Really neat! My only complaint is that the handling is very sluggish. Also it might be nice to have a first-person vew, maybe the camera view contributes to the sluggish feeling.<p>I <i>love</i> the procedurally-generated landscapes. It really captures the feeling of driving on unfamiliar roads.<p>I'm curious how the physics works. Is this using raycast wheels? A couple of years ago I made a racing game for Oculus Quest using Godot[0], based on Godot's "VehicleBody", and getting the physics to work satisfactorily was a major headache. But a procedural world would have made it <i>so</i> much cooler.<p>[0] <a href="https://sidequestvr.com/app/1403/ghost-racing-vr-wip" rel="nofollow">https://sidequestvr.com/app/1403/ghost-racing-vr-wip</a>
A small note: 80 miles an hour on windy roads, driving in the middle of the road, is not slow and chill. That's "I want to die" fast and reckless... maybe have two autodrive settings. "slow and chill" going appropriate speeds and driving correctly (left/right toggle?) and "landscape zoomies" or something for what it currently does. Right now auto pilot is literally stress inducing =D
This would be great for Rally racing games, since it's all about reacting to unknown terrain.<p>Also, it would be better if mouse steering is damping impulse based, i.e. every frame the steering position exponentially decays, mouse position resets to center and the change is added as impulse on the steering position.<p><pre><code> sensitivity = max_ang / ( screenwidth/2 )
decay_rate = 6.0
frame(dt){
dx = mouse.x - center_pos
mouse.reset()
steer_ang += dx*sensitivity
steer_ang.clamp(-max_ang,max_ang)
steer_ang *= exp(-decay_rate * dt)
}</code></pre>
I wish the autodrive had a defensive driving option. As it is, it goes at 120 kmph on these windy roads and takes over the entire available space including the opposing lane. Wish you could limit the speed for a more relaxed cruise<p>This is very lovely and really relaxing (aside from the crazy speeds the autodrive goes at haha). Kudos to the creator! Btw if you haven't tried the numerous options to change weather, time of day, vehicle and even planet, go for it! There's a surprising amount of options<p>OH! I'm just finding out that there's a lock that's next to the speedometer that limits how fast the car goes! Damn this is so neat!
This is really cool! Thank you for making/posting this. I played around with it for about half an hour to 45 minutes or so. I did manage to break it two or three times but I can't reproduce it reliably yet. I'll provide a proper bug report if I can figure out the exact conditions, but mostly if you go off road and get to the top of a big enough hill and then accelerate down the hill as quickly as you can and crash into a barrier you can sometimes flip yourself over it. When you do, you are no longer tethered to the ground and, instead, kind of hover above it and the road. Sometimes you can slip through the ground and the water, and all other barriers become passable.<p><a href="https://i.imgur.com/YDyJa5g.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/YDyJa5g.png</a><p>(edit: It might be related to hitting slightly awkward terrain?)<p>(edit 2: Got it on video, though my commentary didn't get recorded for some reason) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7U-qS7P2tI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7U-qS7P2tI</a>
Wow, I didn't expect I will like this as much as I did. This is a really neat idea and could probably be turned into an actual product. If the author added some more content (like some landmarks sprinkled on the landscape every now and then, possibly some varied terrain eg. bridges over rivers, cities/villages, windmills, dams, maybe some simple wildlife, etc.) and released it on PS4/PS5 for few bucks I can imagine it could sell pretty well.<p>Edit: Seems there's actually a way to support the developer on Ko-Fi: <a href="https://ko-fi.com/slowroads" rel="nofollow">https://ko-fi.com/slowroads</a><p>Edit 2: Also props for good optimisation, it runs flawlessly on my M1 Macbook even on the highest setting.
If anyone is looking for this but as a more complete game, check out art of rally: <a href="https://artofrally.com/" rel="nofollow">https://artofrally.com/</a>
This is a really minor detail, but — how long are the lane dashes? It looks like they're 50% white, 50% space, but in real life they are actually a lot longer and spaced a lot farther apart than most people think. A tiny detail to consider if you're going for realism.<p>Examples:<p><a href="https://www.google.com/maps/@37.9700533,-121.9225333,59a,35y,317.42h/data=!3m1!1e3" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/maps/@37.9700533,-121.9225333,59a,35y...</a><p><a href="https://www.google.com/maps/@37.9700286,-121.9224894,3a,60y,57.11h,63.27t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sWJrrsUK2Q2gVw_MTxAooCA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/maps/@37.9700286,-121.9224894,3a,60y,...</a>
I really enjoyed these settings:<p>- Autopilot on<p>- Using the motor bike<p>- Setting roads to "casual"<p>- Season to summer<p>- Cycle timer of 3 minutes<p>- Setting cruise control to max 120<p>- Hitting "c" until you get complete first person view<p>- View distance: Ultra<p>- Detail: Ultra<p>Very cool experience, sort of put me in a trance a bit.. and I can't quite put my finger on why!
Man, I wanted something like this when I was a kid. (I liked it as an adult too, but I immediately drove off the road deliberately… just like I would have when I was 12)
Nice! Loved driving around and trying to break the physics.<p>At first I was disappointed you couldn't leave the road until I found you just needed to use more speed + boost. After that I spent all the time driving off-road.<p>I drove backwards at the start and clipped into some geometry, causing the car to gain a ton of vertical velocity and fly high into the air up to the clouds! When it dropped back down it bounced around a lot. Found you could reproduce this by finding where the road surface was clipped and gain some speed before entering it.<p>This made me think: You should add some planes!<p>Had a great time exploring.
Some time ago I added ABS, traction control and some torque vectoring to the Unity CarDemo ... that made the supercar surprisingly handable (is that a word?) even with acceleration levels increased to insane values. Especially with keyboard control (ie full tilt left or right) the car would not spin out in curves. Maybe you get a kick out of implementing some "electronic assists" for your car?
I don't know if there are other achievements but the one with the "What did you expect" text popping up really made me laugh. Good foresight anticipating players like me.
"What did you expect" - ha!
Nice. The keyboard controls could definitely feel snappier, but once I got a feel for the mouse controls I settled right in. And taking the coach offroad is super fun!
Love it! If feel like you should lean into the landscapes, which are the biggest draw, by not penalizing driving off the road as much. Maybe dirt roads with some more floaty handling but not the speed penalty?<p>Great work!
The only correct play is to drive forward a few hundred yards, do a u-turn and drive back past where you started. Very entertaining. Especially when you fall off into the ocean and earn an achievement.
Kudos to the developer! I'm a huge fan of open world driving sims (Forza Horizon series) and find the endless roads (and the long races) a great way to unwind. Knowing the roads is one thing, but add in changing weather conditions and general road traffic, each corner can be different each time you go round. Certainly keeps me on my toes!
I got really weird results when I set the seed to 0099FF - not the decimal value of 0x99FF, I mean the literal string "0099FF". I got all kinds of terrain generation glitches including one where the surface on which my wheels rested was a good 50 feet above what the texture was applied to.
For anybody else on mobile, I found this video of it: <a href="https://youtu.be/mEDywA7aVLo" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/mEDywA7aVLo</a>
Neat, this is my project - thanks for sharing! For anyone interested, I have a brief overview post up on Medium while I work on a deeper technical write-up:<p><a href="https://anslo.medium.com/slow-roads-tl-dr-a664ac6bce40" rel="nofollow">https://anslo.medium.com/slow-roads-tl-dr-a664ac6bce40</a>
Procedural landscapes are such a fun thing.<p>When I was in high school I read about perlin noise landscape generation technique in a random blog post. I shared the technique with a friend and he was very excited. A week later he presented a program which rendered Minecraft-style landscapes in ortho projection. A few more weeks passed and he added 3D perspective (using alien tech called "projection matrices"), water reflections, grass and day-night cycle animation with shadows from Sun and stars. All this using Pascal and some primitive bundled-in 2D graphics lib.<p>Another related high school memory is Audiosurf game, where the road and environment are generated using an algorithm based on music tempo. What if we replace this algo with a modern generative model? Probably literally a bad trip.
i loved the drive but the speed is offputting.... i mean it only seems to work when i am like 100km, something that autodrive does while i can expect a mountain winding road to be comfortable at 20-50 because of twists and turns?<p>like there is<p>1. incline effect on the speed (up turns down speed and going down increases)
2. snow effect on wheels
3. traffic mode
4. like above, speed responsiveness at slower speeds
5. gear shifting<p>thank you for building a great product
Very nice creation !
But sad that AZERTY keyboards are often forgotten in mini games. The game is not really playable outside QWERTY keyboards.
(Arrow keys would be a good alternative too)
I love the cruise control and auto drive options. I don't find the default cruise speed very relaxing and appriciate being able to bump it down.<p>A feature request that, if I were you, I would probably say no to:<p>It would be cool to have URL flags to load with auto-drive on and cruise control at a certain level.<p>I think it would be fun to easily share what I find relaxing about this. Also it would be a kinda cool default new page.
I appreciate the player is rewarded for going offroad. That was fun. :)<p>I noticed as I approached the edge that large square tiles started to show up (the terrain was still contiguous until I go all the way to the edge, but it divided into uniform-sized squares by increasingly-high dirt walls with no collision detection). I wonder what caused that?
Nice, looking great. Roadster feels like a super heavy electric car though :D<p>Controller support would be great. Or I wonder if there is already some way to map the controller inputs? Browser extension maybe
"Critical Error<p>Apologies - please click below to continue with a different generation seed. Your distance progress will carry over.<p>This error has been recorded for investigation."<p>Well, I guess that's what you get from leaving the road and continue driving through the hills.<p>Sorry to broke it, I was enjoying driving those hills and was impressed to not hit a "border" of the world. I thought it would happen sooner to be honest.
It popped up a message saying "Hold shift to increase acceleration". But I got the feeling that I was playing it wrong if I went far above 40 mph, so the shift key seems perfectly useless.<p>Lovely countryside -- very evocative of winding country roads in the southern or midwestern USA -- but I get stressed out when driving even in a simulation; real world driving is worse, so I'm not feeling the "zen".
I think this would be way better if it could work with only the mouse. LMB/RMB for brake/accelerator and moving mouse left/right for proportional steering with steering position visual feedback.<p>I've always also preferred the more immersive inside-out view where the view rotates directly with direction of motion rather than the overhead/behind view.
Great idea, but landscape is not very realistic, I'm driving next to sea or huge lake going uphill, then driving further away from sea, all the time going uphill and after some time I'm back at coast at same elevation where I started while going all the time uphill and NEVER going downhill.<p>Also why is autodrive driving in the middle of the road and not in the correct lane?
Took some finagling, but I made it off the road and onto the endless meadow. Really fun to slide around on and try to avoid the trees. Can't comment on the road driving, as I never spent more than a minute on it. I'm surprised you have an effect for driving underwater, too.
OP could add an optional online mode where you occasionally see other drivers cruising around and make it so that you'd just go through them as if they were ghosts if you tried to crash into them
That's very well done. I was pretty happy about turning my Camaro into a Jeep and being able to go off-road for miles before finally running out of map.<p>The fall and winter modes are especially evocative. Winter with fog or winter with night reminded me so much of driving in Utah.
This is really cool. I was reminded of the following thread on elaborating the illusion of engine sound
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32367979" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32367979</a>
It looks great, but I can't stand the wasd controls. Please let me control steering with one hand (e.g. z-x or a-s) and acceleration/braking with the other (e.g. k-m).<p>Supporting the gamepad API would be ideal.
this is awesome! i love having a web-based chill car game like this to play to calm down, let my brain chill, and play it when im in bed or the middle of thinking or in between meetings.<p>for the last 5 years or so, its been this game for me: <a href="http://uploads.ungrounded.net/alternate/1099000/1099839_alternate_46125_r3.zip/" rel="nofollow">http://uploads.ungrounded.net/alternate/1099000/1099839_alte...</a><p>you can see its very similar vibe to yours.<p>in case you shut down the site, is there a way i can download this for personal use so i can host it on my own servers (in the event you take it down)? thanks for making and sharing!
Nice and funny. Adding more details in grasses would make it awesome.<p>The sounds are especially nice.<p>On physics side, the car will really stick to the ground, even when jumping beyond a hill.<p>Also, where are the horse/dragon versions? :D
This is really soothing and nice!<p>The endless explorable landscape is what I wished games could be like when I was a kid.<p>Any way you could offer an alternative to WASD controls for those of us who aren't using standard keyboards?
I really like this, nice work! Only thing missing for me is police sirens with flashing lights chasing me, on coming traffic, and Limp Bizkit and Bush playing in the background.
Fun!<p>Nothing in the lakes; nothing under the sea. Just boring half-light and featureless bottom. Would be nice to see it populated<p>And you can't hit anything! Can drive right through forests, ghost trees.
Auto-drive could go slower and stay on it's lane for extra relaxation.<p>Currently I just kept wondering, that driving on a middle of a road with such a tight corners seemed like dangerous.
I have RTX 3080 but fps is low.<p>- Distance: Ultra
- Render scale: 0.75
- Detail: Low<p>Even if view distance is low, setting detail to med lowers the FPS.
Oh, I thought this was "Desert Bus"[1] ...<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Teller%27s_Smoke_and_Mirrors#Desert_Bus" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Teller%27s_Smoke_and_...</a>