When my motorcycle is cruising down the road at 30mph I can stop on a dime (well, tile). Looking at the RAC stopping distance chart the theory is that at that speed it takes 8m to think “Whoa, better hit the brakes” then another 16m to actually stop moving.
Now I don’t say that we should actually follow that chart, but it does seem that the laws of physics are being screwed over a bit harder than usual right now.
We have portals and interdimensional tentacle face alien demons that work like parrots, and you’re worried if the vehicle brakes follow the laws of physics?
Good. My experience is that brakes times change with engine differences. Electric being the fastest and steam being the slowest, but I wonder how deathmobiles would change if players had to factor in a weight/speed/engine/brake ratio in their construction.
I’ve felt it has been fudging the fact that our character can see farther than the player and would be able to react to obstacles and decelerate better than we can through the interface. So when I go from 30 to 0 with one press of the period key I assume my character would be decelerating at a sensible rate in the time frame previous to that and the movement has just been averaged out for game arbitration purposes.
That’s my personal rationalization anyway. That being said, I wouldn’t be opposed to some kind of inertia or momentum system.
I still don’t know how people travel more than ≈45 mph without crashing in to something. (Even zoomed out.)
Near instant brake time was reasonable for 6 second turns, and I haven’t gone back and fixed it for 1 second turns. At some point, expect that if you brake too fast, your car will lose traction and you will skid, but there’s no ETA for me writing that code.
I would argue that it wasnt reasonable even when turns were 6 times too long. CDDA strives for reality, but there are some limitations, and some things like for example weapons firing range need to be be scaled down only to feel good, not to be numerically-correct with irl data. When turns were 6s long everything involving fighting and moving was already scaled to feel like 1s. But not vehicle breaking. You were able to stop a truck going 120km/h in 12 secs, and there were people defending it. During theese 12s (2 turns) the truck covered distance of about half its lenght.
IMHO best solution wouldnt be really inserting exact IRL data, bacause distance is relative (5 tile long ambulance isnt 5 meters, 3,6km/h wont give you 1tile/turn etc.)
Insted make it something more like this:
-you go through crowded city full of wrecks at 120 km/h? well, you die
-you go through a city carefully at 40 km/h? Then in reward you will be able to react when you realise there is something behind a corner.
-you go at middle speed, lets say 80? well, you can try to brake, but you might loose controll, and braking distance should be like a few lenghts of your wehicle. You might still hit your freshly spoted obstacle, although at lower, non-lethal speed.
i do skid when braking at some speeds, especially when your driving is low
10 km/h/s isn’t even a hard brake. Real world co-efficient of friction is assumed to be 0.7 for old tires, upwards of 0.9 for new cars with anti-lock brakes, so braking at 20-30 km/hr/s should be possible without skidding. Which is why I wasn’t concerned about braking times in 6 second turns, because you reasonably can brake from 120 km/hr to a stop in 6 seconds. Now, the distance traveled was wrong, that’s true, but the rate wasn’t.
If we set realistic brake rates, the rest of the system should sort itself out - if you drive through a city at 120 km/h, even a hard brake at 30 km/h/s means you’re going to travel for 1 second at 90 km/h (11 tiles), 1 second at 60 km/h (8 tiles), and 1 second at 30 km/h (4 tiles)… so you only need 23 tiles of clear space to brake. Good luck with that.
It’d open up a new world of lootable brake components to source out, I’d be keen to see it happen.
Mass, velocity, momentum… they are such fun playthings
If a humble bush can bring my 10-ton tank to a stop I don’t see why carbon steel discs squeezed between hydraulically powered calipers cannot do the same.
Those damn shrubs lol, I feel ya.
And now I want brakes made out of bushes for wooden vehicles. Eco-friendly!