automationgame.com

Small bug here. I'm not sure if it's known or not.

In the Car Designer, under Model, when looking at the page where you choose your car's color and have two buttons labeled "New" and "Choose" for the engine:

Clicking on the New button needs to clear the engine family and variant. Currently when I press the New button, it overwrites my existing engine (if I have one selected) and it's gone.

Great find! This will be part of the reason why so many people are losing their work, should be easy enough to fix too. I'm still of the opinion we should just get rid of those buttons anyway as people can use the drop downs to select engines. We'll see how that will be done though

That would work for the Choose button, but currently there's no way to create a new engine that way and have the size arrows. Also that drop=down list does not filter out engines that don't fit (although it could be made to I suppose).
EDIT: Actually I think the Choose button is needed because otherwise we lose all the engine stats (including the year!).

If you're interested, I'll list a few other items I've observed then:

1) I find that when I go into Sandbox and look at my list of Cars and Engines, now that my list is longer than a page, I have to scroll down. The addition of mouse wheel support is fantastic (the old version didn't have it) but what's happening is that what's displayed on the screen and what the game thinks I'm clicking on becomes out of sync when I scroll up or down. I double click on one entry, and suddenly it shifts and it displays something else. It does seem to actually open the correct item however.

2) Also on the Sandbox list of Cars and Engines, it currently alternates the color of each row, with the currently selected row highlighted in gray. This was great before we had families, but now I find it hard to read like that. I think everything within the currently selected family should be in gray. So, if I have an engine family with three variants, then a total of four rows would be in gray. Maybe have alternative shades of gray if you wish.

3) I think I saw this reported elsewhere, but if I open a car model and try to load an engine that doesn't fit, it will give me an error, and roughly half the time it will not allow me to try loading a different engine. Even when I close the game and restart it, that car model remains broken and I have to delete it and start over. Related to this:

3a) The calculation to determine which engines are listed in red doesn't seem to update soon enough. If I change the front suspension (between McPherson and Double Wishbone, for example), then I go to choose an engine, I find that the list does not update. If I switch from McPherson to Double Wishbone, the list still displays as if I had McPherson selected. This is especially odd since the option to choose an engine isn't even on the same tab as the front suspension selection. My workaround for now is to adjust my suspension, close the Car Designer, then go back in.

3b) Also, it's only listing the engine family text in red, not the engine variant. This makes it very confusing and hard to read, so I suggest making individual variants that don't fit red as well. In addition, this list could automatically filter out all engine families that don't have any engine variants that fit.

4) One thing I've been a little confused about is that when I'm sculpting a new car body, I see that extending the back of the car increases cargo volume and increases body weight, which makes perfect sense. If I move the bottom of the rear windshield rearwards, cargo volume decreases, yet passenger volume does not increase. Also if I move the top of the rear windshield rearwards, passenger volume does not increase. It seems to me from looking at the car models that extending the bottom of the rear windshield should not reduce cargo volume. There's still no room to move the rear seats back further, so the trunk would remain the same size. I've seen many cars where the rear seat had a shelf behind it that covered the trunk beneath the rear windshield. Instead, it seems to me that moving the top of the rear windshield rearwards would simultaneously decrease cargo volume and increase passenger volume, because this is what provides the headroom to move the rear seat back. The top of the rear windshield can never move back further than the bottom of the rear windshield, so the player has the incentive to extend the rear of the car in order to increase either cargo or passenger volume. It seems like this is the direction you were going for.

4a) If I extend the front of the car (on the cars that have that option), there's an increase in weight, but no corresponding increase in engine bay length. Nor is there any increase in anything else. I think this should either not increase weight and be purely cosmetic, or else it should permit longer engines.

5) I don't understand why fuel efficiency is unaffected by the number of gears or manual vs. automatic. Currently I can make a 2 gear automatic as fuel efficient as a 4 gear manual.

4) In many cars the maximum extent of how far the rear seats can be located is limited by the rear wheels. You will notice that most cars have the rear seats just in front of the rear wheels, which is why rear doors almost always feature a circular cutout. So extending the cabin rearwards wouldn't necessarily increase useful passenger volume - there's no point moving the seats backwards if that forces your passengers to sit in a position where they are squeezed by the wheel arches.

I suppose one could argue that moving the rear windscreen backwards should increase cargo volume in a hatchback or wagon (for obvious reasons). I do see some logic in this reducing the cargo volume in a sedan, though - I've seen many sedans, typically sedan versions of compact hatchbacks, where the trunk lid is too small to fit some large items which would otherwise fit into the trunk perfectly fine. The shelf behind the rear seats cannot be counted as cargo volume due to the tendency for items placed there to hit passengers in the back of the head in the event of a crash.

4a) Yes I agree. With that said some cars do have a significant volume of empty space in front of the radiator for aerodynamic, safety, or cosmetic reasons.

5) This simply indicates that your manual's gear ratios are not suited for the application. All other things being equal, a manual transmission will have better fuel economy than an automatic as it is lighter and there is less power lost in the transmission itself.

That makes sense about the rear wheel limitations, but as the game is now, the player will always benefit from moving the bottom of the rear windshield as far forwards as possible, since it doesn't decrease passenger volume. It only affects cargo volume. There's no tradeoff. If the passenger volume is going to be a fixed number then perhaps this should also be a purely cosmetic thing, and just leave the extending of the rear end as the sole adjustment to cargo volume.



You misunderstood me regarding the shelf behind the rear seats. I wasn't saying it was cargo storage on top. I was saying that it indicates that the trunk extends in under the rear windshield. It doesn't stop where the rear windshield begins. Therefore, if the rear seat doesn't move, then the trunk should not shrink from the bottom of the rear windshield being extended back.

Point 5) modern automatics are infact more economic than manuals. But only those designed after year 2000, aprox.

I'm not talking about modern though. I mean on several cars I *gain* 0.1 mpg using a 3 gear manual instead of a 4. I've seen zero gains on any of my cars from using a manual over an automatic, whether it has more gears or not. Even on the Youtube video Killrob made with the maximum fuel efficiency Mini, he chose a 3 gear when a 4 gear was available.

Also, if I hover over the tooltip for Automatic/Manual, it indicates that the game currently gives automatics and manuals exactly the same cost and weight per gear, which makes the manual transmissions more expensive since they have more gears. I can only imagine this will be adjusted later since automatics cost a lot more in real life.

I also have noticed these things, but 1)could not figure out why the clicking stopped working properly, 2) seemed to be associated with behavior from 1, and 3a-b) thought I was doing something wrong.