automationgame.com

The interface looks great, I can't wait to see the video

the ui is looking great.looking forward to the new video.
keep up the great work guys.

Test room is looking great too.

All I have to say is that it looks very neat. The interface is nicely done and everything is in the right place. My only "nag" is that the right hand side buttons should be a tiny bit more big and visible because, afterall, they are important tabs.

Wow, looks great. Keep up the good work you guys!

Thanks for all the compliments!


@Hohenstaufen - you may be right, but they are a quite a bit bigger when you are actually playing the game full size.

However, I think we should be able to make them a bit bigger, and that might make the interface work a little better, we shall see

The new UI looks very clear and nice.
Just one question: there is a slider in the part information section of the screen. What is it good for? To change the manufacture year???

Yep, it changes the manufacture year.

Because there wont be any research, or time passing or anything in the demo, you'll just be able to choose what year you are building the engine in, which will effect how long it takes to make, the quality of the parts, and how much it costs etc.

In the finished game there will be something a bit similar, which will be how much effort you put into building it, more effort will take longer, and cost more, but make a higher quality engine

Will the year in the final game affect the stats of the engine? Or will it be based only on research?

Will there be any measures to prevent researching tech too far ahead of its time?

I didn't like how in Detriot it was easy to max out the technicians and have 60's tech in the 30's.

In Motor-City all the parts were unlocked by the year so you couldn't specialize in one area and be more advanced which wasen't very good either.

Technologies will automatically unlock over time.

You can research ahead of this auto unlock, with a severe exponential curve.

So something 5 years in the future might take 25 tech points, but something 10 years i the future takes 100 tech point, and 15 years takes 225 tech points.

Engine manufacture works in a similar way.

You will have factories of different sizes based on your needs.
These factories have a tooling year, of when they were fitted out.

Say you tool a factory in 1965, you can produce an engine of 1950's standards at worse, and max out your factory to 1980.

The Manufacture year represents what the average engine or tech at that time was. Some engines are ahead of their time, some an antiquated. We have based a concept that a normal Inline 4 takes about 20 man hours, as factories got better those man hours are more productive. If you are in the year 1980 and want to produce something similar to the 4AGE (which me and daffy reckons was about 5 years ahead of its time), it would cost you more like 30-40 man hours to produce that engine. 10 years in the future get towards 120 man hours.

So there is this sliding scale of costs, as you are trying to make a 1980's quality engine with a factory tooled in 1965 it might take you 100's of man hours per engine, instead of the 20 man hours it took make an engine of 1965 expectations. So it will be worth the expense to retool.

This allows us to have different scale of factories based on how people want to make their company, but also keep their factories up to date with current tech.

Wow. That all sounds perfect.

Some questions about the factories though, will the factories only produce one engine at a time? or can you produce multiple engine designs out of one factory?

Will the tooling for engines mean that any engine type can be produced in any factory, or will tooling be specific for certain engine types or sizes?

Will there be any benifit to using similair parts across different engine lines? For example, Can I make a series of I4 and I6 engines that share similiar blocks, the same pistons and con rods and things like that to make it cheaper? (like the Nissan L Engine )

I hate to be a bother with all the questions.. But I can't help it

Each factory size will have a number of production lines. Smaller factories may only have 1, larger factories will have more.



As you will design an engine around a manufacture year, its costs of production can vary factory to factory, based on when that factory was tooled. The exact mechanics of this have yet to be set in stone.

After you have designed an engine, and set it up in a production line, there will be a tooling time, where the factory is re tooling the machines to the new engine design.



Me and daffy have discussed this very topic at great length, we did at one point have planned that to build an engine, the factory would setup a whole set of production lines for conrods, pistons with all unique manufacture parameters. You would have to build a stock of these before you could build an engine.

Therefore you would be inclined to make engines of similar bores and strokes to share the piston/conrod production lines etc.

All of that became a nightmare to managed, the stocks, keeping track of changes becomes a compounded problem.

If you change the quality of a piston, tracking that through the different engines, to then the different cars they end up in. Updating the buyer demographics to manage it. It all became a nightmare to handle, not fun for me to program, and probably not fun for you guys to manage. That would of been a micro managing nightmare.

It is something that daffy and I will probably discuss again.

I really like all the different settings that can be played with, a big concern for me

Hi Indigo - you should come say Hi in the introductions thread too


Yep, lots of settings to play with, and there will be more in the full version, what with turbocharging and supercharging, plus all the different engine configurations besides I4s