Killrob wrote:Daffyflyer wrote:Zeussy has some crazy ideas about writing something to judge if a car looks good or not, based on the era etc.
Hrrmm... at first I thought: "Ohh cool, this would be a really neat feature!", but I gave it some time to sink in: this could yield bad game design if implemented too simplistic. Why?
... (snip) ...
So what does that mean? I'd say it means: in principle this is a good idea, but in practice it might be a bad one if implemented too simplistic. If you tie varying preferences to each individual buyer group, this becomes super-complex and time consuming to program, but also a non-issue and a good feature! Just wanted to say that you might be moving out onto thin game-design ice here.
Cheers!
/Robert
I can think of two ways of possibly handling it:
1) Historical Mode - Where the 'best' design follows the trends that have existed in the real world (eg shoebox for the 80's), but with a little bit of 'random' inserted
2) Random Mode - Where the 'best' design is handled in a semi-random manner per decade or so (eg maybe people in the 60's now love super square hatch-backs)
Obviously you still have the same issues with having an 'optimal' design, but if you make it expensive to keep pumping out new designs, then you semi-solve the issue (just since the benefit of fine-tuning your design endlessly won't justify the cost). If you insert a small amount of randomness in the optimal design per 'new game', then that would help each person's game be unique, even if they were playing in 'historical mode'.
On a related topic, will the game have some sort of mechanism where you can find out the current popular trends? Both in mechanical and body styles? I think it would be awesome if there was the possibility of designing and building a concept car to get the public's reaction, although I'm not sure how that would fit in with the game as it stands.
Posted: Wed Jun 15, 2011 8:40 am
