You may think that we already have enough driving games, but I don't think this one has been produced yet. The task would be to get from Lands End to John O'Groats or vice versa (or other places to other places depending on where you live) in a normal car on normal roads where normal road rules apply You are racing against other cars who are all under the same conditions - but each one has its own characteristics on daringness and speed etc. so that some will try to brake speed limits + avoid police whereas others will always keep under the speed limit, but avoid police. the challenge would be to avoid traffic jams - by using the small roads - and to keep decent speeds - by using motorways. The game would have a complete map of GB (or wherever you are) and all roads would be included. You could also choose other start and finish destinations or name places that people have to bypass. You could choose to bypass your house for example. The program could also just be a route finder. Obviously the police would come after you - and they woould get you and you would waste a few hours- if you did anything very illegal but you would be able to do anything to the opponent cars (about 100) without getting in trouble. You would be able to follow the opponents cars with a GPS or something. Now don't go + tell me this is baked.
-- JoshW, Apr 23 2001

Driver http://driver.gtgames.com/
As long as you go under the speed limit and the cops aren't looking for you, you're free to drive. [AfroAssault, Apr 23 2001, last modified Oct 04 2004]

Grand Theft Auto 3 www.rockstargames.com/grandtheftauto3/
Like Driver, as long as you are not doing anything majorly wrong (you can kill other gangsters, but only a certain number of innocent people) and you don't do anything illegal in front of a cop, you are free to drive a variety of vehicles all over the city which is based (loosely) on NYC. [reap, Oct 04 2004]

To be sure, there's a big difference between a street map and the scenery needed to recreate the experience of driving around those streets.
-- egnor, Apr 24 2001


I'm assuming there would be non-player characters wandering about the place so that you could pull over next to them in order to find out whether you should actually have taken a left 4 miles back in the previous village ... of course, their response would be "sorry, I'm new around here ...".
-- Rodomontade, Apr 24 2001


And sometimes the petrol stations would be completely dry and you would have to wait a few days until they were refilled, or nick a car with petrol.
-- JoshW, Apr 28 2001


Hmmm. It would be an unutterably huge undertaking to simulate all the scenery across the entire country, as egnor has hinted. There appear to be few flaws in the gameplay of your design, too. Driving from Cardiff to Oxford, while obeying the speedlimit, in a realtime game would be about as interesting as, errr, driving from Cardiff to Oxford. Except the graphics wouldn't be quite as realistic. And you'd still be in Cardiff at the end of it.
-- Lemon, Apr 30 2001


It is an interesting concept.

Most of the scenery could be mapped out with generic trees and the like, but having thousands of landmarks would be unrealistic.

Time is also a big issue, because I cant picture myself spending two hours on a single player game without being depressed with lots of time to kill.

However, if you were to regionalize it, and have areas of say 1000sq mi available for download in some massive multiplayer environment where you could race friends and have some VOIP to keep it fun, i could see that being very doable.
-- FunkinDonuts, Dec 04 2002



random, halfbakery