Released American 80's Fullsize Series 2.1

I decided to make the Custom Cruiser a separate vehicle from the Delta 88.


I had many reasons to do this:

• The configs count for the combined vehicle was almost as big as the D-Series at this point, and I haven't even added most coupe configs, any rusty or beater configs, etc. I didn't want another "Kashira incident" with lots of marginally different configs on the same vehicle cluttering the config selector. Now I can add more variety to Custom Cruiser without cluttering it, I will likely move some Caprice wagon configs there to even out the counts.
  
• In real life they were marketed as separate vehicles. They had different names, different trims, different production ranges, appealed to different markets.
• They don't actually have that many shared parts, both irl and in game. Nearly all of the parts the Custom Cruiser shares with Delta 88 it also shares with the Ninety-Eight. This being most of the front end aside from the fenders, front half of interior, powertrain and all. Due to being shared between the 88 and 98, these parts were already in common folder, so there wasn't much work requied to do this. Compare this to the Delta 88 sedan and coupe, which share everything except the body, rear glass and doors, those make way more sense to be in the same folder.
  
• Config names for the Custom Cruiser get much shorter with it being a separate vehicle. For example it goes from "Custom Cruiser 307 2 Seat Wagon (3A)" to just "307 2 Seat (3A)" because wagon is the only body style. This looks much cleaner. Also with the config name being displayed next to the model name, it doesn't incorrectly say "Delta 88 Custom Cruiser" there.

We will see if I will do the same thing with the Caprice and Impala. On one hand, they share most of the parts so separating them would hurt optimization a bit due to moving many parts to common folder. On the other hand, the Caprice/Impala will likely have A LOT more configs than the Delta 88 due to way bigger amount of factory options available for it, especially police parts. A rough incomplete list I made some time ago attempting to combine all the options from catalogues that would be relevant for the mod:


Let me know what you think about separating the Impala from the Caprice. Meanwhile, there are new Restomod and Drag configs for Custom Cruiser made with the new engine parts I added a while back (I tried to keep similar performance to the old engines, but the drag one is a bit buffed as the wagon will be competing against much lighter sedans and coupes):

 

5 cars. Custom Cruiser is one, Oldsmobile Delta 88 sedan/coupe on the same frame is the second, Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight sedan/coupe/convertible/limo on a longer frame is third, then Chevrolet Caprice sedan/wagon would be fourth and Chevrolet Impala sedan/wagon fifth. In the old version of the mod there are 3 cars, currently there are 4.

 

They have been added for a while now

 

I ended up with 48 configs so far on the Delta 88. Still more than every vanilla vehicle except D-Series, but with Custom Cruiser it would have been 82. Keep in mind these are not all, most are still waiting for skins and other parts to be finished before they can be made. I tried to add variety by not having the same engine + transmission + trim combination between body styles if not necessary.

The demo version of this refresh is getting somewhat close to release. Still a matter of many months though. Before that there's still many things to do:

• Add PBR
• Rework skin UV and edit all skins to fit it
• Add configs that are waiting for skins
• Add more police skins, current police configs are too repetetive, and the Chevrolets will need a lot of police configs so many skins needed for them
  
• Add rusty parts, I have an idea how to do it without too many duplicates hopefully, we will see
• Finish police light bars
• Fix rusty/junkyard wheels, tires, hubcaps
• Try to figure something out for grille options - there are a lot of accurate dual grilles but only 1 inaccurate single grille currently
  
• Research more for suspension parts - which car and which factory option mean which spring rates, shocks, swaybars etc.
• Get someone to tune the suspensions and racing configs better
• Beta testing including real life accuracy assurance and possibly adding some more parts if any are missing
• I always just randomly discover new things that are missing but easy to add so there will be some more of that

 

I will remake the screenshots before demo. And for this mod it's not as easy as just weakening the whole car, the rusty parts have specifically finetuned Jbeams to crumple the way a rusty car would, not just weaker overall. But I have some ideas how to preserve this behavior without duplicating entire parts.

 

I won't add it to the interior and mechanicals. I will add it to the main body as SergentFido already had it in progress and I can finish it.