RCT Discussion / The Direction of RCT

There was someone making an OpenRCT, but I think he has given it up.
http://openrct.wikispaces.com/

There was someone making an OpenRCT, but I think he has given it up.
http://openrct.wikispaces.com/

RCTER2... FreeRCT is a much more active project

http://freerct.blogspot.co.uk/

I'm more or less an outside observer at this point not a participant, but if you'll permit me a strained analogy here I think perhaps what's going in terms of RCT-related development on this website is something like the Middle Ages. Which is not to imply that it's in any way primitive or regressive, but rather that your're in a transitionary period of shifting cultural mores. The initial burst of creativity which led to the creation of this fansite was more or less the communal outgrowth of a reasonably small number of like-minded individuals. Many of them came from the same fan community (Danimation) and thus had a lot of the same shared experiences. The idea of the park spotlight as a way to prove yourself as a designer and an innovator grew out of that website and iris' idea of taking it further, into featured parkmakers and contests and rankings and all of the other trappings which came along with it. Having experienced that period of time first hand, it's difficult for me to express just how exciting it was to be a part of a community in which everybody was pushing each other upward, sharing ideas or sometimes guarding them like patents and trade secrets, but nevertheless you were anxious to get on here and post whatever it was you were working on because you knew other people were going to take what you did and put their own spin on it. It was a positive feedback mechanism for all of us, feedback in the sense of an ever-escalating recursory wave. But most of those people have moved on for various reasons to other pursuits leaving behind the structure here of what was built, the cultural signifiers if people know where to look for them, but not the creative pulse behind it.

So the new group of talented parkmakers, however they came to be involved with this game and this community, are no less capable than the old guard in my estimation. And in many ways people continue to push things further than even we imagined they could go. But they don't share the same memories that we did. They didn't have that same experience of opening say Universal Island Xtreme or Mount Sinister for the first time when those parks were the state of the art. And not having those experiences, it's only natural that they would be pushing toward different goals, trying to realize other visions of what RCT can be. It's a curious cultural moment if you really think about it, and one that I doubt most fan related online communities have reached yet. The initial generation of progenitors is gone and yet the edifice remains and so in their place a new generation is building their own legacy, some with ties to that older generation and some completely new to the community with barely any knowledge at all of it's existance. I can't possibly explain to someone who has only played RCT2, for example, how the years and years of playing only LL led me to make certain types of artistic choices that I never would have made if I'd only experienced RCT parkmaking in the age of easily-accessible custom scenery and game manipulation tools. It's a completely different way of thinking that I struggled to adapt to later on when I was competing in H2H contests with some of this newer generation. Not better or worse of course, just different. And the context really is everything both for explaining what all of those old parks meant to the community when they were made but also for explaining the trajectory of development, it's various twists and turns. I could imagine an RCT archeologist of the future digging back to the proto-RCT years of 1999-2003 to see what people like me were making back then and completely misinterpreting the intention in the same way we struggle to guess at all sorts of specifics of ancient Greek or Roman culture.

And to bring it back full circle to my initial point, what grew out of the Middle Ages wasn't a new antiquity, a reinterpretation of the past, it was an explosion of science and knowledge and technology that brought worlds together, even saw mankind's ambition extend off the surface of the planet and into heaven. So naturally it follows that I personally can't really picture what might be coming next. I'm the old guard, I'm buried and dead (figuratively, not literally thank god). But as long as there is anything at all to be gleaned from expressing your individual personality in the tools of a programmed piece of computer code, and as long as there remains a community here to support the fruits of that effort and foster collaboration, I can't see how the results, unexpected though they may be, will be anything but wonderful and valid and a suitable legacy for the ghosts of parkmaking past to rally behind and maybe even (Prometheus' ego) take some small level of ownership in helping to create. If it's hyper-realism with ingenius coding tricks or bizarre nightmare dreamscapes of twisted coaster track and infinitely complex towers of stacked objects or if it's concept pieces and storytelling parks, it's all cool. It's all great. NE has always been about it's parkmakers, has always been about the people that create out of nothing so many wonderful and inspired worlds within worlds. Take pride in that, because all of you help to make it. I really hope this is only the beginning.

Wow! Now that was inspiring to read.

Eloquent as always, Ed.

Ed I think we actually reached the renaissance already because you see people nowadays who look back at the old works and try to recapture that style in the new way. I think this topic is testament to it. people who long for the things of the past which seemed so much better in theire eye then what is build nowadays.

Stil it's a interesting read .

The point is that we would be foolish to assume we have stopped developing just because one style is currently a majority.

The "next" direction of RCT is always going to depend on the people involved, and as Ed points out those people are always changing. NE saw a lot of style shifts from 04-06 when influential members went off to architecture school.

Fucking Ed. It's good to see ya man.

we talk about this like we're real people

but seriously, very interesting read, Ed.

Well it was just a theory anyway. But there have been discussions like this for a very long time. Extreme realism was very popular in the early days of RCT -- obviously it looked much different then, but the idea was still the same, to create the best facsimile possible of real life amusement parks and rides. This is actually where a lot of the use of coaster track pieces as theming and coaster supports came from. Before custom scenery there was just no other way to express a fairly simple theming idea like a water tank without building your own out of bits of something else. Those rapid ride lift segments used as steps in one of the banner screens at the top of the page is a perfect example. I learned how to make my own parks by spending about a year making a recreation of Paramount's Great America. That's why everyone started using the huge wide pathways with no peeps as well and the ghost train windows. It all came from recreations. But then with Danimation and later NE there was more of a trend toward taking those tools and using them to create imaginary theme parks -- Universal Island Xtreme, Disney's Discovery Island, etc. But I guess what's interesting to me is that this wasn't really considered a style of building at the time. People were making parks as detailed as they knew how to make them, the tools were just a lot more primitive. And you can ask Posix about this but when I made Erwindale Forest I deliberately tried to achieve a different level of detail and a lot of people saw that as too much. To some it was sloppy and overdone and cluttered and less aesthetically pleasing as the broad strokes and clean lines of a Scheussler or SACoasterFreak spotlight park. Deliberate withholding of detail became a stylistic choice. And it sounds like that discussion is still going on as regards RCT2.

In the end the history more or less writes itself though. People build what they like to build and the trends are going to come and go based on who is here and what their personalities are. Some people have no interest is the hacking part of the game and some people would rather spend hours detailing a building than tweaking a coaster layout to get the perfect pacing. What's so great about RCT is that it's basically just a sandbox to express yourself with. The coaster/amusement park angle is what hooked many of us in, but it's become more than that. It's become a tool where the style of the finished park reflects the individual quirks of it's creator. And that's what's so cool about it. I'm convinced that it's the only reason why RCT parkmaking even continues to exist. So if I was making any kind of a broader point, it's this -- make parks that express what you like, what you want to see. And that will become what's new and interesting. Like ][ntamin22 said, it's the people that define NE and by extension define what's next in RCT parkmaking. As long as you're getting something worthwhile from the experience of interacting with this community and it's enriching your life in some way, what's not to like right?

Look at me rambling away again like old times. I guess I just can't help it. Some things never change.

Ed your posts are always an interesting read, and very broad and philosophical.. but i'm wondering, on a more personal level...

Who are your favourite "modern" builders? Are you familiar with the more modern stuff?

Ed your posts are always an interesting read, and very broad and philosophical.. but i'm wondering, on a more personal level...

Who are your favourite "modern" builders? Are you familiar with the more modern stuff?

You know, I haven't really been keeping up with things enough to fairly say at this point. But I did just take a quick look through the H2H6 parks and the overall level of skill exhibited in that contest is just staggering to me. It's something like buying an ant farm and then forgetting about it for a couple of years and coming back to find that they've built multi-layered sand palaces complete with sewage pipes and running water, terraformed and started growing terraced crops in the open spaces, invented space travel, and colonized the rest of your room. I mean, my god the detail!

If I started trying to pick out individual names I'm definitely going to leave people out unwittingly, but since you brought it up I've always been impressed by your particular aesthetic gift and it seems to me that we have a lot of overlap in our imaginations. I always wanted to do a Myst themed park for instance, Starflight is still one of my all-time favorite Designs, and if I could pick only one RCT creation that I wish I'd created myself it would be Corsair Veredian. That's just a pure slice of visual imagination and it hits on a lot of the visual and thematic motifs that I've always found inspirational -- the ecological symbiosis of the treetop villages and wind and water powered gadgets, airships and balloons dotting the sky, rickety walkways and scaffolds snaking through the landscape, dominating crags of cliff and waterfall with buildings tucked into the folds like insect mounds. There's a utopian vision there of man in harmony with nature that I also find in most of my dreams and sketchings.

I'm sure this is an over-generalization, but at some base level whether it's a book or a movie or a song or piece of music or a play or a painting or a photograph or an RCT park -- all of these media are just ways to tell a story. I like rides in RCT, for instance, primarily because the nature of an animated object which takes you on a journey through the landscape gives an otherwise static picture some narrative drive. But architecture tells a story too and so does landscape and theming and color choice. It's in everything, really. Even in real life, the people who design theme parks like Disneyland are placing all of those elements there to tell stories. Your stories. So when you look back at the pictures you remember the fun you had and who was there with you and why it felt special. On the evidence of the work I've seen, there are some seriously gifted storytellers here and it's inspiring as ever to catch a glimpse of someone else's point of view through what they've created and see the world just a little bit differently as a result. I saw where you said you were retiring from parkmaking and if that's the case I just wanted to say that you should feel very proud. Thanks for sharing all of those wonderful parks with all of us and I hope you never stop telling your own stories, in whatever form they may take.

See, you were the one who got me into the conviction of having to have sound and deep storylines. Likely because they had always been my weak point, and my parks turning out too featureless as a result. I remember your "RCT essence" talk had a certain impression on me, and perhaps moreso how you practiced it in your LL H2H parks. I saw it as the potential key to breakthrough RCT performance for me. I really tried, but it never really quite worked out. I enjoyed "prettying up" things in RCT. I didn't care much for developing storylines. So I could fill a whole map with stylisations and their cosmetics (Allure Lake), but in order to do that I needed a certain minimum of content, which was always a painstaking task for me to pull off. I remember even trying to systematise the way how to collect theoretical content which then to translate to RCT. It never truly worked.

But then I saw players like slob who didn't have much back story either and still created what I found were simply wonderful parks. So I tried to cut myself out of your religion and go the other way. In hindsight though, I don't think I could ever quite find the right balance. Even more so, at some point I just totally stopped caring to tell stories through RCT altogether (Darkwoords Amusement). I perceived stories as anything but enjoyable.

All too soon I was through with my RCT ambitions, and never really resolved this thing.

See, you were the one who got me into the conviction of having to have sound and deep storylines. Likely because they had always been my weak point, and my parks turning out too featureless as a result. I remember your "RCT essence" talk had a certain impression on me, and perhaps moreso how you practiced it in your LL H2H parks. I saw it as the potential key to breakthrough RCT performance for me. I really tried, but it never really quite worked out. I enjoyed "prettying up" things in RCT. I didn't care much for developing storylines. So I could fill a whole map with stylisations and their cosmetics (Allure Lake), but in order to do that I needed a certain minimum of content, which was always a painstaking task for me to pull off. I remember even trying to systematise the way how to collect theoretical content which then to translate to RCT. It never truly worked.

But then I saw players like slob who didn't have much back story either and still created what I found were simply wonderful parks. So I tried to cut myself out of your religion and go the other way. In hindsight though, I don't think I could ever quite find the right balance. Even more so, at some point I just totally stopped caring to tell stories through RCT altogether (Darkwoords Amusement). I perceived stories as anything but enjoyable.

All too soon I was through with my RCT ambitions, and never really resolved this thing.

Heh, well I'm fairly certain I saw things a little differently then. There was probably a point in time when I felt the need to control things and maybe that came across as me trying to impose my vision of what the game should be on everyone else. I don't recall saying something like that, but I might have. It was a long time ago. And if I did say that than I was wrong. This goes back to what I said earlier about RCT being a very individualistic hobby. There are so many different ways to approach the idea of parkmaking. The storytelling scheme is kindof how I understand the world so I see it in everything. But there are also artforms which are meant to be pure sensation rather than narrative. I don't get a lot out of abstract art for this reason, but I know there are plenty of people who really prefer that style of art over more realistic styles. Maybe storytelling isn't the right word for it, then. Maybe just communication is a better one. A more universal one.

It's interesting though that often what a piece of work means to us as it's creator isn't what it means to other people. Your sections in Audrix Towers are still some of the best LL parkmaking I've seen. I don't know where they lie in your own personal parkmaking journey, whether that was a failed project for you or a success, but I loved the atmosphere in that park in particular as much as I've loved atmosphere in any park. But again, I'm sure impressing me wasn't one of your goals. It just so happens that for at least that one point in time our particular interests seemed to coincide for some reason. Cause you know, I'm probably the only other person who loved Schuessler's parks as much as you did. If I still had a parkmaker page, IOA Hollywood would still be listed as my favorite park. But for whatever reason I never could bring myself to build in that style (well, other than copping his landscaping technique I mean ). In my own way I felt like I was still serving his artistic legacy though no matter how cluttered and detailed things got and even if that connection really only made sense in my own head.

It's easy to say this now in retrospect, but I think the biggest thing I got wrong was caring about the H2H votes so much. Because ultimately, I expressed what I wanted to express and the people who were into it got something out of it, and the people who weren't shrugged and moved on to something else. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just the way of the world. But it does take a certain strength of personal conviction to do your own thing regardless of what anyone else thinks and as a 20 or 21 year old I just hadn't figured that out for myself yet. I always built what I wanted to build, but I couldn't understand why so many people just didn't get it. And I realize now that it plain doesn't matter. If you put your ideas into the world they will find their audience if there is one to be found.

As a sidenote, it's kind of funny for me looking back to realize that the kind of overly cluttered layers of detail technique that I applied to RCT is still with me. All my stories are so layered with subtext and thematic content that the actual plot itself gets swallowed up midway through. I write music where even the counter-melodies have counter-melodies and it often doesn't make sense to anybody but me. So there's a lesson here about self-restraint (that idea of balance you were talking about?). There's a certain elegance in simplicity that helps the important parts rise to the surface and I haven't really figured out how to resist the urge to overly clutter things yet. Still, I don't think detail in itself is bad. Perhaps it's just clarity of vision that's lacking. Or the stubbornness to choose one point of view to the exclusion of all others in order to better convey your point. Or maybe I'll just label myself a perspectivist and let other people sort it out.

awwww. now kiss.

Again, where's the damn 'like' button!