BRC 1955 - The Golden Age [Qualifying R5]

[GenJeFT]

Processing now. This video will be up earlier then the last couple (I am not uploading it at 1AM my time for once).

[07CobaltGirl]

To comment on your question about fps, my laptop (i5-2450m, 2.6GHz, HD3000 graphics) does around 35fps on high settings. This new desktop I built (i7-4790, 3.6GHz, GTX960) only does 45fps. In The Sims 4, the laptop does 80fps in medium settings while the desktop does 140fps on high settings.

[GenJeFT]

The video is uploading as I post this. It will be up in around 2 hours.

I would like to once again thank Killrob for joining us today.

Here is the link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0U3Or4 ... e=youtu.be

As for frame rate. It seems like the game is limited to at best 45FPS right now. But that will be irrelevant because they are switching over to the Unreal engine and that will provide a significant performance boost. I dont have The Sims 4 to do a comparison on that.

[07CobaltGirl]

Well, I mostly play strategy/simulator games, so most of my games aren't very demanding on video cards. TS4 is all I've got! I could load up NFS:Shift? Pretty old game, so probably still not very demanding. Oh, and on the desktop, FPS goes as high as 55, but when anything is moving on screen, it drops to 45.

[Packbat]

Thanks again to GenJeFT for setting this up - my throat may be sore, but this was a fun exercise to do! Hopefully between the four of us - myself, GenJeFT, Jester, and Killrob - we managed to share some information about building engines and cars in Automation people didn't know before.

[Absurdist]

Thanks from me too! It was really interesting to watch

[TheBobWiley]

Maybe ColbaltGirl can help me out here. I have been trying to figure out period correct tires for the 50's and up for my car company, but stuff online seems to say 205mm tire width. This seems awfully high, but maybe I am wrong? If anyone knows some standard tire/wheel/rim sizes for each decade or so after 1955 that would be awesome!

[07CobaltGirl]

viewtopic.php?f=14&t=6341&p=72489&hilit=Tire+sizes#p72489

That is about the best I can do for tire sizes. I'm sure the European world had different methods, but I don't know what they are. The chart can help you determine what was standard, and some comparable (but not exact) measurements.

This will give you some ideas on tire sizes for specific makes/models, but I'm not sure how useful it might actually be for you as it looks like it only goes back to the early 80s, which means they're most likely all P-Metric sizes.

EDIT: Helps when you include the link?

[Lordred]

Maybe ColbaltGirl can help me out here. I have been trying to figure out period correct tires for the 50's and up for my car company, but stuff online seems to say 205mm tire width. This seems awfully high, but maybe I am wrong? If anyone knows some standard tire/wheel/rim sizes for each decade or so after 1955 that would be awesome!

Using modern tire sizes.

195/80-90/15
195/80-90/14
185/80-90/14
175/70-80/13
165/70-90/13


Stuff like that.

[07CobaltGirl]

Here is a website which goes back further. They have information on the 1955 Bel Air, so it would be safe to assume they have a lot more. I only glanced at a bit here and there before posting it. 670-15 was the tire size which came factory on the Bel Air. It is referenced in the first column of the image in the link I posted above and in another thread on here. Makes the image seem rather inaccurate, however. It lists the physical dimensions of the 670-15 as 170/90-15 while the image suggests it would be 205/75-15 (which does seem a bit wide for the era). Hopefully this website will be useful in your searches.

EDIT: This site also seems to have a lot of information: Tire Size Conversion

[TheBobWiley]

Thanks for the links everyone! The automobile catalog I actually found last night while trying to find some information on 1957 engines. Up until now I was using SOHC and DOHC engines in my car company for some reason, even though I have only released cars from 1945 to 1952 so far. I was going for a realistic car company so I was looking around for specs on 1957 engines and found that site, it is INCREDIBLY useful. Replicated the 1957 "blue flame" I6 from Chevy and tweaked settings for more power and better efficiency for my upcoming 1957 lineup. I must have missed where the tire information was when I was poking around the Bel Air's last night.

Another question I have, as I am not sure where to post it, how do people generally go about determining a good price for their cars in their car companies? After some thinking I have decided to use the following system for my company, but I am not sure if there is another way that most people use or something.

I will being assuming that all prices shown in Automation are shown in 2010 money (when the game was made). Therefore, prices will need to be adjusted for whichever time period I am building in. For example, my if my new 1957 car has a total cost of $8,500 I will first multiple the total cost by the number of production units, in the form of a percentage. (110.83 production units = 1.1083%) So my first calculation will give me a true total car cost of $9,420.55 in 2010 money. Then I adjust for inflation and get a car that would cost $1,204 in 1957 money. The average price of a car in 1957 was $2,100, so I can sell mine for around that average price and still have a large amount of profit. It seems like I could abuse sliders fairly easily and still have a decent profit margin though so I will try to limit myself to no less than an 80% profit margin.

Thoughts, help, advice?

[Packbat]

Total cost includes the cost of the production units i.e. labor - I think they're priced at about $35 per. What a lot of people do is assume something between double the per-car production cost and several times the production cost, depending on how high-tech the car is and how high-volume a model it is.

[TheBobWiley]

Oh ok, the production units have a set value and is included in the total cost.... hmmm makes my 1957 car pretty cheap with a decent amount of sliders in use, guess I'll limit myself to a minimum 100% profit on each car.

[Tycondero]

Yes, sale prices are though to determine. As long as we do not have the tycoon part of the game going it is difficult to determine the sale price as we do not know how heavy production units weigh and how much tech and marketing would cost. A supercar that takes roughly 300-400 production units and 50,000 dollars to build in game, might go for anything between 100,000-400,000 dollars IMO.

Indeed, like packbat said, this is dependent on the tech and volume of the car. Limited Editions will likely also go for much more, providing it suits the market demand. High volume mass production cars might even go for much less and 100% profit margin. Maybe a 25%-50% profit margin is enough for those to be viable for a company. Also when using the same engines multiple times in different models one might also be able to offer a good car more cheaply to the market. In the end for pricing products all that matters is what you think you can ask for such a car and what the competition offers and how much you are willing to sell. You might want to offer a car relatively cheap, but if you do not have the infrastructure to meet the demand you might hurt yourself more than necessary. For example, AMC had this issue in real life, the Pacer was hyped in the beginning. This caused huge orders to stack-up and stressed the modest production capabilities of AMC, but by the time they expanded to meet the demand the hype was over and the project resulted in a huge failure and ultimately directly initiated the downfall of the already weak company.

[TrackpadUser]

Automation prices are in "money units"

I imagine the price is somewhat related to real life at some point in history, but I don't exactly know when.

As for the selling price compared to the production costs, one thing not to forget is that engineering costs and tooling costs can be very expensive.

And since those are split between the cars that you make, they will be a larger percentage of your costs in the case of low volume cars.