What are some good Nero quotes? Wikiquotes only has two; one of which is "I wish I could not write." which seems a bit ironic since it seems most of his writings are now gone.
!!!! 2 meters separation at 70 km/h gives you a tenth of a second to react to anything the car in front of you does, that's flatly insane. Where in the world do people drive like that?
Seriously, that's objectively insane. Try the ruler drop test for reaction times if you don't believe me, a 10th of a second to even initiate your response isn't realistic and obviously gives no time for the response itself to have effect. What I'm saying is that at a tenth of a second, you can't even start to press the brake pedal in time, let alone have enough time to actually slow down.
In America, with only 2 meters between vehicles the traffic would be inching forward at a snails pace, under 20 km/h at least. "Stop and go", as in people would stop their car and then drive forward slowly when a larger gap ahead of them appears.
> I've been in rush hour (where keep-to-the-right-unless-passing is very strictly enforced) in bumper-to-bumper traffic and the left two (out of 6) are completely empty and everyone is doing 'around' the speed limit.
I've been on interstates in every continental US state and I've never seen this, but I think something has been lost in translation because "bumper-to-bumper" and "everybody doing the speed limit" are mutually exclusive as I understand the terms. If everybody on the road can fit into the right lane with enough space in-between to do the speed limit, that is done but I wouldn't call that traffic "bumper-to-bumper". I would call that light traffic. Bumper-to-bumper is when the space between cars really starts to contract, because everybody is going substantially below the limit, or because people aren't maintaining a safe distance.
Once the road has too many cars to fit them all into the right lane at the speed limit, then in every state I've driven, cars start using the left lane for travel, not just passing. If the right lane is so full that it can only sustain 5 below the limit, then people start driving in the left lane and stay there for as long as the right lane won't support speed-limit traffic. In this kind of traffic you'll start to have cars moving fast alongside each other with low relative velocity.
> It is a vanishingly small number of scenarios where you are keeping pace with a car next to you and you're not in the wrong.
I think it really depends on where/when you're driving. I find this to be a common scenario on interstates during rush hour:
I'm in the right lane, doing approximately the speed limit. There is a safe distance between me and the cars in front and back of me, but only just. If many more cars enter the road, traffic would need to slow down to maintain safe distances. In the left lane is the same situation, except they're averaging about 1 or 2 mph faster. In this situation, there are cars in the left lane passing very slowly, spending a lot of time alongside me. I could slow down below the speed limit every time a car passed on the left, to reduce reduce that loiter time. But this would make my driving less predictable to the drivers behind me (and waste a lot of mileage too...)
So normally, when the other cars are my size, I maintain my present course and speed, driving as predictably as possible to help the other drivers anticipate my course. Changing position in traffic is inherently risky, so I avoid making changes unless doing so is necessary to avoid something I judge to be more dangerous than the average. If a truck passes me on the left, I'll slow down to make the passing faster even if that means a car behind me has to brake. But if in that moment I judge the guy behind me to be even more dangerous, then maybe I won't. It's the kind of decision that needs to be made on the spot in a case-by-case basis. On interstates that are flowing fast near capacity, you need to be constantly evaluating the relative threat of the traffic around you.
In light traffic, I wouldn't. In medium traffic there often isn't that much choice, but in those situations I prefer the company of other cars my size, and preferably ones with attentive drivers (so I discriminate against Tesla drivers.)
Not really though. You played a different game using a much simpler sort of engine (probably a raycaster, similar to wolf3d) with much simpler level geometry (probably square on a grid, and probably without stairs, windows through walls, elevating platforms, etc) There are several games like that on the z80 line of TI calculators, for instance Gemini: https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/247/24742.htm...
But the real Doom isn't a simple raycaster, it uses an engine that exists in the space between a raycaster and a true 3d game like Quake. A so-called "2.5D engine". The level geometry had height data, but couldn't overlap itself (so no navigable bridges unless you fake it using raising and lowering platforms (or teleport the player to another part of the level, like the Build engine did.) Rooms could have arbitrary polygonal shapes, walls weren't all at right angles to each other, which complicated the process of rendering and necessitated the use of BSP trees to traverse the level geometry efficiently.
I know of one instance of such a game engine being created for the 83/84 z80 lines of calculator, detailed in a series of blog posts here:
