automationgame.com

First: WOW! IT's been a while since I have jumped on the game. Once I downloaded the updates and jumped in, there have been a lot of changes. It looks great, and seems to be getting better and better. I was a bit sad that I lost all my previous work though . I would like to say that this is a game that I have wanted to be released since I first played Gran Turismo and you guys are doing a fantastic job with it.

My suggestion is for the the vehicle design portion. I do enjoy what you have made but there are way too many limits on how the frames turn out. I think it would be a bit better, and allow for way more designs and unique designs, if you had us pick a design for each piece of the frame. What I mean by that, is having all the frames you have built but chop their sections and allow us to mix and match them. So I would be able to use a Coupe hood, with a 50's Coupe fender, a Hatchback trunk, on an SUV chassis.

The other expansion on the vehicle designer would be giving us more "stretch" editing options on the vehicle. Separating the hood, fender, roof, upper door, lower door, rear fender, upper trunk, lower trunk, and bumpers. Giving us further customization in each of the frame sections would allow for more unique designs. It would also be nice if there was more movements for us, sometimes I would like to raise the height of the fenders on my car but keep the hood where it is, or have the hood/center of the vehicle stick out further than the fender.

Sadly that is technically very difficult and thus not feasible for us to do. Our work-around is to offer as many base body shapes as possible, which to some extent offsets the lack of customizability.

Also, don't get attached to your creations, they probably will need to be deleted with every major update before the final release.

Not gonna happen. You know how hard it is to makes these panels/parts connect well to eachother? I think the current cardesigner offers a lot of freedom and uniqueness already.
I see what you are trying to say, but its virtually almost impossible and would set back the game atleast 1 year of hard work.




Additional morphin areas are a possibility to include in the future I think. But with more models (and their variations) coming a long, you wont be morphing just one body, but selecting one that looks closer to it and morph that to your wish. Raising/lowering the roof is one of the things I would like to see too. The "stretch" your talking about, won't be possible for the simple reason explained above already.

I wish I knew more about game design and programming, it would help so much when coming up with suggestions. I was thinking that by just having generic designs of eash panel for different years and vehicle type that it would reduce the overall work of having to create every single body that's been out there.

For a learning experience, why is it more difficult to design the panels over the body as a whole? I can understand that the adjustment tool would be difficult for every panel though.

Because the current designer works with the models being morphed and getting fixtures stamped into them.
That would mean they have to re-create a complete new designer to work with parts.

Those parts however, all need to work exactly as you want them. They need to align perfectly to make a good looking body.
Then when placing fixtures, the stamping can easily breakdown (rough guess, but reasonable assumption) and not work properly, creating body glitches and ugly spikes like sometimes now happens still.

Also, creating all these panels is far more work than making a body that is morphable.

Yeah, the problem with those kind of methods is usually trying to make sure that every panel fits perfectly with every other panel.

It certainly wouldn't be possible to get the morphing to work properly with it I don't think.


The other problem is that stamping fixtures in relies on the car having a consistent UV unwrap (hard to explain, but basically a flattened out version of the 3d model that it uses to work out how to apply a texture to it), and if it had multiple different sections that could be added and removed it'd ruin that and cause weird holes in the wrong places when stamping fixtures.

There will be a pretty big range of car bodies and fixtures in the end, so I don't think there will be too much of a problem with lack of design choices.

Well that's good to know. I am definitely enjoying watching the game grow, and it's seems to be expanding fast recently. It's amazing to see how much has changed since the last time I jumped on.