Body Configuration

General Chat Suggestions
1

There’s a lot of model spawn due the rigid body selection, which puts every car into buckets so specialized, you need 4 times the same style from 2.3 to 3.0 meters wheelbases to cover all cases

As it stands now we need pages of the same basic shell, scrolling in both directions:

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My proposal would be to let this be a style picker. The bodies design can still influence base drag, but it’d be mostly a stile selection:

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Chassis looses the suspensions, and makes space for a platform configuration:

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you pick wheelbase and track size, and the game calculates internal volume available. These options are limited by previous chassis choices. A further slider allows the player to reduce cabin space in favor of a larger engine bay or vice versa.

The body tab changes significantly to allow the same options you would get from the model pickup, but all grouped and available in a flexible way:

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Seat rows would come mostly for boxes: one/two boxes that aren’t open bed or close cargo gets 3, the rest get 2. of course if you design something of the size of a S2000 and actually cram 2 rows of seat in there you’d get an appropriate low comfort penalty.

Pros:

  • More flexibility in designing the car, of course.
  • Game logic controls options, not arbitrary body availability.
  • Same with seat rows, they come from Style and Configuration.
  • We finally get to change suspensions per variants
  • More freedom: two box coupes for proper sportbacks, closed cargo three boxes for UTEs etc.

Cons:

  • lots of effort put on creating morph points on body designers
  • much more ways players can shoot themselves in the foot raising the barrier to entry
  • all the maths behind it
  • what to do with less sensible choices (albeit you can probably find real world example of any combinations)
  • there’s a hole in the ux I didn’t knew how to fill.
3 Likes
2

That’s some great ideas, and would probably reduce new model lag too. But probably there’s a mountain of match and programming we’ll have to see if the devs can climb.

3

The custom wheelbase was discussed a few times years ago and then there was no way for it to happen due to some big problems and complexity of the changes needed. And I can see even less a modular body configuration working, like that set of choices. Each config needs a new body model, combining several into one body would probably result in very janky shapes and weird fixture behaviour.

3 Likes
4

Unfortunately this is not technically possible or feasible, otherwise we would be doing that already as it is so much more intuitive and important design parameters, too. It is the technical art side that is giving you a massive middle finger proposing this, as it is easy in terms of UI, game mechanics and even programming. Making bodies not freak out with this is extremely unlikely, and throwing the entire body catalogue out of the window at this point would be… … suboptimal too! :smiley:

From a game mechanics side of things I would be all for this btw., just isn’t possible.

4 Likes
5

Speaking of UI for a moment. Is it possible to add a “Body Group” tag that allows you to scroll through the body groups, and then, either through dropdown submenu or menu screen, pick from the variants in wheelbase and style. This would make it much easier to navigate the menu and make larger numbers of bodies more feasible from a usability standpoint, as it would group together cars with the same base model, fr instance the many variants of the cars shown above.

6

Yes, we have something like that planned :slight_smile: condensing down the list a bit by not showing all wheelbase options.

3 Likes