Ask the Experts / Kumba's Hack Tips

merge a reverse-freefall track for the launch.

The launch pieces in OpenRCT2 are a dirty hack. There are no free slots to add extra track pieces, so the booster piece shares the same track piece ID as the spinning control toggle. The behaviour depends on the track type, so everywhere that track piece is referenced there's a check to see what the current track type is.

But it looks like they missed one - here the track piece ID is compared but the track type isn't. This conditional will execute for booster pieces as well. I think this is the code that turns off the spinning.

Putting a second spinning control toggle or booster piece immediately after the launch piece should turn the spinning back on. However, I'd suggest filing a bug report as this is incorrect behaviour with a pretty simple fix (actually I might submit a PR to fix it).

This sort of thing is why hacking in extra track pieces like this is not a good idea - it's very prone to bugs like this. The only reason they did this for the booster piece is because RCTC did.

merge a reverse-freefall track for the launch.

That will not work - the reverse freefall "launch" pieces are just ordinary straight track pieces (you can see this if you change the track type on a reverse freefall coaster). Reverse freefall coasters will accelerate on any level track.

To get this behaviour, your ride type needs to be the reverse freefall coaster (though you can immediately merge onto another track if you want), and the operating mode must be "LIM powered launch".

However, this is a bit limiting if your layout contains straight track pieces that are not supposed to act as a launch - you cannot control where the vehicle accelerates and when it does not.

actually, this is great news because I always wanted to implement Spinning Control in my coaster but couldn't do it because the Rotating Wild Mouse track allows so little options that it was almost impossible to merge it with my layout if I didn't want to implement longer straight tracks. The launch with two acceleration-tracks works perfectly, so does the Spinning-Control now

Also thumbs up to me for actually getting my ass up for once and build something. Stay tuned for Crazy Chateau Screenshots soon hopefully

BTW, I noticed that the 10-across Dive Coaster Cars have animations for inversions, although the standard dive coaster doesn't allow for these. Is there any chance that we will se a proper spinning coaster or at least spinning cars in the future that animate properly in banked curves or steep slopes?

I've submitted a PR to fix the issue anyway - it is a bug and someone else is bound to run into this problem sooner or later.

Is there any chance that we will se a proper spinning coaster or at least spinning cars in the future that animate properly in banked curves or steep slopes?

I did initially have them spin. There were two reasons why I turned off the spinning on my Maurer Sohne trains.

The first was because the game was crashing when I enabled banked curves. I think it was because there was a limit on how many sprites you can have in an object file, and with 32 times as many sprites as a normal coaster, you can't enable as many elements on a spinning coaster without exceeding this limit. This is all conjecture though - this was before OpenRCT2 so I could not trace the source of the crash.

The second problem was that spinning cars can't support sloped curves. Normally, any ride that has support for slopes contains a full 32 frame rotation of the car on a slope, but if the train is spinning, this becomes a 4 frame rotation. I think this was done to save sprites since none of the default spinning rides have this track piece available. However, it's annoying, because it means that if you want sloped curves you must turn off spinning. I'd have prefered a few extra sprite flags.

I decided it was more important to support the full range of elements than to enable spinning, as Maurer's rides tend to be quite different in layout to the Reverchon ones and can't really get away with such a limited set of track pieces. So I faked the spinning by having the cars rotate as the train navigates a curve. Sometimes this works well, sometimes it looks terrible but it was the lesser of two evils.

Support for spinning was later dropped from my ride editor, with the intention to reimplement it at a later date, but that hasn't happened and I no longer update the tool. I could still make an actual spinning car in principle, but it isn't as simple as rerendering the original file at this point.

Not the right topic for these questions, but good to see X7 (by any chance, do you have a name with letters you also go by?!) supplying you with the answers.

This topic is hopelessly out of date and some of the tips in it are also out of date. If I ever find the screens I took for it, I could update it.

The PR was merged so this bug should be fixed - if you update to the latest develop version you should find that booster pieces no longer interfere with the spinning.