General opinion on the new fuel system

[Lesseps]

Am I seriously the only one who likes the new fuel consumption? Outside of the devs?

I’m with you on that.

[Aabbcc]

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:15, topic:13008”]I’m writing some test cases.

How much fuel do we want to be used in what kind of “voyage”?

I’m thinking something like this:
Car (the basic one) accelerating to full and then braking suddenly should be able to offroad a 1 overmap tile like that with one tank full of gas. The constant braking is supposed to simulate going at low velocity, turns etc.
That would be a pretty good stress test that can be automated.[/quote]- An overmap tile is… a block? this is far too short distance to drain a full tank in a regular car, regardless of off-road or how you’re driving, particularly in flat terrain.

• Unless all you’re achieving with driving like that is skidding and barely advancing an inch, but I don’t think the current system results in that.
• It /shouldn’t/ be about distance on flat off-road. A car shouldn’t be consuming that noticeably more on off-road unless trying to go that fast makes it skid all over the place and waste energy, which you simulate with either skidding or a cap on top speed.
• I suppose tall grass and the like /could/ require more fuel, you could do something tricky like using the walking move-costs of terrain to determine how hard it is to drive a car through it, but how do you differentiate obstacles a car couldn’t pass through like small trees from grass? Also, I’m not sure the effect is worth the effort of coding such a thing, since unless it’s multiple contiguous tiles of such terrain, the impact on fuel should be minimal: if I take my car and drive it through some bushes, I shouldn’t see the fuel meter drop dramatically for it.
• The current difference between ‘cruising’ and ‘inefficient driving’ is pretty large, but not /that/ large. If one gets you one tile, the other would get you… what? 4? 5 tops? this means a car that goes off-road to travel to a nearby campsite would drain a full tank just getting there. Someone, say, living in a farm driving their car over a couple blocks of dirt road before hitting the street would drain half the tank just getting out of their home. Unless you also make off-road vehicles massively more efficient than regular cars in those conditions, this is way too much.

[kevin.granade]

When Coolthulu says an Overmap tile I’m pretty sure he means 180x what you think he means. If you start a new game and do debug->reveal map, the area revealed is one overmap. This is an area that can contain a half dozen small towns or one megacity, it’s not particularly small.

A car shouldn't be consuming that noticeably more on off-road unless trying to go that fast makes it skid all over the place and waste energy, which you simulate with either skidding or a cap on top speed.

Really? You think a car is going to get the same mileage on turf as on asphalt? To be clear, the initial stab at lowering mileage for offroad is a 50% increase in fuel consumption, this is due to higher rolling resistance due to a softer surface, bumping due to a rougher surface, and perversely slipping due to a lower traction surface. I honestly have no idea how good an approximation of reality this is, any resources indicating how off-road mileage differs from city or highway mileage is welcome.

[Aabbcc]

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:23, topic:13008”]When Coolthulu says an Overmap tile I’m pretty sure he means 180x what you think he means. If you start a new game and do debug->reveal map, the area revealed is one overmap. This is an area that can contain a half dozen small towns or one megacity, it’s not particularly small.[/quote]If that’s the case, then it’s a lot more reasonable. What led me to the conclusion was the word “tile”, which normally refers to one square/character.

If it’s an overmap… hmm. it’s tough to pin down exactly how much an overmap covers, what it’s meant to represent. I find “average city size” or “average inter-city driving distance” more useful, since we can mentally correlate it with the real life analogues they are meant to represent far easier.

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:23, topic:13008”]Really? You think a car is going to get the same mileage on turf as on asphalt? To be clear, the initial stab at lowering mileage for offroad is a 50% increase in fuel consumption, this is due to higher rolling resistance due to a softer surface, bumping due to a rougher surface, and perversely slipping due to a lower traction surface. I honestly have no idea how good an approximation of reality this is, any resources indicating how off-road mileage differs from city or highway mileage is welcome.[/quote]The problem is that you should be having lower efficiency already due to driving under optimal road speed. Most of the difference in mileage between offroad and not is going to come from this.

If we do get some information on off-road mileage, say, we find some magical number saying it’s 50% worse, we shouldn’t add a 50% penalty to efficiency, instead, we should consider how much efficiency the vehicle is already losing to speed change and then see how much it has to increase to reach 50%.

Since you’re driving slower so the tires have good grip, that takes care of slipping unless serious skidding mechanics are implemented, which would allow you to drive above what’s safe on off-road and pay for it.

Rolling resistance is only a very small part of fuel efficiency, enough to be noticeable over a few weeks when you change tires or toy with pressure, but not huge. Biggest change I’ve experienced doing that was ~5%, offroad would be bigger, but not huge.

Bumping… we’re already working with a perfectly flat world without hills, are bump mechanics desirable or too much of a hassle? if they are, shouldn’t the size of tire affect this? the type of terrain instead of a mere ‘offroad/road’ divide?

[ragamer]

Rolling resistance is only a very small part of fuel efficiency, enough to be noticeable over a few weeks when you change tires or toy with pressure, but not huge. Biggest change I've experienced doing that was ~5%, offroad would be bigger, but not huge.

The main issue with “offroad” is “effective friction”. Taking RL as inspiration, this are the main effects that change drag on your vehicle when you move from pavement to loose ground (ie “offroad”):

• Friction coeficient between contact surfaces goes down. Which has nasty effects as: Easier to slide, cap on the max acceleration you can apply, massive increase on full stop distance. Driving offroad over dirt WHILE raining is a feat only a few locomotive systems can manage reliabily (Treads, mainly).

• Uneven surfaces. The constant up-down movement due to uneven terrain translates itself as an average “ramp” if we were driving on pavement.

• Soft Terrain. Your contact surface becomes progressively higher because the terrain is not consistent enough to sustain vehicle pressure over the ground.

Almost every1 is familiar to what happens with a heavy vehicle with not enough wheels when attempting to drive over mud… Eventually, to beat the drag due to weight, your transmission needs to apply such ammount of power that wheels simply slide because of the reduced friction coeficient… They become effectively stuck.

AFAIK all of the above is simply modeled as an increased “friction” percentage over road performance (Converted as an inverse “offroad” percentage of speed). And if you currently start to reduce the ammount of wheels on a given design, it goes down steadily. We don’t need an extra penalty on fuel efficiency offroad ATM (The fact that the same engine regime yields less speed makes your fuel needed per km travelled figure to go up), maybe a cap on friction offroad percentage (It’s possible to reach close to 100% offroad adding enough wheels) and definitively a reduction on it for vehicles traveling offroad while raining or snowing. As a touch of realism the possibility to become “stuck” on mud could be incorporated… But I don’t know enough details of how the simulation is programmed to offer a proper model.

[Coolthulhu]

Yes, I meant the 180 tile overmap. I added that “tile” out of momentum, but meant just the overmap.

I checked some random sources on google and could only find that:

[ul][li]Gravel road increases consumption by at least 10% compared to asphalt[/li]
[li]Sand roughly doubles consumption[/li][/ul]

Grass and dirt should be somewhere in between those, with the assumption that they aren’t neat decorative fields, but nearly knee-high wild grasses and muddy/dusty dirt.
I’d avoid making grass and dirt too different, because it could lead to having to swerve around just to avoid bad spots on the field, which would be pretty tedious but without much impact otherwise.

In the game it currently can’t be evaluated properly due to bugs. The “offroading” is a multiplier for max velocity and acceleration, not fuel efficiency.
Going with higher penalty than IRL would make sense since the in-game roads tend to be very short compared to IRL ones (100 houses of length).

[ragamer]

The "offroading" is a multiplier for max velocity and acceleration

That’s more than enough… No need to add extra calculations. Players will be slowed down on “less optimal” grounds while keeping their engines working the same… This triggers the extra consumption per km travelled naturally.

I would proceed leaving accurate simmulation behind to favor in-game perception. Just order “terrains” by “difficulty” and spread your maximum penalty between them. Assuming a typical civilian wheel this should be the order in increasing difficulty:

• Asphalt (I).

• Cement/Concrete/Ceramic (II).

• Gravel/Dirt (III). The key difference between gravel roads and dirt ones… Is that rain makes Dirt roads into Mud, while gravel stays like that (more or less).

• Sand/Snow/Mud (IV).

If later, you want to offer some variety in contact surfaces, you can add some specific “wheels” specialized on a given terrain. For example Asphalt is better for civilian wheels because of the rubber they are made of and how the contact surface behaves when wet… Meanwhile, for treads, there is almost no difference between (I), (II) & (III) been always worse than wheels on the same terrain but been substantially better than any wheel on terrain (IV).

[Aabbcc]

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:26, topic:13008”]Going with higher penalty than IRL would make sense since the in-game roads tend to be very short compared to IRL ones (100 houses of length).[/quote]I don’t understand what you mean by this. Isn’t the scale difference between game and rl distances already covered by the standard fuel consumption? why would off-road work under a different scale than road?

[Coolthulhu]

I don’t understand what you mean by this. Isn’t the scale difference between game and rl distances already covered by the standard fuel consumption? why would off-road work under a different scale than road?

IRL taking a shortcut between two stretches of road would very often end up as a giant waste of time and fuel. If there are no roads, you’d need a vehicle adapted to lack of roads to actually get anywhere.
In the game the shortcuts are all pretty short, so giving them relatively low fuel consumption would result in offroading being the rational choice in most cases, thus defeating the point of making them realistic in the first place.

[SenorOcho]

What options are planned to make offroad-capable vehicle adaptations a possibility?

My most recent run had a found electric car with 20% battery fail to make it out of town back to the evac shelter (about 8-10 map tiles). That’s pretty ridiculous, offroading penalties or not.

[Greiger]

Adding more wheels or swapping your current ones out for larger wheels will already increase your offroading capability. Electric engines also have a much lower effective travel distance then liquid engines of comparable sizes. Many people say too low.

[Codeslamer]

[quote=“SenorOcho, post:30, topic:13008”]What options are planned to make offroad-capable vehicle adaptations a possibility?

My most recent run had a found electric car with 20% battery fail to make it out of town back to the evac shelter (about 8-10 map tiles). That’s pretty ridiculous, offroading penalties or not.[/quote]
Correct me if I’m wrong, but this game is set in the (near?) future, right? And if a map tile is the size of 1 house, then that’d mean there are alot of map tiles in 1 mile. (Again, I could be wrong). Regardless, the RL full electric cars (the fancy Tesla’s ect) are able of about 350Mi on 100% charge. 20% of 350 is (if my maths hasn’t failed me) 70. So we can say that in RL an electric car on 20% would be able to go about 70 miles. Also, Tesla say they could’ve doubled this by next year. Clearly the in-game car doesn’t get 70 miles. It seems to get about 100 yards.

There are some things not taken into account here which would affect the range, such as the condition of the in-game car, the condition of the in-game road taken, the fact that this isn’t RL, and is a game, ect.

Yet, I feel that even if the car was as good as new, or if the roads were perfect, it wouldn’t have gotten much further. Regardless of whether this is a game or not.

((Ramble over. Now we can all live happy, knowing I have just defended one of my many hatreds. The electric car.))

[Codeslamer]

Unless the vehicle mod is still broken (I thought I saw it get updated but I don’t know), or if engine damage affects fuel usage, then the fuel is used up way to quick. I used up 0.2l moving 4 map tiles in a 2.0 Inline 4 car. Unless this car gets the lowest MPG in existance, that’s insane. I may as well take a grinder to the fuel tank and be done with it. I’d be lucky to make it to the end of the street I’m on.

I have seen a 2-stroke scooter near by, so I am going to waste my time fixing it to test how the fuel consumption is on that. Because that might be the new way of the road for me.

[Coolthulhu]

Unless the vehicle mod is still broken (I thought I saw it get updated but I don’t know)

Last time I checked (1-3 days ago?), it was update but still contained the bug.

[Aabbcc]

[quote=“Codeslamer, post:33, topic:13008”]Unless the vehicle mod is still broken (I thought I saw it get updated but I don’t know)

Last time I checked (1-3 days ago?), it was update but still contained the bug.[/quote]The bug was from the mod redefining the gasoline ammo item. There is no such definition in the mod right now, and this has been the case for the last, hmm, 20 days: https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/commit/1217e8712d5ed0e5d344fc30cab8dec5042fce07

[Codeslamer]

[quote=“Codeslamer, post:33, topic:13008”]Unless the vehicle mod is still broken (I thought I saw it get updated but I don’t know)

Last time I checked (1-3 days ago?), it was update but still contained the bug.[/quote]
In that case I’ll continue to wait until it hopfully gets fixed

[Nibelung44]

My Hippie Van is also using fuel like an heavy tank.

[Voqar]

I started a game without blazemod to see if I could actually play this game, because with blazemod you could literally run out of gas within feet of your origin.

Now, I’m not going to say this fuel change is the dumbest thing that’s been done to the game lately, since it seems like the devs are in a competition in that regard and it’s a fierce competition, but it’s up there.

It’s simply not fun and adds nothing to burn thru half a 50L tank of gas going less than a mile in slightly modified humvee. It’s beyond stupid.

I just don’t get it. This is one of the best games ever created but for the past few months it seems like the devs are doing trying hard to make it too miserable to play. And on top of changing/adding shit nobody wants that adds nothing but tedium hell, they also add bugs and otherwise break the game and don’t fix crap for days and days.

As I’ve stated before - if this is truly “experimental” then then realize that not all experiments are successes and it should be perfectly ok to strip out the UTTER FAILURES.

[Voqar]

I thnk the idea of burning more fuel is a good one because before this mess, fuel DID seem to last too long, but it’s gone entirely overboard now.

Fun. That’s what this game used to be.

Building cool vehicles and actually being able to drive them. That was fun.

The ridiculous changes to fuel consumption and as equally suck, the changes to vehicle speed/power, are also NOT FUN.

As many have stated, if you want to make these kinds of changes to the game that many won’t like and that to anybody sane and object, truly suck donkey ass, then do that as a mod. We shouldn’t have to use mods to undo the suck that gets randomly inflicted on the game.

[BorkBorkGoesTheCode]

The game lacks scale.