Just looked at the tips and can confirm what Kubby is saying it really is a mixed bag you need to improve on. Here some comments:
Use a higher cam profile for high revving engines, and a low cam profile for low revving engines. (On average the case, but not implied)
Heavier engine parts will run less stable at higher rpm. (What does stable even mean? Less smooth? Less reliably? The statement doesn’t make much sense.)
Trying to make a really economical engine? Try using Inline-4 engines. (Engine economy has nothing to do with engine type.)
Want decent power from a small engine? Use turbos or superchargers. (True, but that’s only one way of doing that.)
Always try to keep your RON just under your fuel octane level for best performance. (True.)
Higher rpm limits will drastically reduce your engines’ reliability. (Not “drastically” if your engine is capable of higher RPM.)
The wider the lines on the turbo graph, the better it will perform. (I don’t even know what that is supposed to mean?)
Try adding more boost to your turbo for some added power, but remember: more boost (thus air) requires more fuel! (Yes, but that’s not as relevant as needing more octane.)
Try using VVL for more economy on a powerful engine. (True.)
Crossplane V8’s have more torque, but Flatplanes are smoother (Double wrong. Flatplanes have slightly higher exhaust efficiency, thus more torque. Crossplane engines are smoother.)
Want a smooth engine? Try an Inline-6. (True. Also applies to V12, B4 and B6 engines.)
Thinner tyres are more economical, but also give less traction. (That’s a relatively small effect in the realm of reasonable tires, the grip statement is obvious. Pointing out costs and service costs would be more useful.)
Using a lower cam profile can significantly increace economy. (True.)
@vmo: The downloads arent yet there, yes. We are still working on that. Please let this be clear to everyone that the site is still under construction and quite some stuff still need to be developed!
@Cobaltgirl: I believe something went wrong there with the countdown timer function. We will try to fix this ASAP. Thanks for posting the issue.
@KillRob: Thanks a lot for pointing these things out individually. Basically we need to improve on that a lot yes! Should have double-checked on those instead of just copy/pasting them onto the site. I’ll fix them ASAP!
Can you only scale the statistics images when they are larger then the maximum, otherwise display them at the normal size. I play automation on 1440x900, which makes getting images of the required size difficult, and when scaled up they look terrible (jpg and all). My normal screen is 1680x1050, but I play in a window, since I use multiple monitors and fullscreen is always wonky with multiple monitors.
OK, I also had to do Ctrl+F5 to get page to load past timer. It worked. Company registered. Interesting site layout. You should probably note somewhere the company image has to be a non-GIF image file, or suggest which files will work. I can tell you PNG files will work.
@Cobaltgirl: When uploading the images it already says jpeg or png if i’m correct. For the company logo however, we should probably limit the extensions to jpeg and png in the file extension dropdown
Its supposed to scale up to keep it fitting with the current layout. Could you PM me any specified issue if something really is not working well andcausing blurry images?
After a couple of days getting everything smoothed out and adding some user-friendliness to the website, we can safely say that we launched and are up and running!
First of all, I want to thank the community for being awesome. We really appreciate all your appreciation (YES!) and we hope you will utilize the website to its full extend, even later on when we expand with additional features! Secondly, we want to say a big thank you to those showing their appreciation and donating money to us to upkeep the website and keep expanding it! Besides all of those using the website already, this is a big plus on motivation for us to continue. As said, we will reinvest the donations into making everything better, including our livestreams, videos and all the other content we want to offer!
I wish you all the best and I hope AutomationHub will be having a good 2015 as well as Automation itself. Without this awesome community, both the game and the website wouldn’t have a big chance of existing anyway!
On behalf of the whole AutomationHub Team, Aaron, Simon, Alex(website programmer) and myself, Bart, have a joyful, healthy and amazing 2015 and full Steam(pun intended!) ahead!
We fixed some bugs. Here is a list of what we fixed:
When editing your car, the engine you had selected would so now and then jump back to the first in the list, instead of the engien you had selected for that car.
When deleting an image belonging to car or engine, it sometimes deleted an image on all other cars and engines, too.
Changing your company logo on one car company, also changed it on the other, second company (Platinum contributors)
Pages system on the company catalog still showed two pages when ‘Show 120 companies’ was selected, with under 120 companies in the catalog at this point. (82 as we speak)
Furthermore, we are working on a system for easily marking up your additonal car and engine info and your company history through a WYSIWYG-editor (What You See Is What You Get). This means you put together everything the way you want it visually, and when saving it, it should pretty much exactly like that.
Right now this is already possible, if you have some HTML and/or CSS knowledge.
As for many other features, we are looking to implement a ranking page which shows the 100 best cars, engines and companies in some sort of Hall of Fame. We are also looking to get medals to work with those so it really matters and pays off when you reach first place!
Hope that excites you enough! Keep those companies updated. I am really pleased with the current companies that have some nice cars and engines
Also is it possible when adding a car, to specify the type? Eg High end sports car, compact etc? That way we can compare say all full size cars created by all users?
That is actually a nice idea, and indeed something we thought about since we already did it for the engines, but definetly something for down the road.
We currently use the engine types (and would use the car types) far too little to implement it now. Other things have higher priority.
When we do it, then we will implement it according to this list: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_classification
Note that we will probably only add the main categories, so not muscle cars, pony cars and whatsoever, to keep it simple.
Most people that will end up playing the game, wont go as deep as knowing every single category and thus keeping it simple and straight forward for those users is what we tend to aim for.
At last, a nice home for our “public” stuff.
[size=50]In my case, once I get back to consistently play the game, that is.[/size]
Just a thing, though: you guys might want to restrict the HTML on the descriptions for companies/cars/engines/etc. - right now it allows for some rather nasty XSS stuff.
Some more blank fields in the future could help too, default stuff like price, etc. Although obviously there isn’t much point implementing it as of yet.
You can add all that to the additional info box. Thats what it is for.
Later on we will have a WYSIWYG editor in there to make this bold, color text or whatever.
I’m not saying we won’t do it, but if we do its a long way down the road.
Ok, so we found out our first cheater on AutomationHub, spamming the ratings button with multiple accounts.
We track pretty much everything and get notified when several weird things occur. People doing this will get warned or banned, depending on how severe things are theyve done. Ranking will ALWAYS be reset, no matter what. Shame we have to do it this way, but yeah. Soon we will implement a report button so the community can moderate itself to a certain extend and keep an eye out, especially when we end up getting quite some users. Votes connected to a certain userID will also be deleted, so everything will stay in order the way it is supposed to be.
it really is a mixed bag you need to improve on. Here some comments:
