Confessions of an Automationeer, Part 71: Themed Car Challenge Explained

Confessions of an Automationeer, Part 71: Themed Car Challenge Explained

Before the debut of the Car Shopping Round, the Themed Car Challenge was the most important and popular challenge among Automationeers. As a successor to the Themed Engine Challenge (in which the objective was to build a suitable engine for a particular type of car), we expected great things from it. And for the relatively brief period of time it ran in its original form, it really was one of the most hotly-anticipated challenges on the forums. Now, after a two-year hiatus, it has returned for the latest UE4 release of Automation. So here is a brief explanation of how the Themed Car Challenge works.

In each round, users submit a car to the host according to the rules of the current round, and for each user, only the first submission is valid. Once the submission period ends (either due to the deadline being reached or after a certain number of users have submitted their entries, if there is an upper limit on the number of submissions), the voting period begins, in which any user can vote on a top three (originally a top five for the first two seasons) for the current round, with a vote for the winner being worth the most points for the entrant that received it; however, no voters are allowed to vote for their own submission, if they had one. The entrant with the most points earned through voting wins the round. In addition, the top two entries will be featured on a video series, called the Automationeer Standoff, in which various aspects of each car are explained in detail, followed by a final decision which determines the winner.

So far, there have been two full seasons (consisting of four rounds each) of the Themed Car Challenge; both of these, however, were held in the Kee era of Automation, long before the transition to UE4. In the first season, the themes for each round were as follows:

• Round 1: 1995 roadsters for the European market.
• Round 2: 1985 executive sports sedans, again for the European market.
• Round 3: 1990 entry-level cars, yet again for the European market, but with 91 RON regular unleaded gasoline required, and cast engine internals mandatory.
• Round 4: 1968 sports coupes for the American market, running on 92 RON regular leaded gasoline - regular unleaded gasoline was not selectable in 1968 with the then-current version of Automation.

For the second season, each entry had to use the same car model and engine family, and be based on a four-door sedan or five-door wagon body - usually that of a mid-sized/D-segment car. Uniquely, this whole season was also set entirely in a single era - specifically, the mid- to late-Nineties, when this particular kind of car contributed a far greater percentage to annual car sales than it does now. The themes for the rounds held during the second season of TCC were as follows:

• Round 1: 1995 premium executive sedans.
• Round 2: 1996 mainstream family cars.
• Round 3: 1997 off-road variants, capable of running on 80 RON low quality unleaded gasoline (in the current UE4 release, low quality gasoline is 85 RON).
• Round 4: 1998 high-performance variants, requiring 98 RON super unleaded gasoline.

There was also a reboot of the TCC for an early version of the UE4 release of Automation, set in 1990 and themed about affordable sports coupes for the European market. However, it wasn't until much later that the TCC was relaunched yet again, as TCC 2.0. This long hiatus may be justified by the fact that UE4 Automation is now drastically different from what was when it debuted, especially in terms of balance and realism. More specifically, in between the latest TCC and the previous one, Automation had been updated and rebalanced so often that it is now a much more complete game than it was when it transitioned to UE4, especially with the introduction of hundreds of mods on the Steam Workshop having added more aesthetic options for car designs.

Thus ends our discussion of what the TCC is, how it works, and its relatively brief history. In the meantime, stay tuned for a review and summary of the very first round of TCC 2.0 - it will be posted once the round has concluded.