Sorry for my bad English, I don’t know how the forum works, but I wanted to know if it’s possible to share your cars. I know how to build engines, but I’m terrible at building cars. Where can I find them?
Hello, welcome!
You mean the car files that you could download and see how they are built? I’m sure there was a thread with those, possibly more than one, but a) I don’t remember how to find those threads and b) by now those cars are probably quite outdated. I can tell you that my random stuff thread contains some downloadable cars that are, I think, all up-to-date enough for the current stable (default) version of the game. Those are not the best optimised, and I’m not as good at designing whole cars as I am at engines and drivetrains, but I guess they could be helpful anyway.
There are indeed multiple problems and Hshan has mentioned one of them.
I shall attempt to break it down
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Outdated .car files
This game is in development for a long time and went through a lot of very deep revisions and that means .car files aren’t necessarily fully compatible between versions. Hshan has mentioned this problem, but I shall expand on it further…mainly because there is an aspect he has not covered.
You see, I recently decided to document some of my earlier cars made in Automation by making YouTube videos going through their engineering choices. As said videos are public, you are free to visit said channel and witness the wackiness. Thankfully, it’s possible to go to earlier versions of game to do so. Not so thankfully, various mods on which some of these cars relied would be pulled out of Steam Workshop which includes entire bodies. (Will note that I went through 4.21 and 4.24 for this reason, so no surprise no mods would be maintained nowadays; these are several year old versions) -
Discourse breaks .car files
I heard an instance where this happened. While I can’t recall the details, I can roughly direct you towards where discussion about this took place.
This game has official Discord server and within it channel labeled #challenges. One of pinned messages in that channel will be posted by Killrob and was basically summarization of that discussion, worded somewhat similarly to how I named this part of the text. -
Sharing .car files isn’t that common of an occurrence
Partially due to reasons listed above and partially due to varying interest of people sharing .car files, sharing .car files by multiple people in one public place is not common. Maybe you join some Discord server where people do share their .car files with each other or happen to ask right person about whether or not you can take a look at their car and they send you .car file and generally that’s easiest way to get some cars to analyse. People may decline to send you desired .car due to few reasons:
- car in question is their entry for current challenge. Challenges are generally very good way to learn how to design and engineer cars and engines and we will generally provide lot of help and tips in case you ask for feedback. You can team up with someone else to enter and that case is not what I’m talking about here
- note that I recall few people taking care of somebody else and presenting it as their own creation. By few, I literally mean two different instances of this happening. Some other people recall these events as well and aren’t going to be open about sharing their cars due to this.
- some people generally aren’t interested in their stuff being public due to personal reasons.
While I’m neither a good designer nor particularly stellar engineer, I would happily provide .car file of car I made if asked for it. Out of two, I would say my engineering is better.
There is indeed such a thread, which you can find here, although I found out the hard way that any cars made in 4.2 and later that were posted there will need extensive revisions to be viable for the current stable release.