Are these planned? I notice that the lack of engine bay scaling with body morphing means parts like radiators clip through the vehicle.
It would be nice to be able to shrink the engine bay in favour of a larger passenger space, or increase the engine bay to be able to place the engine further back and possibly reduce service costs due to less cramped packaging (depending on engine size vs bay size). A placement slider would let the designer be able to affect front/rear weight distribution and maybe service costs based on ease of access (under the windscreen = bad, at the very front = good).
This is not planned, no. On the other hand we DO plan on better detection for actual engine bay limits such that what you describe doesn’t happen. This will have to wait until UE4 though.
Is the body morph where the base of the windscreen can be moved back and forward not meant to affect engine bay size? Is pulling the windscreen back just converting passenger space into unused space, and stretching out the front of the car purely aesthetic (aside from added weight)?
Perhaps it’s too much of a development difficulty, but it’s a bit odd that passenger space is dynamic but the engine bay isn’t. More or less incentivises all vehicles to be short nosed.
It’s based on the differences between the body and frames. All the frame measurements are hard coded into the .lua files (length, wheelbase, overhang, firewall position, etc), while the passenger and cargo spaces are “boxes” in the 3D models of the bodies that can be stretched and deformed while morphing. To allow the variable engine bays, then the frame would also need to be morphable, which would be a whole other level of coding since the body morphing is all organised directly in the 3D model. The .lua code for the morphing is just the upper and lower limits of movement on each axis.
It’s irritating to me that some body morphs are neither purely aesthetic nor balancing even gameplay trade-offs, so that dragging a morph in one direction is always beneficial statistically, and that you’d only want the other direction to either handicap the car or because you are so taken by aesthetics that you don’t mind worse gameplay outcomes. Another example is how the rake of the windscreen doesn’t affect aero at all, so you almost always want an upright windscreen (~5% more passenger space for <0.5% more weight and costs).
If it isn’t feasible to make them fully gameplay active, could there be an option to disable or remove all gameplay effects of those morphs, incl. on competitors so as not to affect competitiveness? I guess because they still tend to affect weight enough to mess with other factors like gearing that this isn’t feasible either without retuning all the competitors.