Body design optional?

[Antaguana]

Is it difficult to add some impact from the wheels?
Ie larger wheels/low profile tyres = more style and young person interest, better handling (less roll)
High profile tyres = more comfort (more shock absorption) but worse handling (increased roll)
Outer diameter changes gears (ie increase in Dia => larger top speed less torque )
Thicker tyre = more drag but also more grip

etc.

Are there plans to further develop the vehicle designer or are you leaving that to the team at Automation

You have no doubt been asked this a hundred times and are sick of saying no, buuut given Automation have a good vehicle designer and you have good business models; have you thought of teaming up? It would give us the best of both worlds. (ok I understand that having both aspects is not necessarily a good thing as some people want to focus on one aspect or the other, that's why you add in the ability to hire a design team and let the AI do it for you... yeah i know it's not that simple)

[Eric.B]

Is it difficult to add some impact from the wheels?

There is a medium possibility of this happening after we implement pre-made vehicles. There is a segment of the player base who has no interested in the car designing side of things. So I would like to make designing optional before I start penalizing designs.

Are there plans to further develop the vehicle designer or are you leaving that to the team at Automation

Outside of a couple missing pieces of artwork and slightly better paints, the car designer is considered finished. Without a major cash injection, we do not have the funds to redo or improve the artwork. As for Automation, remember, that they've had a free artist working full time for nearly 6 years on their car designer. That's roughly worth $250,000-$500,000. And I believe they now employ another artist full time for the last year, which is another $25,000-$100,000... Compared to our art budget which was around $10,000-$20,000 for the entire game. Big difference.

You have no doubt been asked this a hundred times and are sick of saying no, buuut given Automation have a good vehicle designer and you have good business models; have you thought of teaming up?

I actually made this offer to them when I came across their project around 4-5 years ago. But it was shot down in a pretty braggadocious manner by their programmer, specially after I mentioned that they should port their custom engine rendering stuff to my engine which uses Ogre3D. Which is kind of funny now that they're moving to Unreal which is a lot more work than just following Ogre's upgrade path to Ogre2.1...

Anyhoo the artist is a cool guy, and both of the games/teams have had a friendly, do not step on each other toes, approach. Which is nice. We share many of the same users, people who complain about their lack of tycoon are pointed to us, people who complain about our car designer, crappy UI, or complex game design are pointed to Automation. Works out well, even if they end up the bigger, more successful game.