Desirabilty

[maffc]

In the full tycoon game how will desirability be handled?
I know, like in the real world, it's a hard thing to define, but for example, hatchbacks did not become popular until the mid 70's & 80's (IIRC). Will we be prevented from producing one until the world is ready for it, or can you attempt to "change history" by inventing a hatchback in the 1950's and gradually bring it into acceptance early.
Will desirability of a vehicle be based on purely technical / factual items (performance/ economy / reliability, etc) or will appearance somehow play a part.
I'm sure the real world has produced some very good cars that on paper and based on their stats should have been good sellers, but because they were "fugly" never sold very well, e.g. Fiat Multipla
Again i'm sure it's probably a hard thing to do, I mean s there any way to define programmatically what is ugly or not.

[WizzyThaMan]

From what I know, there will be lots of targetgroups like, elderly, young adults, mid-aged men, soccermoms, etc. all that types of groups. They all have their own desires, like mid-aged man (very stereotype) would want a convertible with 300 HP for example. They change over time more or less. I guess probably also differ on various continents, where america might like muscle cars, I can imagine europe like hot hatches and asia wants cars like 240sx, toyota corolla and honda civics (very stereotype again). That doesnt mean that particular car wouldnt sell well in other regions of the world.

Also take into account that fuelprices might affect the type of cars you want to aim to sell.

When it comes to design, aesthetics are indeed not programmable. Though, you can calculate something like this:
Headlights 10x50 large, generate 75% light. If I choose to add a couple of small lights in the bottom of the front bumper, I could end up with 95% (which I dont know, you have to test it out I guess)
When I add headlights 100x500 (extremely large) I can end up with lights that show 205% light, so it's overdone. That could be considered bad.
If the same is done with the heating, by adding grills and vents, and also with the taillights and recognizeables (adding logo, using same type of headlights, grill setup) might contribute to what is considered pretty or not and also considered effective or not. This way you could still add tons of headlights, but small ones, to get close to 100% and so keep creativity.
Then there is also the amount of headlights placed that can be counted. When having 100 lights, it cna be considered ugly maybe? Its a possibility

If you connect that to what targetgroups want, you might get younger people wanting small broad headlights(calculating meassurements), so the car looks more aggresive, thus selling better, where the elderly probably want to be good visible in traffic or at night, and thus aiming for maybe larger headlights which also look older to a certain era when they were younger (lets say its 2010 now, they want cars that look early 90s headlight, so more boxy headlights) that could contribute. They might want bigger or moreheadlights that give 110% light on the scale.

But as said, aesthetics (prettiness) cant be programmed and is very personal. I think my description might provide a solution to work around that.

[vrmcardoso]

That sounds really complicated. I'm pretty sure they will either find some simplification, like if the car uses a body and fixtures that belong to that era, then its beautiful, otherwise its dated. Or that section will become the most difficult part of the game to develop.

The first time i thought about this I imagined it could be possible to have some sort of analysis of the cars in terms of ratios between given fixtures distances and the closer the ratios were to phi, the prettier the car would be (the golden number tends to appear a lot in nature. Flowers and leafs etc) But I'm pretty sure that would be tremendously hard to implement. In fact it seemed so complicated I decided against suggesting it.

I mean, it does make sense, there is even a study about the human face that uses this principle. Just like what you were suggesting could make sense, wizzy. I just think every solution for this will be too hard to be worthwhile.

[WizzyThaMan]

Compared to the engine and design part both were already a heck of a job for the devs, personally I think the tycoon part is going to be the worst. And then they still have to get your engine and your car working in the tycoon part.....

As you are speaking about simplifyng, I think what I explained is still rather a simple implementation of how it could work and provide about the same in-depth gameplay and mechanics like the cardesigner and enginedesigner.

[Daffyflyer]

That sounds really complicated. I'm pretty sure they will either find some simplification, like if the car uses a body and fixtures that belong to that era, then its beautiful, otherwise its dated. Or that section will become the most difficult part of the game to develop.

Yep, it'll mostly be that, and maybe some base stats of the car body itself so that they know how old it looks, and if it looks like a van or a slinky supercar

[maffc]

That's sounds cool, so like in the real world a car gets old and dies.
It also could be used say for a budget or lesser brand where they use and old design like when Seat started to make the older Audi A6 as the Exeo. They get a proven yet older design at low cost and so can sell at a price lower than the original and more (im)famously, eastern block manufacturers using old fiat designs.

I wonder though if there could be the possibility of a "classic" design, outliving it's time, such as the original Mini, produced for 40 years, outlived it's facelift (clubman, etc) and its replacement (Metro) and still popular

[JussiE]

Yep, it'll mostly be that, and maybe some base stats of the car body itself so that they know how old it looks, and if it looks like a van or a slinky supercar

But it would also be nice to be able to be "ahead of time". What I mean is to be able to create modern car for certain era and still be able have success with that.

[maffc]

Yep, it'll mostly be that, and maybe some base stats of the car body itself so that they know how old it looks, and if it looks like a van or a slinky supercar

But it would also be nice to be able to be "ahead of time". What I mean is to be able to create modern car for certain era and still be able have success with that.

Or alternatively have a Ford Sierra Moment where they went for the really modern car and it freaked out the buyers of it's predecessor for a good few years.
http://www.aronline.co.uk/blogs/cars/fo ... t-history/

[vrmcardoso]

I wonder though if there could be the possibility of a "classic" design, outliving it's time, such as the original Mini, produced for 40 years, outlived it's facelift (clubman, etc) and its replacement (Metro) and still popular

I think the devs are considering something like that: viewtopic.php?f=14&t=2399&p=21023&hilit=legendary#p21023

[JussiE]

Or alternatively have a Ford Sierra Moment where they went for the really modern car and it freaked out the buyers of it's predecessor for a good few years.
http://www.aronline.co.uk/blogs/cars/fo ... t-history/

Yes, it's true that Sierra did freak out some but it was still quite a successfull model atleast on some of the markets...

From gameplay point of view I think that you should be able to be modern and still success. I understand that some of the models might flop if those are too modern but you should still be able to be the one who changes the world/history in the game. I'm hoping that it won't be too limited although some limits would be sensible.