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.