Automation is making leaps and bounds in its development and I find that I am enjoying trying to make my cars look good (even if I’m not good at cosmetics). One of the features I wish Automation had is a copy function for individual fixtures. Another game I play, SimplePlanes, has a feature in its designer where after you spend time creating a part and sizing it and shaping it, if you want to make a direct copy of that custom part, you just right click on it and drag and it will make an exact duplicate of that part with all of its properties and allow you to place it.
This, I think, would be a wonderful addition to Automation. After I shape and size a fixture and go through it picking all the colors of it, sometimes I want to make another and I find that getting it exactly the same is a PITA.
Another feature in SimplePlanes that would be nice to see in Automation (however it may be more difficult) is sub-assemblies. In SimplePlanes you can create a group of custom parts and then drag those parts to a side menu to save them in that configuration, then later you can drag that sub-assembly out to use it on other models that you may be making.
This would be wonderful in Automation especially for people that want to create a certain image for their company cars with grills, logos, headlights, taillights and all the other fixtures.
Anyway, I don’t know if any of this would be possible but I can hope!
Figures, a hidden feature I wasn’t aware of. Well, that takes care of one of my 2 problems. Perhaps a small side menu listing the controls would be helpful then.
Would be great to be able to save and copy fixtures to new cars though. And to be able to group fixtures together and move them as one (and maybe save those for new cars as well).
Talking about the functions people don’t know, because they’re not apparent… is there a CTRL+Z thing going on like in kee, or is it actually absent? I really fiddle too much with fixtures
One thing about fixtures I would love to see (though this might be difficult to implement, I could imagine): Would it be possible to assign layers to fixtures and have fixtures with a lower layer “hide” behind higher layer ones where they overlap?
Yeah this feature sort of exists, it works like the move above/below that you see on MS Office programs for instance.
You can make fixtures that overlap with others to move behind others so the one you want on top will be above. To get these, click on the fixture and it’s there with similar icons as in the picture above in the gizmo for the transformation of the fixture.
Then maybe a request for a tutorial about controls would make sense? I had no idea about that cycling through fixtures, and it seems extremely un-obvious to me. The way I imagine such tutorial is that it could be just a normal build of a car in a car designer, but guided by some pop-ups telling the player what they can do with various elements. For example drag the highlighted area to morph, click the fixture and drag it onto the car, here you can change fixture’s look with other materials, here you can make it asymetrical, shift+drag to copy it and so on.
Yeah, the current functionality is not as limited as some may think, it’s just not obvious or explained anywhere. We definitely need to add that info in.
