Pro Tour 2 / The Pro Tour 2

Blitz, you are entirely correct, especially this bit:

And on that note, it's not like one can see into your MIND what fantasy "realistic" coaster you were "working" from to make your "realistic" coaster. Those fudges are game fudges to the viewer, not realism fudges. They are fudges based on how other people have TYPICALLY fudged RL coasters to fit RCT. It's a stylization, not a realization. But people either don't realize that or don't care, and thus don't realize they aren't making something realistic, they are just ripping on a style that claims to be.

Oh, and a question about this hotel thing, does it have to be a "Hotel" (a large urban building, with rooms and suites for rent, accesible from the inside), or can it be any place providing short-term lodging? Say, a Hostel, Motel, Bed and Breakfast, or those wierd Japanese things where you sleep in a plastic box? Just wondering before I get too far into this...

Those work too.

Can it be a cryogenic freezer chamber?

I can see it now...

The ALCOR Resort & Spa - Scottsdale, Arizona

endorsed by Teddy Ballgame himself!

But wouldn't that make it a long-term residence, rather than a short-term one? Or are people really so frightened off by aging that they want to not age the 8-hours they sleep every night? Well, maybe, considering that's one third of your day. Imagine: "If you had done this from birth, at 30 you would have looked and felt 20!"

It might just work, actually... chillingly... sadly...

...either that, or I've gone bat-shit loco...

You probably shouldn't put that at the end of your post. It gives people an easy out instead of trying to answer the difficult question you've brought up.

There's definately a trade-off between what works in the game on a mechanical level and what works on a visual level. I find most of the time when my coasters fail to function within the game's mechanic it's because I've done things which I know are wrong from a mechanical standpoint, but nevertheless they fulfill my desire to create something visually impressive. It's not simply a matter of not understanding the requirements of a good coaster design or falling into the trap of using 'realistic coaster' cliches. There's also an element of ideology involved. When I'm trying to create a ride, it's important to account for the mechanical element. Because of the way the game is designed it becomes neccessary to sacrifice some visual appeal to make the ride work.

Think about real coasters for a second. Some of them create a fantastic ride experience without being very visually pleasing. An impulse coaster for example can be fun to ride, but it doesn't really add much to the visual aura of an amusement park. Then you've got something like John Allen's Racer which, in terms of ride experience, is nothing new or extraordinary but it's notable because of how fantastic it looks in it's surroundings. It uses coaster track not just as a functional means to an end, but also as sculpture. That's two very different ideologies about the purpose of a coaster. I think you're speaking to some kind of ideological ideal which is a perfect blending of the two. If you can make the ride experience perfect and the visual look of it perfect, than you have achieved in some sense a perfect coaster design.

I understand that concept of the ideal coaster because I often aspire to it myself. However, there are other times when I prefer sometimes to work in extremes. I bring up binary oppositions usually as a joke, but this is one instance when I think it can be useful. If there's a balance of function and visual design, then we can think of those two parts exclusively. What would a coaster be that is fully functional vs. one that is fully visual? Probably most people don't even bother thinking about these concepts and just build by feel. Because my nature tends toward rationalization, I find it interesting sometimes to build around an ideological concept. That's where the idea for the garden park comes from, a diliberate challange to the notion of what an RCT amusement park should be. To this end, I sometimes find myself intentionally discounting the mechanical element in the interest of creating a perfect composition. It's not that I think the mechanical element is unimportant. I just get fascinated with the idea of 'the coaster as sculpture' and concentrate on that.

To take egytopia as an example, there's some of both. Sandstorm Rally is creating a ride experience not a sculpture. In fact, there isn't any track at all that's visible on the surface which means the ride is freed completely from the visual element of the track and becomes purely mechanical. The visual element is there in the theming, but it's all designed to work from the rider's point of view, not the park viewer. Then there's Pestilence which is built more as a sculpture. The whole concept of custom supports in RCT is about 'coaster as sculpture' more than it is about realism I think. At least the way they're used by NE parkmakers. Looking at my own work I tend to seperate the mechanical and visual elements and concentrate on one or the other. If it's a trackless ride it's always about the ride experience. If it's a traditional coaster, the concept of sculpture is foremost in the design process. The important part for me is getting the track right. The actual train going around the course is more of an afterthought.

It's occured to me since speaking with you how much preference I give to the visual element in designing coasters. I did it quite subconsciously before. Even with real coasters, I actually enjoy looking at pictures of them more than I enjoy riding them. There are exceptions of course. I think suspended coasters like Ninja are equally fun to ride and look at. That makes it a perfect coaster as far as I'm concerned. And while I realize there should be a balance in the game, an ideal blending of the mechanical and the visual, I'm too stubbornly perfectionist to give up any of the visual style I've worked so hard to cultivate. I create the sculpture how I like it and then it's a struggle to turn that into something that works mechanically too. Since my perfect coaster is both perfect visually and perfect mechanically, I'm not willing to give up anything visually in order to make the mechanical element work better. I want to keep the visual at 100 and get the mechanical up to 100 too instead of dropping the visual to 75 in order to get the mechanical up to something like 75. The result is that I end up with coaster which could rate 90-100 visually and 20-30 mechanically. Given my own tendencies, I'm usually okay with that. It doesn't surprise me that other people don't think as highly of them as I do though, given how much preference I give to the visual.

Which gets me back to the question of how much ride stats matter. When RCT parks stopped being peep friendly, people stopped putting stalls in them. It was right I think to recognize that they are not necessary. If ride stats represent the 'ride experience' from the perspective of a peep, they are only as necessary to the functioning of the park as stalls are. If you don't have peeps, you dont need ride stats. This leads me to a different interpretation of what the 'mechanical element' means when referring to RCT rides. It could mean the extent to which the ride conforms to the game's mechanic for generating ride stats. That, I think, is the definition you are using. That acknowledges that RCT is a game and as such there is both a right and a wrong way to play it. There's another interpretation though which goes back to what I said about impulse coasters. The mechanical element of a coaster design, as it relates to real life, is the ride experience. The forces it exerts on the rider, the twists and turns it takes them through. You're not just trying to make the coaster look beautiful to people standing next to it, you're trying to make it fun for the people riding it too. I think you can do that in RCT without having ideal ride stats. You have to pay attention to the shape of the track. How smooth the turns and elevation changes are. Sharp unbanked turns create painful forces on the riders. I think the ride stats thus are a useful tool for refining the mechanical element of a coaster. If you ignore the stats completely and put in those sharp unbanked turns just because they look good (which I'm as guilty of as anyone) you're creating a coaster sculpture which may be fun to look at, but it's essentially unrideable. The ride stats were not designed to accomodate track merging and all of the other hacks people use now, so I don't think they're really the rule. I think you can have a ride that is great mechanically and still has awful stats. And that's because I think the mechanical element of the ride has more to do with the ride experience than with trying to accomodate the design of the game. If I really cared about playing the game the way it was meant to be played, I would be playing scenarios and trying to make money and keep peeps happy. But I think you're right Blitz that it's really incorrect to just say that the stats should just be ignored completely. I tend to think they mean less than most people here do, but I still pay attention to them and use them to refine my coaster designs and consider the ride experience as that's an equally important part of designing a coaster as how well it looks as a sculpture. In terms of amusement parks, it's probably more important.

And I'm tired of these greens going around talking about how stats are useless and bogus simply because they never spent the time getting acquainted with what exactly affects them.  There are a lot of factors that work towards creating the intensity, naseau, and excitement ratings, most of which are simply dismissed cuz "i changed it to make it better and it got worse instead".  Wrong, you simply aren't taking all the factors into account.  It's a question of skills and knowledge, it's NOT random, people!  Seriously.

I wasn't saying that ratings are random, they are based on numbers, which is the problem (stuff like a 70 mph launch for a station will become 10 excitement rating, or whatever). Computers can't feel feelings as far as I'm concerned, even if it's a made-up feeling.

The whole concept of custom supports in RCT is about 'coaster as sculpture' more than it is about realism I think. At least the way they're used by NE parkmakers....The important part for me is getting the track right. The actual train going around the course is more of an afterthought.

The first part I agree with, the fact that most people use custom supports merely as decoration, which has a whole thing to do with copying others who have copied others who maybe at some point in time had made supports for a realism cause.

Anyway, correct me if I'm wrong but I recall you stating a while back that you were not satisfyed with your coasters, although I forget any particular aspects, if any, that you mentioned. Do you think that the second part of what I quoted has anything to do with that? In real life, I would say that most of the time a B&M coaster is more pitturesque than an Intamin coaster, the way the track flows and the supports and the track itself. The thing is, some of the worst looking coasters happen to be some of the best rides out there. Back to the Intamin and B&M thing, I would definitely agree with anybody who said that Great Bear looked more dominating than Storm Runner, yet Storm Runner is by far the better ride. At PKI, the legendary Racer is definitely a better sight to see than the hidden although to me more legendary Beast, but the Beast is by far the better coaster. I would agree that coasters can be beautiful in how the shapes of the track blend together and all, but lets not forget the purpose of a rollercoaster in the first place like so many at this sight have. I personally wouldn't necessarily sacrifice looks for experience or vice versa when working on a realistic project, but I would try to take the philosophy of the manufacturer. It seems to me when the manufacturer is you and you're not satisfied, I think that the manufactuerer should rethink their philosophy.

About the whole ratings thing, if you recreate a coaster to the best of the game's abilities, you are bound to get something that is tolerable by rct's standards unless the coaster in question is a rather intense one in real life. Recreating Robin: The Chiller is impossible to get the intensity under extreme, and that's a challenge to anybody. Although the limitations of Rct partially contribute to this with the single sized corkscrew and whatnot, Robin is one of the most intense coaster experiences I have ever ridden to begin with. Would it be wrong then when making an accurate recreation to make the ratings extreme? I'm not sure if this last paragraph was pertinent to anything but I felt it had a good point to make.

Another thing to note about ratings is that heavy hacking can affect them. I know that when I was making Frightnights sometimes the ratings would be 40+ excitement and intensity while other times being just that high in intensity, messing with the game's engine messes its physics also.

Man...this topic has completely switched from one thing to the other. Not that I'm complaining...it's a good discussion to have.

Personally I build the track so that the train will flow through it in a way that is pleasing to me. That's why I hate is so much when people build their coasters in a way that the banking and unbanking of turns is done in a "choppy" way. I perfer to have my coasters "bank" or "unbank" for or after turns while leveling off from a rise/drop or going into one. Oh and another thing, when you have a barrel roll or corkscrew that goes to the right (for example) if there's a turn out of it I feel that it must also be to the right, how hard is it to switch the direction of the roll to make the banking into the turn flow with the roll of the inversion?

Once my obsessiveness over flow is satisfied and the elements I desired are in place then I might fine tune the ratings by tweaking things here and there.

Basically the flow of the ride, or the riding expearence, is first for me when it comes to the layout. Oh and as part of the riding expearence, how about having turns that go left and right on the same ride? Even if it doesn't effect the visuals much it effects the ride expearence in a big way imo.

The elements that I believe make up the riding expearence are when I consentrate on first, followed by the visual look and finally by ratings. Doing it different just wouldn't do for me.

ride6

[sir edwards essay]

well, I wrote a bunch in response, but I felt it was really superfluous, so I rewrote it... and then trashed it again.

All I have to say is that pacing is a skill which is both mechanical and aesthetical in nature, and the ratings and graphs of coasters is a good way to acquaint yourself with the workings of the games engine in that respect.

So ed, while that 20 - 30 won't change, messing around with/practicing on the mechanical aspects from time to time will raise the quality of that 20 - 30. Personally, I used to take large blank maps, and fill them with duelers until there was no room left. Or, I would take the micro park bench and build coasters in that. That's just what I did though...

are you allowed to post youre entry for the pre-rounds at the advertising district before the end of the round ?

Unlikely. If you wanted feedback you could ask people over AIM, I guess. But then again, do you want other people knowing what you're up to?

are you allowed to post youre entry for the pre-rounds at the advertising district before the end of the round ?

Definitely not. By tradition, these have been kept secret. I don't think you can have other people test it in game (i.e. sending the park to a few select people for feedback) either, but you'll have to ask Iris for that.

At most, if you could show screens, it'd be one, but I'm not completely sure whether the one-screen rule applies to the prelims as well as the actual Pro Tour.

We can show 1 screen? Really? I might do that in a couple days... still have some work to do before any of it is properly presentable...

Actually the one screen applies only to the actual Pro Tour. No screens are allowed for the Prelims. Besides...it wouldnt make sense to show screens.

Why not? Why must I wait to show people my pretty buildings? Oh, well... I think it makes sense to show them... but... whatever...

As much as I want to show off, I have to agree with not showing screens. Ruins the surprise.

I like what Ed is saying about the visual aspect vs the mechanical aspect. Its a constant battle, as the 2 can literally detract from one another. Personally, I put more importance on the mechanical aspect, not the visual, but thats cause of my background as a mechanical engineer, its in my blood. But lately i've grown to appreciate the visual more, and have come to see RCT as more of a "mechanical artform" and have been striving more to blend the 2 in a way that satisfies both, making the coaster mechanically sound, and using custom supports in a more "real life" way, but also using the scenery to disguise the mechanical as more visually pleasing. This is definitely an interesting topic for discussion....

As much as I want to show off, I have to agree with not showing screens. Ruins the surprise.

Expect another defeat.

Expect another defeat.

You know, I was thinking about that the other day.


But my, how the tables will be turning.