Fri Dec 04, 2015 8:01 am by Killrob
This whole discussion comes up often and at least to me is really strange. Yes, it is an issue. No, this aspect is not "finished" and yes, there will be tweaks. No, from what you see you can't draw proper conclusions for how well the system will work once done - at least with the limited knowledge that comes with "not being a dev or the person who designed it".
Let met give you a metaphor: You're building a robot supposed to run (as in: on two legs). "Hey, robot developer, this robot of yours doesn't work!" "It's not quite done yet, so yeah, what's the matter?" "It can't run." "Well, yes, that is because it doesn't have legs yet." "But you see, his hips rotate far too quickly and that doesn't seem to work." "True that, it is just a function test after all, it will be adjusted once it has legs and we see how those move."
In this case the legs are: "many car bodies to choose from" and "full car development & production cycle", the hip rotation speed is "depreciation of car bodies over time", which currently seems too fast and it very well may turn out to be too fast. That is not something worth spending time on to fine tune though because we don't have the bigger picture yet.
With the upcoming subproject we will have one of the legs, the engineering / production side mostly done. Car bodies will take much longer.
There are two pretty easy to tune factors in the depreciation: the starting age of depreciation (should be dependent on the average development and production time of new cars) and the slope of depreciation (should be depending on how many car bodies are available and how prestigious the demographic the car is made for is). Considering a facelift occurs every 3-6 years, I don't think the "hip rotation speed" is too far off from its mark right now. Depreciation occurs fast for trims, and slowly but then stronger and stronger for models.