I thought I’d start a thread explaining my need to redesign the car design system, and show you what I’ve done (and why). This is for 1.13.
Hopefully we are all in agreement that the current system with its 32,000 different car designs, and that constant pop-up asking you to pick a price is needlessly fiddly and annoying and not at all fun. The problem is that there are too many permutations of features in the game (and many more to come) to have the player constantly asked to give a price for any conceivable combination.
My solution is to redefine a design as basically being a ‘model’. (its still called a design in the game…for now anyway).
A design is now a whole body style of car, so right now we only have one, and its the one that looks a bit like a Jaguar/Tesla/posh luxury car with 4 doors. Eventually more types will come, SUVs, sports cars, 4x4s etc.
With the new system, a design is just a name, and a series of markups. Those markups (for both the base car and any conceivable feature) are the prices you are charging for each feature that gets included in the car. A feature is something like electric windows, or a spoiler.
So now you will (cor example) say that ‘car1’ has a basic markup of 20% on the initial value, with a 5% markup on each feature. These markups are calculated based on the initial game starting price of each feature (including ‘basic_car’ which is just another feature).
Example: The game starst with a base car being valued at $16,000. There has been some stiff competition from the AI, so the current ‘market value’ for a basic car is now only $15,200.
You price your markup for the base car at 20%, meaning you charge $16,000 + (0.2 * 16,000) = $18,200 for the car, even though the market value is only $15,200. As a result, it will take a while to sell the car at that price.
Over time, if competition remains high, and output goes higher, you will have to reduce the markup on that car.
You will have a new GUI where you can set (or edit) the markup for each model, and for each feature on that model. Not setting a markup explicitly will mean that it sells at the default initial price.
A side-effect of this new system is that the car stock window will not show designs, but actual real cars, including the correct colors and other physical attributes. Here is a screenshot of the new car stock window:
I haven’t started work on the new dialog which will replace the current new car design dialog. It will be very similar, but will have separate price adjusters for each feature you can add. You will only see this dialog when selling a new car model, or if you want to edit the prices (from a new car design browser).
Thoughts?
(it will need testing).
