A few thoughts about the engine designer.

[Mesa88]

I have a few ideas for the engine designer i want to share with the devs and community. I hope to get a bit of feedback, and hopefully my ideas will contribute to make Automation a superb game!

1: Cooling - I think i would be a nice touch to be able to choose cooling systems for your engine. It would probably effect price and MTTF and how hot you can run the engine. It would make the engine feel more real (less generic).

2: Part robustness : It would be nice for some parts to be able to choose to make them more robust, increasing MTTF, but adding weight and reducing performance and increasing material cost. This would mean that you more easily could make a frail Italian sports-engine, or a heavy but robust truck engine.

3: Timing belt : It would be nice to be able to choose between a timing belt, or chain or double chain- system. The chain system would be more costly to produce, but lower the service costs of the engine (and perhaps increase the MTTF a bit).

4: Responsiveness, loudness and smoothness : The numbers don`t really tell me much. How responsive is an engine with a responsiveness of 45.3? I thing it would be informative to write it something like this Res: 45.3 (decent) or do the loudness in decibels. It`s my opinion that this would give the player better feedback and have more meaning than just a number.

That was all I had right now. I hope these ideas might be of some use to the devs

[fordford]

i like the idea about doing the loudness in decibels, but i think you still have the same problem for eg how loud is 85 decibels? are you likely to find 85 decibels in a city car (vw polo) or in a merc s class? its all still just a number to me.

[geozero]

i like the idea about doing the loudness in decibels, but i think you still have the same problem for eg how loud is 85 decibels? are you likely to find 85 decibels in a city car (vw polo) or in a merc s class? its all still just a number to me.

Maybe this helps:

http://www.gcaudio.com/resources/howtos/loudness.html

Basically rock music is 120-150db. That's loud. Inside a car a typical car engine is at 85db. The link has a lot of comparison ideas. As for variances in engines??? You might have to do more research on that.

[T16]

It's not really any better if you have to go online to find a website with decibel comparisons to figure out if the engine is loud or quiet.

[fordford]

@ T16 yes my point exactly its still just a number.

now this idea of mine will need a dev thumbs up if its to late to implement or not but here it is.

what about useing a traffic light system for eg green = hybrid (nissan leaf toyota prius)and going through to amber=midrange hot hatches stroke muscle cars and then finally red= ferrari lambo aston pagani etc etc...
the same system could be used for smoothness,responsiveness aswell as loudness.

a similar system is used nowadays to rate electrical products for efficiency.
i think this idea would make it easier for people to understand what kind of characteristics the engine will have. (you just aim for red)

i hope all of this makes sense and i will be interested in what the devs think.

[Killrob]

Let me extract the good parts here:

1) Additional feedback on the arbitrary stats to have a direct (rough) absolute comparison. Take the example smoothness
Extremely Rough, Very Rough, Rough, Slightly Rough, Average, Rather Smooth, Smooth, Very Smooth, Extremely Smooth

This is a good idea. Extra feedback / communication is the way to go for a user friendly game.
It makes some sense out of arbitrary stats - I've added it to the Revamp List.

2) Robustness: yes, we have thought about this too, but it will make things much more complex and difficult to implement
into the current UI, especially if it is for almost every part. This will not be added for those reasons.

3) On loudness: Saying that "rock music is 120-150db" is as meaningless as saying "rock music is loud". No it isn't, it depends
on how loud you play it and how far you are away. Giving an absolute dB measure is meaningless. From 1km distance all engines
are pretty quiet people have no feeling for sound intensities... mainly because it is a logarithmic scale, which most people
don't even know what that entails. It would be a lot of rather useless work to figure out a good system for this - work much
better spent somewhere else. Going for something like the above point 1) but for loudness on the other hand would make a lot
of sense and is easy enough to do.

Cheers!

[geozero]

I agree noise is a relative thing and would be abstract. Also agree that programming time is better spent elsewhere, for the sake of finding accuracy I added my comments and link. Engine noise could be assumed (as far as loudness) to be either from inside the vehicle in the driver's seat or outside and immediately next to the car. BTW - rock sound levels are measured differently based on the venue, the stage steup and the number of stacks of amps. Generally db is measured at the mixing console position in a concert which is typically half way back from the stage, although measurements are also taken from stage, close to stage and other areas. An average rock concert the db's would be based at about 100-200 feet from stage. The actual db's are further affected by whether it is an outdoor venue, a club size, or an indoor arena. I toured for 10 years. I have permanent ear damage. It ain't fun.

[Vain]

You could also give the loudness as the acoustic power level (also given in dB, but measuring a different quantity), which doesn't change with the distance from the sound source or the surroundings. But that's a completely useless value to anybody but sound engineers. So I guess its fine as it is.

I support the cooling idea though. I'd love to see e.g. air cooled engines and cooling effectiveness that increases with the technology level.
I imagine it to work this way:
Each car body type has a maximum cooling 'capacity' available that basically tells you how much air flows through the engine bay. Grills and air inlets could improve this value at the cost of air resistance. If your air cooling technology is very good you can build a high-powered air cooled engine that fits into that body type without overheating, improving reliability due to the lack of moving parts. Otherwise you'll have to rely on water cooling. But even then you'll sometimes be restricted by the available cooling, e.g. when you want to make a high-powered rear-engined vehicle that doesn't have a lot of space for coolers. Then you may have to tack on some ridiculous air intakes near the engine bay to make the vehicle viable. An the other hand, a large investment in cooling technology could allow you to remove some of the air intakes from your vehicles to reduce aerodynamic resistance and thus improving fuel economy.

[Daffyflyer]

Hmmmm, cooling is an interesting thing that we've never been sure about. We shall ponder all these things for the revamp

[Jsskso]

Would it be worthwhile to replace the different fixed block sizes with a "bore spacing" variable?
This would obviously effect the overall lenght of the engine and, in cases of low bore spacing to bore ratio, the reliability of the engine. Different capacities of engines could be created around the same bore spacing saving on tooling costs on introducing a new engine. Oh! I sure hope you will model the tooling costs of new products properly!

[Trifler]

1: Cooling - I think i would be a nice touch to be able to choose cooling systems for your engine. It would probably effect price and MTTF and how hot you can run the engine. It would make the engine feel more real (less generic).

3: Timing belt : It would be nice to be able to choose between a timing belt, or chain or double chain- system. The chain system would be more costly to produce, but lower the service costs of the engine (and perhaps increase the MTTF a bit).

I also would like to see the ability to tweak the cooling system.

I was thinking there should be an option for a timing chain myself, so +1 on that.