Confessions of an Automationeer, Part 79: Screen Time, Part Deux

Confessions of an Automationeer, Part 79: Screen Time, Part Deux

Following the success of the inaugural Automation TV and Movie Car Challenge, a second round was commissioned in short order. This time, though, I decided to accept hosting duties - an opportunity given to me after the winner declined the offer. It was clear that for this round to really deliver, I needed a theme that would draw in enough entrants to be viable.

After some deliberation, I settled on a live-action film adaptation of a TV series as the next theme. Specifically, I chose the second round to be about a sequel to the source material. The film was called Operation Incredible, and set for a 1999 release date - 25 years after the last episode of the series first aired. The task for the entrants was to provide a genuine sports car for the two main characters, ION (Incredible Operations Network) agents Danny Hawke and Jessie Vance, to drive in the film's climactic final chase through the streets of London - after their previous car, a 1992 GEC GS4 4.0, was destroyed at the end of the opening sequence set in Los Angeles. However, the new car had to look the part as well as being fast enough for the role.

An example of the 1992 GEC GS4 4.0, which was sacrificed in the opening scene of the (fictional) Operation Incredible movie.

I set aside just over a week's time for submissions, and waited for other users' entries to arrive. Eventually, they came, but at a fairly slow pace. Still, there were nine valid entries in all - enough for judging to take place as planned. There could have been three more, but those were disqualified for not meeting requirements and/or not being submitted at all before the deadline.

The three finalists in MCC2: Operation Incredible - Vector XSL 37TT (top), Decarlis Adriatique (center) and URABUS 70TT (bottom).

When the judging period finally began, I was honest about each of the cars' pros and cons. Anything that was too soft or slow for the lead role was immediately rejected. However, there were three cars that impressed me enough to make me examine them further. These were the URABUS 70ATB, Decarlis Adriatique, and Vector XSL 37TT. Ranking them should have been quite difficult...

...except that it wasn't. The URABUS was the fastest car of the three - too fast for its own good, in fact. The Decarlis, on the other hand, was the slowest, but handled well enough to stay in contention - until I found it to be under-braked. The Vector, meanwhile, had all the advantages of the other two cars with none of the drawbacks of either. The upshot was that the URABUS was relegated to third place (although it would serve as the car driven by the film's main antagonist, the notorious smuggler and terrorist Hans Kerner), while the Decarlis had to settle for second, leaving the Vector to get the nod.

The Vector XSL 37TT won MCC2 by doing everything right - a unique quality in the small but strong field of competitors that it faced.

And so another one of my competitions came to a close. There will be another MCC in the future, but it will be quite a while before it debuts. Until then, see you next time!

Confessions of an Automationeer, Part 78: New Year's Evolution 2020

Confessions of an Automationeer, Part 78: New Year's Evolution 2020

Happy New Year to all my fellow Automationeers! It is a pleasure for me to announce that the latest update to the UE4 version of Automation has been a welcome improvement since it arrived on the public branch late last year, after a few weeks in the open beta branch. It doesn't just look better (not just the cars, photo scenes, and materials, but also the UI), it plays better as well. For example, the engine tab (now with a blue theme) now offers you three choices up front: creating a completely new engine family, using an existing engine variant, or cloning said variant. In the campaign, the former approach is the most expensive one, and is therefore only recommended when using a variant from any other engine family is impractical or impossible.

The revised engine tab now begins with three options: creating a new engine family, using a variant of an existing one, or cloning a pre-existing variant.

The new update has also brought with it a whole host of much-needed bugfixes as well as balance improvements across the board. In addition, there are now even more car bodies to choose from across all types and eras, while many of the existing ones have been reworked to varying extents (especially those which now have new body styles), making them more usable than before. For anyone who likes to use these bodies often, these changes have been a godsend.

Here are some examples of the new bodies that were introduced with the latest Automation update. Many of the existing ones were updated at the same time for usability and/or balancing reasons.

About the only problem to be found is that the latest update is incompatible with some newer drivers - but that can be fixed by launching the game in DX10 mode. Looking further ahead, the next big update aims to fix this issue once and for all. On the subject of issues, this time last year, the game was virtually unplayable for most players, including me - but the devs quickly debugged everything to the point that us Automationeers could start playing it again. From then on until now, the Automation community, much like the game itself, has gone from strength to strength, with an increasingly diverse array of vehicles, brands, designs, and competitions to suit everyone's tastes. However, given that 2020 is still the last possible year for the campaign and the sandbox, we hope that future updates add the ability to build stuff in any subsequent year - up to 2025 or even 2030 should suffice, especially for users with lore-heavy brands.

Thus ends my brief review on the latest Automation update. Here's to an exciting 2020 and beyond.