Truck Simulator Wiki:Driving directions

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Dead end sign.svg Driving directions are no longer maintained.
All work on the wiki project described on this page has ended. The project was active during 2020/2021. Since 2022, driving directions are being replaced by location descriptions on city pages. For more information, see:

This page describes the Driving Directions project on this wiki.

The primary purpose of driving directions is to enable finding the location you're currently delivering to, without using any form of GPS navigation. This basically simulates driving as it was in the last century, when GPS devices weren't ubiquitous like they are today.


For the actual ATS driving directions, see Category:Driving Directions for American Truck Simulator.


For style guidelines on driving directions, see Help:Driving Directions.


Move to City Articles

Main article: Project:City location descriptions

There is an ongoing project to add location descriptions to city articles. These new "Locations" sections are replacing the old driving directions pages. This effort started in September 2022 with cities in Flag of Washington.png Washington and has since progressed to other states. An earlier blog post discussed the rationale for this change.

Sunsetting driving directions

The driving directions project is considered abandoned since late 2022. The following steps are being taken to announce this change and prepare the driving directions for archiving:

  1. This project page needs to be updated to reflect that help with writing new directions is no longer required. ✓
  2. A blog post needs to be published. ✓
  3. All driving directions pages (and any related content) need to be marked as obsolete. ✓
      ↳ Template {{Driving directions project end}}
  4. On company pages, change the existing driving directions hatnotes to explain the project change. ✓
      ↳ Template {{Company location descriptions hatnote}}
  5. The pages for Coastline Mining and Sell Goods should be re-merged, because the earlier split-by-state experiment is considered a failure and these pages are still manageable with "only" around 40 locations. ✓
  6. Further work (not urgent, fully optional):
    1. Wallbert should get dedicated navboxes to avoid red links; reusing the Coastline Mining template is a possibility.
    2. The navbox {{Directions to companies in ATS}} should be added to all directions pages.
    3. The guidelines should be checked in order to fix any obvious errors and remove completely outdated stuff (e.g. Gallon Oil and probably categories).
    4. The #History section should be a prose narration.
    5. Further improvements to the project page.

Archiving driving directions

Until city location descriptions are complete for all cities in the American West, the old-style driving directions still provide value to players. Even afterwards, the differences in style may be enough for some people to prefer driving directions over the new scheme. Plus, cool URIs don't change.

The existing driving directions pages will definitely be kept online on this wiki.

The exact location, however, is not yet determined. There is a discussion of several of the available options on the blog post "City location descriptions". Please join the discussion in the comments if you have an opinion!

Mostly Complete Destinations

The following sections refer to the old driving directions pages, not to the new scheme mentioned above.

These are the destinations for which you can expect to find directions in this wiki most of the time. Places listed here should have directions available for at least about 80 % of delivery locations.

Project Status by State

Status overview, mid-August 2021

Arizona

Directions are missing for:

Additionally, some locations in Nogales, Phoenix, and Tucson only give the street address of the depot, which may not be enough by itself to reliably reach these particular depots.

California

Only very few directions exist. Some of these have been invalidated by the base map rebuild.

Colorado

Incomplete.

Idaho

Directions are missing for:

Beyond these, Idaho is complete.

Montana

Directions exist for some companies (mostly near the beginning of the alphabet). However, there are major concerns about their accuracy. Location headers are incomplete.

Nevada

Incomplete.

New Mexico

Directions are missing for:

Oregon

Directions are missing for:

Beyond these, Oregon is complete. However, most Oregon directions were sourced in 2019 on game version 1.34. Later updates improved signage, so that many directions are probably more complex than necessary now.

Utah

Incomplete.

Washington

Only few directions exist, but city location descriptions are fully complete for Washington state.

Wyoming

Writing Style Discussion

For context, see topic no. 3 in Thread:27885.

Different writing styles were being considered for driving directions on this wiki, including:

  • Writing directions like for a real company's web page (the "our" style).
  • Writing directions as neutral as possible (the "encyclopedic" style).
  • Writing directions as a collection of informal recommendations, as if shared at a truck stop. [1]

Nautofon for the most part tended to use the "our" style. For example, they wrote "our shipyard is on Marine Way" rather than "the shipyard is on Marine Way". The reason for this is that it was effectively "in character" for driving directions of a simulated world, and they didn't want to break anyone's immersion in gameplay when looking up directions.

Also, this was initially the easiest style for them to write, and lack of content seemed to be a much larger problem for this project than choice of writing style. However, an argument could be made that driving directions are unfit for encyclopedic writing. They considered discussing this issue in more detail here, but never got around to it.

Although Nautofon considered the topic of writing style to remain open for debate for the entire duration of the project, further comments on this topic were never actually received at any time.

Games Targeted

This project only targeted ATS, simply because Nautofon doesn't play ETS2. But of course, the concept should apply to ETS2 equally.

See also: "Wiki Categories" in the Driving Directions guidelines

History

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