I was already thinking about implementing mod like this recently. I want the ability to drive along a wall and pick up items faster. But the car moves too fast. I typically manage this by manually pumping the accelerator, but that is error prone. It would be great if I could set a lower top speed and maintain that.
So, I created a prototype this very evening.
It even tracks top speed separately for each player & vehicle type (car, tank, etc).
However, it's not ready to share just yet because I've run into a design issue that I would like some community advice about.
How should the top speed be controlled?
I initially created two keys to increase and decrease the top speed. This is kind of what
Car MK2 does. But the down side is: what interval should we use? Is every button press 1 Km/H? 5 Km/H? 10% of current? 10% of max? What if you want the vehicle to be unlimited again? We can't know what the maximum possible speed is without enumerating all vehicle types, fuels, and terrain types in the save. (This should be difficult but doable.)
Or maybe there is a fixed set of intervals, which could even be configured by the user with a comma-separated list of speeds? (But then what if there are new vehicle types, and the list of intervals should be different for those other types?)
Or maybe there should be a key to toggle between "unlimited" and "current speed is max"? This would be a kind of inverse cruise control because the vehicle has a governor that limits top speed and the player still needs to accelerate the vehicle.
Or maybe there should be some combination of these things? Set the top speed to "current", and then allow tweaking up or down from there.
But there is beauty is a simplified design, and I don't want too many hotkeys. I'm currently leaning toward the current-max-speed toggle only. Thoughts?
I also had an idea to display the current top speed with a "speed limit sign" GUI, which could then have additional buttons. But that sounds like a later version feature!