This one has been a little more slow and complex to develop than expected, but after a long 3 months (4 really, but one was taken up with our first holiday in 4 years!) B1414 is now live for everyone. This update brings more complete car design aspects, along with car designer scenarios and a much improved user interface. There are also quite a few more new car bodies to base your designs from.
What's next?
The next few months will be dedicated to some fairly unexciting but very important work, ready for release on Steam. We'll be making major improvements aimed at making Automation more polished, easier to learn, and all around more professional looking. More improvements to UI and the process of model designing will make it much more logical and simple to design a big range of models based on one particular car. Pop-ups/Tooltips will be added for many thing, and tutorial videos will be done/redone covering every techincal part of the game. We'll also be aiming to add a bunch of improved multiplayer modes, including Lap Time and Rally Stage Time challenge modes, with the ability to set your scores over the a few days, so you don't need to all be online together to compete.This update will be the first one to release on Steam, which is an exciting milestone, and will hopefully bring in more sales allowing us to bring further people on to work on car body art and other new content, And after this update is out of the way, it's finally time to start work on the Tycoon aspect of things!
Change Log for B1414
Car Designer Features & Changes
Added Mid Engine Cars
Suspension Easy Mode
Added Quality Sliders and dependencies for all car designer tabs
Adjustable Rim Offsets
Added Multilink Suspension
Added the first automatic gearboxes
Reliability and Environmental Resistance stats
Passenger Space and Cargo Space stats
Production Units, Costs and Service Costs stats
Offroad and Utility stats
Rebalanced Sportiness, Tameness, Comfort, Prestige and Safety calculations
9 Car Designer Scenarios
Rebalanced material properties
Many new part year dependencies
Limited Cars to a Maximum of 2 wings, and 2 lips
Added tire profile year limitation
Base safety will stop progressing 10 years after a body first unlocks
Bodies sorted by Year. Newest at the top
Revised the “Bottoming Out” calculations to be less harsh
Wings/Lips no longer punch holes in the body shell
Car Designer Fixes
Fixed the crash caused by using MPH + dragging the top speed slider to top for high-revving engines (finally!)
Fixed the Yaw Rate graph cut off when using mph as a unit for speed
Fixed Certain cars not being able to complete a lap
Fixed the proper gear delay being used on the test track
Fixed Front Longitudinal AWD engine placement issues
Fixed the sensitivity of resizing various fixtures, making it more responsive
Fixed “steamroller” bug where wheels would become comically wide
New Car Bodies
Large 60s Coupé
2 Large 70's Coupés
Large 90's Coupé
Large 60s Sedan
Large 00's Sedan
Small 80s Supercar
Small 10s Supercar
Large 10s Supercar
UI & Sound
Completely reworked UI and UI flow
Car Design Wizard for the whole car design process
All new UI sounds
Ambient sounds
Added test track soundsNew Car & Engine Manager
Temporary changed the Platform/Model game mechanic
Many more stats on the three different testing pages
Updated graphs
Updated test track UI
Manual start for car testing on testing page
Engine Designer Fixes / Rebalances
Reduced power gain when riching up fuel mixture
Octane rating in VVL systems uses the lower cam setting
Added bypass valve year limitation
Fixed the “your engine was created in a previous version” message bug
Fixed bore and stroke having two decimals too few using imperial units
Fixed a bug where loading a VVL engine set the wrong lower cam setting
Fixed an engine loading bug that caused the block config lua error
General Things
Changed “MTBF” to “Reliability” for less confusion
New scenario scoring system implemented for car designer scenarios
Fixed various aerodynamics calculations and exploits
Changed all “Man Hours” to “Production Units”
Added Console can be accessed by pressing tilde (~). Commands are help(), HideBuildings(), ShowBuildings().
Changed to saving screenshots as PNG. If you turn off FXAA, and use the HideBuildings() command, you can take pictures of engines/cars on a transparent back-drop. Useful for taking screenshots of Engines and Cars with no backdrops.
Fixed the tutorial video sound cutting off after a minute
Thumbnails are now deleted when you delete the model / engine it belongs to
Many more little fixes…
