4.13 development update discussion and feedback

[Treetop64]

All this talk about traffic on curved roads in this game is nice and all, but...

When the game was first in development - or any game simulating a physical environment, for that matter - the environment, or world, was created as a platform with certain rules that all objects within it has to follow. How everything moves in the environment is dictated by rules formulated by the mathematical framework of that environment. IL-2s linear road traffic is one of the manifestations of that.

If one wants to go in and reinvent how road traffic moves in the game, he must go in and rewrite how that part of the environmental framework is built and how it functions, including all mathematical functions associated with the change (the "rules"). In other words, it isn't simply a matter of just telling traffic to follow curves or a color, instead of straight lines, as has been mentioned, but actually rebuilding the environment that allows for road traffic to follow curves.

As can be imagined, it would be a disproportionately large and complex task for such relatively minor effect, and one that carries prohibitive risk since making such a fundamental "core" change introduces the chance of unintentionally altering other parts of object interaction with the environment. Also, it also involves yet another instance of having to go in and change someone else's code, potentially without notes or guidance, and this is something that most coders try to avoid if they can...

Considering it's age, the current road system, while it's not aesthetically perfect, works well. If efforts are made to change how it works then it would obviously be more efficient to just increase way-point and road data resolution to something finer than the - IIRC - 200 meter minimum that the current environment enforces. If doing that risks breaking the world, though, it is probably better to leave it alone and work with what you have.