Our Al Rilma Update cover car came to us courtesy of Ivan. Congratulations!
After a very lengthy development process, we are thrilled to share the latest update to Automation with all our players; the Al Rilma Update! It's not much of an exaggeration to say that virtually all aspects of Automation have been improved in some way in the Al Rilma Update; even before we get to the staggering amount of new content we've added, just about everyone will find a cleaner, faster and much more stable version of Automation with this release.
Let's dive in, shall we?
Car and Engine Designer
Superchargers and More Turbochargers
Superchargers can be used on any engine layout.
One of the core features of the Al Rilma Update was, after more than a decade of promises, to finally add superchargers to Automation; we are happy to deliver them to you for the first time in Automation's history! You have the option of three different types of superchargers - Roots, twin-screw and centrifugal - each one with their own benefits and drawbacks for you to balance in your engine builds. Moreover, superchargers are available from the earliest date in the game, which gives you a forced induction option far earlier than you had with turbocharging.
Twincharging gives you the ability to help reduce turbo lag and boost thresholds, among other things.
With superchargers - specifically, with the Roots supercharger - you also have the ability to access another new feature of Automation... twincharging! With a combination of turbocharger and supercharger, it gives players the ability to hit big horsepower numbers out of very small engines, with a much more usable power curve - or if that's not to your taste, just to hit massive power numbers, period.
With all the work that came with adding a second stage of forced induction to Automation as a result of adding twincharging, we've also added in sequential turbochargers, for those of you who want to run big boost at high RPM but also not lose out on low RPM performance as well. Additionally, compound turbocharging - where one turbocharger feeds into a second turbocharger - has been added too, for those who relish the challenge of hitting huge horsepower numbers in their drag racer builds!
When one turbocharger just isn't enough.
Improved Engine Simulation
The new throttle simulation creating a lot more realistic throttle vs. RPM maps for ignition timing and fuel efficiency.
A lot has changed under the hood of the engine simulation. Throttle is now simulated properly for the first time, bringing significant improvements to engine flow calculations as a whole, but especially for the behavior of fuel economy and emissions.
Both the engine's volumetric efficiency and combustion efficiency have been revisited to make for even more realistic engine outputs. Lots of calculations have been fixed or improved, while more nuances for the various component choices you are making were added. Another neat little new feature is that CVVL has been added as a modern, fuel economy focused VVL option.
Carburetors have been fully revamped in the calculations, which now simulates their vacuum and mechanical advance mechanics with different levels of sophistication, depending on the chosen fuel system! Also, ignition timing simulation was improved, as it previously always chose the perfect timing, a feature which now has been relegated to only the most modern direct injection fuel system in the game.
New Engine Art
New carburetors, new headers and more!
We've revamped a lot of Automation's engine visual art for the Al Rilma Update, with virtually no aspect going untouched. New carburetor models based on photogrammetry greatly improve the quality of our visuals, enhanced by new models, textures and materials on almost everything else. Every engine gets new header layouts; some engine layouts have had a complete overhaul of their headers during this process. Lots of small details have been changed and improved, all in an effort to make Automation engine art more believable and pleasing to the eye.
All-New Reliability System
Reliability calculations have been revamped, and opened up wide for all to see. That is the base for cars too, not just engines.
For a long time, Automation's reliability calculations were very opaque to the player. Not only that, but there was a lot of technical debt in those calculations; aspects of the reliability calculation did not play nicely, parts of it ignored very important aspects of car or engine design, and other parts of it were just broken. With the Al Rilma Update, we've made huge improvements in the aspect of reliability by rebuilding a solid system from the ground up, and break it all down - item by item - for the player to visualize exactly where they are doing well in their reliability, or are doing poorly. In the example above, it is easy to spot that the pistons and the materials mix are the worst aspects, but also that their importance is lower than for example the fuel system or the valvetrain due to their smaller rectangle area.
Multiplayer
A whole new way of playing Automation awaits... maybe we'll see your server here soon!
Scenario-based multiplayer has returned to Automation, after a very long absence - before we were even on Steam, actually! In this game mode, you are presented with a scenario of certain stats you need to achieve, and others you either need to match or exceed, all while dealing with restrictions, all chosen either randomly, or from parameters set by the host. You then have a limited amount of time to build either a car, or a car and an engine to match these parameters! This gameplay mode is fast-paced, and it will absolutely make you a better, more well-rounded and knowledgeable Automation player. Not feeling confident in your abilities just yet? You can always try Practice Mode instead, where you get the same experience, but it's only you competing against the scenario parameters!
For now, the only option is to run custom games with random players or your friends in open or password protected games. In future iterations of this mode we are going to add ranked play, as well as other, more flavorful game modes to the multiplayer roster!
Campaign Mode
Campaign Mode got a lot of attention with the Al Rilma Update, to say the least. Much of Campaign Mode has been reworked in this update, with the progression through your car projects being a lot more streamlined than before while giving you more options as to what to produce. Moreover, we've done a lot of work on performance in Campaign Mode as well, so the late-game slowdowns are almost a thing of the past now!
Company Headquarters and Add-ons
The new company headquarters mechanic. Customise your company to suit your needs, increase your ability to engineer new cars and more...all for a cost, though!
The biggest Campaign Mode change in this update is the addition of the company headquarters and a series of add-ons, to give a more believable sense of managing limited resources, as well as improving aspects of your company that you feel are most important. In this new Campaign Mode, your company is now limited in terms of how many factories and engineering projects you can have operating at any given time, through the new company level and logistics points mechanic.
While you can exceed the soft limits for your marketing, R&D, and logistics capacity, there are penalties for that, so do so at your own risk! Expanding your company headquarters will give you more logistics points and expand your R&D and marketing departments to work on various projects, while building HQ addons will boost your baseline research and give unique benefits to production and engineering, while also coming at a cost of logistics points. These can help you a bunch in specific areas of running your car company - but you need to choose wisely to not stretch yourself too thin financially or expand too quickly!
New Time Progression
Time progression is completely different in Campaign Mode now.
A major change in terms of gameplay in Campaign Mode is the complete rethink of time progression in Campaign Mode. Where before, time would progress in a linear fashion, ticking constantly from month to month while unpaused, we have gone to a system now where time only progresses when and where you want it to, with the default state of Campaign time progression being stopped. This is a lot smoother and more intuitive than the old, clunky timer system, and we feel like it's a major improvement in how Campaign Mode plays!
Regulations Overview and Capacity Taxes
An automotive world without regulatory hoops to jump through doesn't feel very believable...
Governments all over the world put all kinds of rules and stipulations on all aspects of cars, from how they are taxed, to specifying emissions or efficiency standards and so on. Even in jurisdictions where it feels like the car market is largely "free", there are in fact hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations, tax codes, safety standards and more that must be complied with in order to sell your cars there. We've taken yet another step to simulate this, with the addition of engine capacity taxes in the various countries of the Automation world. Some countries have a pretty shallow progression in taxation from small engines to large engines, while others are incredibly steep - and these change over time too; you'll just have to play to find out for yourself and adapt to the meta these taxes imply for engine sizes. Fortunately, with all the new forced induction options, size certainly doesn't limit power all that much anymore!
With this, we've also added in a central place to view all of this information. In the new Regulations screen, you can see upcoming changes to emissions and safety standards, leaded fuel status as well as the current and future capacity taxes. In addition, the Regulations screen also shows you the compliance status of each of your car trims, including those in development, which should remove a lot of the guesswork about whether or not your cars are rules-compliant, and (hopefully) stop you from making the often-fatal error of spending billions to develop a car that can't be sold in your target market.
BeamNG Exporter
Our Al Rilma cover car, once again!
The BeamNG exporter has had many improvements made to it for the Al Rilma Update. First and foremost is that you will notice the new Soft-Body export; we've had a complete re-think of how the beams are generated in the exporter, with a greatly improved mesh all over and throughout your exported car models, which dramatically improves the properties they exhibit in BeamNG.drive.
A major change under the hood is that we now use our own custom engine simulation with our BeamNG exports that makes use of all that 2D engine data we now properly calculate (throttle vs. RPM). This makes Automation engines in BeamNG behave a lot closer to how you designed them and makes Automation engines more complex and complete performance integrations into the BeamNG simulation than even their engines at this point.
Additionally, we spent a lot of time working on suspension geometry in exported cars, reworking a number of assumptions and errors we found along the way, as well as spending a lot of time figuring out how to better ensure that exported cars have masses and mass distribution that is as close to the Automation car as possible. Sounds simple, but it was a major focus for our beta testers to go through literally hundreds of cars in testing, to make sure we got all of the progressions and behaviour correct! This has the effect that any car exported to BeamNG.drive from this version of Automation will drive much more realistically and predictably; something that will no doubt we welcomed by a good part of the community!
Compatibility Notes
A stylish JDM sedan, by Kartoha.
All Sandbox cars from the current public build will continue to work just fine, though their engines will need a bit of re-engineering with the new fuel selection tab in the Engine Designer, and new cylinder head types chosen from the new options. All publicly-listed mod content on the Steam Workshop that is compatible with the current public build will continue to work seamlessly in the Al Rilma Update.
Due to the number of new body families/variants in this update, we strongly recommend you subscribe to the Legacy Car Bodies mod if you have an extensive library of cars built in earlier versions. This is where we put all of the old, retired and otherwise broken bodies we remove from Automation; this will at least preserve your existing builds that are on these bodies. If any of your builds are missing bodies, please report them to us; we've retired and added so many bodies in the Al Rilma Update that we're bound to have missed a family in the process! Also note, that we do not recommend building any new cars on the Legacy Car Bodies in the mod, as they all have been replaced by newer, improved version of these car bodies.
Campaign Mode saves from the Ellisbury Update (the just-replaced version of Automation) are not compatible with the Al Rilma Update. If you wish to complete your existing Ellisbury Update Campaign saves, you will need to opt in to the "ellisbury_final" beta branch in the beta version selection, accessible by right-clicking on Automation in your Steam library, then going to Properties -> Betas.
If You Have Lost Your Cars With The Al Rilma Update.
We have had a number of players who have contacted us in the last little while, stating that they had opted in to the Al Rilma open alpha or beta at some point, then rolled back to the old public version.
If you have done this, and you've lost all of your cars, it's a relatively straightforward process to get them back:
Step 1 - In Steam, right-click on Automation and go to Properties. In that tab that opens up (General), click the button in the Steam Cloud tab to turn OFF cloud saves. If it's already off, that's fine, go to Step 2.
Step 2 - Go to %localappdata%\\AutomationGame\\Saved\\UserData (copy this pathway into your taskbar search in Windows, and it will take you to the appropriate folder), and delete your Sandbox_241218.db file.
Step 3 - Once that's done, Start Automation; this will re-generate an Al Rilma save database from your existing Ellisbury save database.
Step 4 - Exit Automation, then go back into your Properties for Automation and turn Cloud Saving back ON. You will get a sync error prompt from Steam; choose the local option to overwrite the save files on your cloud save.
What's Next?
The cars our community comes up with never cease to amaze, such as this wonderful vintage race car from sureascanbe.
Test Track Editor
A bit of a behind-the-scenes look at one of the new tracks in Automation, as seen in our soon-to-be-released, standalone track editor.
You may have seen us talking about the upcoming standalone track editor for Automation. With the new test track simulation we introduced in the Ellisbury Update, which was up until today the public version of Automation, we decided that it would be time to release a proper, standalone track editing tool for Automation. With this tool, you will have full access to the tool that we now use for building your very own custom tracks in Automation, and you will be able to share them with your friends and the Automation playerbase with Steam Workshop integration. While we can't wait to see all the tracks the community makes with this, the editor does need a few more weeks in the oven to iron out bugs and UI issues so that you get the smoothest launch experience possible!
As always, please be sure to report any bugs or issues you may encounter to us, so that we can address them quickly! We've spent a lot of time testing the Al-Rilma Update in closed and open beta testing, and we're pretty confident that your experience with the new version will be a marked improvement over the previous public build.
We look forward to all of your feedback on this new update, please comment and leave your feedback for us here, or in any of our community hubs below.
Cheers, and have fun!
