AutomationHub - For all your Automation needs!

[WizzyThaMan]

Intro
Hey everyone,

It's quite some read, so without further a due;
Together with a friend I had the idea of making a website, where people can find everything for Automation.
Something like other games have, like Simcity or C&C games, where you can download your models, savegames, engines, mods etc.
SO we got to work and planned out this concept, which we are currently working on and try to get up and running end of March.

- A cardirectory, where people that register their company name (1 per registered user) with some sort of pagetemplate to display their latest models, put up a badge/icon for their company and write a historical story about their company. The cardirectory will then list all the companies registered in a list, 'alphabetically' or 'last updated'.

- A way to share platforms, engines, models, savegames or other ORIGINAL (non-modded) gameplay stuff. Think about realistic remakes of real life cars, 99 or 100% accurate engine copies of, for example, an Skyline R32 GTR or a savegame which places you at a certain point in game which might be interesting to share. All the uploads will be reviewed, so when it's just a bad upload, it won't be put on because we have to also think about bandwidth and webspace.

- Mods to download, that provide additional gameplay elements. Maybe new models to pick and design, or other user-generated-content that you might find interesting to add to your games.
Also, quite important, a way for modding teams to showcase their products and show their progress. Only available for those who have a good concept/idea for a mod and keep updating/progressing regularly.

- Tips, tricks and hints but maybe also cheats to help you play the game. Think about guides on how to set up the first steps of the company, how to learn the market and its targetgroups or how to make a company with just sportcars. It can all be there.

- On the frontpage, there will be news with some latest interesting uploads or news about interesting mods. Also a car company gets listed randomly when making fun or good models or engines. This way you have increased chance of people visiting your carcompany page when you just keep it updated and add new content.

- Forums to talk with your fellow players and maybe form teams to play online, share server IPs, form modding teams, advertise your company, or just have a fun chat with others about the game or non-game related stuff.

That's it quite in short. First I have to say that we try to focus on getting that cardirectory in and a way to host the engines, models and platforms and have thm up for download.
We are working on it whenever we have time and hope to release this quite soon.
Besides all this, we are still open for feedback. Also we will be looking for people to test those engines, models and platforms in the future to see if they are worthy to upload. We really don't want it to be a large trashbin with everyone who feels to upload can do so. We want to keep the quality up. Also people that would like to moderate the forums there are welcome. But all of this is for the future.

I hope a lot of people are enthousiastic, at least we are! And we cant wait to get this up and running. As said, we don't know when it will be up as we want to do this good, but we will do our best to do this very soon!

Where can I find this "AutomationHub"?
Right here! http://www.automationhub.net

Donations and Support
First of all, we should make clear that we are aiming for non-profit. We mainly try to get our expenses covered, such as servercosts, domainname costs and later on, eventually one or more Dedicated Multiplayer sever(s). We spend a lot of our free time in developing this. So we would really appreciate if you could 'Buy us a beer' through the support button, to get off the work in our free time and have a drink. If you choose to support us, you can do that here. The website will have ads on them to generate a steady income for us to support all the costs, as we are not sure who, when and how much will support us. We are looking into payment options to gain extra features on the website, like more space for you to expand you company or even get more than one company per account, get an ad-free website, get a medal for supporting us, having your own category with downloads of engines or cars and more. So in short, we try to give back everything we get to the community by giving extra features, carcompany uploadspace and dedicated servers to play the game on when multiplayer is released.

AutomationHub Team
Founders
WizzyThaMan - Bart
Schnitzel - Alexander (not on the forums)

Additional members
Jakgoe - Tester

List of contributors for manuals/guides/tutorials and tips&tricks:
USDMFTW - N/A Engines
SamSheepDoq - Turbo's on Inline engines
Jakgoe - Big V8 N/A engines
Pleb - Car Design tips and Designing an older looking car

Anything more?
Suggestions, feedback and other related comments and replies are more than welcome. We are trying to create a place for the community, so why not make you have a say in things?
So what are you waiting for!

Regards,
The AutomationHub Team



Updates per date
- 8th of April - We got the 'Create a Company' page finished, along with the 'Carcompany Catalog' and are working hard on 'Company Profilepage'. We also have the complete News-section working to keep you up to date about AutomationHub, Automation the game, carcompanies and mods!
- 17th of June - After a more quite period because we were quite busy with school and work, we finally picked up some work again, and how! We have updated the company catalog with sortable buttons from A-Z, Z-A, highest rating to lowest rating, and various others. This way you can easily sort according to what you are looking for! There is also a searchbox, which will allow you to search for companies with a certain name. Check the screenshots right under this update. While I've been working on designing the Downloads page, my companion is working on getting the Carcompany profile page ready for adding your own engines and models. Basically it's functioning already, but it needs to be clear and bugfree so everything will work out just right. Stay tuned for more updates on this the next couple of days.
- 4th of August - It took a bit for me to update you guys, since I personally was busy with my graduation and the programmer had to get his final tests for his year in college too. After that we took a small break and started working again. We are pretty much polishing up the carcompany profile page and everything related to that, to make it as user-friendly and bugfree as possible for the first Alpha release to be tested by several people. I already have my list of people I'm going to ask to test it, so you don't need to sign up for it, sorry. Maybe later on we will announce a public test, but for now it will stay closed. After the test, we have to work out setting everything up for public release and do some bug fixing found during testing. Then we need to still arrange things to stay public and get everything to work when there is, lets say, 40 people at the same time on the website. Also, we need to take care on contributors and donations that they get what they contribute for. We ask you to not get on your toes if this takes a day or two to get done after you donated. We are still working on an automated system to take care of this. Make sure you give your username WHEN you decide to donate some money. That would definetly make it clear for us what username needs to be upgraded. Anyway, for now it's working hard and staying up late, trying to get this thing ready for testing. Its slowly time for you guys to get coffee or energy drinks and some popcorn to enjoy creating your company or view other peoples company. SLOWLY, I said
- 11th of August - We've been working hard (several almost all-nighters) and have the website close to being beta tested. We still have to polish some things now and add some more stuff to increase usability. Here's a short list of what we still need to do before we can test it ourselves and then get it ready for betatesting:
- Optimalized layout for the car/engine page
- Banners and buttons instead of just text links
- Adding Engine type to engine uploads (V8(CP and FP), I4/6 for now)
- Optimalize public car and engine showroom with sortable tags to sort them alphabetically, date created, rating and several other

On another note, we now have Awards/Medals working as a sort of achievement system. Also the rating system works correct. Several exclusive guides (both PDF and video) by contributors Pleb, SamSheepDog, Jakgoe and me are on the website waiting for you to see! We hope to be able to finish it soon and release it to the public. According to what the betatest might bring up, this can be either fast or slow. So stay tuned!
- 28th of November - Well well well.... you thought we gave up? Ofcourse not! Don't be silly! We have been working hard (on both AutomationHub TV and the website) to get this all going. So close actually, that we are close to finally releasing a closed betatest! If all goes well, and the testers don't give us a shitload of work, we can launch the website within 2 weeks from now! Exciting huh?!
What is there more to say... Basically it all comes down to the last bits and you can actively participate on the website to get your companies up and running.
The next planned step will be adding downloads and finetuning the company catalog with some extra stuff to make it even more enjoyable and exciting.
We are even looking into maybe just putting up a rankinglist with top 100 best ranked companies, engines and cars so you can compete in that!
We will announce the launch here on the forums, but if you are looking to become one of the first to be registered, make sure you check us out on http://www.facebook.com/automationhub and like our page! Also, on AutomationHub TV we will keep you notified during the streams on our progress, so make sure you watch and listen to them too! Make sure you subscribe to our Twitch: http://www.twitch.tv/automationhub
As a last note, I just wanted to say that when the site launches, we have a nice little suprise! So try to be there when we do!

Carcompany Catalog


Downloads Page

[Jakgoe]

I am going to arbitrarily number the points from 1 to 6.
1. Seems awfully similar to the car sharing on the forums. Unless you can upload files to share.
2. Yes!
3. When mods are supported this will be a great idea.
4. This would be extremely helpful. I would be very willing to help out on this.
5. Great idea!
6. We already have forums, but yours would probably serve a different purpose (not in a bad way).

It would be the "official non-official" page, unless the devs are willing to make it "official".

Who are you working with to make the website?
Is their any way I could help?

[USDMFTW]

Would be cool but it could be a pain because of the updates breaking older versions of peoples uploads making them all useless and just taking up space.

[WizzyThaMan]

Jakgoe:

Cardirectory on the forums is different. Everyone has a different layout. The website will offer everyone a way to make the same page but with their own content.
Cool you would like to help! I am making this with a programmer and myself, who is more designer, but I can program a little too. My companion is mainly there for the PHP/Database end stuff and making things work. I'm there for the layout, the HTML/CSS part. The other forums will be mainly just for the fan kind of things. In some ways it will indeed be a 'copy' of what can already be done here, but the website needs a way for people to communicate. When you want to help Jakgoe? What can you actually do? Could you PM me about that, saying if you have any experience programming, or is it more for testing uploads and modding the forums?


USDMFTW:
The uploads will probably be enabled only when there is a stable full/demo version of the game. Maybe earlier, but we will see. It would mean we have to erase the database everytime engines etc. dont work anymore with a newer version, which is do-able.

[boyercam]

Jakgoe:
Cardirectory on the forums is different. Everyone has a different layout. The website will offer everyone a way to make the same page but with their own content.

Yes, that is the biggest problem on my version, but yes, I like the idea.

[Razyx]

Hi there!.
I think is a good idea... but it requires time and effort
Dunno whether it would be like a hobby thing or not but, maybe through a poll, i'll try to have an idea of how popular it would be.

If you go ahead with the project, i'd suggest Cakephp to manage fast and easily all that stuff. You will find many resources that will help almost in anything you want to do.
Perhaps the shared stuff might go in a free external server (something like Mediafire) just need to find a way to manage it (maybe defining your own processes/calls)...

[USDMFTW]

Yea despite the version changes, in my experiance depending on the website, wiping all of the uploads should not be to hard. Id love to help with the website anyway i could.

[WizzyThaMan]

Good to see all the feedback and people thinking.

Razyx:
We are using a CMS system and my companion and me both have experience in programming HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL, so that shouldnt be a problem. Plus we found a good webhost.
About the popularity part, if it is anything like Simtropolis for Simcity, it would be great haha. Plus I think the userbase behind Automation is quite big and needs a platform to share their stuff in an ordered, and goodlooking way. Currently its a bit of hobby project, but when this gets going, we are able to free up some time on a weekly basis for this.

USDMFTW:
What would you like to help with? Could you PM me with some of your information like name/age/gender/experience in webdesign or such?

[WizzyThaMan]

As for the name and logo, we are proud to announce this:



AutomationHub - For all your Automation needs!

[USDMFTW]

As for the name and logo, we are proud to announce this:



AutomationHub - For all your Automation needs!

Dis gon be gud.

[Jakgoe]

Dis gon be gud.

If I was a mod, I would give you a warning for grammar (just kidding) . But I agree, dis gon be gud.

Mod edit: Warning for bad grammar. (Der Bayer)

[WizzyThaMan]

LOL @ Bayer hahaha!

Thanks guys. I'll post some updates about the site later today to keep you up to date. Also some layout designs will be posted. The designs will be very basic, so dont expect rocket science and top art work, as my programmer merely wants effective stuff instead of nice, good looking stuff to create the pages

[WizzyThaMan]

Alright, so here is some updates:

We registered the domainname already so we can put the site online as soon as some parts of it are ready for the public to register to etc.
We already created a login and register for the website, so that works already.
Next step is to create the Carcompany directory listingpage, the Create a carcompany page which allows you to register a carcompany to your userID you login with and the page to show your carcompany.
The one named last, the carcompany showroom page, will look a bit like this:




Additional things to happen, are things like editting your showroom by adding or deleting models from the line up, or viewing the complete list of showroom models.
It all will be supported with some sort of CMS system (Content management system) to make it easy for users to add, edit or delete stuff.

As soon as we've got more, you will be the first to know!

[gt1cooper]

Perhaps a class system of cars might be warranted? As in Sports, Family, Luxury, Gran Touring, etc. within each company. When looking at a list of companies, this could show so you could see what kind of company it is.

[Jakgoe]

A tag system based on class, era, realism, etc. has been discussed, and will hopefully be implemented,