Silly question but if my toon is fighting in the middle of the road. Are the NPC vehicles just going to plow right through us and push us out of the way. Are they going to stop. Are they going to go around. Will my toon do some kind of awesome acrobatic to jump out of the way like in MxO. Always seemed like fighting in the middle of the street is such a normal thing to see that NPCs just drive right through it and assume you'll move.
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Owner and Big Sister of the Justice Girls -Champions Online-City of Titans-
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Its' a balancing act, really.
In some of the previous games, the cars rode on "rails" of predefined paths. This eased bandwidth concerns- you really didn't have to communicate the car's position too much- when you loaded the game, it told you that character x was at point y going on path z. That was it. Now you freed up the bandwidth for that positional data for something that was more useful. If you instead track every car individually, you'd have quite a mess.
A middle ground is to have "tracks" with an 'event-based update system." Cars would run in these predefined tracks, as before, but they'd react to things like heroes in their way (stopping, changing lanes to another 'track", or even crashing." When these events are triggered, an update goes out to all users that "car x changed from track a to track b at time y" to keep everyone in sync.
Now, having a car actually have the ability to collide and harm your character, well, you'd need to define the "attack zone" where the effect would be applied to you, track that, and make sure that there aren't situations where players would be unfairly affected. It'd be interesting and add a dynamic to the street fight, but the scripted behaviors governing this would likely be quite an investment to reliably deliver it as a launch element.