Sun Aug 23, 2015 12:59 pm by Killrob
*sigh* yes there definitely are two camps arguing for and against it, this discussion has happened many times already, too, and honestly I'm about as tired of it as "make cam profiles more complex", it's the same story.
Engines in the game are more complex because that complexity was FUN to play with when we tested it and obviously is something people enjoy. Fuel mapping on the other hand is super boring after you've done it once (haven't done it myself, but Andy and Cas have and sigh whenever someone suggests it), just imagine to do it for all say 200 cars your company makes during its time on the market. Gear ratios, final drive, etc. are really important, which is why we wanted to have it in the game. It turned out to be tedious and not fun, so we found an elegant way around it.
Individual gear ratios will never come back to the game, period. Been there, done that, it sucked. If we ever get around to making a racing manager expansion they would most probably come back because for performance applications they are very important and very much needed. I highly doubt though that most of you get how much you can do with those two simple sliders and I think you are exaggerating when you say that it becomes poorly optimized by default.
The only thing I think we easily could do is to indeed have a final drive field showing the number calculated in the background. It will change whenever you change tire size, but if that is something that people want I see no big reason why we can't put that there, it's not taking long to do that and doesn't interfere with the game's flow in any way. The only argument against having that is information density, which the game suffers from already in a big way, but I guess one more number doesn't change that by much.
Edit: Another thing I could think of as being acceptable would be to have the ratios and final drive to be shown in a tooltip while you change the sliders, that would give a bit more immersion while keeping the UI clean, at the disadvantage of giving higher information density on screen by a significant amount.