The best walking sim ever to involve a truck

    [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. ;-)]



So, with a single key bind, I just turned my favorite driving sim into
a walking sim.

The former being, of course, the SCS Truck Driving Simulators
(American/European), which have kept me cheerfully engaged for close
to a decade now.* Driving down the highways has always had a calming
appeal. It's not a very difficult game; the default simulation
settings are fairly mild**, distances are minimized, and traffic is
minimal.

But what if I could make the game even easier? What if I could make it
so my driving sim had all the challenge of your average walking-sim?

It turns out, I can, and all with a simple key-press. See, the
developers recently added 'lane-keeping' capability to the trucks.
Which, combined with cruise-control for speed management, means I
barely need to DRIVE my driving game at all anymore. Just get the
truck up to speed and in the right lane, press a couple of buttons,
and it's hands off!

Well, not really. Lane-keeping doesn't do navigation, or avoid
traffic. And -whether because of bad navmeshing or intentional design-
it's not all that stable; the truck 'pinballs' slightly to the left
and right of the lane, with the swing getting slightly wilder as time
gets by, until finally manual intervention is required to stabilize
things again. The truck also takes no note of things like construction
or traffic lights or any other obstacles; it'll just happily barrel
forward at full speed unless I suggest that maybe --just maybe--
plowing into another truck at a crossing is a Bad Idea. So I still
have to do /some/ monitoring.

But, yeah, it does take a lot of the stress out of the driving, and
even I have to wonder what's the point of playing the game this way?

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. One
of the biggest flaws (purposeful design choices) of the SCS Truck Sims
is to make the world a 1:20 imitation of reality. This is good in the
sense that I can finish a 1000-mile journey in a single sitting, but
it does lead to some oddities on the map... like excessively twisty
roads. Considering the size of the map, a remarkably large number of
the highways feature extremely tight turns (sometimes multiple S-turns
in the span of several hundred feet), and -too often in normal play-
you dare not take your eyes off the road for a millisecond lest you go
over the edge. It's actually a bit annoying, especially since I find
the best parts of the game are when I can turn OFF my brain and just
relax (their representation of the German autobahn is perfect for
this).

But with lane-keeping? Why, I can finally look AROUND me and watch the
pretty landscape go by. It's changed how I play the game entirely. I
can look at the other trucks. I can look at the inside of MY truck. I
can play with all those buttons on the dash. I can marvel at the
idiosyncratic AI. I'm no longer fixated on how the pavement directly
in front of me might suddenly weave to the left or right. Suddenly
there's a whole world around me that I can appreciate.

I'm not sure I'll stick with it though; as I said, the game lacks much
in the way of challenge to begin with, and that's almost entirely gone
with lane-keeping enabled. But it sort of amazes me how one tiny
change so drastically altered how I experience the game.

All from a single key-press.














* what can I say, I'm easily amused.
** you can tune a variety of settings to make them -presumably- more
realistic, but since I have no idea what it's like to really drive a
Big Rig, I don't know what values to change those settings to, so I
just leave everything at the defaults