We know that you won’t make strange types of engines, however, if that’s what the community wants, why not give them the opportunity to do what they want themselves? I didn’t see if anyone had asked this question before, but the question is: is it possible for you, if so, how much would it complicate the project, and if you could, would you make it possible?
Are you referring to modding in different cylinder layouts? Well, by definition of a “mod,” yeah anyone with the skills can mod anything they want today. The reason no one does is because it’d be a shit ton of work.
Automation’s engine designer isn’t built in a way that makes adding engine types easy. You’d have to do hundreds of hours of math and data collection and testing to get working even mostly realistically; not to mention all the art and UI changes necessary to accommodate it, nor the balancing with everything else in the game. And unlike the developers, a modder would have to do all that in their free time, largely uncompensated, and with a lot less familiarity with the code.
I should note, there are already a bunch of modular “engine” fixtures on the Steam Workshop, that you can use to visually build engine. It’s only aesthetic, but at least that way you could make the car look like it has a unique engine type (while approximating it with a normal one).
(standard disclaimer: not a dev)
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guessing Heads would also be a huge pain to get working? (proper Hemi or poly heads for example)
And an even bigger letdown, probably. +1% in stat A, -2% in stat B, +0,5% in stat C.
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The devs have talked about this a lot, over on Discord if nowhere else. The answer to “how much would it complicate the project” is “a lot”. A massive portion of the engine code is not designed to be modified or altered like this. It would take quite an extensive rewrite of some very complicated code that’s very important to how the game runs. They’d also have to be even more careful about future changes to the engine designer code, complicating future development - you wouldn’t want your engine mods becoming incompatible or broken every few months, that’s never a fun time.
Add in the amount of effort that would be required for modders to get vanilla-quality engine mods, and it’s really not worth it for the devs to officially support this form of modding, as cool as it would be.
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