Roads and Driving



Diving should be semi-realistic, similar to games like GTA and Driver. Basically, the driving is restricted to roads, not artificially, but instead by the fact that if you drive a standard car off-road, you get stuck.

Different types of roads in different places, Highways with lots of traffic between major cities, older tarmac roads next to them, gravel and mud roads crossing in between. Just like roads are in real life.

Main roads would be goverment controlled and subject to speed limits. Punishment for attacking another vehicle on these roads would be destruction of the assaillant vehicle. Police would have some sort of helicopters. Punishment for going over speed limit would be fines. Cars would have speed limiters installed, to help drive without breaking the speed limit. It would be possible to evade police by driving away from the major road, cause areas between major roads are controlled by different raider gangs that shoot down every police chopper they see.

By purchasing an off-road or tracked vehicle, you could leave the road and go explore the areas between. There you would find things to salvage, to be used for crafting. I'm still trying to figure out more reasons to leave the road, to make off-roading really worthwhile.

Car handling would depend much about the way car is set-up, but more of that in the car customization section

Also one more very important thing, vehicles have fuel consumption. so you have to refuel your car. This can be done at gas stations in cities or around major roads, or at a tanker truck. Many car statistics change the fuel consumption, but again, more of that in the car customization section.

What happens when you drive out of the road and get stuck, or if you flip your car over when off-roading and find your roof where you wheels should be?
Do not worry, luckily we have the TS (Towing Service). They have made exclusive deal with goverment, to allow their helicopters to be allowed into airspace and since they don't select their customers, raiders allow them in their airspace as well. So you just give them a quick call and their chopper will come and airlift you to a near safe spot, back on you wheels again. In some cases they may even transport you to the nearest city.

Later thought about the towing service:
1) How does it work? First, you give a call to the service, asking for service. This will activate a 1km radius around your current location. If you go outside that area, your request is automatically cancelled.
2) Depending on the situation, it will take 30-150 seconds for the service to arrive, suring this time you will see timer on your hud.
3) 10 seconds before the service arrives, you must be stopped with your engine off. The pickup timer will stop to the 10secs, until these requirements are met. If they are not met within 30secs, the chopper will leave and you have to make a new request.
4) Chopper will pick you up and you will be taken to the world/area map, where you can select you dropoff point. The cost of the service will vary, depending on pickup and dropoff location and distance between them.
5) If you can't wait for the service, there is also the posssibility for emergency request. This will be much more expensive than normal service, but it will arrive in 10 seconds.
6) If you make another emergency request within 1 hour, the price will be 10 fold. after the hour, the price will gradually decrease back to normal during 24 hours. If you make a new emergency request within this time, the remaining portion of the 24 hour timer will be added to the 1 hour timer. Complicated, isn't it.
7) If you make several cancellation in a row or during one time cycle, you will be penalized.
8) There have been rumors about rogue towing service, fooling officials with vehicles identical to the real TS choppers, this rogue operation has been told to be much cheaper than the original one, but only selected few know how to contact them. As usual, there has been no confirmation or denial to these rumours from the goverment.


A created a little map of the game world, to make things I plannes easier to understand. There's a link to the picture below, but first, let me give you a quick map legend.
1) Black circles are cities, the size of the circle tells you how big city it is. The biggest in the middle is the capital.
2) Blue lines are highways. Notice how there is a highway around each of the larger cities, so you can go around the city easier. These are the goverment controlled roads with speed limits and all.
3) Orange lines are older tarmac roads, where highways exist, these roads have become secondary roads.
4) Green lines are gravel or mud roads.
5) Red squares are raider bases or at least places for possible raider bases.
6) Dark red areas are impassable zones. Maybe there's big canyon or large body of water or something like that.

Few more things to mention. Notice how most of the big cities are concentrated in the north area. There are 2 bigger concentrations of raider bases, up-left and bottom-right areas. All cities are not connected by highways, so it's not necessarily safe to go there. Also these cities may be more symphatetic to raiders, since they don't get much help from the goverment.

Game map concept

NPC traffic

Decided to add the info about NPC traffic here, since this is the area it concerns most and I didn't want to create new section for it.
Start with the basics, roads are filled with various traffic, all vehicle types are represented, with the exception of tracked vehicles being very rare.
I have hoped of possibility of creating some kind of convoy system, instead of just random traffic. Basically it would work like this:
1) The game randomizes the main vehicle.
2) Depending on what vehicle is in question, it is given a simple task (go to this city, go around that and that city then return here).
3) According to the task, the vehicle receives it's route.
4) Depending on the task, the vehicle might get some escorts.
5) The vehicle gets spawned at city gate (or raider base, if it's a raider vehicle) and leaves to do the task.
6) If it's a bounty hunter on patrol, it engages any raiders it sees. If it's a raider, it attacks any trucks it detects.
7) After either the task is done or the vehicle is destroyed, the game creates a new one.
Notes: Depending on the time of day, amount of traffic will differ. During daylight there is more traffic than during night. Highways will have lots of traffic, mostly trucks and private vehicles. Secondary roads will have some trucks, some corporation agents with sport cars on courier mission and also some amount of raiders and bounty hunters. Gravel roads will have mostly raiders, but also some amount of bounty hunters.

I don't know if this kind of system is possible to create, it would require hell of a lot processing power on the server, but it's a nice idea.

Crashes and collisions

Minor crashes with other cars are not a problem, when times are like this, these things happen. But for bigger crashes you will have to pay a fine, depending on the severity of the crash. This will be a very hard feature to code so that it works like it should.
If you happen to lose control on a road that has railings and you end up crashing and breaking those, you will have to pay for them.