Sorry your browser is not supported!

You are using an outdated browser that does not support modern web technologies, in order to use this site please update to a new browser.

Browsers supported include Chrome, FireFox, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer 10+ or Microsoft Edge.

Work in Progress / Cars Incorporated - WIP

Author
Message
Westmere
14
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 12th Mar 2010
Location: Germany
Posted: 12th Jan 2011 23:51 Edited at: 27th Mar 2011 22:01
Link
Cars, Incorporated is a little game I am currently working on, kind of in an early WIP stadium.

It is a management simulation or as I like to call it a creative management simulation as it gives you a larger influence about your products, in this case Cars.

Unlike older simulators I know of you won\'t just research the next level of a technology and sell that but you can also spend a lot of research in between on improving existing technologies.

For instance: You have a 50 hp engine and a smaller 40 hp engine. You want a 50 hp engine in a car you are building but the engine is too large. Now you can let your engineers work on a shrinked version of your 50 hp engine or you can try to increase the performance of your 40 hp engine.
In both cases you will get an engine that is unique and might give you a slight advantage over your competition.

Here is a screenshots from this stage of development:


And another one of the screen where you bring your parts together to form a car:

(Adding \"extra\" parts like electric startes, windshield whipers, etc is still on the To Do list)

To really make it feel like a car YOU built the game uses a dynamicly generated 3D model as a representation of you car (no fixed models on this part of the game). This generation is based on some values from your tech research as well as about a dozen points you can drag around to change your car in the ingame body editor:


And here\'s a zoomed view of another similar but larger car:


I plan on using those models later on in different parts of the game, showing them at expos or at award ceremonies. And of course I still need to put a garage together to replace the plain grey background

This whole car creation process is already in a working condition (although I need to iron out some bugs and do some more polishing as some of the graphics are still pretty basic).

Tools used so far: Dark Basic Pro, Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, a little bit of Blender and some good tips from this forum. Thanks for that btw!

Further development will add the missing things to make it a complete management simulation, such as location management, building production lines, marketing, hiring and firing people, public contracts and a stock market allowing you to take over opponents. I will probably add a more elaborate features list with development status to this post soon.

Please keep in mind that this is still an EARLY WIP.

Edit: Fixed something with the screenshots I hope they work now.


Homepage
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
C0wbox
18
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 6th Jun 2006
Location: 0,50,-150
Posted: 13th Jan 2011 01:02 Edited at: 13th Jan 2011 01:02
Link
Hah, wish you'd started this about 6 months earlier, we could have worked together and had your cars compatible with World Off Road and given people a truely customizable racing game. xD

Not sure how much of a game this really is or how fun it'll be to play but it looks good. !

Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
Daygamer
14
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 16th Mar 2010
Location: United States
Posted: 13th Jan 2011 06:10
Link
Cool, Westmere, looks impressive!

yrotate when you can spin?
God Bless!
Back to top
Profile PM Email
KISTech
16
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 8th Feb 2008
Location: Aloha, Oregon
Posted: 13th Jan 2011 17:38
Link
Nice! Looks good.

Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
Westmere
14
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 12th Mar 2010
Location: Germany
Posted: 14th Jan 2011 10:57 Edited at: 27th Mar 2011 22:02
Link
Thx @all!

Quote: "Hah, wish you'd started this about 6 months earlier, we could have worked together and had your cars compatible with World Off Road and given people a truely customizable racing game. xD"


Oh well that shouldn't be too much of a stretch. From what I've seen your game uses .x models. Cars Incorporated uses the same file format for temporarly storing finished car models (in several parts per car). So in theory it should be possible to make an exporter that supports your game

However I might should mention on that topic that a possible future feature I've been toying in my mind with actually is a small racing mode (not offroad though) since I would already have all the necessary car models. But this idea is still pretty far ahead as I need to finish the main game first. This mode might also turn out to be sort of an add-on later on if I ever do that.

Quote: "Not sure how much of a game this really is or how fun it'll be to play but it looks good. !"


Well I guess how much fun it will be depends largely on whether you like business simulation games or not. I always enjoyed them. Which is why I am making one

Edit: While experimenting with the .x files I found myself throwing them into blender, adding some materials just to see what would happen... see attachment for the result.
The only changes to the model where adding materials and removing duplicate vertices (they appear when importing .x into Blender and mess up object's smoothness). Other then that this comes from the original .x files the game put out.


Homepage

Attachments

Login to view attachments
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
Westmere
14
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 12th Mar 2010
Location: Germany
Posted: 26th Feb 2011 01:07 Edited at: 27th Mar 2011 22:02
Link
Current update:

Most basic screens in the game are up and running now from a programming point of view, except for the office screen which will give you statistics, access to your personell office and messages from the game (e.g. letters).

While most screens in the game are made up of basic graphics the site screen, revolving around production and sales offices, is still heavily clogged with place holder graphics - so no screen shots from that as of yet.
Improved graphics (especially backdrops) will be made with Blender for a second alpha demo version but so far for the first alpha it will be mostly just Paint Shop Pro.

Here's a new screenshot from the bank page (fully working but the buttons are placeholders from another part of the game, still need to make some here):

Future improvements will see an additional link to enter a stockmarket (that would probably be alpha 3 or 4). Dunno what else to do with the banking screen so it might disappear to become a sub-menu of the main office at some point.

I also exported some of the cars made in the game to .x-files and imported them into blender, threw in some basic materials, created a primitive set (just a sky and a ground with some ugly grass on it) and turned the result into a little splash screen which also serves as the backdrop for the now working main menu:


So while still being pretty ugly Cars Incorporated is beginning to be something of a game. You will probably see screenshots from the production and sales offices sometime next week and if all goes well a playable alpha 1 demo sometime in march.

Edit: Forgot to mention. The flag on the menu screen is actually a switch allowing you to change the language of the game between english and german. This also works on the fly in the middle of the game.


Homepage
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
Z31NA2T
14
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 22nd Nov 2010
Location: Upstate NY
Posted: 26th Feb 2011 20:32
Link
Coolness, I've been working on something similar. I had a full system working where you can research engine parts individually and put them together to develop engines, and power output depends on parts used. One of my combinations, in an example, is similar to a Ford 5.0. With a 5.0L V8 block, and OHV Low Compression heads, with EFI and low flow headers it outputs 225hp, but with the 5.0L V8 block, OHV Low Compression Heads, EFI, and high flow headers it makes 250, higher flowing head, 280..etc.

BUT, I lost the sources switching computers so I have to rewrite it. LOL
Back to top
Profile PM
Westmere
14
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 12th Mar 2010
Location: Germany
Posted: 26th Feb 2011 22:23 Edited at: 27th Mar 2011 22:02
Link
Sounds very interesting.

I was thinking of a similar system but I feared it would get too technical. On the other hand I didn't want the system used in other (older) games like this where you could just research a new level of engine and that's it.
So the way it works now is kind of a hybrid. You don't get to build the engine from parts but you can tell your scientists to improve a certain aspect of an engine (e.g. performance, efficency) or just build a version with more displacement.
A point I am still thinking about for future versions would be to create a limited amount of extras in the special parts research menu which you can optionally put on your engines to give it a stats boost in some area. I'm thinking thinks like direct injection, turbo charger, charge air intercooler but limited to a small total amount so you can easily select what you need.

If you rewrite what you had I'd be very interested in seeing your approach to this, so feel free to drop me a message if you do.


Homepage
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
Z31NA2T
14
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 22nd Nov 2010
Location: Upstate NY
Posted: 27th Feb 2011 01:07
Link
It was basically each part had what I called a "flow" number, or performance number. I then determined a mathematically equation to add all of the flow/performance numbers up then devide it by a per determined value, and it worked out great. It included cylinders and displacement into the equation, and it proved to be pretty realistic, more so than I originally expected. lol

I began trying to come up with my equation again today so hopefully I can figure it out, but I may boot up my old computer and see if I can find it on there.
Back to top
Profile PM
Westmere
14
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 12th Mar 2010
Location: Germany
Posted: 27th Feb 2011 13:29 Edited at: 27th Mar 2011 22:02
Link
Oh well the most difficult part I had in my system was to bring a performance spread into the game which is at least partially realistic when you look at the different years of the game.
For that I took dozens of real cars from all kinds of times from wikipedia into a chart and tried to figure appropriate values for their times out. As a result any new engine that is up to date would produce at least around 30 hp in 1960 and 50 in 2010 for examples. They are also limited from how high you can go: The 1960 tech level will not allow engines above ~250 hp, while in 2010 you can reach close to 700 hp.

Engines are generally spread into 12 different tech levels which are comparable to the tech levels of other business simulations of this kind. When the earliest time for a new tech level arrives you will get the new generation engine as a "suggested research project".

Once you have a basic engine of the new level you can create derivate projects, targeted with increased performance, efficiency and so on.
Each tech level has a base level for the researchable improvements and an upper cap. The base for the 1960 tech level would bring you to said 30 hp with a 1.0l engine and will not allow for engines exceeding 250 hp.
Each time you improve an area your engine will move a bit closer to the upper cap but will not actually ever reach it. So at a certain point tweaking an engine further is a waste of time and money and you better improve other areas or wait for the next tech level to become available. (You still can do quite some research before you hit that point).
To further encourage improving technology you actually can improve every engine tech so far that it will be better then basic (=unrefined) engines of the next tech level. So you can stay one step ahead of your competition even if they manage to build the new tech level before you which is quite possible since the project suggestions will be given out randomly throughout the year of the introduction. So might receive it in january. Or in may. Or if you are out of luck you need to wait until december.

Lots of talk so I better stop now before boring you to death


Homepage
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
Z31NA2T
14
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 22nd Nov 2010
Location: Upstate NY
Posted: 27th Feb 2011 21:10
Link
haha, doesn't bore me, sounds interesting!
Back to top
Profile PM
TheeLord
16
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 23rd Jan 2008
Location: Chicago
Posted: 15th Mar 2011 21:10
Link
This is awesome. I was playing around with s similar concept which was all 2d in visual basic. I am very impressed! Wish you were doin this in gdk I would offer to setup a quick online mode with you. There are so few good business games that are online capable.

You ever play "Detroit" from like 1994?? Such a fun game and you look to be expanding on it's ideas here. Keep it up and make it awesome!! I would pay for a very good car business sim. Haha
Back to top
Profile PM Email
TheeLord
16
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 23rd Jan 2008
Location: Chicago
Posted: 15th Mar 2011 23:54
Link
So are you going to be able to manage your facilities and factories? Always thought it would be neat to have to worry about where the cars are being made and making sure your facilities can handle that sort of vehicle. I'm sure you couldn't make a huge suv in a plant designed to work on small compacts without lots of retrofitting. I'm very excited!
Back to top
Profile PM Email
Westmere
14
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 12th Mar 2010
Location: Germany
Posted: 16th Mar 2011 19:43 Edited at: 27th Mar 2011 22:03
Link
Yes, I have actually played Detroit, which was called "Rüsselsheim" in Germany, as well as the similar themed "Motor City" called "Oldtimer" here also during the mid-90s.
So you might find some ideas or concepts from those games in Cars Incorporated as well, others are improved / changed and some might be unique to this game. In fact the body creation of Detroit was what actually sparked the idea of a car building game.
I have also looked at some shareware games with this or a similar topic however most of these look more like an old Windows application, which might be due to most of them being done in Visual Basic, Delphi and similar development tools. The problem with those is that you rarely design your own buttons and elements and thus most VB- and Delphi-stuff looks like a Windows app

I've been carrying this idea around with me since I was very disappointed with "Car Tycoon" which I had hoped to be a lot more like Detroit and Motor City in 2003 I believe.

As for your second question: Factories are represented by local production lines, seperate for each continent (North- and South-America, Europe, Asia, Afria and Oceania - you can see how this is split up in the attached map image).
Before you can build anything you need to build production lines which can be increased in their technology level. This results in a higher output, depending on the amount of workers you place there.

On that factory screen you also have a view of this locations storage content, showing you not only current stock but also the changes of last month/turn, this storage view is also visible in the shop-view where you determine your dealers' range of products and set prices.

I will try to post a screenshot of this later but I haven't had the time to translate the texts of this screen yet, so right now it would be in german only

Topic online-capability: The problem with that is that you would need a fixed and very slow speed for the game to make it online-playable plus you could not change through any timescales. Imagine one player competing with a 1960s car, another with one from 2010. Even without that improving technologies would give advanced players too much of an advantage.

However there will be limited multiplayer-capability. The game will definitly have a hot-seat mode. I am also thinking of adding network/Internet support but that's still down the road.

As a sort-of-multiplayer feature I do want to let the player compete with other players' companies. After you have played through Cars Incorporated you can save your company as an opponent. This will pack it all into a single file which you can give to your friends or upload on the internet for others to compete with your endeavors.

Attached you will find a small world map prototype as it is used in the game. Colors do not have any meaning, there just there so I can see what's what


Homepage

Attachments

Login to view attachments
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
TheeLord
16
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 23rd Jan 2008
Location: Chicago
Posted: 17th Mar 2011 06:44
Link
Very cool, how close are you to needing people to test it for you and stuff? I would love to help test =)
Back to top
Profile PM Email
Westmere
14
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 12th Mar 2010
Location: Germany
Posted: 17th Mar 2011 23:03 Edited at: 27th Mar 2011 22:03
Link
Well I'll send you a PM once the first alpha test version is available. That version will probably be buggy as hell but it should be playable although limited to the core features as the rest needs to be implemented first

Unfortunately the work is progressing quite slow atm as I have to sort out some real life financial difficulties first. Once those are gone I'd say a playable first alpha test version is just 1-2 more weeks away for you to toy around with the game

Here's a new screenshot for you as I just finished translating the data for this screen.

It still needs a decent backdrop as this is something thrown together in about 5 minutes. But making better backdrops with my limited Blender capabilities is something that is on the list for the 2nd alpha test version

So here is what you actually see on this screenshot: It's the production lines overview from one of my savegames. In the top bar you can see that the currently selected region is Europe. This whole thing actually is a working setup producing 3 versions of 1 car. All three (AB Sabre 1.0, 1.3 and 2.0) use the same body (Compact 100) and the same chassis (that would be the "CH 1250 31-29-30" thingy) but different engines with 22, 29 and 40 hp.
All those names where given by the player (in this case me) in the development screens, so sorry if they look confusing to you

Lines 5 and 6 produce the two parts common to all 3 variants of my car: The chassis (line 5) and the body (line 6). As you can see I've needed quite some workers on line 5 to produce the 120 parts per month as the line is only at level 1. Line 6 produces 122 bodies with less then 10% of the workers as it is upgraded to level 3. And the part also is cheaper to produce anyway...

There are still some bugs on this screen:
1. Since there simply is no personell screen to hire and fire people yet all lines have access to up to 1000 workers each (that's why the numbers don't add up)
2. Cars and Bodies have the same look and cannot be kept apart visually yet. That's because they both only have a grey backdrop (still on the to do list for Blender stuff for alpha 2). Yes they all use the same silver body (not a bug)
3. Stock change numbers on the left are buggy. They don't show the amount of produced parts if they have been used right away in car production. Stock numbers are correct though. As for the 65,416 chassis used I can currently only say "WTF?" as this was the first time this occured.
4. The storage section misses the following buttons: Push a viewed position up or down, destroy parts and move parts to another region.

Some trivia about this screen: You can use up to 100 production lines per region. 6 regions (aka continents) x 100 = 600 production lines. Even if you used a seperate engine, chassis and body for every single model you could still produce up to 600 / 4 (car, body, chassis, engine) = 150 different cars at the same time.


Homepage
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
TheeLord
16
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 23rd Jan 2008
Location: Chicago
Posted: 18th Mar 2011 03:44
Link
awesome, looks very good. Definitely tell me when you're going to start alpha testing and i will help you find all the bugs and give you feedback and everything =)

Keep it up!
Back to top
Profile PM Email
Westmere
14
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 12th Mar 2010
Location: Germany
Posted: 27th Mar 2011 02:42 Edited at: 27th Mar 2011 21:45
Link
just a quick update:

I have begun to set up a simple homepage for the game. You can find it here

Right now it's on a free host but I will probably change that once it moves close to a release


Homepage
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
Westmere
14
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 12th Mar 2010
Location: Germany
Posted: 19th Apr 2011 23:21
Link
Update and a test download:

1. I am currently doing some rewrites to speed up my GUI / buttons system as it tends to be a bit slow on older systems (I guess that's the curse of having an i7 for development )

2. When that's done I'll finish up technical work on the sites screen and add actual car sales so a player can make money (instead of just using it up as it is right now).

3. And when that's done I'll begin changing the original "sort of experimental" car designer into something more flexible. That will include a rewrite of the modeling code with the main targets of more flexibility and a huge speedup especially when one diplays a polished model - I have some thoughts how to do this but I will probably open a discussion on that once I'll get to that rewrite to get some more ideas. For now I would recommend not switching to the "polished mockup" if you have a slow or older system.

4. After that I will probably ready it as a first real demo. For now you can try out the original body editor and if you like you can give me your thoughts about what you would like to see added or totally changed. I would also be interested to hear your thoughts about how to restrict shapes so the bodies will visually fit certain decades.

The topics speed and bugs don't need to be discussed as the editor will not stay as it is now (see the above tasks at hand). Oh and it also needs some different symbols to pull around so you can see the directions you can pull into.

You can download the car editor below. Other screens beside the editor have been blocked for now (in fact their backdrops aren't even in the download).

You can change the body by dragging the red dots in the lower half of the screen around (speed issues on slow systems will hopefully disappear with the GUI reworking).
The drag points in the top down view affect the width of these parts, all drag points have certain limits which usually are set by the drag points next to them.
After that press the refresh button in the lower right to update the model to your changes. You can click the model for a larger view.

The X in the lower right (actually the cancel button) will end the program.


Homepage

Attachments

Login to view attachments
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
Cliff Mellangard 3DEGS
Developer
18
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 20th Feb 2006
Location: Sweden
Posted: 20th Apr 2011 00:38
Link
Looks really cool
You know that this idea would work for an app kit game to?
Only replace the 3d models with 2d !
Back to top
Profile PM Website
TheeLord
16
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 23rd Jan 2008
Location: Chicago
Posted: 20th Apr 2011 06:59
Link
Very neat!! Played around with it for about 10 minutes I cant wait to see more. Hope you keep adding features to the car body creator at some point too.

Only thing I would say is, maybe make the refresh button a bit more apparent to new players? Thought it was not refreshing and broke for a bit.
Back to top
Profile PM Email
Westmere
14
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 12th Mar 2010
Location: Germany
Posted: 20th Apr 2011 13:02
Link
Quote: "
Looks really cool
You know that this idea would work for an app kit game to?
Only replace the 3d models with 2d !
"


Thank you.
I MIGHT take a look at that in the future to create a mobile offspring or something. Replacing the models isn't that easy though as there are no models. They are created ingame by a routine calculating all the triangles to build round shapes.
It probably is possible to do in 2D but it would involve many drawing operations and I am not sure how much fun this would be on a tiny screen anyway.

Quote: "
Very neat!! Played around with it for about 10 minutes I cant wait to see more. Hope you keep adding features to the car body creator at some point too.

Only thing I would say is, maybe make the refresh button a bit more apparent to new players? Thought it was not refreshing and broke for a bit.
"


Thank you.

Well as I said the body editor will receive some makeover anyway, especially on the technical side.

In the process I hope to be able to restructure the body creation routine in a way that will allow me to manipulate the whole thing in real time. I have some ideas on how that could work but it still needs some planing. If I can get that to work the refresh button will be gone.

Right now the car is recreated from scratch everytime you press refresh - especially when you have the polished stuff on that takes quite some time.

And of course I will add more features to that revamp. The current version is the original experiment the project was founded with


Homepage
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
Back to top

Login to post a reply

Server time is: 2024-11-24 16:29:54
Your offset time is: 2024-11-24 16:29:54