After a few delays, caused partially by the fact that we've moved ourselves and our company from Melbourne, Australia to lovely Wellington, New Zealand. Update B1362 is now out as a public release.
New Features
A lot more car stat calculations, the foundations for how the cars will be evaluated in the Tycoon aspect. New stats include:TamenessSportinessComfortPrestigeSafetyMore options and controls added. We are more or less at the final design of all designers.A new test track mode. Where the car is driven virtually around a track from a birds eye perspective.Custom Tracks can be made, check the forums for player made tracks and competitions.New bodies added.
Bavarian Rally Challenges
To take advantage of the new test track features, our car physics expert Der Bayer is running a set of rally challenges. Build cars to various class specs and try for the best stage times down a challenging set of stages. Details can be found in the video and forum thread below
What's Next?
Next project is further work on the car designer and will focus on some of the stats that are still missing, such as Cargo Space, Off Road Ability, Passenger Space etc. It'll also add some car design scenarios, visual feedback on ride height and some more car bodies.
I wish you the best for your game it's an amazing concept. The custom tracks sounds very interesting as well. Since I heard of your game I keep hope that one day we'll have some kind of inter-compatibility with your game and a racing sim like LFS, Assetto Corsa etc so we could create our DREAM car in Automation while driving it on real racing circuit on a dedicated sim.. just a though! I would beneficiate both genre for sure. I imagine future racing games where teams could create their own cars while having to respect league regulations and then bring those cars to virtual tracks for real competitions and I see your software as a first important step in this direction. Might be a pipedream for now but who knows what the future holds.
We'd love to do an exporter to a race sim. rFactor 2 or Assetto Corsa seem like good bets.
If it ever happens it'll be years from now though.
Your game look already great and realistic without this feature but that sure would create a new dimension in the genre if it ever happens. I'm sure these two sims you mentioned would be open to this, seems like a win win from both sides. Good luck for the rest of the project!