It’s great that we can run an engine on the dyno and test it’s power, economy, etc. However, I think it’d be great to test an engine and have more control over the test. We could have a standard test which does what’s available now, and a then a manual test.
The manual test would let us start an engine and decide how long, and at what RPM we want to run the engine. We can use this to test things like fuel economy, reliability, endurance, etc. It would be cool to see the engine heat up and see the pipes begin to glow red while running at high RPM for a long time. It would also be fun to test the car at lower RPM (between 1000-1500) to test things like fuel economy and how smooth the engine runs, or how it idles, etc.
Its easy enough to let you have control over the engine revs with some kind of throttle, but I’m not sure how that would translate into test results, would there be a paticualar set of throttle positions/revs you’d need to perform to test it? I don’t quite see how it would be implimented from a gameplay point of view
There could be a throttle control via a “slider” that we could use. This would be used independently of the current test, which should remain. Perhaps we could have other tests available in the future, though manual control of throttle via some slider or some pre-defined positions would work.
It’d be cool to test emissions and economy when idling, and when running at ordinary cruising speeds. Also to test city/highway economy. There’s also the possibility of “run to failure” test to see how reliable our engines are.
Any of these suggestions could be future work and don’t have to make it in the final version of the game.
having the throttle slider is great! It would be great to tune the fuel and ignition timing on the same screen. Add a dial for ignition timing, and similar for fuel mixture. I believe it would make the game play faster. instead of running the test going back to the fuel screen adjust and re-test.
there should be a graph just one that shows you information the player wants say economy or emissions and when they have tuned that they could change to horse power and see if it has affected it it would be better than the auto test mode and different from the now implemented manual test mode
Another handy feature that the manual test mode could have is a separate slider for load.
e.g let the engine free rev with no load and then stack the load up and watch it bog down.
I would try and have it so that the load is constant for all engines, say a 1.3L I4 could only handle a max 40% dyno load and a 5L+ I6 maybe 80%. These percentages would have to balanced to compensate for all engine configurations, capacities, fuel types and aspiration.
