Help us out: Engine Designer Revamp

I noticed a few things, but I'm not sure which of them are this way by design:
1. I may be misinterpreting the "responsiveness" value, but it doesn't behave like I would expect it to in relation to the cam profile. I can push the cam-profile to 100 and get a torque curve that resembles one from a jet engine. The responsiveness-rating of such an engine is very good despite the fact that it'd take half a minute to rev to the limiter in neutral. Responsiveness should take the ratio of available torque at several rpms to the engine's inertia into account.
2. Similarly the bore/stroke-ratio doesn't appear to have the kind of influence on responsiveness I would expect. I didn't run the math but I would expect that given identical combustion volume the engine with the lower bore/stroke-ratio would have a higher angular inertia and thus feel less responsive to the driver.
3. The effect of the valve-timing slider appears not to be very useful. Right now I either leave it at the bottom for all engines or tune it so it creates a little torque-bump to boost maximum torque. I think generally the mechanic doesn't add a lot to the gameplay.

[Daffyflyer]

Yeah, responsiveness is more how snappy it is on the throttle, how well you can rev match shifts, that kind of thing. How torquey and "midrangey" it is will be determined from the torque curve and combined with the gearing etc will determine a lot about how the car feels to drive.


2: Will investigate this one, interesting thought.


3: Yeah, I'm not 100% a fan of this right now, will consider removing it I think

Regarding responsiveness:
It's been discussed some time that the term "responsiveness" is unintuitive. But that's not your fault, the concept of moment of inertia is just not well known to the broad public. I'd like to suggest that all testing results get mouse-over-tooltips to avoid further confusion. That would be the place for the layman's terms explanation and the more precise definition. That would also allow you to add more test results.

Just a few (it started off as a few anyway ) thoughts/ suggestions from myself;

1) Consider adding options for wet/dry sumps, the wet sump would be more reliable in low performance applications and much cheaper. The dry sump should add cost and servicing costs but increase reliability in high performance applications and allow for a more compact bottom end.

2) Are the grades of steel for forged and billet cranks uniform? If so the forged with it's better grain structure would be more resistant to long term fatigue for regular applications rather than the billet machined crank, which only has the directional flow of the original extrusion (that said you can impart this quality via heat treatment).

3) Will there be simulation of one off costs and tooling costs for the manufacturing processes later in the game? For instance to refer back to the crank, a forged option has a large set up cost but a much reduced material and labour cost in comparison to a machined crank which has negligable set up cost (providing the machines/ heat treatment facilities are available) but high tooling costs. I appreciate this may not add much fun to the game and perhaps add uneccasary depth but I thought I'd raise it anyway!

4) An option to choose between belt, chain and geared engine chests would be appreciated. It would provide an extra dimension in the cost/ reliability battle and another tool to get those extra pesky M/revs

5) Valve return systems, choosing between springs and pneumatic return systems would allow for more modern automobiles to achieve better fuel economy and performance and allowing much higher RPM's well beyond the natural frequency of valve springs (about 12krpm I recall). The opportunity to model Fiat's multi air engine or a 2006 21k rpm F1 car engine would be awesome!

6) More options to choose material will always be welcome to me though I appreciate this may not add to the wider appeal of the game, options for various surface and heat treatments would follow the same point. Maybe expansion packs of extra detail for the particularly anorack amongst us would be a long term option?

7) Will the option for clutch type be part of the gearbox tool or should that be part of the engine designer?

Finally, I just want to say what a fanastic game the demo alone is, it's been utterly engrossing from day 1!

Not sure if this has been covered elsewhere, but the construction year timings for fuel injection seem REALLY off. Many Japanese cars had electronic multipoint injection in the late 70's, but they don't appear until you wind the game year up to 1993 (1988 for single point injection). Seems weird.

Maybe change the efficiency of the FI based on the year set. ECU's in 1980 were incredibly limited compared to 1990, which were again primitive compared to something from 2000. Maybe add something like sequential vs batch injection (affects emissions, responsiveness efficiency etc) and have it's availability based off the year.

[Daffyflyer]

One thing to note is that the year of availability is when its freely available to everyone. In the actual game, if you research you can unlock them ahead of that date, but it wasn't till the early 90s that EFI was absolutely ubiquitous, it was only used by the companies that had put in the R&D to get it working for them

Issue description: No noticeable change of sound on hi/low cam change
Possible solution: Make it louder and deeper at hi cams
Important because: Sound better, and more right

[Daffyflyer]

^already done, just not released in the public version yet

Also will you make the "valves" in the throttle bodies move, and make an animation on the hi-low cam change over when on dyno?

As ive seen a few other places in this forum, i would really like al little more realism in the mixture, cam and ignition metrics.
100 Fuel Mixture? 100 cam profile? 100 ignition timing? Its confusing and abstract, and i cant really associate it with anything.. I understand that the cam slider is probably the most complex one to change; it would at least need lift and duation (i would be very happy with that).. But the two other, ign. timing and mixture, would really just need a name and range for the variable, like degrees [30,-10] and fuel/air ratio [x,y].