While creating and testing levels with new features and road signs. I’ve noticed quite a big problem. Traffic flow is better when you just leave all traffic lights green. Basically make an uncontrolled intersection and let the cars figure it out for themself. Yes, cars sometimes crash, maybe more often, than with controlled intersections. But overall intersection throughput is much better.

As you imagine this is not very good for gameplay. Why bother to set up traffic lights if it is just better to leave them always green. Problem is, that the cars are a little bit like daredevils and drive through intersections very confidently. My first thought was to detect such an uncontrolled intersection, where all traffic lights are green, and upon car entering the intersection, make it more stupid, disable some detection colliders. So more crashes would accrue.

I did not like this idea much. My car’s AI is not perfect. They crash a lot already. So I did. So I made them drive through uncontrolled intersections very slow. It makes sense. You just don’t fly through an uncontrolled junction. You stop, take a look around, and approach slowly.

Now if you leave all traffic lights green, for cars it takes much longer to reach the destination. Problem solved. What do you think?

Categories: Devlog

Arunas Pangonis

Solo game developer. Creating game for Apple platforms using C++ and OpenGL.

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