I've been following this game since its inception, since the idea was put on the Rigs Of Rods forums. I bought into the game when it was ONLY the D-Series and Gridmap, and, well, I've been doing some thinking, and with the West Coast USA map coming out, would it even be remotely possible to have traffic? Maybe something along the lines of code of the car is a moderatly detailed shell (like LOD2's in GTA V), with basic up-down suspension, until you're about 10 feet away, when it becomes a full J.Beam structure? I have no idea if it would be possible to code in them obeying traffic laws and the like, but with such a large map coming, a desolate city would seem a bit lonely. Just an idea though.
I agree with you, Would be a great addition to beam making the game seem a bit less lonely at times. I'm sure coding vehicles and AI like that in the game would be a lot of work... Possible... yeah.. but it would be a lot of hard work to implement that.
Traffic has been talked about already and I'm sure its possible. I forget the thread where it was talked about though.
Not going to happen anytime soon. The LOD idea is good in theory but that would require an insane amount of work to dynamically switch to a higher density N/B on the fly, this would probably also have bad stuttering issues as it switches too. Not to mention how it would actually be done in the first place. Also the AI just isn't there yet for proper traffic, stuff like road rules, keeping to a lane, avoiding players etc would all need to be coded in, this would be time consuming but probably quite possible.
I had nearly the same idea: Why not build a simple car (that has very few details, very basic Jbeam). Not to crash into but to spawn in order to make the map look less empty! The lack of Detail would allow to spawn 10-20 "cars" with Random AI. So once in a while you'd encounter something/somebody else on the road.
They could maybe do something like: first solution: Load somes cars into the memory (somes = depend of the computer performance) and then make them drive around the player and when a car is too far from the player it's automaticly teleported somewhere near the player but the problem it that the cars would alway be the same second solution: Same thing but without collision like this they could spawn more car with less lag but the player can't colide with them
