Responsiveness of Key presses tied to distance to next node?

[anthonyromyn]

Hi Cody,

This isn't an issue, just a question: when the user presses a key to move to a different lane, does the car start to turn to the different lane only once the next node has been reached? So the more dense the nodes are, the more 'responsive' the car will be to user input, yeah?

Best,
Anthony

[codyhowarth]

@anthonyromyn Your intuition is mostly correct - the car will initiate a lane change when a node in the lane you want to change to is within a certain distance. So yes, technically the more dense the nodes are, the more responsive the car should be. In practice however, there may be some other weird behaviour that occurs. It's definitely worth testing out though if you're looking for more responsiveness.

The pathfinding/node following system in general is where pretty much all of the complexity within RR lies. The decision was made early on to use real physics for the car, and I still believe it was the right choice, as it allows for a much more extensible design going forward. There's plenty more you can do with a real car compared to a simple object that 'skates' on rails, or similar.

I'm sure you've noticed the janky-ness of the way the car follows the path sometimes [see: oftentimes]. This is directly related to the node/path setup on the prefabs. In most cases it can be greatly improved simply by carefully adjusting the position and distance of nodes (too close together and the car 'vibrates' back and forth, too far and the car takes forever to move to the desired position). Keep in mind, current node placement was done somewhat quickly by myself in order to get things up and running.

All that said, there is still plenty of room for improvement within the AI system itself, though these types of improvements will likely be the most costly time-wise of any features/bugfixes. As such, focusing efforts here will have to be weighed against other work appropriately.