Automation - The Car Company Tycoon Game & BeamNG.drive - Design your car then drive it!

[jztemple2]

OK, so it might be weird to ask in one thread about two games. Automation - The Car Company Tycoon Game is a game where you run a car manufacturing corporation, designing cars and trying to do so to make money by producing cars that people in five different countries might want. If that was just the gist of the game it would be like many others, but the difference is that Automation you have an astonishing amount of control over the design of the car, from how it looks to what kind of engine it uses, the type and size of the brakes, quality of the tires, type and size of springs, so on and so forth. And you can actually design the engines, too. Inline four, V8, V12, with carburetor or fuel injection, piston size, fuel requirements, so on and so forth. Really good nerdy stuff. And Steam Workshop support.

BeamNG.drive is "A dynamic soft-body physics vehicle simulator capable of doing just about anything". What it has is a couple of dozen vehicle makes each with many different model variations, with about a dozen different locales (Italy, West Coast USA, Utah) on which to drive them. And there is a big modding community out there that has made lots of vehicles, variations of vehicles, and new locales where you can drive them.

Now for the reason for this particular post. You can design a car, from the 1940s to today, in Automation and then export and drive it in BeamNG.drive. For me this is really, really cool. I didn't have that much interest in BeamNG just to drive some car that I didn't have any input in designing it, but by building the car in Automation and then driving it in BeamNG, the decisions you make in how you design the car became apparent and, more importantly, you can feel the difference when you drive it. For instance, I designed a mid-sixties family sedan with an inline four (think Dodge Dart, which my family owned). Then I made a variant where I ran it on premium, increased the compression, added four barrel carburetors, added a manual tranny, stiffened the suspension and did a few other tweaks, and boy it really drives differently. It is really something to be able to change a car and feel how the car behaves differently. As I said, really cool.

If folks are interested in these games and the exporting from one to another, I'll post screenshots and more info.

[gbasden]

OK, that sounds really interesting. I'd love to hear more about both.

[jztemple2]

OK, more information.In Automation, here's a look at the screen you use to adjust the types of springs, dampers (shock absorbers) and sway bars. This is 1965 so not a lot of options on dampers and sway bars since I picked hydrodynamic ones. You can adjust the suspension tuning to affect the ride of the car. When you tweak the settings, the two windows center and right automatically change to show how the adjustments you are making will affect your car. Those two windows can be swapped out for other windows that display other info. In the screenshot below, I'm looking at slow speed and fast speed steering versus yaw rate. As you can see, the car is fairly neutral at low speed (the center window) while at higher speed the car will tend to understeer; in other words, if you are approaching a corner too fast and turn the steering wheel, the car will tend to keep going straight. Oversteer is of course the opposite, the nose will dig in and the rear of the car will come around and you'll be going backwards!


Here's another good window. There is a pop-up window when you mouse-over the yellow "!" on the lower right side. Right now it is partially covered by the pop-up window, which is titled "Car & Engine Suggestions". At the bottom of the pop-up there is a guide to the severity of the suggestions. Red is fix it now(!), yellow should be considered and blue is something to think about. In this car, A 1960 Gurney, I've replaced the original V8 with a V12, which is physically larger. Note how the suggestions window tells me that the tight fit of the engine will increase service cost. This is a consideration when you play the campaign game of Automation, because a car with a higher service cost is going to be less desirable unless it is compensated by some other feature. Also note the mention in the first two notes of "oversteer" and "terminally oversteers". That means that at slower speeds the nose tends to wander, while also at higher speeds while cornering the whole car might swap ends!


Next a quick look at the engine designer. This is my Cascade V12 with triple four barrel carburetors that will be designed to run on 98 octane.


Finally a look at my 1955 Portland Monza. Oh, you can use metric or imperial measurements, this was a screenshot before I switched. The Monza uses an inline six engine (the listed Newton I6 - Standard) which produces about 87 horsepower. It is a "sporty" two door, with a lower powered engine but has a fiberglass body for weight savings and a double wishbone suspension front and rear for sportiness. In the campaign game this would be a good car for those looking for something with perkiness but not a gas guzzler. By the way, the body style is set as a default, but you can use your mouse to, say, stretch the nose or trim back the trunk. The bumpers, mirrors, lights, grille and door handles, as well as the wheels, are selectable and except for the wheel, you can position them where you want.

[gbasden]

That looks pretty cool. Do you need to be a mechanical engineer to understand what you are doing, or does it do a pretty good job of walking you through it all?

[Daehawk]

Never heard of it. reminds me of a car game I liked in the 90s called Detroit.

[jztemple2]

That looks pretty cool. Do you need to be a mechanical engineer to understand what you are doing, or does it do a pretty good job of walking you through it all?

There are a series of tutorials. The one below walks you through building your first car. It's a couple of years old so some of the screens look different, but the concepts haven't changed.

[Isgrimnur]

[coopasonic]

This piques my interest but I wish I wouldn't have seen it a week ago when I was more bored/wanting for something to play. Always too much or too little, never just enough.

[jztemple2]

And not forgetting BeamNG, here's a car from the pre-1940s (obviously), using a body mod for Automation and fitted with an inline three cylinder engine. I'm driving it on the Italy map in BeamNG.

[Kasey Chang]

Heard of both games, didn't know they can link up like this. Will add to wishlist.

[jztemple2]

Heard of both games, didn't know they can link up like this. Will add to wishlist.

Yeah, Automation (what a bad name, really) goes on sale quite often, BeamNG not quite as much.

[jztemple2]

I'm going to start posting some screenshots from a recent build I made in Automation and then drove in BeamNG.

First I start Automation and got to the main menu:


I'll select to start a new car design, which sends me to a page with different car bodies to pick from. The one I selected is from a mod, it's a limousine. The 174.4 inches refers to the wheelbase.


And here is the selected car with the chassis specifics. We'll start from the top.

• The car is a 1970 Bling Sparkle V8. The "1970 Bling" is the model, the "Sparkle V8" is the specific variant. The names are completely up to the player. I like to use the year as part of the model name, so it sorts properly in BeamNG. And in the variant name I like to add the engine configuration ("V8") so as to identify between variants. I might, for instance, want to make a different variant for hilly places with a V10 or V12 so I'd give it a different variant name.
• The silver is just the default color at this point. You'll be able to paint the car later on.
• Next we have the chassis construction details, from Panel Material to Rear Suspension. It's 1970 so are choices are somewhat limited. And I'm doing a bit of role playing, my car company is figuring to sell this 1970 Bling model to limo service operators, so they want pretty basic chassis construction. Money spent on, for instance, Double Wishbone suspension parts isn't important to them, they are going to be driving a pretty stately car.

Next post I'll talk about designing the engine, if I get some responses to this post . After that it is some engine tuning, adding fixtures to the car (lights, bumpers, mirrors, etc), painting, transmission, tires, suspension, interior features... and then we start tweaking for more optimal results and of course some compromising on performance versus cost. Then for some road testing in BeamNG, then back to Automation to make some changes as needed, then back to BeamNG for a ride around San Francisco!

[Rumpy]

Looks like a really cool game. Can you put a newer engine into an old car and vice versa? I've been watching Car Masters: Rust to Riches on Netflix, and one of the things they tend to do is sometimes either put a newer engine into an old body, or modernize an exterior while keeping everything else under the hood original.

[Daehawk]

Gotta have a landau roof dont it?

[jztemple2]

Gotta have a landau roof dont it?

Very seventies

Looks like a really cool game. Can you put a newer engine into an old car and vice versa? I've been watching Car Masters: Rust to Riches on Netflix, and one of the things they tend to do is sometimes either put a newer engine into an old body, or modernize an exterior while keeping everything else under the hood original.

Yes, car and engine design are separate. However, as I'll post later, the engine you design has physical dimensions and so the car in which you wish to put it must have a big enough engine bay to accept it.

[jztemple2]

Would folks prefer I use the regular image tag, rather than the bigimg one? I'm using the bigimg one just to avoid bogging down folks' browsers with a bunch of screenshots, but if folks don't care, it is easier if the images load on the same page as the description, rather than swapping back and forth between the forum post page and the page where you have expanded the image.

OK, so it's time to add an engine to the limo design. I could use an engine my company has already designed, but what fun is that? So I'll design a new one. At the top right of the screenshot is the name I assigned the engine, model is Fountain V8, variant is Standard. I can later make a variant that uses the same cylinder layout and displacement (same "bottom end") but with new heads, gear trains, that sort of thing. The smaller pop-up box on the center-right, with "Size" in the top left corner, is the engine size table. On the table in the first couple of columns you can see that using this engine in the limo we can have either rear wheel drive or all wheel drive. The next three columns are length, width and height. There are no issues with the length or width of the engine in the engine bay of the limo, and if we go with RWD there is no issue with height either, but for an AWD configuration (where the drive shaft for the front wheels would have to share space in the engine compartment with the engine) the height would be at 87% of capacity, which is getting to be of concern, but can be dealt with. That last column, labeled "Fill" is the amount of the engine bay taken up by the engine. At 50% there is still plenty of room for a mechanic to work on it.


In the next image I've selected the specifics of the engine. It's a 90 degree V8, cast iron block (cheaper but dependable) with a default displacement of 243.7 cubic inches using a square bore and stroke. Valve actuation is good old push rod technology, with cast iron heads. Notice how the "Fill" has come down from 50% to 43% of the engine bay used. Push rods mean shorter heads means a bit more room for the mechanic.

[jztemple2]

Let's continue designing that engine. We've gone to the next page of the engine designer. See the little scroll across the page at the bottom? That shows which step you are at. Nothing exciting here, we're going with cast iron crank, conrods and pistons. Again, money savings.


This step is fast. It shows cylinder compression and the cam profile. We'll leave the sliders where they are right now. It would also show the variable valve lift profile and the type of variable valve timing we were using, if this wasn't 1970 and those things hadn't been invented yet


Next step is really simple. This is all about the turbocharger and since we aren't using one, it is all blank


Now the fuel system details. We need a bit of pep from this V8, but fuel injection is a bit costly, so we'll stick with good old carburetors, two 2 barrel ones. Standard intake and it will run of regular leaded gas, 92 octane. Ah the 70s, I remember the (awful) smell of tetraethyllead . The fuel mixture is 14.2 to one, air to fuel, normal. Ignition timing and RPM are left at default, we'll adjust those later.

[jztemple2]

One last bit of parts to add, before we start tweaking the engine settings. We need exhausts for the engine, so a single short cast set of headers on each side of the engine that join together to a single tail pipe after going through a single baffled muffler. No catalytic converter, it will be five years before they will be seen regularly on US cars. By the way, the above image was one I just took now, after doing all the other steps to the engine, because I missed taking one here during the original sequence. So ignore the fact that the valve covers have been painted

[Rumpy]

That's pretty sweet. Part of me is interested to see just how unconventional I could get things if I were to get this

[jztemple2]

Now it's time to start adjusting the engine settings to get the max performance and efficiency. When we go to the next step, looking at the graph we see that the engine is putting out only 15 horsepower(!) and the reason is over on the right in the subscreen labeled "Stress". The engine has terminal knocking and valve float. Mousing over the red exclamation mark on the right side, we see two items with a red border marking on the left. The game suggests how to fix the issues; lower the compression, change the ignition timing and reduce the RPM limit.


After we adjust those three sliders, we see that we are now all green in the eight stress boxes.


Next we click either of the two arrows on each side of the word "Stress" to select the "Flow" screen. No red boxes, but "Exhausts" and "Headers" boxes are less than bright green. More tweaking needed.


Clicking the question marks on the bottom right of the screen gives some hints on how to fix the problems. In this case increasing the exhaust diameter from 2.00 to 2.75 inches fixes both issues.

[jztemple2]

Now for the final touches. We paint the engine.


And now we can put the engine on the dyno and test it. We can even run up the throttle manually.


So we the engine ready, it's time to go back to work on the chassis.

[jztemple2]

Let's paint it red. Black is so boring a color for a limo!


Now it is time to add the fixtures, like headlights. You add other external features like lights, door handles, bumpers, etc.


It's possible to alter the actually outlines of the body, by using the mouse to for instance tug forward the end of the trunk or pull the nose lower. I usually don't bother with that since I'm not much for tweaking the outlines of the car. But some folks are real artists and make really pretty looking cars, like this.

[jztemple2]

We are in the home stretch (ha!) believe it or not. Now to work on the drive train. Drive type, transmission and differential. Ignore that top speed value, we'll tweak it later.


And next it is the tires. It's 1970 and radials are the way to go! Hard long life tires to keep costs down, as well as steel rims for the same reason. The tire parameters are left at default for now.


Brakes! Gotta have brakes. Drums are cheap.


Interior details like seating and the entertainment package (premium AM radio!) are really for the campaign game since they are price and desirability items, but I'll show them here.


Finally, and oddly not the least important, we decide on power steering and safety standards. Again, that latter item is for the campaign game.

[jztemple2]

Didn't we forget something? Yep, the suspension. Now the game starts showing us performance graphs and we can see how the car will drive.

We make some decisions on the suspension. Standard springs, twin tube dampers (shock absorbers to you Yanks) and with a preset of comfort clicked the game adjusts the camber, springs, dampers and sway bars to comfort settings. That screen on the right, "Suspension testing", down at the bottom shows with those red and blue horizontal bars that the springs and dampers good enough for comfort (easy chair ) but not good enough for sport (steering wheel). Fine, not intending to autocross with the limo!


We change that righthand display "Steering (Fast)". Now we are at a critical point. That middle display, "Steering (Slow)" tells me that at slow speeds the nose of the car till tend to yaw (swing left and right). The "Steering (Fast)" looks good, right the middle ground. But see that yellow button with the white exclamation point inside the white circle, over on the lower right? That tells me we have issues. Mouse over that button to find out what they are.


Uh oh. Four issues to consider, three to note. Need to tweak the brake settings, the gearing and address that oversteer.

[jztemple2]

Playing with the brake settings and the gearing sliders, I've gone down to only two yellow, things to consider issues.


But the heck with all this tweaking, let's throw caution to the winds and make a driveable version of the "1970 Bling Sparkle V8" . Let's export the car to BeamNG and give it a drive!

[jztemple2]

I've fired up BeamNG.drive and went to the car selection screen. There's my 1970 Bling Sparkle V8.


I've selected the map that contains the three dimension version of the 2D test track that is in Automation. I'll drive it around and see how it feels.

[jztemple2]

Uh oh. It drove like a drunken sailor. Weaved all over. Guess they were right about that low speed understeer . So it's back into Automation to tweak the car.

Let's ask the game for some help. Clicking on that question mark on the "Steering (Slow)" window gives me a lot of useful info.


We make some changes. Eventually we figure out that the best fix is to increase the rear tire width to 315mm from the default 255mm. We leave the fronts the same. Now the suggestions window has dropped the Consider item for oversteer. The front brake is still considered undersized but I'll drive carefully . The Note (blue) item about the rear tire width can't be helped, in the campaign game I'd just have to deal with the increased cost and inconvenience of having different front and rear tire sizes.

[jztemple2]

So it's back into Automation. A quick run on the test track shows the oversteer is gone, so now it's on to the West Coast USA map and the San Francisco like city.


I drive around a while. The limo drives decently.


Driving uphill I find the car could use a bit lower first gear for more grunt going up, but it's not too bad.


And now for the Bullitt test, driving down hill at 75 mph! Will the limo take it?


Sadly, no . On the last big jump the front left suspension collapses. I use the new BeamNG feature where I can step out of my car to walk around and assess the damage. Well, probably not unexpected. It is a limo after all.


And so that's it, from the start of a design to test driving to actual around the city driving. Any questions?

[gbasden]

That's very cool! You mentioned the campaign game - does it let you actually run a car company over the decades? How does the campaign play?

[jztemple2]

That's very cool! You mentioned the campaign game - does it let you actually run a car company over the decades? How does the campaign play?

Yes, you run a car company over the decades, but I haven't played it yet. It is still in development and while the car and engine design features are pretty complete they are still tweaking the campaign stuff.

[WYBaugh]

jztemple2, thank you for the awesome review and AAR. You've got me fired up to try this but I'm worried since I'm not a real car guy. Will try and be patient for a sale then give it a shot.