I just started Automation as I usually do in the morning and then let it load in the background. Today, it decided to crash while literally just idling in the main menu in the background.
Also, as the game was idling my computer fans were on full blast as if the game was loading something heavy-duty. I have the game running in the background as I write this and the fans are still on jet engine mode. No clue why a game running in the background doing literally nothing but rendering a few UI buttons and an environment with a spinning camera would be using almost a gig of ram, but it’s most likely a problem on Epic’s end.
I reported the BugSplat as usual and restarted twice, but all my cars and engines had disappeared. Nothing in either screens (car or engine designer), not even any greyed out items, so hopefully it didn’t corrupt anything. I have tried multiple game restarts and verified game cache (3 files were missing and then replaced), neither have fixed it.
(Sorry for the walls of text.)
I hate to say it, buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut
You’re probably screwed. Maybe @Killrob should be the one saying this, but all you can do is add back the cars you exported .car file for.
There’s also probably a way to transfer stuff from Beam back to Automation, but I would NOT know.
You’re probably right. Guess I’ll just start from scratch again, maybe make some proper lore this time.
If you are running borderless window mode as you should then the game will continue running as normal in the background, using its normal amount of resources. We could look into making it go to a lower framerate when not in focus in order to limit how much it taxes the GPU though. Btw, make sure you use a sensible FPS limit if you don’t like your GPU going crazy.
Regarding the database corruption, there should be a backup of the sandbox database which it tries to load when the current database is broken… so if you don’t see any cars, check the size of the backup and the main database to see if they are empty or not. If one is empty and the other isn’t, try deleting the empty one.
You find them in Documents\My Games\Automation
I found the backup, but I think I’ll actually just keep it if I need it, and start anew. You know what they say - after a rain comes a rainbow. Not a gay one, though.
Curiously, the backup is smaller than the current one even though it has more cars. Is it compressed?
It is not compressed, but if you had a mad car building session then it would be smaller than the current one 
Was that the solution btw? Moving away your current database so the backup could be loaded?
I haven’t tried moving the new database yet, but no, I didn’t have a mad car building session. I have many more models and engines in the backup (or, at least, I should…) I think I’ll just roll with it.
Edit: Holy fucknuggets the game just made my computer bluescreen. System service exception. Apparently it can happen to do with graphics drivers, and that seems to hold up since I was having heavy artifacting beforehand. I’m talking a huge black rectangle on the screen taking up almost a quarter of it. I’ve only had graphics problems this serious with Automation, by the way. Something about this game makes it tank like it really shouldn’t, even when what it’s doing shouldn’t be that intensive.
Guess I need to replace my piece of shit GPU, then. I think is the fan isn’t working, so the card is overheating easily, but it’s loud as shit so I don’t get it. Maybe it’s a different fan I’m hearing, but then why isn’t that enough to cool the card? How mysterious.
Yeah, that sounds like your GPU is really fucked 
that indeed would cause black/blue screens, not much we can do about that.
that indeed would cause black/blue screens, not much we can do about that.