Evening all.
I have been working on overhauling
"Not Created Equal" with the intent of adding several new features.
- Allowing players to customise the starting performance of a New Season's Car by both the amount and the areas they wish to invest in (based on Resource points earned). In fact, all teams are given a very very slow basic car template - and each teams standings and resource points are used to build on this template to create a faster car.
- Engine Selection - meaning you are not stuck with a Honda Engine forever if it continues to be really bad - you can sign up to have a different engine (including new engines)
- Engines Develop Independently from the teams each season - meaning that the disaster that is a Honda Engine may well become the best engine in F1 come 5 Seasons in).
- Phasing out the vanilla in game research each season (making vanilla RnD less of a big deal - and...).
- Replacing RnD with a separate system for you to provide upgrades to your car on a race by race basis (though some upgrades may take many races to develop - and performance of the upgrades will vary). Use your experience and teams infastructure to determine which upgrades are worth investing in or not.
- Using the new upgrade system, most components added will be lost at the end of the season, meaning you will have to keep investing in this new RnD to keep current for all 10 seasons, not just the first few.
- 2nd Driver Penalty - If you are the second driver for a team, your teammate gets priority over upgrades which add performance. As such, your car will naturally be a few tenths slower then his, until you become the team leader.
- Car to Track Suitability - Depending how you build your car at the start of the season, some tracks may benefit your car more then others. A small additional penalty / bonus is applied if your car is really suited or unsuited to a track.
- Creating random / scripted events which impact the teams (e.g., Manor get a new owner who invests heavily into the team, improving their starting performance next season. e.g., Mercedes withdraw their engines to all other teams who will have to run different engines next season. e.g., Williams have added an upgrade to their car which makes them untouchable for the first few races of a season, but the FIA deem this as unfair so ban this system for the remainder of the system. etc., etc.,)
The Bad News
While I have the Infrastructure to make all this possible, It's probably gonna take about 5 months for me to do when I consider how much work I have going on naturally, the holiday season coming up and the fact I'll actually be playing games as well as building the mod.
Because of the complexity of the mod, I am designing it in an external program which the player can then use to determine their builds etc, and Petar Tasev has already helped the project hugely by providing me a custom erp compiler so that builds, research and events can be exported to F1 2016 between each and every race, instead of you having to manually move about files at the end of a season.
However, if you want to help me reduce that time frame, there's a couple of areas which others who are modding may be able to help me.
- A User Interface / Graphic Creator - I make no illusions to my graphical design skills; it is Zero - I am neither quick at it, nor will be able to make it anyway pleasing to a persons eye. I can happily code putting a button into the program and making it do things, I simply cannot create any sort of astetic button to save my life. So if someone out there wants to come and make screens, buttons, icons, bars for charts - and can suggest ways to display data, information and inputs so that they're intuitive, then all help is welcome.
- A Content Writer - I can do this, but alas, it takes time which I could be spending implementing features. The Research Items, the Random Events and a couple of other bits and pieces would need to be given at the very least, flavour text such that they make sense. So if you're feeling creative and know a bit about F1 tech, then help is indeed welcome.
There will probably be some other bits and pieces as I go through the development of this, so I'll keep ya'll posted if something comes up.
Final note: If someone can work out a way to rearrange the order of the tracks each season - that would be an awesome as it will let me add an extra feature to this mod.