Re: The best walking sim ever to involve a truck

On Tue, 7 Jan 2025 11:11:20 -0800, Justisaur <justisaur@gmail.com>
wrote:

On 1/6/2025 8:10 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

 
     [Once again I wax on endlessly about that stupid truck-driving
      sim. Just move on to the next post. It's okay; I'll understand
      if you do so. ;-)]
 

On my recent 500 mile trip I tried the lane and distance keeping cruise
control on my 2021 real car.  It worked pretty well but some stretches
of road it did a lot of pin-balling back and forth, and if there was
rain or the road was wet, or the markings faded it tended to not find
the right and would try to veer into it or the shoulder if I was in the
rightmost.  It also complained when I had my hand lightly on the
steering wheel.  It mostly did better than I at at detecting cars ahead
and keeping pace with them up to the set cruise speed, but had trouble
with people cutting me off (way more times than I could count) taking a
few seconds to recognize that, and detecting a car to the right when it
was veering off that way.

I seemed to get tunnel vision far less than driving with just plain old
set speed cruise control, I was worried I'd have more trouble paying
attention with it doing all that, but perhaps because I was monitoring
what it was doing I was more engaged.

Interesting. I've never had a car with lane-keeping, or even driven a
rental with the capability. So I've no real familiarity with how well
it works.

I assumed the pinballing was an effect of the game's mechanics. The
game's roads are stitched together using pre-made roads with nav-mesh
lines underneath. Sometimes the stitching isn't quite perfect, and I
figured the back-n-forth was a result of the AI jumping between the
nav-mesh lines as we crossed over the stitches. But maybe it was
intentional after all?

Except... it does change things somewhat to the positive. For one
thing, I can now dare to take my eyes off the road for a second.

>
Ah yes, I noticed that with the fancier cruise control too, that may
have contributed to avoiding tunnel vision since I could glance off at
signs and landmarks much more, and also made the drive more enjoyable.

In the game, it allowed me to look around more. I'm not sure that made
me a better driver though. While I felt a lot more aware of my
surroundings, I felt a lot less aware of the road. The lane-keeping
didn't cause any accidents but I felt less in control (it also was a
bitch when it came to changing lanes). I'm not sure it's something I'd
want to use in Real Life.

But it made for an interesting change of pace.