Re: Sunday Update
Posted: Wed Feb 09, 2011 11:08 amzeussy wrote:Each factory size will have a number of production lines. Smaller factories may only have 1, larger factories will have more.
As you will design an engine around a manufacture year, its costs of production can vary factory to factory, based on when that factory was tooled. The exact mechanics of this have yet to be set in stone.
After you have designed an engine, and set it up in a production line, there will be a tooling time, where the factory is re tooling the machines to the new engine design.
Sounds good.
zeussy wrote:Me and daffy have discussed this very topic at great length, we did at one point have planned that to build an engine, the factory would setup a whole set of production lines for conrods, pistons with all unique manufacture parameters. You would have to build a stock of these before you could build an engine.
Therefore you would be inclined to make engines of similar bores and strokes to share the piston/conrod production lines etc.
All of that became a nightmare to managed, the stocks, keeping track of changes becomes a compounded problem.
If you change the quality of a piston, tracking that through the different engines, to then the different cars they end up in. Updating the buyer demographics to manage it. It all became a nightmare to handle, not fun for me to program, and probably not fun for you guys to manage. That would of been a micro managing nightmare.
It is something that daffy and I will probably discuss again.
Yeah, having to manage the production of all the little parts would be too much micromangement.
I do have one idea for a simplified way of doing this. ( I dunno how well it would work, but ill throw it out there anyways.)
What you could do is have an option in the engine design screen where you take an existing design and modify it to create a series of engines.
There could be 3 levels of modification.
Level1: Simple mods like Intake and Exhaust.
Level2: intermediate mods like the top end and Aspiration as well as above.
Level3: Advanced mods to the Bottom end and everything above. (except for block size)
The lower level mods would have a larger % of time and/or cost saving, while doing more advanced mods would have a lesser benefit.
However it would be hard to code unless each level had a set % of savings regardless of how much actual modification would be done. It wouldn't be as realistic, but thats the trouble with simplifying things.. I dunno if it would be worth it.
I still think it would be a handy feature to be able to modify existing designs even if there is no benefit to cost though. I'm sure alot of players would find it easier to make a series of engines instead of building one from scratch everytime.
There should also be an option similar to above except to modify existing stocks of an engine where you send it back to a production line. The lower level mods wouldn't take as long and cost less. Since players will undoubtedly run a surplus of parts like engines it would be useful to be able to modify them.
It would also be useful if a player wants to play as a tuning company and buy engines from competitors and tune them for your models.
I don't think that should be too hard to code would it?
Also a Must have option is to be able to Export and Import part designs to .txt files(or similar). Especially with multiplayer where a player would probably have alot of premade designs since pausing is quite annoying for all the players.
