DaemeonX

OK, so let's talk verisimilitude. The gameplay in CMS is an odd blend of pretty plausible things, things that have been streamlined for the sake of gameplay, and a few shortcuts that are kind of odd.

The diagnostic tools and the way they're used are pretty reasonable. Apart from the "test path" (the room with the suspension and brake testing stuff, which is all arranged on a track the car moves along), they're mostly handheld gadgets you access through the radial menu system that is how most things in the game are done or manipulated. You have a tread depth tester, which will tell you whether the tires on the car you're testing need to be replaced; an electrical multimeter, which can test various bits of the electrical system (battery, alternator, cooling fans in cars where those are electrical, etc.); a fuel pressure tester, which will tell you if the fuel pump, fuel filter, or (if so equipped) fuel injection system is bad; an OBD reader, which can access the on-board diagnostic computer in more modern cars and report things like failed ignition coils and whatnot; and a compression tester, which will tell you if there's a problem with the pistons, piston rings, crankshaft, or engine block.

Older cars don't have an OBD port, so the reader is no use with those, but then most cars that age don't have electronic ignition systems with individual coils for each cylinder either, so that works out. The other stuff works on all cars, with the caveat that the compression tester won't work if the engine is incomplete, so it's usually not useful on barn finds (which are almost always missing their oil pans and at least one cylinder head cover). Amusingly, even racing cars with slick tires can be checked with the tread depth tester, which will report if the slicks are too worn and have to be replaced.

The OBD port brings me to one of the odd concessions the game makes to playability, namely: a bunch of the stuff that would be on the car, mostly inside the engine compartment, is omitted to reduce visual clutter and make working on them less complicated. For instance, although cars with mechanical distributors have ignition wires, the ones with electronic ignition don't; the coils just sit on top of the spark plugs, not connected to anything. Similarly, cars with ABS have the computer module for same, with a big edge connector on the front of it, but there's no cable to connect. The hoses that connect air filters to induction manifolds are likewise just not there; the air filters in modern cars seem to live in a little plastic box off to the side of the engine and just work through a sort of totemic magic. Like air filters, radiators are just there, not connected to anything, nor do they need to be drained or filled. Also, evidently no car in the Car Mechanic Simulator universe has air conditioning, or even a heater. There are no AC compressors, fan motors, ducts, heater cores, or anything like that to mess around with.

Suspension systems are similarly a bit simplified. All cars in CMS use the same universal steering rack and tie rods; there are only two kinds of coil spring in the whole automotive industry, front and rear, and one model of leaf spring fits every car old enough to have leaf springs in the back. Brake discs come in ventilated (which always go on the front) or regular (always on the back), in only one size. Every car in the world takes the same single-cylinder brake caliper, except the Bentley Continental GT, for which there is a unique type that takes two cylinders. Even then, they're the same cylinders that the normal ones use.

There is some variation in suspension parts—there are a few different styles of lower suspension arm, and some cars have fully independent rear suspension while others have an old-fashioned live rear axle, and so on. It's a lot less complicated than in the real world, though.

Ditto for engine parts. Pretty much every American car in CMS that dates to before 1980 uses the same overhead-valve V8, parts for which are interchangeable between every example of same in the world. I've taken apart a General Motors small-block V8 before, and the OHV V8 in CMS seems very like one of those, but there are a few things about it that are a bit Ford-y—although if you have the Ford DLC installed, that adds actual Ford engine models to the game, which are basically the same as the original OHV V8 parts, except they're painted blue and only like to be used with each other. Even those, though, take the same universal piston as every other engine in the world except the '60s Chrysler Hemi engines and the W12 in the modern Bentleys. Working on a Ford 351 Windsor Race engine out of a GT40? The generic OHV V8 in a Chevrolet El Camino Bolt Atlanta? The inline-4 in a Smart Emden Lotz microcompact? Doesn't matter, you need Piston and Piston Rings; accept no substitutes. :)

I could go on, but you get the idea. A lot of this is simple to understand, as anyone who has ever had to source and apply parts for any real automobile will readily recognize. The back rooms at auto parts stores are bigger than the area the customers get to roam around in for a reason, and having to hunt around in parts menus any deeper than the game already has would get old real fast.

All that said, though, the parts and procedures involved in the game do bear a worthwhile resemblance to the way they work in the real world; they've just left out things that the developers deemed would be too much of a hassle for all but seriously hardcore sim-gamers to be willing to do.

I'll give you an example: When you're rebuilding an overhead-valve V8 engine, which you will be doing a lot if you play this game, you have to remove the individual valve rocker arms from the cylinder head, then pull out each valve push rod, before you can unbolt the head from the engine block. That's pretty fiddly work, since an OHV V8 has two valves per cylinder, so by the time you're done dismantling one head, you've unscrewed eight rocker arm retention bolts, pulled out eight push rods, and then undone the six bolts that hold the head onto the block.

(I should note here that you place or remove a part by long-clicking on the part, in remove mode, or the highlighted place where it goes, in install mode, and do up or remove any fasteners on said parts by long-clicking on them, in turn, once your first long-click has put the part in "putting on" or "taking off" mode. Parts without fasteners only take the one long-click to go on or come off. Precise positioning is important for the smaller parts, so the valve push rods are a pain in the ass even though they don't have fasteners.)

Doing the push rods and rocker arms on one of these cylinder heads is a fiddly job in the CMS interface, but in the game, the work of dealing with the head ends there. In the real world, you would then take the head to a workbench and painstakingly undo all the retention things for the springs holding the valves on, take the springs off, remove the valves themselves from their seats in the head, and inspect everything, grind the valves smooth again or replace them if they're too far bone, possibly replace the seats... rebuilding an overhead-valve cylinder head is an enormously fiddly and time-consuming job in its own right, IRL. And that's only for one side of the engine. You've got eight valves' worth of that to do on the other cylinder bank, too.

In Car Mechanic Simulator, once you've taken the head off, you take it over to the repair bench and click "repair". You'll pay a little money and, depending on your repair skill and an RNG roll, either restore it instantly to 100% condition, or break it and have to buy a new one. In either case, you're done and can put it straight back on.

I haven't looked, but I bet there are people on the Steam community forum for this game complaining bitterly that it doesn't let/make them actually rebuild the head in exact lifelike detail. I am not one of those people. I've done it in real life, and probably will again this summer, and I'm not looking forward to it. Working on car engines can be fun, but rebuilding a cylinder head is a shit job. :)

So yeah. Lot of typing just to say that the gameplay is stripped down to make it a decently paced game, but still realistic enough to be interesting if you know about how that stuff works, and probably instructive if you don't. I don't think it would teach a layperson how to fix an actual car, but it would at least provide some insight into how they work.

(Similarly, although you take jobs and get money for doing them, the game is not really a detailed business simulator. You cannot, for instance, make your customer angry by trying to repair a part that was not below the job's "minimum acceptable condition" threshold, breaking it, and having to buy a new replacement for it; it just goes on the bill and the customer pays it without demur when you turn in the job. It would be interesting if there were a mechanism in the game for developing a reputation for quality work or shoddy, fair dealings or foul, by the way you do the jobs, and have that affect the kind of clientele you attract and whatnot—but I'd only want that if it could be turned off. It would certainly damage the casual-ability of the game if it were mandatory.)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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DaemeonX