User blog:Nautofon/Status of Driving Directions, August 2021

So it's been well over a year already since the first driving directions were published here. Time flies! Where do we stand with the "Driving Directions" project, and where are we headed?

First of all, I'm grateful for every single contribution we've been getting. I have no exact count, but it seems that at least 15 different individuals have added new directions or fixed up old ones over time. A big shoutout and my special thanks go to User:Busted85, who's been very active for a period last winter. Nice work, everybody. Thank you!

As you may know, the project status is described in text over on the project page. In short, both the Pacific Northwest and Arizona / New Mexico have a lot of directions complete. Utah and Colorado have some, while California and Nevada have very little content so far.

Here's a map of the current situation. As you can see, there are plenty of cities to go to if you want to reach your destination without GPS.

Disregarding the base map states (which I haven't included in the map), I count 610 delivery locations in the game, of which 354 have directions right now (58%). In May 2020, this count was about 150 out of 440 (34%). I believe we can call this a success, so far.

But what does the future bring?

Well, we know SCS isn't publishing a great deal of new content for ATS in the year 2021. But the fact is, they are hard at work behind the scenes, producing content faster than ever. It seems fair to say that SCS adds more than 150 new delivery locations every year. In 2021, it'll be far fewer, but Texas is set to exceed that number next year just by itself, and the DLCs will just keep coming.

This means that we need to add directions to at least three new delivery locations every single week on average (or about 14/month), just to keep up with new content! Not to mention filling in the many gaps shown in the map above.

Of course, this is perfectly possible in principle. We've already exceeded this pace for a period last winter. Unfortunately, at this particular moment, we don't have enough active contributors to sustain it.

Speaking for myself, since this past winter, I have much less free time than I used to. Consequently, I spend a larger portion of my ATS time actually driving rather than writing directions.

Additionally, I've kind of discovered mods over the winter. Driving in areas added by map mods has been great (I tried ProMods BC first, then Reforma). But integrating information about mod content into this wiki is impractical for several reasons, so I didn't write new directions during that time. I also spent some of my time getting my feet wet creating small mods of my own (though I haven't published any of those just yet).

I will continue to contribute new directions, but at what pace? It's really hard to predict. For what it's worth, these are the geographic areas I personally would like to work on this autumn, as far as my time allows:

• Idaho—get it entirely green
• Washington—try mostly green, at least
• New Mexico—several cities are half complete; getting those green should be relatively easy

There is also some administrative work that must take priority.

In particular, many of the direction pages are starting to get excessively long (Wallbert, for example, now has over 100 entries). As SCS completes more DLCs, the size of these pages will only keep growing. I believe the time has come to split up the directions pages into several pages each. The only logical way to split them seems to be by state. I plan to work on this soon for the largest companies, starting with Wallbert.

Help:Driving Directions will need to be adjusted accordingly.

Soon, Wyoming will become available. As usual, I plan on getting it day one and add location headers to the direction pages (this time primarily using the game's def files rather than manual research).

I doubt this will be the right strategy going forward though. The idea was to make it as easy as possible to contribute a single direction. Even users completely new to the wiki would have been able to contribute upon seeing that edit link in the location header. But since the word "edit" was removed in the (questionable) Fandom redesign, this strategy may have run its course. Once company pages are split up by state, perhaps the page-wide edit button will suffice, and at that point, we might not need all those empty sections anymore.

Finally, I feel like a status map such as the one above could be really useful for players and contributors alike, if it was updated regularly. I'm considering how such updates could be automated.

Lots to do. As always. 😅

Drive safely, everyone.