Another year of Automation development comes to an end and we’re ending it with a big milestone release. Here comes the first open beta version of the Car Designer Revamp!
the Templar EsVedra Superluxe, by foodliker
Among other things, this means a complete overhaul of many of the game mechanics determining the car stats. The biggest changes were made to the secondary stats like Practicality, Utility, and Offroad, which received a complete rewrite and a lot more detail. The UI and user feedback has been improved as well, giving you more info on what areas for improvement could be. That is important, because with all these changes, including a complete rewrite of how the suspension tuning is handled, you need more information on what is going on in order to make better decisions.
In this video update many of the changes are discussed and explained in some detail:
https://youtu.be/QDGmag2nBRQ
Apart from this major overhaul, this update also prepares us for implementing the Lite Campaign V3 into the UE4 version. During the course of this update many changes have been made to make possible a car building AI, which indeed generates cars for every demographic throughout the years. At the moment of writing this it may not be the most competent yet and requires more fine tuning, but the basics are there and being able to just quickly regenerate the 1500-2000 cars you’re competing against in sandbox mode, is just so much better than hand-building them all over the course of a month... with a group of 10 people. The AI is an absolute necessity for any proper, dynamic campaign!
At this stage the new version is still pretty rough and not all planned features are implemented, but will serve as a solid foundation for implementing the remaining features planned for this update, do balancing, and test for bugs the coming weeks, before embarking on the big task of bringing an… epic… campaign to UE4.
the Kasai Quero S, by R-dJ
Please note that due to the massive changes to the car calculations and car data structures, unfortunately, your old cars will not be compatible with this new version! BUT you will be able to switch back to the default branch without it breaking and there will still be your old cars.
To get this latest version, you need to opt in to the open beta branch of the game. Do so by right-clicking the game in your Steam Library, Properties, Betas, select the openbeta branch - it doesn’t require any password.
We will be around only sporadically over the holidays and out of office until the 3rd of January, starting into what will be an exciting year for Automation including some surprises.
Thank you all for being with us on our Automation journey in 2017, we wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Cheers!