Again, I can’t speak to the tastes of the rest of the judges who participated in the pre-judging; I gave you the best advice that I could, and I’m sorry that didn’t work out for you in this case.
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How the heck did car number 2 even fit into the category to begin with? It’s absolutely great, don’t get me wrong, but that’s a car you expect on the set of Blade Runner, not on a racetrack. Slap a livery on it, it still looks like a prop car.
I don’t mean to belittle the massive work you guys are doing for the comp, don’t get me wrong, but there is no way that car passes as a serious racecar imho.
I’ll be blunt, I have little intention of spending an hour listening something I already heard enough of in the summary. Summary is afterall, the main point of the thought and if you felt it was worth mentioning there, don’t see any reason why there will be backtracking in a larger explanation. If the next challenge fixes things, that’s great, but come on, we’ve both been around long enough to at least filter out what should be binned before bringing it to the finals.
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Well, this is absolutely unreal. Thank you so much, honestly not sure myself if my car should’ve won though. Although, should I have received an e-mail yet or does that come after all categories have been judged?
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Well, that’s your loss then; there’s a lot of good information in there.
After the competition has wrapped up.
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a bit late to the discussion, but could I inquire as to how my entry scored -9 in preliminaries for category C?
Okay, I feel I like these competitions less and less, cars getting on the finals when they don’t even fit the category, or having just 1-2 fixtures on the body. I don’t really understand why “losers” have to ask individually for an answer as to why their cars didn’t make it, and what could they improve on. On top of it is that for days after the submission deadline we heard nothing of the whole thing, and you only gave updates when people ask if it was shot down or not. Sorry guys, as exciting it was to create the cars, it is that much of a dissapointment the overall execution is.
You already said during FOTU that that must have been delayed as the team focused more on improving the game rather than judging the entrants as issues cropped up, but maybe just do one thing at once. Have all the ideas implemented and the bugs sorted out, doing the “real” work, and when everything is stabilized then have a “relax” with these events.
I hope this comment comes through as constructive rather than being rude or a smartass, as I love doing these challenges, and I’d like to continue loving it. At least that is my point of view.
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To address your points:
A challenge on this scale is an unimaginable amount of work.
I’ve been working for Camshaft since the end of March of this year, and quite literally the day after I was hired I was working on designing this challenge. From the end of September I’ve basically spent all of my waking hours working on this project. @Killrob has also devoted a huge amount of his time - which is far more valuable than mine is, in terms of game development - as well as many others in the company.
Did I mention I even had to build an app from scratch to even make the pre-judging feasible in the first place?
Even if we did only one category instead of twelve, there is no feasible way to have a fully-judged competition.
Each roundtable discussion video was filmed in a window of approximately two and a half hours, and each judge devoted about an hour or two of their time per category to do the judging of the finalists - of which there were between 7 and 12 in each category, with the average being 10. Now multiply that out by a factor of seven, for the larger categories with 70+ entries, and now you’re looking at 7 to 14 hours per judge to score the entries individually, and another 20 hours of recording time for the roundtable panel.
On top of that, our video editor puts in approximately 8 hours of work per hour of video posted, so add that into the mix, as well as the countless hours of time rendering animatics and images, image editing and the like. Also, Rob and I and our video editor have spent countless hours in calls and DMs auditing videos to make sure they’re up to the standard we want them to be.
A fully judged challenge would mean no celebrity judges.
I should also mention that without the format we designed for this challenge, there was ZERO POSSIBLITY of any celebrity judges participating in a fully-judged competition. The people we wanted to bring in are extremely busy professionals in the automotive industry and elsewhere, and they even found the two and a half hour time commitment for judging and recording to be difficult to integrate into their schedules.
At the same time, Automation development activities must continue with minimal delay.
We are a very small team working on Automation, with only 9 staff working full-time developing the game, and myself handling the marketing and PR side of things. Pulling staff from their development roles is not an option, and with the way that the game is being made, there are not really any slow times of the length we would need to pull large numbers of staff from their core duties into this.
That said, mistakes were made, and on this scale it’s unavoidable.
I will be the first to admit that there have been a lot of things that have not gone as I had hoped. Beyond the fact that many of the cars I wanted to see in the finals never made it, there were flaws in the process. I’m keenly aware of that, and have been since FOTU wrapped up. The next design challenge we run - if we run one - will be similar, but better-executed in terms of pre-judging, and will have new tools to prevent a lot of the things that happened here. Stuff like:
- An improved pre-judging app that will allow multiple pictures of an entry to be uploaded,
- A re-think of the pre-judging process, with the ability to keep entries out that are very obviously out of brief or undeserving of a finals spot;
- Hopefully in the next little while, a complete set of good-quality photo presets will be baked into the game, so people aren’t left relying on their rather lacking photography skills; they can just plug their car in to the preset and have a good-quality result with minimal effort.
Even with all of that, mistakes are inevitable; with over 500 entries submitted, this is pretty comfortably the largest Automation community competition ever hosted, by anyone at any time. All I can ask is your forgiveness and understanding collectively that sometimes these things happen.
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I’m just grateful we had a design competition. And I truly hope there will be another in few years time.
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literally the biggest gripe people are having is that road cars are getting in a racing car segment whilst actual racing cars are getting binned (no offense to the creators of said road cars, they look really well made)
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No worries on my end - regardless of results, feedback or not, I had a total blast uping my game (from lightly doing the exterior untill this contest to now fully detailing an interior, planning gas tank placement (with filler), and decking out never ever to be seen trunks and engine bays, etc, etc (yep, this was all a first time to me (well, interior was my 2nd time trying)). I have never gone as far down the rabbit hole of detailing a virtual car out as far as I did (and oh boy did I go too far, though those results were not submitted - I just continue to add to that car). And I continue to go further and further down that rabbit hole - great, a new addiction - ROFL
Cheers!
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I’m not blaming you, I’m sorry if it sounded like this, I try my best to be understandable in english but it’s not my 1st language, I could sound unpleasant so I say it again: I think you did a great job organizing this event, regardless of the result.
I was just questioning the judging on this category (and not the judges), I wasn’t criticizing you in particular.
Again sorry if it sounded harsh
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I think a lot of misunderstanding came from the fact that the category had “Prototypes” mentioned in it’s name. Probably people thought that prototypes meant concept cars and not Le Mans prototypes or similar sort of race cars. I mean one of the finalists was clearly referencing Mazda RX500 concept car in their entry. Even I considered making some sort of concept car (while understanding that it will be either a stretch of rules or pretty much an exploit as description clearly explained that we’re supposed to make a purposely built race car) but ultimately decided against it.
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If possible MrChips, I’m curious to know why the judges chosed this one of my 2 entries to be in the finals (I really though you would prefer the other one haha) in category F 
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Apologies for the delay!
Well…it’s not the greatest photograph I’m sorry to say, it doesn’t really show the car off that well. My advice is that you can’t go wrong with a front quarter view, instead of going for the straight front view.
Also, the asymmetry is a bit odd to say the least…not sure if it would be allowed anywhere in the world in terms of legality of the headlights.
Well, you almost made it!
I think the biggest issue here is that your exposure is a bit blown-out on the car in this photo; you lost a bit of the detail that was present in the car. Otherwise it would have also been a finalist almost assuredly!
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Oh well - next time. 
Thanks again!
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Haha, just finished watching the expanded round table discussion. Did the end credits feature the future concept cars or something instead of the JDM entries?
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You took all those photos of the cars right? Why didn’t y’all use those to judge the cars?
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just wondering, were my chances of getting into the cat F finals killed just because i forgot to put a driver in the car, or is there a much bigger reason why
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