Driving Fast ! Is it possible?

Game Talk The Bunker
1

I have vehicles that can “safely” run at around 200 km/h (HURRAY FOR THE METRIC SYSTEM), my character has 5 in driving skill. I can hardly run at 50km/h while being actually safe (dodging minefields, rocks, trees, turrets). I know this is a very reasonable speed and in reality you probably wouldn’t drive much faster but I was wondering if there was any way to drive actually pretty fast while still being able to control the vehicle like a boss, Tokyo drift style.

My top speed is usually around 120 when I want to ram some really powerful zombie like a Hulk, but when I do that, I must make sure I’m on the right trajectory before going into LUDICROUS SPEED.

Has anyone found a way to go really fast ? A fellow player once told me that having high driving skill would allow me tighter control but I couldn’t really figure if that was true.

2

If you know the roads your following running 120+ on way between to locations your familiar with is pretty reasonable. I’ve done 250 between locations after being infected, wasn’t the safest of trips but I made it back in time.

3

Yeah, driving skill has a significant effect on your ability to handle the car. 5 is pretty good, though. I believe it maxes out its effects at 10 – my main guy has that, and he can thread a needle at a pretty good speed.

4

In theory, you could just build a vehicle that has lots of durability and those trees will no longer be an issue. That might also solve your problem. I think tanks have really good frames if I remember correctly.

5

So 8 kph is 1 tile/turn. The limit of your vision is 60 tiles, which means you can’t really go more than 480 kph. The sine of 15 degrees is ~0.25, which means for that for every 32 kph of forward motion, you move 1 tile to the left or right if you’re just slightly turned off from moving in a cardinal direction. So if you’re driving down the center of a road through the forest and turn 15 degrees to avoid an upcoming car, at more that about 384 kph, you’re going to drift 12 tiles off the road and run into the forest. That’s the best case if you’re on a 1 tile wide motorcycle, since each tile of vehicle width reduces that speed by ~48 kph.

Based on data I collected for the vehicle speed rework, most people don’t like traveling about 12-15 tiles/turn. 200 kph is 25 tiles/turn, and 6 tiles of drift for turning 15 degrees, so it’s pretty reasonable that most people can’t handle that.

There’s a vague plan (as in, it’s something the developers want to do but don’t know how to do) that will involve automatic navigation between known points, and that will allow for much faster travel than what you could manage by yourself.

2 Likes
6

That form of fast travel sounds both amaizing and hard to pull off depending on how it’s being implemented.

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Do you often dodge minefields, rocks, trees, turrets and hulks in reality on 200 km/h?

1 Like
8

Yeah yeah, older thread.

Not sure how much driving has been looked at since the game switched to 1 sec turns.

I find that currently the driving skill doesn’t seem to functionally do much of anything unless you drive pretty crazily fast. If you stay down at 25kph you can take a Hummvee with a missing tire over bad terrain and not even notice it at skill 0. Complex 8 point turns? No problem for our newb in a MBT.

I was thinking that one of the best ways to simulate lack of skill even without overt loss-of-control events would be to lengthen the control tick when comparing vehicle handling vs. player skill

Vehicle Handling = (Vehicle Mass / ((#Wheels - wheel condition)^0.5)) * control system damage penalty

Higher vehicle handling is worse. Manual Shift control systems are harder, automatics are easier (but more fragile?), and you could potentially install cool exotic control systems to further improve handling.

Vehicle Handling / (Skill + dex mod?) = Vehicle Control Score (again, higher is worse)

VCS would used to determine your tick length when controlling your car. If it’s really bad, your ticks between being able to issue a turn/acc/dec action get longer, making it extremely difficult to control your vehicle, even without overt loss of control events.

Bad terrain conditions wouldn’t really affect VCS, just increase the chance of skids and handling issues as it currently does. The VCS/Skill comparison is essentially your action speed in a vehicle, or your reaction time if you will.

Thus starting out on a bicycle or moped or golf cart would be enormously helpful. Letting you train up your skill early on in low mass vehicles without crazily swerving around the street mashing fenders, mailboxes and porch railings.

Training driving could also have difficulty thresholds where it examines VCS*current speed to determine if your current driving is ‘hard’ enough to train your skill further - you can train your skills by driving really fast or by finding larger more unwieldy vehicles to practice in.

This would also result in really amusing early pratfalls where a starting survivor finds a working armored vehicle, leaps in, gingerly taps the gas - and promptly drives it through the building in front of them due to the 10+ second tick time resulting from the vehicle’s mass + their total lack of driving skill. :laughing:

More seriously, it would also put a direct premium on vehicle mass in general, requiring survivors to keep their driving skill competitive if they intend to be hauling around in a 20mt deathmobile.

1 Like
9

Twenty millitonne? So, what, a bicycle? oh, wait. deathmobicycle :grin:

10

Who hasn’t tried to weld a spike ram plate onto the front of their bicycle?

11

rams are for the weak, str 20 + shredder is what real survivors use.