Pavement Drive Assist Continued

Introduction

Pavement Drive Assist Continued is a helper mod that guides player's vehicle alongside roads (with optional cruise capability) and aids in improving survival rates of all surrounding structures.

The mod also sports road signs and circuitry that can be used for making safer crossings and for improving player vehicle detection in general.

Here is a small demo of Pavement Drive Assist Continued in action:

For a higher-quality demo video, please see this page.

Features

Driving assistant

The driving assistant (toggleable via key binding i) keeps player's vehicle on paved roads - so long as the road bends are not too sharp. The assistant scans all tiles in front of the vehicle and changes the orientation to follow tiles that are most likely to be part of the road (which is determined by an internal scoring system of the mod).

While active, manually turning left or right overrides the assistant, steering the vehicle outside of roads or towards desired direction at crossroads.

Road tile detection

When upcoming road segment consists out of multiple types of tiles, the driving assitant tries to follow along the tiles that have the highest score assigned to them. Normally, the tile with highest score is refined concrete, but stone can also be easily set as primary (highest-scoring) tile via mod settings.

Besides the vanilla tiles for refined concrete, concrete, and stone, some other mod tiles are supported as well. Additional tiles can be introduced by including their name and score value into the scores field found in the configuration file.

Here is a more complete list of scores, ranging from higest to lowest, across both vanilla and mod tiles:

• Asphalt
• Refined concrete (vanilla + mod variants)
• Concrete (vanilla + mod variants)
• Stone (vanilla + mod variants)
• Gravel
• Wood
• Road markings

For a full list of mods with integrated support, see the Mod integration section below.

Cruise control

Cruise control (toggleable via key binding [o]) helps vehicle maintain a constant (configurable) speed while moving. It is an excellent option for long travel, safety zones, parking lots or for vehicles that could otherwise reach uncontrollable speeds.

In order to ensure maximum safety, braking will always override cruise control and if the vehicle is stopped or is moving backwards, the system will be temporarily inactive.

Speed limit values can be set directly using a pop-up dialog (default key binding ctrl+o).

If Alternative cruise control toggle mode option is enabled via personal mod settings, toggling cruise control will set the cruise speed to last used value (set by speed limit signs, for example) instead of setting it to player's configured default.

Speed limit signs

Speed limit signs can be placed on roads to impose a speed limit on vehicles that drive across it. This helps prevent driving at breakneck speed through gates, across railroad crossings or in a central parking lot.

The limit can be changed by clicking on a sign and setting the desired value for its output signal.

Driving across an end of speed limit sign or disabling the cruise control removes all imposed limits.

Speed limit and end of speed limit signs affect the passing vehicle only when both the driving assistant and cruise control are active.

Variable speed limits can be set by linking speed limit signs to a circuit network - by removing the limit on the sign itself and providing at least one signal via red or green wire. Signals coming over red wire are prioritized over the ones coming over the green wire. Signals also take priority according to their internal ordering (0 > 1 > 2 > ... > 9 > A > B > C > ... > Z).

Automated traffic control

Automated traffic control can be employed for creating automated railroad crossings or traffic junctions by using stop signs and road sensors. This feature is explained in detail in FAQ section under "Automated railroad/railway crossing tutorial".

Additional features

• Road departure warning

  Provides acoustic or console output warning if the vehicle is leaving paved area, e.g. at a dead end or in very sharp curves. If not steered manually, an emergency brake will be activated to stop the vehicle.

• Highspeed support

  If vehicle reaches speeds over 100 kmph (customisable in configuration file) the "path finder" will increase its search area in front of it, allowing safe ride for speeds up to 350 kmph. It is highly recommended to design roads with appropriate curve radii before traveling at such high speeds!

• Native mod support

  All kinds of vehicles are supported, as long as they are valid "car"-type entities.

• Blacklist vehicles

  Vehicles can be explicitly black-listed based on type, in which case the mod will completely ignore them.

• Global speed limit

  Global speed limit can be set for all player-controlled vehicles.

• Optimised code for multiplayer

  Running a huge server? That's not an issue - the main routine causes almost zero load as long as no one is driving, and up to 10 players are able to drive simultaneously at any given time without causing any serious lag! Some benchmarks on an older laptop have resulted in 25 simulated players driving at 130 km/h and active cruise control causing only a 10 UPS drop.

• Fine-tune CPU usage

  It is always possible to reduce the tick rate of the driving assistant or to disable cruise control in case of issues via configuration file. Opposite is true as well - precision can be incresaed to up to 60 scans per second, effectively doubling the CPU load.

• Assign new tiles and reassign existing tiles to specific tilesets

  In spite of mod coming with an extensive default listing of various tiles, sometimes it is useful to either add an unsupported tile or to assign an existing tile to a different tileset/category. There is a number of map settings which can be used for this purpose exactly. Keep in mind that the tiles must be listed using the internal game names.

• List tilesets and tileset assignments

  Use the /pda-list-tilests and /pda-show-tileset commands to list available tilesets and show what tiles have been assigned to them. This can be helpful for understanding why the driving assistant is picking specific tiles/paths over others, and for figuring out what names should be used when overriding default tileset assignments for tiles.

Mod integration

• Asphalt Roads was specifically designed to work with Pavement Drive Assist. Asphalt is preconfigured as the primary road tile and vehicles will try to avoid crossing lane marking tiles (roads with separated lanes will therefore allow safe two-way traffic). Unfortunately, Asphalt Roads has not been updated yet for Factorio 1.1.
• Asphalt Paving is a fully compatible drop-in replacement for Asphalt Roads with support for Factorio 1.1.
• Color Coding
• 5Dim's mod - New Decoration
• More Floors
• "Dectorio" by PantherX
• Krastorio 2

Incompatible mods

Since the relase of version 2.1.0, there are no incompatible mods. "Vehicle Snap" can be used alongside PDA without issues - by simply disabling it with the respective hotkey when entering assisted driving mode.

Other information

Effects on gameplay

This mod increases the importance of proper roads as it allows crossing kilometres of land on roads, while doing nothing more than pressing "forward"!

If this is still too much work, cruise control comes to the rescue and the vehicle will accelerate on its own to maintain its speed. At this point the only remaining task for the driver is to press "left" or "right" at crossroads or to brake at destination. Meanwhile the driver can perform useful tasks - like browsing through production statistics or managing trains. Autonomous driving has reached Factorio!

Technology

The technology required to use the driving assistant and cruise control is called Driver assistance systems and only has Automobilism as prerequisite.

Features can be used without research as well, provided that the Tech required option in the map settings has been disabled.

The traffic signs used for sophisticated traffic management require the Smart roads technology which is available mid-game.

Current language support

• EN (English)
• DE (German)

If you like the mod and have created a translation of your own, please do not hesitate to create a pull request on Github so that it can be made accessible to everyone in the next version release. Thanks in advance!

History

Originally the idea was first implemented in the Pavement Drive Assist mod created by sillyfly. Unfortunately, the mod was never updated to work with Factorio 0.13+, and was subsequently taken over by Arcitos, who also made it available on the mod portal.

Arcitos had made huge improvements to the mod and redesigned it around the excellent scanning routine from sillifly, adding a number of additional features.

The mod had remained fully usable until Factorio 1.1 came out, when small changes to Factorio API broke it again. After a couple of months of waiting for the original author to release an update, a fork called Pavement Drive Assist Continued was created by azaghal with the necessary fixes.

Interfaces

PDA main variables are accessible via remote functions.

To read/alter PDA's main variables call the following remote functions:

Name of the interface: "PDA"

List of functions:

#1
"get_state_of_cruise_control"
parameter needed: playerindex (int or player)
returns state of cruise control (boolean) for the specified player

#2
"set_state_of_cruise_control"
parameter needed: playerindex (int or player), new state (boolean)
sets state of cruise control for the specified player according to the handed over parameter

#3
"get_cruise_control_limit"
parameter needed: playerindex (int or player)
returns cruise control limit (float) for the specified player

#4
"set_cruise_control_limit"
parameter needed: playerindex (int or player), new limit (float)
sets cruise control limit for the specified player according to the handed over parameter

#5
"get_state_of_driving_assistant"
parameter needed: playerindex (int or player)
returns state of driving assistant (boolean) for the specified player

#6
"set_state_of_driving_assistant"
parameter needed: playerindex (int or player), new state (boolean)
sets state of driving assistant for the specified player according to the handed over parameter