Hi everyone!
I've been making adjustments to vehicle AI this week, among some other things. After the body bag update I wanted to put more effort into having Cops clearing the scenes, and to do that they will need to move vehicles and as part of that I have created this week's update.
Previously when a car found an abandoned vehicle in front they would abandon their vehicle, causing long trains of abandoned cars once one was abandoned.
I've changed the AI so if possible the vehicle can do a U-turn and go back the way they came to avoid these issues. This keeps the traffic flowing a lot longer than it used to. It's not perfect (they still stop at intersections) but it's a step in the right direction and I personally think it creates more interesting shapes of traffic and abandoned vehicles in the streets.
With this kind of change there were a few glitches that ate up a lot of the dev time this week but I've also been doing something else on the side. DeadOS is made using Unreal Engine 4 and it has a system for animating UI that I previously wasn't taking advantage of (I was coding the UI animations myself) so I'm converting them over to the new animation system, starting at the moment with the Escape Menu but working it in to other screens as using this system is going to allow me to create some really juicy animations further down the road.
I've been deciding that I want to rework some of the escape menu options into the game UI (mainly the ones I've decided are Tools) so that people have better control of sims. I also want to add the option to go back phases more easily as at the moment undoing mistakes in the setup feels a little clunky and I want to deal with that in upcoming updates.
Thanks for playing and I'll see you in the next update!