Improved Civilian Traffic (A.I.)
This is a very basic addon that replaces the official default AI and default AI aircraft addons with one that not only merges them into a single efficient package, but also removes several major bugs, updates it with some additional vehicles, adds the ability for vehicles that are destroyed to respawn any losses they’ve suffered as well as make use of the crush depth and explosion mechanics from the Bungeling Raiders addon.
Even though this was initially created in order to compliment the Bungeling Raiders (Hostile AI) addon, it will work just as well without it and shouldn’t interfere with the career search & rescue game at all – in fact this may actually enhance the experience as you’ll find more civilian and commercial traffic going about their business in the world and you’ll no longer get any errors if any of the ambient AI vehicles get accidentally destroyed by a meteor storm or whirlpool.
When starting a new game you should do the following to avoid any errors or conflicts:
- In the OFFICIAL tab disable the DEFAULT AI and the DEFAULT AI AIRCRAFT addons.
- In the WORKSHOP tab enable the IMPROVED CIVILIAN TRAFFIC addon.
- Tweak the settings to your preference.
- Enable or disable any other addons you want.
- Start your new game and enjoy!
- 100% Career mode friendly. This addon is essentially the same as the official Default AI and Default AI Aircraft addons, except with several improvements and bugfixes in order to ensure they work with the most recent version of Stormworks.
- All the ambient civilian vehicles will slowly respawn back up to their maximum amount after taking any losses during the game, the settings for these can be adjusted using the addons menu when starting a new game.
- The option to start a new game with less AI vehicles and have them slowly populate the game world as time goes by.
- All the civilian vehicles will explode upon taking a set amount of damage, or when they sink below a depth of 20m.
- 10 additional vehicles, including several from the career search & rescue missions as well as a few others that have been specially chosen from the Steam Workshop.
- The Hospital ships will now come to a complete stop whenever a player approaches one, this makes it significantly easier to use them when transferring casualties via boat or helicopter.
- Performance friendly. All the vehicles, especially the newer ones, have all been hollowed out, had their moving parts replaced with static alternatives where possible and their interior spaces fitted with physics flooders in order to make them run as smoothly as possible.
- For those that have the Industrial DLC installed, landing zones for the AI controlled helicopters have been added to Meier Island (the Arid island to the south) as there were none in the original, most likely due to the fact that the Default AI Aircraft addon was released prior to the Industrial DLC.
After creating the very popular Bungeling Raiders addon that added hostile AI enemies to the game, we quickly came to realise that there were some bugs with the old Default AI and Default AI Aircraft addons that would cause them to throw back an error in the console whenever one of the original AI controlled vehicles were being instantly destroyed by guided missiles, Bertha cannons or even some natural disasters such as meteor storms and whirlpools.
Unfortunately these errors sometimes resulted in the AI script becoming broken, even after several failed attempts at using the "?reload_scripts" command, so after looking at the code, my colleague Professor Sins and I decided that we would not only fix those bugs but we’d also improve the original addons so that they worked slightly better with the Bungeling Raiders addon by adding respawning, explosions and even crush depths to the civilian AI controlled vehicles too.
I mean lets face it – those old scripts made by Geometa were released well before the weapons DLC and natural disasters update and it doesn’t look like they’ve been touched ever since, so they were definitely in dire need of being updated.
- There’s a bug that exists where some vessels will go ablaze and refuse to sink, even when the fire has completely damaged all of the blocks on the ship, sadly this seems to exist in the base game, is a known bug in Stormworks and unfortunately it’s not something we can fix on our end.
- Sea monsters such as the Kraken and Megalodon will sometimes prefer to attack and even destroy the larger AI controlled ships over the player owned ones if enabled. This is most likely an intentional choice by the developers at Geometa, but the smarter players out there may be able to use this to their advantage in order to escape.
- Great care and attention has gone into making this addon as performance friendly as possible, but with all that being said – players using older computers or running the game with several other performance intensive addons at the same time as this one may encounter frame rate or sim speed related issues, especially if you’ve chosen to spawn in a high amount of AI vehicles.
There’s too many vehicles contained in this addon to mention here, plus many of them have come from the same author and Geometa haven’t exactly provided us with a comprehensive list of who created all the legacy vehicles from their missions and the original two default AI addons, so I’ve done a little digging on my own and come up with a list of credits for all the content creators (or as many as I could find) that have contributed to both this and the two original addons that came with the game and have posted it here.
Unfortunately I don’t have the free time available to contact everyone on that list (As there’s over 26 at my last count) to ask for permission as this would be a little impractical, nor is there any guarantee that I’ll get a reply, as some may have since moved on or, sadly, may no longer be with us.
For the ones that I’ve not had a chance to speak to directly, hopefully the fact that they’ve uploaded their creations to the steam workshop and with us giving them due credit and a link to their workshop with all their original creations should be enough, but if not then please feel free to message me directly if you do not want to have your creation featured in this addon and we will discuss removing it and/or finding a suitable alternative if possible.
