TaxiDriver Reloaded 3.4.1 RC — Native AI Driver and Dynamic Events

This release candidate contains every change made after 3.4.0-beta. It replaces the overextended predictive driving experiment with a smaller adapter around BeamNG's native vehicle AI, adds traffic-aware protection for the player and hired Fleet vehicles, and expands Random Events and physical pickups.

Experimental AI notice: AI Driver still depends on BeamNG road graphs, vehicle controllers and traffic behavior. It is intended as an entertaining assisted-driving mode rather than a guarantee of human-level autonomous driving on every map or mod vehicle.

Native AI Driver architecture

• Replaced runtime use of the predictive free-space planner, local A* controller, aggressive bypass and custom reverse-recovery stack with BeamNG's native ai.driveUsingPath.
• Added an explicit player-vehicle identity guard. AI commands for a stale or NPC vehicle ID are rejected instead of moving, teleporting or despawning the player's car.
• Disabled native setRecoverOnCrash for the player vehicle so a stationary boarding sequence cannot be mistaken for a crashed traffic bot and safe-teleported.
• Kept native obstacle avoidance and lane following enabled during ordinary travel.
• Simplified AI presets and Custom settings to parameters the current native adapter actually uses: aggression, following time, minimum following distance, comfortable braking, traffic wait time, speed-limit compliance and lane discipline.
• Removed the obsolete decision-visualization setting from the UI.

Legal routes and optional strict GPS

• Added directed-edge route planning for the final target road. It approaches the target edge in its legal travel direction and forbids an immediate reversal through the opposing lane.
• Added Strict GPS route as a setting independent of driving temperament. When enabled, AI receives the exact ordered road-node sequence currently displayed by BeamNG ground navigation.
• A recalculated GPS route immediately marks the AI route dirty and sends the updated shortest route to the vehicle.
• If a strict GPS path is temporarily unavailable, AI falls back to the legal autonomous graph route instead of turning itself off.
• Filtered coordinate-only ground-marker entries before Vehicle Lua serialization, preventing invalid table: 0x... waypoint IDs and native AI errors.
• Native Route Done is accepted only after checking physical distance to the active TaxiDriver target. A premature completion causes an immediate current-position replan, bounded to three retries.
• Final-target braking activates only after the vehicle is aligned with the target-side travel direction, preventing early stops on the opposite side of the road.

Smooth traffic guard

• Added the lazy Vehicle Lua taxiDriverStockAiObserver around native driving.
• It observes map-tracked vehicles, maintains both a configurable time gap and minimum bumper gap, and derives a progressive speed cap from relative speed and comfortable stopping distance.
• Speed reduction is jerk-limited. Full emergency braking is reserved for critical time-to-collision or a physically excessive required deceleration.
• Added steering-arc prediction so vehicles crossing the swept path during a turn can be detected even when they are outside the straight lane corridor.
• Added target-aligned final-approach speed limiting without taking steering away from native AI.
• The observer owns the protected native Route Done hook only while an AI route is active and restores the original BeamNG hook when stopped.

Passenger and cargo pickup flow

• Passenger orders can spawn BeamNG's unicycle character at the pickup point; cargo orders can spawn the small cardboard-box vehicle.
• Physical pickup is optional at runtime: missing content or an unsupported spawn falls back to the existing logical pickup without cancelling the order.
• A manual horn near the passenger starts walking toward the taxi.
• AI pickup now requires the taxi to be within seven metres and fully stopped.
• After stopping, AI emits two 600 ms horn pulses separated by 200 ms, waits for the passenger boarding event, and only then starts the destination route.
• The passenger is treated as a pickup obstacle. Hitting the passenger cancels the order, records the incident and applies a major fine.
• Reduced physical-passenger command frequency and excluded its prop from broad vehicle prediction scans to prevent pickup-area frame spikes.

Configurable Random Events

• Added a dedicated Random Events settings expander.
• Every event has an independent enable switch and probability from 0% to 100%.
• Existing cancellation, destination-change, additional-stop, conditional-tip and fragile-cargo events now use the same configuration model.
• Added passenger no-show, VIP/quiet ride, forgotten-item return and temporary road-reroute events.
• Added an opt-in police inspection using BeamNG's native police and pursuit systems.
• Police content is selected from installed compatible configurations, preloaded asynchronously and activated 500?600 metres behind the player when the event begins.
• Police inspection is disabled by default. Enabling it requires a confirmation explaining that preparing a police vehicle can stall the start of a shift for 5?15 seconds.
• A completed native police stop can apply a small randomized administrative fine; unavailable police content fails safely without breaking the trip.

Trip history and Fleet access

• Reviews are now expandable trip-history records containing outcome, fare, date, penalties and Random Event history.
• AI-assisted trips remain marked in review and profile history.
• The Fleet map button remains present with F 0 when no driver is hired, allowing the hiring screen to be opened during an active personal shift.
• Fleet controls and driver-count labels remain CEF overlays above both personal and Fleet maps.

Traffic-aware Fleet workers

• Hired drivers keep the low-cost native route worker introduced in 3.3.1 Beta.
• Each Fleet vehicle now runs a simplified instance of the traffic guard: smooth following, minimum-gap control and steering-arc collision prediction.
• Fleet observation runs every 200 ms with six trajectory samples, versus the player's 100 ms and twelve samples, limiting aggregate CPU cost.
• Fleet presets provide aggression, legal-speed behavior, following time and braking values without instantiating player-only target logic.
• Fleet route progress remains staggered at 250 ms, trims already passed nodes, rebuilds from the current road segment and abandons an unreachable job after bounded retries.
• Fleet traffic state is isolated per worker and never uses the player's position when selecting or repairing a route.

Runtime modularization

• Extracted native minimap ownership, dynamic zoom, occlusion regions and restoration of BeamNG navigation settings into navigationUi.lua.
• Reduced taxiDriver.lua from 4,199 to 4,026 lines and from 179 to 166 main-chunk locals, restoring meaningful safety margin below LuaJIT's 200-local limit.
• Kept Vehicle Config suspension and lazy vehicle rescanning unchanged so editing parts does not reintroduce the previous long configuration stalls.
• Added dedicated physicalPickup.lua, policeCheckEvent.lua and tripHistory.lua services.

Validation and compatibility

• Passed the Lua gameplay combinatorics suite, including native player routing, strict GPS, directed-edge approach, premature Route Done, traffic observation, physical pickup, Random Events, police lifecycle, Fleet economy/routing and 500 deferred respawns.
• Passed 357 responsive UI states across all supported locales, native/Connected Phone layouts and DPR 2 HiDPI rendering.
• Built a deterministic 59-entry release archive and verified the installed archive hash.
• Existing 3.4.0-beta settings, driver progress, reviews, vehicle history, shift history, Fleet records and LAN identity remain compatible. Removed AI fields are safely ignored during settings migration.
• UI cache revision: 341-rc.

Package

• taxidriver.zip
• SHA-256: C3E58715FEFF5F3543D76CA6E7FE9BAF4826BCEB250D9F33D2BA38E41B0BED9F