car and van trajectories

[betatester]

at the start of the game you only got cars and later vans. You are supposed to take a plane and rent a car or a van at the airport but in fact you travel at car or van speed all time long. base-airport and airport-base should be at vehicle speed but airport to airport should be at airplane speed.
airport should be located in the towns in the map.
Public air travel should add some hours at the start (a regular line start) and one at the end (luggage)
Private air travel will negate these delays.

Actually it's possible to patrol at a way point at sea with a car or a van

[Solarius Scorch]

Yes, and how to do that?

That's a serious question. Because this is exactly what I envisioned 5 years ago; after all it's kinda... obvious?

[betatester]

I don't know if it's possible to put waypoints on the geoscope like the ones we got for smart missiles but
when you select a destination with the car if it's above X miles
1 you locate the nearest city on the map near the base
2 you locate the nearest city near the destination
3 you travel to the city near the base at car speed
4 if you're on public transport you wait for next hour +1
5 you travel at plane speed (with no radar ?) to arrival city
6 you wait next hour on public transport
7 you go to destination
if the van is "on plane" you can't interact with it from the base

no destination allowed on water for cars or vans

[TheCurse]

ye technically it seems kinda easy.
the hard part rather is, how to do that without rewriting not so small parts of the engine...?

[SuperCaffeineDude]

This is probably awful so I'm not really suggesting it, just speculating.

Spawn alien bases around globe as "airports", roll a cutscene "you depart from x to y" with a nice few of slides like...
-you drive to the airport-
-you check your luggage in, you take nothing suspicious-
-you fly off to your destination-
 
In addition spawn alt mission if the player is close enough to drive to, bonus maybe being they can bring what they like.

-insert desired mission-

missionXCompleted research awarded
baseSelfDestructCode destroys all airports (to remove mission).

Obviously an actual flight in a civilian aircraft is a little too much to simulate, as would be the passage of time, so probably the most accurate way to portray those steps is to just average out the the x-hour drive and y-hours of flight. as you do now.

[JustTheDude/CABSHEP]

I think that the effort needed is not worth the effect. Current speed of any car/helicopter is just averaged speed of a vehicle, transport (public, or private) and time needed to change between the two.

It would require fuck ton of waypoints to be viable and some regions would start to be inaccessible if their infrastructure would be taken into consideration. Good luck going to mission in Arctica, or Africa with something like that.

How stopping would be handled? What if I decide to abort the "flight" back to base and Agents are in the middle of the flight? They jump out of with parachutes?

[Solarius Scorch]

Actually my initial idea was just using existing cities instead of spawning thousands of virtual airports. We're not playing a vacuum energy simulator...