(Just an idea) If you drive a particular car a lot, you will start to see scratches and the paint will start to fade. The longer you leave the car, the more the paint will get torn up. After a very long time, the car can even get rusty. To avoid this, you can put cars in your garage (that holds like 10 cars). If you have too many cars, you will have to park some outside where they will start to decompose. If the paint starts looking bad, you can drive it to a car wash and the paint will be restored. The decomposition would take a long time, so it's not a problem to leave a car outside for a brief period. This also opens up an opportunity to make your car completely rusty. Something I really wanted to do is make a rat rod and leave it outside in this game. After a while, it would get completely rusted. Then, I would put new wheels and parts to make it a true rat rod. (imported from here) (imported from here) (imported from here)
Wow, where do you get all your awesome ideas? This idea is really cool and realistic, but the time will need to go faster otherwise the paint of you car will fade after 10 - 15 years of playing the game xD.
I like this idea alot. It will be cool to abandon a car from which you got bored, somewhere in a forest or desert, or drive it in a lake/river. And after some time elapsed, you will whant to restore it, or participate in demolition derby and earn some money, but don't want to spent your costs on a car from junkyard. So you will need to find this car which you abandoned, repair it or completely restore it, and you are ready to go. Just imagine large terrain about 2.5x2.5 km or even larger in size, and you need to find your abandoned car somewhere in a forest, or pull it from lake/river's botom.
The wear on paint like that, fading, is a very slow process. It takes many years for that to happen, the fastest I've seen paint start to fade is over 5 years because they wore the wax off it that allowed the sun to bleach the paintwork. Even rust going through paintwork is on the scale of months, if not, years. It'd be nice to have the simulation, and you've given me an idea that expands on yours. I'd like it if the cars had an age variable that affected the stiffness of the frame, the appearance of rust textures, how well the bodywork stays attached, fading paint textures and the car's structural resilience. The simulation shouldn't be performed all the time, but incrementally. Take a range of time, anywhere between 0 and 50 years for example. Say at 50 years the car is basically rotten and will fall apart with little provocation, at 0 the car is basically new. In sandbox, maybe the user could change this with a slider to edit the properties of the car. In terms of a career mode in the game they come out with, If you had a car ownership system maybe the game could record the time you bought it and what age value it had based on your system settings. If you somehow keep a car going for a year the game would add one year to the age variable by checking the date, comparing it with the date you bought the car and adding the difference. Your car would age in real time. This allows for difficulty settings without arbitrarily altering the strength of the vehicles. For the sake of argument, if I assumed that the game was based in the year 2000, we could do this; Easy - all cars bought start with 0 years Realistic - All cars bought can be no younger than the date they where created, so if the Maverick had a production time between 1993-1997, All mavericks will be between 7 and 3 years old. Hard - Cars ages are entirely random Stupid - all cars are between 35-50 years old and age 15,000 times quicker than real-time, one year of aging every 35 minutes. as for repairing paint, how about resprays and the ability to draw on your car? The garage simply slows down the aging process, any cars stored will have their increment delayed by 6 months before the year is added The game itself might want to work on a slightly faster timescale than real-time but it'd allow your car to age without you needing to keep the game running all the time.
I know. The effects would have to be sped up. Maybe if you left a car out for 3 real days, you would start to see some wear. I think 15-30 days would be appropriate for rust. That way, you would have to actually want rust to get it. - - - Updated - - - I figured that the garage would completely eliminate the aging, so the cars would remain in perfect condition. You would have to manage it wisely though. You could buy every car in the game, but you could only store a limited amount in your garage. You could either expand your garage to protect your car, or simply fill your yard with cars. The cars left outside would fade, but the ones kept inside would stay clean.
That's certainly an option and would be a genuine advantage over leaving it in the field. Suppose its really down to the creative control of the developers. although 10 cars in a garage would defeat the point. Just one would make it so you can only preserve your favorite car.
