Mass Traffic is a system in recent X games that generates paths and makes vehicles fly along them. It mostly runs on a dedicated thread, minimising the performance impact on the game.
It’s mainly made for adding decorative, atmospheric civilian traffic around stations. The most important functional uses are transport drones for cargo transfers and welding drones for constructing, dismantling and repairing.
There’s not much intelligence to mass traffic. Vehicles emerge from a hole, fly along a completely predefined path and ultimately disappear into another hole. There’s no need to avoid any obstacles or slow down for another vehicle, everything has been fully precalculated.
Limitations
This makes mass traffic a nice bit of eye candy, but it doesn’t really hold up much under scrutiny. Everything moves smoothly all the time and apart from welders these ships never do anything.
There are two exceptions to this, situations in which a mass traffic vehicle will leave its predefined path and become “real” - with a pilot running an AI script and proper steering behaviours.
The first one happens when a mass traffic vehicle is rammed or attacked. It and potentially some nearby ships will panic and try to fly evasive manoeuvres, sticking close to station surfaces if possible. If they manage to survive for a while they’ll find a spot to rejoin traffic and go back to the precalculated movement and simple AI script.
The second one is police vehicles, also called watchdogs. They frequently break out of their path to go scan other ships for contraband. They can also react to illegal violence by attacking the offender. Like other mass traffic ships that broke out of their path, they will try to rejoin it once they decide their patrol is over.
There are a few things this system cannot do, but which our brains would expect to see in a real environment. Intersections, traffic jams, places for ships to go that aren’t just holes. A parking lot, a gas station, a drive-thru, a car wash. These are things that would be very hard to add on to the current implementation of mass traffic, without rewriting at least the basic movement logic.
Boring Disclaimer
While I’m talking about a wishlist of improvements it’s very important to note that I’m not soft-announcing that they will arrive in the game at any point. After some posts explaining how the current system works - and why it can’t easily be extended with the desired features - I’m going to talk about a prototype I’m working on privately, but it’s just an experiment that might have the disappointing result that it would be too hard or expensive to do at the scale that we need. Okay? Okay :)
With that out of the way, please look forward to the next post, in which I will define some terminology. Exciting!