So far Asobo have been doing an amazing job on scenery, buildings and airports.

I wonder what there plans are for road traffic.  I think it's one of the important parts of having it feel like a living breathable world.

From many screenshots it looks like there's a fair amount of cars baked into the road and ground textures and very few moving cars on the road.  I assume this is all a work in progress.

Obviously we don't expect Project Cars 2 type driving physics, as that would be way to taxing on the cpu. But it would be nice to see cars drive around with some form of acceleration and collision detection amongst other cars.

One thing Xplane does well (especially in twilight) is there can be a large amount of road traffic, and seeing their lights as they're all moving around does look amazing.  However they are quite primitive. Theyre all just moving flat out, no slowing down or acceleration, they can clip through other cars and blow through intersections and corners flat out.

Not seeing many cars around Los Angeles, will make it feel like a ghost town .  On the other hand, I wonder if they can handle the thousands of cars LA has.  Maybe they can fake it somehow.  And I think traffic at night looks great in real life, so hope they can do it somehow.

If they don't get more car traffic, it will be funny to see the five o'clock live traffic helicopters flying over invisible traffic jams.

3 hours ago, Theboot100 said:

Theyre all just moving flat out, no slowing down

This makes them a completely accurate simulation of me, driving to work. 🤣

On the plus side, it will be easy to simulate the traffic on the motorway which passes the Trafford Centre and over Barton Bridge at Manchester when you get near the aerodrome, because it never seems to move.

Edited February 28, 20206 yr by Chock

They also have an easy job to simulate road traffic in Sydney, Australia. All they need to do is make traffic static from 7am till 7pm.

4 hours ago, Theboot100 said:

Theyre all just moving flat out, no slowing down or acceleration, they can clip through other cars and blow through intersections and corners flat out.

It's the good old ethernal fight between quality and performance. Same applies to how AI traffic behaves.
If they can do it without killing performance, they will. If they don't, you know why they didn't.

It would be nice to have dense road traffic where it should, traffic with tail lights is a wonderful detail, trains could be added too.

1 hour ago, Pastaiolo said:

It's the good old ethernal fight between quality and performance. Same applies to how AI traffic behaves.
If they can do it without killing performance, they will. If they don't, you know why they didn't.

True. Traffic ai would be very easy to do on a separate core as it's completely independent on anything to do with flight.

I do think though having traffic that accelerates, brakes, stops and drives with the flow of other traffic goes a long way to having a realistic feeling world, especially when flying VFR.  It removes the emptiness of the world.  I hope that and removing baked cars from roads is part of Asobos plan.

6 hours ago, Theboot100 said:

But it would be nice to see cars drive around with some form of acceleration and collision detection amongst other cars.

I don't know most advanced collision detection techniques, but I don't see this happening without tanking fps. Personally I wouldn't trade performance for this.

3 minutes ago, marty2756 said:

I don't know most advanced collision detection techniques, but I don't see this happening without tanking fps. Personally I wouldn't trade performance for this.

We're not talking advanced collision between cars and terrain.  More a simple, follow car in front and snap to speed of car.  A well written algorithm could easy handle a few thousand cars.

For me traffic on the roads is just as important as truck IR.

It is a deal breaker for me if these two aspects are not working as good or better than FSX.

FSX road traffic is limited but brings life to the world.

Also ability to bring in AI ships from FSX would be crucial for me.

 

mike

Being able to glance down and catch something moving down there is brilliant,  but in the same instance,  my eyes are out to make sure I dont hit something,  like an ultralight flying past my nose while I'm on base leg for final. Trust me, I learned quick where to keep my focus. And it's not on cars or gauges. Haha

How much attention is a pilot going to be paying to whether a car stops at an intersection or not?  As far as I'm concerned, the way raffic works in FSX is just fine, maybe just a little more of it.

I will definitely not buy the new simulator if the cars don´t incorporate individual national laws and rules.

I want them to heed the individual speed limits, turn right on red in the US (but not in Germany), have the proper license plates (with correct letters for the city or state they are in).

They need to yield to pedestrians on the crosswalks, I want to see people getting in and out when they stop, I want them to get stuck on slopes when it is snowy. I think this is the very least we can expect, anything else would be a major disappointment!

Jan

 

If you are flying VFR and following a freeway, you notice cars more.

Moving road traffic is very important as it adds, as shadows do, to the the tridimensional depth perception which is, by definition, poor on a screen. And that doesn’t contradict attention to the air traffic as these cars/trucks are in the background vision, kinda visual noises.

I wouldn’t ask for more than convincing speed, lights at night and not too shabby models.

Now  I must admit  that I remember flying a P51 along a flat trailer on a Texas road. That was fun. And I wouldn’t mind doing the same with a train.