great if trucks had a slightly slower speed.

I don't understand why it would be so hard to implement maybe 3-5 different "types" of drivers.

It would help on multiple fronts. What I really had in mind though was the different types behaving differently, as in which lane they would prefer, preference of streets vs highways (garbage trucks anyone?), and potentially even the route they would take (faster time vs shorter distance).

I know its a long shot, but really right now traffic behaves almost identically and suffers all the same problems as SC2013, which I shouldn't have to mention is a bad comparison.

 

[MaxxPower]

I don't understand why it would be so hard to implement maybe 3-5 different "types" of drivers.

Because then you would have to model overtaking behavior, which i guess is pretty complex and not easy to implement.

 

[cpy]

Because then you would have to model overtaking behavior, which i guess is pretty complex and not easy to implement.

And that's why in city simulator police/ambulance/fire truck ALWAYS stop at red light, people don't give way for them, and yeah, no overtaking ever, if they overtake other cars, they will be sentence to death by snoo snoo.

 

[Shiggs]

Because then you would have to model overtaking behavior, which i guess is pretty complex and not easy to implement.

I don't think its so much that its so complicated. I could probably write the subroutine for it myself if i knew exactly what kind of tags and variables they were using, but yea it would be a cpu hog trying to run that routine for every car. I can see that as the reason.

Even still, you could drastically improve the "variety" of traffic without the need for overtaking. Maybe differing speeds is asking to much to start with. But if drivers would simply utilize open lanes, pick less congested routes, prefer streets over highways, none of that requires overtaking.

 

[hjarg]

Another thing that bugs me are the 100 kph farm tractors... They shouldn't be on the highways at all. I can see farm tractors and their wagons for local delivery, but not on highways. Maybe that's a European thing, but tractors around these parts are slow...

Actually, tractors are not used for long-range freight trips in neither Europe or US, They plough the fields, do other tractory things near the farms and when the farmer needs to deliver goods to the city or somewhere, they either use delivery trucks or the nice folk who buy stuff from farmers send their own trucks etc. The chances of seeing tractor doing intercity freight or freight from your farms to your factories or something else like that are basically nil.
Not even sure why CO thought to use tractors. Perhaps they thought it was cute

 

[Red_warning]

I'm pretty sure tractors on highway is illegal in many countries, I know it is here in Sweden.

 

[Turjan]

Aside from the tractors, it probably depends on the area whether trucks are slower than cars or not. In the area in the US where I lived, they generally drove the same speed as cars, except up mountains. I've been overtaken by lots of trucks who cared even less for the speed limit than I did. So I'm not too worried about this.

I would much more appreciate if emergency vehicles would change their behavior in this game. Why do they use their emergency signals if those don't have any consequences, except at their destination?

 

[hert]

The tractors are just a visual thing. Its easiest to identify them as your farming industry. Would be cool if the ore trucks were the actual hopper trailer instead of the box one. Would be cool if as traffic becomes more and more in-snarled that they would start beeping there horns or something. Something that was in CiM 1 that really increased the ambiance of the game. Even though I know a lot of people are against this.

 

[jamiechi]

Where I live, on Interstate 5 in Seattle, and pretty much everywhere else trucks drive at or above the speed limit. And will tailgate you within a car length at 60+ an hour. There is very little traffic law enforcement.

 

[Doc Savage]

Aside from the tractors, it probably depends on the area whether trucks are slower than cars or not. In the area in the US where I lived, they generally drove the same speed as cars, except up mountains. I've been overtaken by lots of trucks who cared even less for the speed limit than I did. So I'm not too worried about this.

I would much more appreciate if emergency vehicles would change their behavior in this game. Why do they use their emergency signals if those don't have any consequences, except at their destination?

Where I live, on Interstate 5 in Seattle, and pretty much everywhere else trucks drive at or above the speed limit. And will tailgate you within a car length at 60+ an hour. There is very little traffic law enforcement.

Some trucks do fly by, making time hasn't disappeared from the highways for sure. However those trucks don't do 0 to 60 in the same time frame as a car. Unless maybe it's a Prius... Just because there are exceptions doesn't mean we can't go forward, anyone can find an excuse to use another method for reaching traffic nirvana.

As a player I want to see some diversity, as a DEV I want to see it too but recognize that single car/single truck solutions aren't terribly viable. Like everything else in the game, methods need to be found that allow the game to cheat, to create the illusion of diversity without the complexity of perfection. In this particular case, a little bit of chaos will go a long way in giving the game the look of different drivers and speeds without the overhead or performance hit of trying to code individual vehicles.

Looking at this from a simplistic "what can we actually do without getting into massive lane change or overtake coding" perspective and bearing in mind I know nothing of what would be involved:

I'd make 6 classes of vehicles:

1. Emergency Units: The vehicles would favor center lanes and disregard all traffic devices and always take the most direct route. All cars move to slow lane or park when approached.
   
2. Cars: Fast Speed: These cars would favor center lanes, obey all traffic devices but always take the 2nd fastest alternate route.
3. Cars: Slow Speed: Uses current vehicle behavior and route choice but runs at 90% vehicle speed.
4. Trucks: Fast Speed: Uses current vehicle behavior but always uses 2nd alternate route. (dodging the police occifers)
5. Trucks Low Speed: Uses current vehicle behavior and route choice but runs at 80% vehicle speed.
6. Farm Tractors: Uses fastest route, operates within a single tile radius, travels at 50% vehicle speed and is barred from highways.

If possible introducing a 3rd alternate route would be very nice. I imagine that would depend on how the game queries and how much of a load that would add. If it was a relatively smaller batch of vehicles maybe that would mitigate the overhead.

It should be noted that this method does not incorporate any lane change or passing behaviors, the vehicles will travel their preferred routes at their designated speeds until they get behind a slower car or truck. After that they're stuck in traffic just like the rest of us.

So how do we get this to work from the programming side..?

1. Coding class 1 and assigning all Police, Fire and Ambulances to it. (and maybe the occasional speeder or LA type chase parade)
2. Creating the classes, assigning the assets and setting speed parameters per class.
3. Making the ability to use a secondary routes reality. (or 3rd routes if performance isn't impacted greatly)
   
4. The ability to factor traffic red zones into the equation. (or elevating red zone awareness to give a higher impact on route choice)
   
5. Creating the Farm vehicle limitations.

I don't know if this is possible, but it seems to fit within the game's framework just fine. The added behaviors are either set it and forget it or simply dividing the assets into groups and giving them a few quirks. It's far from perfect, but to me seems something plausible to add a little more "real" to the game, something many of us crave.

Cheers..!

 

[JerkyJerry]

Could roads or lanes be made for just trucks to use?
Could roads or lanes be made for just emergency vehicles to use?
Could roads or lanes be made for just buses to use?

 

[hjarg]

Could roads or lanes be made for just trucks to use?
Could roads or lanes be made for just emergency vehicles to use?
Could roads or lanes be made for just buses to use?

That is actually a great plan. Only- i wish there were more then 6-lane highways then And buses and emergency vehicles could at least share.

 

[JerkyJerry]

Until or unless a dev (or someone at CO with knowledge) comes on here and provides us with information and answers we will all just be speculating.

 

[cpy]

Do you even realize how much computing power real time traffic calculations would take? It could be threaded probably pretty well but, it's really hard to do.

 

[JimmiG]

Another thing that bugs me are the 100 kph farm tractors... They shouldn't be on the highways at all. I can see farm tractors and their wagons for local delivery, but not on highways. Maybe that's a European thing, but tractors around these parts are slow..._

No, tractors and other slow vehicles are banned from highways here in Europe too. In fact, tractors wouldn't be used to make the deliveries. Tractors are used on the farm fields - that's why they have those big tires. For delivering farming products to factories and stores, milk tankers and refrigerated trucks would be used.

 

[Teodosio7]

Because then you would have to model overtaking behavior, which i guess is pretty complex and not easy to implement.

+1 we are not going to see overtaking any time soon.

 

[Shiggs]

I'm pretty sure tractors on highway is illegal in many countries, I know it is here in Sweden.

Here in the US, if it has headlights, turn signals, a 50cc motor or higher, and a license plate it can be made legal. Though I think it has to be within a certain range of width and length without needing additional permits. Though I doubt many farmers would even want to try.

 

[FireFlowerist]

C:SL tractor:

Anyway I also think why all vehicles have same road speed is time needed to make working overtaking system to exist with fastest route planner. Of course tractors could be only trucks also but I think designers wanted variety on roads.