After having build quite a few engines it´s starting to get difficult to find them again.
Could you add an option to create and name folders like “eco engines”, “Drag engines” or “1965-1970 bigblocks”?
That would be really great.
I like this idea. Seems like something good to do. Especially after a while you easily end up with tons of both engine and car designs.
Even a ‘sort by’ kinda button would do.
I think folders would be great. Imagine playing the grand campaign…
running several brands across 5 continents. After a few decades the engine list is going to be a crazy mess.
would be cool if it was possible to even just sort them by clicking on the headings too. so say click on service cost or man hrs and it ranks the list accordingly.
Ahh, yes, we do want that.
I just registered to suggest folders. This would help greatly organize the engines. The way it is now is unworkable if you have more than 15 engines. People will moan and need to use external solutions. Currently the only way is to organize the files myself, but it would be nice if this was integrated somehow, especially because the game cannot handle alt-tab.
There is another problem that really bothers me: the engine manager menu gets painfully slow with more than ca 15 engines. It’s very laggy when I scroll and buttons often don’t respond to clicks for several seconds.
Being a C# programmer myself I don’t see what would slow down a simple list with so few items. It should be blazing fast. I guess you parse the lua files and do other stuff every time the selection changes?
You could either read the complete data into memory or use just a small header file with metadata. Either way there would be practically no slowdown in the list. I have created controls with thousands of items and they felt faster than this.
Otherwise no major complaints! Absolutely great program, looking forward to the game and will definitely preorder as soon as there is a little more functionality!
Yup, there are a bunch of known optimization issues that we need to work out for the engine manager (performance wise) and we certainly will be putting in more tools to help sort and organize designs 
Responsiveness is extremely important to my enjoyment of games. I eventually get tired and lose interest if the UI takes several seconds to respond. You already simulate car engine’s responsiveness (RSP), so this should not be new to you.
Lack of responsiveness is generally a problem with games written in dotNet compared to C++ solutions with let’s say Qt. A similar game, Kerbal Space Program shares many of these problems. They became so bad I stopped playing it at some point, until they made serious optimizations.
Your engine manager itself does not cause me any problems. Ok, it chugs along sometimes when a part is loaded but for some reason that doesn’t hold me back as much. The problem is mostly with the menus, especially the engine selection. I guess that’s because of parsing the complete lua file every time the selection changes. I am also curious about the preview image. Since I did find not any king of jpg files etc, is it possible that you generate them along the fly? That would of course explain the sluggishness. Handling something that can take in the range of seconds to every OnSelectionChange will produce an unworkable UI.
As I said I would simply store a preview jpg when the engine is saved, and write the 10 or so major parameters into a small file. I guess you probably realized that already. I just wanted to point out that once people are going to play a game with dozens or hundred of cars/engines they want a fast, repsonsive UI and currently major optimizations are due.
Yeah, the way it loads engines currently is really damned slow, that’s known and very much on our list of things that need optimizing, we know what needs fixing to speed it up, it’s just going to take a while.
The preview images are stored as JPEGs, and AFAIK don’t cause any performance impact.
The engine preview thumbnails are stored in [documents folder]/Automation/Engines/Thumbs, so it’s not this. I think it’s because it generates every statistic on the fly.
(Oh, and the engine manager IS the engine menu.)
Ok, somehow I didn’t see those jpgs.