I've been searching through the FoT program code for areas related to character skills. I've found all of the expected behaviors for skills, except one - the Pilot skill doesn't seem to do anything really useful. The only effects I've found are:
1) When a character enters or leaves a vehicle, make sure the character with the highest Pilot skill is made the driver.
2) There is a very minor damage reduction when the vehicle runs into an obstacle. Low pilot skills appear to do 4-10 damage, average (50-100%) does 2-10, and >100% does 1-5.
There is an additional place where the "skill check" code (the same code used for Lockpick, Traps, Science, etc.) is called for Pilot, about 3-4 times per second while a vehicle is moving. But this check appears to have no effect - the result of the check is left on the stack, and discarded immediately when the stack frame is released, and the margin of success for the check is written to the "Chance" variable in the Vehicle class, but is never used again until it is rewritten.
Has anyone done any explicit testing with the skill, and verified if it has any clear effect? I've seen that FAQs and the Wiki mention vehicle speed being affected, but I can't recreate this, and there's still a lot of misinformation from those sources.
1) When a character enters or leaves a vehicle, make sure the character with the highest Pilot skill is made the driver.
2) There is a very minor damage reduction when the vehicle runs into an obstacle. Low pilot skills appear to do 4-10 damage, average (50-100%) does 2-10, and >100% does 1-5.
There is an additional place where the "skill check" code (the same code used for Lockpick, Traps, Science, etc.) is called for Pilot, about 3-4 times per second while a vehicle is moving. But this check appears to have no effect - the result of the check is left on the stack, and discarded immediately when the stack frame is released, and the margin of success for the check is written to the "Chance" variable in the Vehicle class, but is never used again until it is rewritten.
Has anyone done any explicit testing with the skill, and verified if it has any clear effect? I've seen that FAQs and the Wiki mention vehicle speed being affected, but I can't recreate this, and there's still a lot of misinformation from those sources.
