Can't wait to see body designer!

[AguriForever]

Because it's something visually rewarding, should be very interesting to experiment with, and will probably be great for publicity.

I'd love to see if design elements like grille and vent shapes or even as subtle as the Hofmeister kink on BMWs can be used to create a certain look for your car company.

I have to imagine that the designer is a piece of considerable complexity, so I'd give a big thanks to all the developers for their hard work!

[Daffyflyer]

Thanks! We'll be releasing a video preview of the car designer soon - hopefully in the next few days.


Probably the biggest aspect of creative control you'll have is over headlights, tail lights, door handles, grilles etc (not only style, but where they are placed on the car)
so these are the main things you would use to establish a corporate "face" for your cars.

The actual body design will be done via choosing a base car shell (for example I'm working on one now that looks a lot like a MK1 Golf or Lancia Delta) and from there you'll
be able to pull around some handles to change the shape of various parts, for example making the guards more flared, the bonnet shorter, or the skirts wider.

Its not quite designing a car body from scratch sadly, but we hope to have a pretty big range of base car bodies as well as bits such as headlights, so you should be able to make a huge range of cars

[RedRiot]

I'm really curious how the body-designer will work. I think the success of the game greatly depends on this part.

"Probably the biggest aspect of creative control you'll have is over headlights, tail lights, door handles, grilles etc (not only style, but where they are placed on the car)"

Have you guys played the game Spore? In Spore you can design creatures and their vehicles, buildings, etc. The vehicle-creator is easy to use and fun: maybe a similar system in Automation may work fine.

Let's see how the designer in Spore works:
1. The parts are divided into groups: base body shapes, which you can resize and combine free. How could it work in Automation? What about to split in two every main body shell, for an upper and a lower part - divided by the waistline. You choose a lower part design, which would be the base of the modell family: and you could put different "top end" to that. This way you could make the sedan, station wagon, coupe, cabriolet etc. version of the same car. Of course, you could modifiy the basis for each version: for the coupe you could make it shorter, for the minivan you could make it taller, stuff like that.

2. The basic vehicle shapes are "magnetic": you could attach the smaller parts onto it. It's a great way to place the handles, bumpers, lights, etc.

Spore vehicle creator gameplay:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6zcC0xc6Ik

I don't suggest you to copy the whole Spore vehicle designer into Automation, but I think it's a clever system and some points of it would be worth to try.

---------------------------

Anyway, I think there is two way to make the body-designer interesting:
1. Make the building system complex. Give the player great freedom to shape a few basic model. I think it would be hard to make it bug-free and easy-to-use. Let's see the other solution!

2. Make a simple building system, with a few basic transform options (Spore-like), and add masses of models and car shapes to it. It 'would be a huge amount of work, but maybe you could find talented 3D artists how would be interested in your project, here: http://www.smcars.net/

[Daffyflyer]

Yeah, I suspect the method you're suggesting would be very hard to actually implement nicely for cars.


Out of those two options you list, we're very much going for option 2

[astracrazy]

so will you basically have a choice of headlights for example
then you can choose the placement on the front of the car
then you can choose the width & height?

how much will you be able to go into it. say you wanted Porsche style headlights (maybe more the older style) would you be able to do it?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... e911sc.jpg
the headlight effects the shape of the bonnet

[RedRiot]

Out of those two options you list, we're very much going for option 2

Happy to hear that. With enough body-styles and parts I'm sure it'll be fun.

[Daffyflyer]

so will you basically have a choice of headlights for example
then you can choose the placement on the front of the car
then you can choose the width & height?

Yes - although the size changes don't work yet, but they will do

how much will you be able to go into it. say you wanted Porsche style headlights (maybe more the older style) would you be able to do it?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... e911sc.jpg
the headlight effects the shape of the bonnet

Not really no, there will be some bodies that look like that Porsche though, and they'll just have a very small range of places you can logically put a headlight