Be Excellent To Each Other

After the great success that was Perkies' Farm, I came to realize something. All I was doing now was loading my farm machinery onto my flatbed truck, driving to a field, unloading it, and setting my AI farmhands to work... then returning home for a different trailer to collect the grain and take it to the elevator for sale.

In other words, I wasn't farming much. I was a truck driver.

I decided I should be playing a truck driving game instead. Now, after SEVEN years in the pipeline, SoftLab-NSK had finally finished their sequel to the legendary Hard Truck series, "Rig n' Roll". However, the Steam forums were less than kind, calling it a load of old crap, basically. No speed limits? No traffic lights or stop signs? Ridiculous omissions, and with the game no longer on sale I decided against it.

The only alternatives were the collection of European truck sims:
-UK Truck Simulator, which is programmed by a group of Eastern European developers who don't seem to have even been provided with a road map of the UK. Did you know, for example, that if you want to travel east from Cardiff towards London, you need to take a little diversion SOUTH on the M5 before rejoining the M4 afterwards? Me neither, but that's what the authentic UK trucking experience offered.
-German Truck Simulator, not really of interest to me.
-European Truck Simulator, looks pretty good, but maybe anoather time (when it's on Steam and is cheap).

Which leaves me with my old friends SCS Software, makers of an old favourite of mine, 18 Wheels of Steel. I bought the newest non-EXTREME!!!! version, American Long Haul. I also installed some mods:
-fixing the traffic AI
-replacing all the fake business names with real ones
-letting me start with a decent truck (I opted to start with a Peterbilt 379)

A few other mods (additional trucks) made it crash, so I left them out.

With 92.9 'The Bull' streaming away in the background, I set out to make my fortune.

Oh dear. You can only choose to be male or female, so I'm stuck being this big fat trailer trash in a wifebeater.



Off we go, onto the Trans-Canada Highway towards Vancouver. Montgomery Gentry on the radio, singing "That's something to be proud of; That's a life you can hang your hat on; You don't need to make a million; Just be thankful to be workin'; If you're doing what you're able; And putting food there on the table". Well, I'm proud of my truck, I guess.



Before I knew it, a strange yawning sound effect could be heard, along with a 'You are tired and should rest' message.



Suddenly, this happened:



I was falling asleep at the wheel! You can still control the truck while dozing, but you can't see where you're going. The best thing is to hit the four-ways which causes all traffic around you to back off. Fortunately, I wasn't far from a truck stop with a motel, so I pulled in and spent the night.



The next day it was freakin' pissing down outside.



As I entered Manitoba, the weather started to get very cold.



It was getting dark again before I knew it, and I had to start thinking about finding a place to pull over and rest, already.



The cops are bastards (more on that later), and I came to fear and revile them. I hoped this one didn't get me for being over my hours.



Thankfully, another service area was up ahead and I parked up and checked into the hotel.



The next morning the snow wasn't letting up as I lined up with other trucks for the weigh station.



A day's trip through a blizzard saw me once again getting tired, and with no parking areas or anything nearby. I'm not sure the police would appreciate me stopping on the hard shoulder for a nap.



A dangerous swerve across the median into a gas station on the other side of the road revealed another trucker who'd been forced to stop for the night. I crawled gratefully into the sleeper and pulled the curtains closed.




The next morning, the only option open to me to continue was to drive out the wrong way offramp, back across the median, and continue my journey. I waited for a gap in the heavy traffic, and went for it.





Made it! I flashed my fourways in thanks to the traffic who'd let me across.



Now then, you remember I mentioned the cops? See that little bar in my HUD in the image below, next to the star? That's my wanted level. Doing anything wrong (speeding, running red lights, driving without lights on at night) and it starts to fill. If you then pass a police car with any wanted level, they ticket you for the offence.



Another night spent in a gas station.



Saturday morning rolls around. I've had an early start, and I'm not far off Vancouver now.



Yup, definitely on the 'Wet Coast'.



Busy traffic slowed me through the city itself to the warehouse.



I've arrived. Just gotta back the trailer up to the loading dock door and I'm done. The cargo is undamaged despite my hijinx, and I'm paid in full.



Whoa there buddy! You might have come around that corner a bit fast! Note my wanted level.



The wanted level is the single most jarring thing about the game. As I said, do anything wrong, and it will fill up, and the cops then will get you if they see you.

The thing is, if your front bumper goes an INCH over the stop line when the lights are red, the cops immediately know about it and the wanted bar fills completely. Even if you're on a deserted road on an industrial park with no cops anywhere in sight. What's more, the fine for running a red light is $9,000. I'm playing on hard, so I've started the game with $20,000, and a $100,000 loan to pay off. If you can't pay a fine, game over, the bank has seized your assets (your truck) to pay for it. This is unreasonably harsh.

HOWEVER! There is an ace up your sleeve to beat Smokey. If he can somehow know that I overshot a red light a bit, I can somehow make him vanish into thin air. See, when you load a saved game, the game world is momentarily unpopulated. After a few seconds, other traffic starts spawning and the roads begin to fill with traffic. The police cars lurking at the side of the road count as spawns. So, if you have a wanted level, and see a cop lurking up ahead (other truckers will warn you of them) you can just save the game, immediately load your saved and poof! he's gone! The wanted level ticks down very slowly, so if you evade capture for long enough, you've gotten away with it.

In the screenshot above, a cop has homed in on me, code 3, and saving/reloading doesn't shake him off. However, as I'm parked in this garage's yard, he can't get close enough to ticket me, and so long as I keep my lights on until morning (even though I'm off the public roads) I'm not breaking any laws and my wanted bar is slowly emptying. A very badly implemented system.

Which brings me to the other big issue with it all. The fatigue system. You can only drive a certain number of hours every day, and the in-game journal screen shows a tachograph-style screen showing how many hours you've spent on-duty, off-duty and in a hotel or sleeper, asleep. I'm not sure if you can just sprawl across the seat and sleep in a crew cab without a sleeper, as I used that mod so I didn't start with the shitbox starter truck the designers intended you to.

This is all well and good, except that you get no warning that you're approaching your limit (UK Truck Simulator has an 'eye' indicator which becomes increasingly droopy as you fatigue), not least of all because the in-game clock runs so damned fast and there's no option to slow down how quickly it runs. Just circumnavigating the highway around the outside of Calgary used up most of a 'day'. Granted, my truck needs a few engine upgrades as it can't even get to the speed limit with a heavy load yet, but that's just nuts. Almost as soon as you're underway, you're worrying about finding a place to stop, again. I *guess* you can just use your sleeper anywhere you feel like stopping, but again like the wanted level, it's a nice idea, badly implemented if it's this much of a fuss.

Other stuff I noticed along the way:
-the speed limit signs are European-style, red circular with the number within. I've only played the game within Canada so far so I don't know if this persists south of the border (note: Canadian speed limit signs look just like American ones, but with a 'KM/H' on the bottom in case of any foreign visitors).
-the traffic is REALLY HEAVY! Lots and lots of cars and stuff constantly streaming past you, much more than in 18WoS: Across America. You really need to check your mirrors and signal before changing lanes or you run a real risk of creaming someone.
-the weather effects are pretty darned good. Not only do you have impaired visibility through heavy snow and rain, but as I was going around a big cloverleaf I found myself sliding on the snow and ice, and used carefuly throttle inputs to keep my truck under control and avoid the guardrail.

The eventual aim, you ask? To buy more trucks, hire more drivers, and build up a transport company. For now, though, I'm going to hide in this yard until the police give up, and then see if I can't get a cargo heading towards Las Vegas.

Fricken Awesome!

Can you 'be' Lisa Kelly?

When I saw the subject I thought "I hope this is another weird sim that Perkies is playing"

I'm always kind of impressed by people who are really dedicated to sims, especially aircraft sims; those who really invest in the equipment and use the sim in realtime, undertaking long-haul flights for example.

Unfortunately I lack the patience (and the time) for such undertakings.

I may be drunk but that sounds a bizarrely wonderful game. Or maybe I just love Americana too much.

Next up - programmers! Please! Can you make me a game where I'm a lineman for the county, who drives the main road, searching in the sun for another overload. Perhaps some audio sound effects can help me detect which parts of the wire are faulty, perhaps by an off-key whine. I could also weigh my vacations against work time to ensure I stay efficient in the game, and keep track of weather conditions to ensure that the wire can stand the strain. The reward at the end of the game is that I get to meet my wife after a job well done, who I need more than love.

Long-distance Perkies, drives a juggernaught
way down the motorway
to the busy port
Long-distance Perkies - nothing's too far away
Picking up and dropping off, load after load

Long Distance Perkies, shifts the gears
Long Distance Perkies, he safely stears
Long Distance Perkies, slams on the brakes
Long Distance Perkies, accelerates
Long Distance Perkies driving round the bend
Hot dinner waiting at his journeys end
Long Distance Perkies, driving down the road
Always on time and never late

(spoken)
Long Distance Perkies, well, he could drive,
across the Albuquerques ....

Pole to pole, east to west
nothing's too far away
for Long-distance PERKIES!

This would be the best game ever, but I'm sorry to have to break this to you: it's going to feature pylons.

I want to see SharePoint Administrator and Developer Simulator 2011, with tossing around on the internet mini game which you'd have to go into when the tedium bar starts getting too high. If you don't win the mini game then you have to take some time off only when you come back your backlog bar is in the red and you have to spend half a day repeatedly clicking through the same set of web pages and....AAARRRRGGHHHHHH

Perkies, your gaming habits are baffling at times.

Now if that game had a mode where you have to drive from Atlanta to Texarkana and back to illegally deliver beer within 28 hours, whilst a co-op partner draws the attention of the police in a black Trans-Am - I'd buy it in a second.

It could be multiplayer - one person in the truck, one person in the Trans-Am, and one person driving the police car!

It would be a Hell of a map though.

Google earth innit .

It would need to be Google Earth from the late 70's though.

It's the southern US states, how would you know it wasn't the 70s?

Fair point.

Or the 1940s for that matter

This thread makes me want to play Big Mutha Truckers on the Cube again. Hardly any kind of simulation, but was fun for a while.

When you're stopped at a truck stop, do you get to spend some of your money on dodgy Benzedrine and cheap porno? Score some bennies and watch you fatigue gauge shoot right down!

No, just murder prostitutes.

This simulator may appeal to you, Perkies:

http://desertbus-game.org/


Actually in googling that there appears to be dozens of bus driving sims out there!

Ah, Desert Bus. And I actually still have my NTSC Sega CD to run it off. The game itself (Smoke and Mirrors) was never released.

I have Tokyo Bus Guide on the Dreamcast. I'm not sure about SCS' own Bus Driver, the physics and "passenger forces" gauges seemed a bit broken. There's also that New York Bus Driver game, which even lets you get out and walk around, GTA style. Maybe when it's cheap...

I'd actually like a game with an accurate map of New York, just for wandering around. That'd be nice. No missions or danger, just exploring.

http://goo.gl/maps/2aPE
Right now, you're looking at the hotel I spent my honeymoon in.
Across the street is a sweet shop.

Knock yourself out.

I'll take a wild stab at that being a link to streetview on Google maps.

TBH, there is zero danger to you exploring the very authentic Liberty City in GTA4 unless you go looking for trouble... a bit like the real thing, I guess.

Been there. If you start a multiplayer game on your own there's no police either. I'd just like it to be the real New York

Round 2, and I'm still here, trapped in this yard by the cops.

I actually had to spend most of the following day in there, listening to his siren wail, go back to sleep a second time, wake up (siren still going) and drive out when my wanted level had ticked away to nothing. Halfway down the block, the cop pounces and, seemingly without evidence any more, gives me his final warning and doesn't fine me.

I go back to the same warehouse as before and accept a consignment of eggs to Las Vegas. A 'turnpike double' no less... two 48 foot trailers. With fragile cargo. I'm an idiot.



Of course, as I head out of Vancouver, I'm then met by a fallen traffic light WITH a cop sitting right next to it, and traffic stopped right behind me so I can't even back up to escape (not that I really could, with two trailers). My only option it to try and swerve around it (wanted level rising...) and push it out of the way before it damages me too much.



I somehow escape without being arrested, and make it to the US border.





I reach Seattle, and discover to my dismay that what looks like an intersection or something on the map...



...is actually an elevated highway passing OVER another road. I've no option but to continue driving all the way south, then turn back on myself, go back through Seattle and eventually join Interstate 84 that way.



Naturally, I become dangerously tired in seconds, and after several terrifying blackouts I manage to pull into a DHL container yard for the night. The following morning, a crafty U-turn and I'm heading back towards Seattle again.



Of course, this means coming out BACK across a divided highway... I get a gap across the first lanes, but there's no sign of any for the next. My huge truck is completely blocking the way, surely, one of my good fellow citizens will let me out. Principal Skinner style, I wait. And wait. And wait.



Back on my way, I stop for gas... right underneath the damned highway I was on before.



I'm heading the right way now!



I'm now driving through the night, up steep mountain roads, hoping fatigue doesn't get the better of me.





Fatigue wins. The steep, narrow roads don't co-operate, and when I regain my vision I've only swerved across the interstate and been hit by a nuclear waste truck (really).



Incredibly, my cargo of eggs is undamaged, my truck merely scuffed, and an environmental catastrophe rendering the Pacific Northwest uninhabitable for millenia somehow averted. A service area is up ahead, and I swerve (deliberately this time) across the oncoming lanes to take refuge for the night in my sleeper.



There's a service area here too, so I take the opportunity to upgrade my truck. As you can see, I have the crappiest of absolutely everything, which explains why my truck struggles to hit 45mph and can't stop. I buy the best engine and brakes, a slightly better gearbox and some bigger tires.



I also paint my truck orange, so it'll be easier to see when I drive across six lanes of traffic to get out of here.



My new engine and brakes work great (note my speedometer) and I zip straight down I-84 past Boise.



These interchanges are really confusing... the road straight ahead forks RIGHT, if you want to go onto the other road, you fork left. I guessed correctly this time.



Outside Salt Lake City, sleep threatens to overcome me again and I have no choice but to pull onto the hard shoulder for some sleep.



Later that morning, though, I see my first sign for Vegas!



The landscape becomes more arid as I head south towards Nevada.



A helicopter went flying past... I assume it's one of those Grand Canyon tours returning to Las Vegas.



At long last, I arrive in Las Vegas... and a lot of traffic on the offramp.



Just gotta fight through the sleep until I deliver the cargo! The Strip looks mighty tempting.



Made it! Once again, my cargo is undamaged. I spent three hours backing the trailers up to the loading dock, as you can't uncouple them and do them one at a time.



My task is complete!



I plan now to head back to Thunder Bay, but via a delivery to Mobile, Alabama.

I love reading these, Perkies. It sounds almost brilliant, but ultimately quite frustrating. How're you controlling it?

Keyboard. Brilliantly, it comes by default bound to both WASD and arrows, so you can swap hands if one gets tired. There's a cruise control, but when you switch it on, you'll invariably lose about 5mph of speed before it kicks in.

LLOL

You'll need to tell me how realistically shit they make it look.
Great thread, by the way.

This is amazing, again. These guys also made the excellent 'Bus Driver'.

Metalangel, you're making me want to play this game. Stop it!

Great travelogue though. But what about the people you've met on the way? Surely you've had some illicit romances in the lay-by with your fellow truckers? As Magnetic Fields sang:

"Papa was a rodeo
Mom was in a rock 'n' roll band
I could play guitar and rope a steer
Before I learned to stand
Home was anywhere was diesel gas
Love was a trucker's hand
Never stuck around long enough for a one night staaaaaand

Before you kiss me you should know...
Papa was a rodeo."

Wait, that's not specifically about truck drivers. Oh well, I likes the song.

Let us know if the Sherrifs down there are fat Rod Steiger types.

You don't meet anyone along the way, alas. The older 18WoS games let you choose a little cartoon picture to represent yourself, with the unchosen pictures appearing next to other drivers when they talked to you on the CB. Now you just hear the (recycled from the old games) soundbites come randomly over the CB and with no indication who they came from, nor the reputation building of giving helpful advice when other truckers requested it.*

Rig N' Roll has an actual story, with cutscenes, and characters you convey for story missions. However, the huge quantity of bugs (and excessive price) put me off trying it for now.

If anyone of you do try the game and want the mods, http://www.filefront.com/user/Phantom359

I think the 'AI Road Speed Mod' is the most crucial as it stops the traffic just slamming on its brakes and swerving between lanes at random.

*they ask about the weather and traffic conditions ahead, if you're wondering

From my experience this is an accurate AI representation of American driving.

I sure hope they release a patch for UK Truck Simulator where people drive at 50mph in lane 2 of the motorway, crash into the back of you at roundabouts because they 'thought you'd gone' and stick their front bumper and wheels across so-called 'give way' lines!!!!!

I wonder if they would be able to accurately simulate the tedium of the M40

I had a look at the Euro Truck Sim, as there's a free one-hour trial on their web site. Impressions:

• I need a life
• This really doesn't work well with just a keyboard and mouse. Everything is fine bar the steering, which is a constant struggle of tapping to stay on course.
• The UK map is way, way too simple. Each major city (there are only a few, anyway) is just a couple of blocks of town, then a short, mostly curvy, motorway stint up to the next one. London to Newcastle can be done in ten minutes.
• It is actually quite fun, but it seems very, very limited in scale.

I'm going to check out the 18WoS Extreme 2 demo, so I can be an Ice Road Trucker.

"Go as fast as you can until you see a gray BMW"

Do they really ship eggs from Vancouver to Vegas in lorries? That seems somewhat inefficient, unless the US has a huge egg deficit ( and Vegas does get through a lot of eggs. All-you-can-eat buffet breakfasts! )

They should do an EVE of this - I should very much like to operate a small independent trucking company, struggling to stay afloat in a world of super-efficient behemoth corps.

They transport cows through space, for no fucking reason, in Firefly. And not too many of them. Now I feel sad. Poor Firefly.

Sounds about right. That's part of why I was initially interested in Rig n' Roll, as it models just California, so there's much bigger distances between each city.

There's an hour's trial of UK Truck Sim too, give it a try. Pick an area you're familiar with, and marvel at how it bears absolutely no resemblance to the real thing. Motorways don't even look 'right', it's like you're driving through the uncanny valley as the screen is telling you this is the M5 but it sure as hell doesn't look like it, that junction for example is just WRONG, and what's wrong with the road markings???



I don't know... I was more interested by the destination and the payout than the cargo. FRAPS is needed to capture the cargo screen (stupid in-game grabber doesn't do anything then) but you go to one of the big cargo depots on the map and get given a list of suppliers who have cargo that needs taking, what it is and where it needs to go. You pick that, and the trailer appears at a nearby loading dock for you to hook up to.



An MMO does seem a logical next step, but they'd need to make the map even bigger and think of a way to avoid obvious griefing tactics. I suspect EVE works because it's in space, and because you don't directly control your ship, so it makes 'sense' in a game context.

Are you even driving on the proper side of the road?

That's just EvE. Buy a hauler, make friends with people you see on your trips, start your small corp.

That's just EvE. Buy a hauler, make friends with people you see on your trips, start your small corp.

Until you goes out in a little frigate to a belt to pop some NPC rats, as you're a bit bored, you see an unescorted mining barge and go "Hell, yeah!", close orbit, scram and begin to blasterise it before "WTF?" and you are in a pod as you are on Tsara Bluebirch, not MaliA, in a 0.6 system.

Hahaha nobber!