I have grown to like bus routes lately, but I think there could be some ways to make them more interesting. How good bus driver you are, could be a score, which would be formed by evaluating few variables. -Brake wear, how much brakes are used -Tire squeal, this would give heavy penalty -Following of speed limits, not sure how this could be implemented easily. -Smoothness, exceeding certain g-force value for longer than X amount of time, like 0.5 to 1 seconds would give penalties -Fuel consumption, generally economy is big thing when evaluating how good bus driver is -Any kind of damage/contact should give heavy penalty. -Staying on given schedule, too early leaving of bus stop is bad, coming late less bad but bad still, of course clear indication of target time is needed. After completing bus route, one would get his score and breakdown of what areas got reduction from the perfect score. This could also be possible to implement into online leaderboards. It also could be set so that perfect score is impossible to achieve, you get perfect smoothness, but it is not possible to keep schedule with that, so driver needs to balance different areas to get highest possible score, different variables would be given different weights so you get less penalty from smoothness than from keeping time schedule for example. I think it would make bus routes far more immersive and with possible online leaderboards and careful balancing it would provide whole lot of gameplay value for relative low amount of work. Adding traffic like @Gamergull has done on scenarios could provide even more challenge if it can be smoothed out bit more or made so that some lag is not introducing for example smoothness variable to be compromised. There could also be different difficulty versions, with traffic, with fuel consumption targets etc. I believe that if possible to create such bus routes, gains for amount of work would be quite good.
We implemented a proof of concept which included bumpiness of ride, cornering smoothness, damage tracking, and checking how precise you are at parking the bus on each bus stop. Seemed promising, but unfortunately just those features alone require quite large amounts of time to polish into something that can really be shipped widely. For now we don't have the resources so it's on hold and it's unclear whether we'll be able to devote any more effort to it.
Fine tuning all parameters certainly is taking time, especially first round when pioneering new system. Simple brake usage percentage and fuel usage alone would need lot of test runs etc. for each route to find perfect value, I guess, so maybe something that does not need so much refining, where players refine it by driving themselves, that would be no cap maximum score type of scoring I believe. Hopefully there could be idea some day that gets around resource issues, as there is so much potential on those routes and of course modding community might always come up with something, for example there is drift points app, maybe some day there is bus route score app
One simple thing which would add a lot would be to set the amount of "laps" that is how many times you have to pass the route and then lets say return to depo/parking spot.
This is actually a really good idea, even if it won't be created in the near future (if at all) it would still be cool to have online leader-boards... maybe leader-boards for scenarios can be made? I'm not sure how hard it would be to do this though...
I think that we can already have leaderboards. Script would save time to encrypted file, then additional program would be needed that reads said file and send it to server on website, which would then add data to database. External program would need to handle user login etc. I think it is not possible to send data using lua or anything that game has because of security reasons, but we could get around of that by using external program. Also UI app would be needed. Kinda hack solution, but there was game times online, who remembers that. Then again devs might have better coming at some time in a future regarding online leaderboards, but it is always hard to predict how much work such is and how much resources they have available for such etc.
When doing those routes I go out of my way to give my passengers the most terrifying experience possible. I wish to get a score for being a maniac bus driver. Let’s face it, most in real life seem to be sometimes.
Would that be then Postal game mod? Also I think that using g-force sensor one could make different kind of sound play, from old woman displeased to screams of horror, depending how high g-forces you hit, of course it might need bit more complex logic, but certainly there are ton of possibilities, learning LUA just seems to take a long time for me, some day maybe I can make some of these crazy ideas, or then I just keep expressing them and someone more capable can get lot of respect from making such things
Start off simple, use only fuel consumption and max G ratings, this is kinda how it works in real life (skip to 2:13) i'm guessing their "risk rating" is based on G-force.
