How I taught the school bus to drive 🚌

I thought I’d share a bit of the insanity that went into building my road framework that is part of the Animated School Bus Service if anyone is curious 😅

I started by creating a script that exported txt file that included the lot info of all the lots in each world, which i then turned into the below table (in my modder planning sheet) that i could use to go through EVERY default residential lot (currently 259 lots) to check and list how the road sits in front of each lot.

Out of those, 113 had a straight road, 108 were incompatible because there was no suitable road in front of the lot or they were apartments, and the remaining 38 lots had different road layouts that weren't straight

To my absolute horror I spent a lot of time animating different driving routes in Blender. That worked perfectly on flat roads... until I tested on a hilly lot 😭 I wasn't able to adjust the bus to the terrain seamlessly as it moves, so I had to completely change how the buses movement worked.

That meant going back over all 259 lots again😭

This time I took top-down screenshots, added a 10 metre grid and mapped where the bus should park and exactly how it should drive in and out. Green is arrival, blue is departure, red is where the bus parks and the white dot is the door side.

I figured out how to move the bus using scripted movement instead of animation which also allowed the bus to follow different terrains. As it drives, my mod checks the ground height underneath the front and back of the bus and adjusts its height and angle, so it can actually tilt uphill, downhill and over dips in the road. See below

For the non-straight roads, I created my own route instructions to tell the bus when to reverse, turn and drive forwards.

Then came A LOT of testing, loading each lot, watching the bus arrive and leave, marking anything that was off, changing the route or where the bus starts driving from and testing again.

There are 414 lots in total across all worlds, and if testing goes well I’ll extend the driving framework to cover the remaining 151 community lots too. They’re community lots by default in a fresh game, but I know some simmers change these to residential lots.

The Animated School Bus Service beta releases this Friday, 30th October 🚌💛