Introducing (with a barebones post because heck CSS)…
THE AUTOMATION COLLABORATIVE DESIGN CHALLENGE
Ah, collaboration. Creator of the most wonderful designs and the most heated fights. In the real world, most cars are the work of a skilled team of designers - not a single person working on everything. To capture a little bit of that chaos, this challenge will revolve around collaboration.
Basic rules:
All entries must come from teams of 3-4 people.
Each person should be able to point to some impact they had on the entry.
So long as each person has some work done, work can be divided in any way.
Once you have a team assembled, please send me a message on discourse with the members of your team. You will be assigned a team number, for administrative purposes.
When submitting, please title your engine family and your model in the format ACDC - Team .
Judging will occur in two phases. First, cars will be put through a preliminary binning round. Any car which breaks the rules will be excluded. Second, cars will be put up to a community vote on engineering, overall aesthetics and “best car”. The winner will be chosen by the community vote.
Feel free to discuss teams here, in the automation discord… Anywhere goes.
CHRISTMAS UPDATE: V16 engines are BANNED, to maintain a level playing field.
CURRENT DEADLINES
The deadline for team submissions is currently set to midnight UTC, December the 31st. The deadline for car submissions is currently set to the midnight UTC, January the 24th. Voting will begin shortly after the deadline, or will begin once all teams have submitted their cars. It will remain open until the January the 24th.
Further details
With the housekeeping out of the way, let’s move on to the specifics. This challenge will focus on Modern Luxury Sedans. Specifically:
Cars should have a trim and variant year of 2020.
Catalytic converters and at least one muffler are required.
Cars should have a maximum price of 100 thousand automation dollars.
The maximum allowable engineering time for the trim and variant is 200.
Cars must have at least 4 seats and 4 doors.
Race parts are not allowed, and carbon fiber is mildly discouraged.
An advert of some form is strongly advised.
As this challenge will be left to a community vote, it is difficult to give full, definitive priorities. However, some recommendations:
Luxury sedans should look stately and impressive, from any distance and any angle.
They should be powered by a smooth, predictable engine.
The car should be easy to drive, with a comfortable ride and an impressive interior.
So what exactly is stopping us from having 5, 6 or potentially more people and just saying we only had 4 people make the car? This rule is kind of pointless imo and isn’t really needed considering people can cheese it anyhow
You could have:
1)Someone do the engine
2)Someone design the car itself
3)And someone tune the suspension, gearing and aero etc.
So of course there’ll be a need for people to tune the car since most like the designing aspect but i guess it’s down to sharing work, if everyone wants to design then you could share the car into bits, like the front, sides and the rear.
As far as the number goes… 5+ seems like a really, really inefficient way to do it, right beyond the level of useful collaboration - and it’s hard to get stuff for each of the people to do… Teams of 2, however, had people on discord worried that it’d come down to established pairs from CSR. The point is to get people outside of their comfort zones, after all. In terms of running out of things to do with 3, though, it’s certainly possible to have 1 on engine, 1 on style and 1 on chassis, or full collaboration, or a host of other stuff.
Around having teams get additional help and lie about it… Sure, nothing stops that - but nothing stops a lot of potential dishonesty. You could easily steal someone else’s publicly-shared car, tweak it just a touch and submit it to another challenge. You could easily create 2 alts to “team up with”. I don’t have a way to prevent any of this - the challenges work on an honour system, and assume good faith. Having said that, I doubt that people will cheat.
I do think the maximum limit should be removed, but the minimum limit of 3 is a good idea. Plus I’m pretty sure we have good detectives here that can detect alts, etc…
To me, the more the merrier
In my opinion, this would be the best way to split responsibilities - a single build could be handled by one expert each in the three categories. As for my skill set, I am weakest in exterior design but better at the other two.
Please note: I’ll be using these results to inform my changes, and might not go with the most popular result. If 40% want 2012, 35% want 2018 and 25% want 2020, I’m more likely to go with 2018.
I don’t think the year/budget need tweaking. I am curious to see how the judging works though. It’s a vote, so will voters be instructed to consider the best combination of stats, or mainly go off the ad, or what? It’s worth considering since most people probably don’t care the difference between 80 and 85 comfort, or whatever, so in that case we might focus mostly on getting the vehicle looking nice and with some impressive specs to point out.
The judging is planned have three votes at the moment, although I’m open to suggestions. The plan is for the first vote to focus on aesthetics, the second to focus on engineering and the third to focus on overall results. The results from these will be combined in some manner to give final rankings.
I’m not convinced changing the budget would be a need change. It’s more of a challenge to make an impressive car with 80k than 100k, there’s compromises to be made. Whereas with 100k, all cars entering the contest would be equipped with virtually the same stuff, I believe.
Edit: with the latest issues that LCV 4.1.5 has brought, I suggest that the deadline should be moved, to let the teams work on their cars in the next update (if it fixes the known bugs).
The “deadline” of the 8th (which has passed but eh) was largely a rules one for me. I won’t be making stuff due until OB is relatively nice, and (hopefully) not until I have a proper GPU. Having said that, on the topic of deadlines - I want to note that we haven’t had an official deadline for team submissions. If anyone else wants to form up a team, they’re more than welcome.
My team and I had it mixed up and thought the deadline was the 8, so we worked super fast to come up with something decent, but I fear other teams that are either in the making or already working together might not have something ready. You should do a poll to decide on a deadline. I’d vouch for something around mid january
