Custom Scenery Exchange / Custom Rides by X7123M3-256

this is how I did a mack water coaster

 

 

Its okay-ish I guess.

The lift doesn't look too bad actually. Whenever I try to layer two tracks on top of each other it usually glitches horribly. The rest of the track is too narrow though - it needs to be wider than the boats and there's very few available tracks that have that property. You're basically stuck with wooden, bobsled, or heartline twister, none of which really work for this.

Wood track with no supports is the most accurate you can get with this kind of ride, unless you don't really use turns and you can use heartline then

What bothers me so much about the water coaster is how fast it looses speed. I know, they're supposed to be slow, but damn, is it annoying. I'm trying to design some kind of Poseidon/Atlantica hybrid, but anything more complex than a valley with a turn is impossible since it just dies on every slope.

Then why not just hack the friction lower?

Because you seem to be the only one who knows how.

It's a little difficult to "just hack the friction lower" when there doesn't appear to be any tools to do so.

I'm not too much into the game mechanics either, but wouldn't the changed values just be tied to your system (meaning that the friction values were reset to standard when somebody would download my park)?

Because you seem to be the only one who knows how.

 

Really? Do trainers not do this? I'm surprised at that because it's exactly the sort of hack that a trainer could implement easily - you don't need OpenRCT2 for this, though that's what I use. At the moment my method is to patch vehicle_create_car in the source code to set the friction to the desired value. Then I open the game, spawn the train, then save the game and revert back to the unpatched version. This is pretty straightforward (at least if you already have a source-built version of OpenRCT2, not so much if you're using the binary distribution), but it is a bit awkward. It would be better as a console command, I'll implement that soon.

 

Previously I had an alternative method that involved modifying DAT files. You can still do it this way but it's long, complicated, and pretty much obsolete as far as I'm concerned. I used to use this method when I knew that the friction could be changed but not exactly where it was stored.

 

 

I'm not too much into the game mechanics either, but wouldn't the changed values just be tied to your system (meaning that the friction values were reset to standard when somebody would download my park)?

 

No, it will persist for others. Friction values are saved in two places. One is in the .DAT file - you can change it via this route but getting it to persist without having to export the modified .DAT is tricky. However, when an actual train is created, a struct is allocated for each vehicle of the train, and the friction value is copied there, so you can adjust friction on a per-train (or even per-vehicle) basis, and the result will be saved in the SV6 file (it does not reload the value in the .DAT on load, so this will persist when the park is loaded again). However, if you despawn the train and recreate it, the friction value is reset, and you have to do the hack again.

 

 

I'm quite surprised there aren't already tools for this - but if all else fails, you can decompress the SV6 and edit it manually (I assume there are tools for doing that? If not, I'll have to post the script I use sometime).

X7 you might be hold the record for knowing the most neat little tricks in RCT2. It's probably a safe assumption that nobody else knows, with the possible exception of the rest of the OpenRCT2 team.

Really? Do trainers not do this? I'm surprised at that because it's exactly the sort of hack that a trainer could implement easily - you don't need OpenRCT2 for this, though that's what I use. At the moment my method is to patch vehicle_create_car in the source code to set the friction to the desired value. Then I open the game, spawn the train, then save the game and revert back to the unpatched version. This is pretty straightforward (at least if you already have a source-built version of OpenRCT2, not so much if you're using the binary distribution), but it is a bit awkward. It would be better as a console command, I'll implement that soon.
 

No, there's not a trainer that does anything to do with friction values currently. I imagine if someone knew where the friction values are stored, they could modify them with winhack, but there's so few people who even use winhack that I doubt anyone's figured it out.

And yeah, I'm pretty sure that the intersection of people who would care to change friction values and people who have source-built OpenRCT2 contains only you.

Interesting. I never used trainers so I don't know exactly what features they offer, only the features that could be implemented with a trainer. I do a lot of things by messing with the source code that I know other people use trainers for, like lowering track pieces, so I thought this was another one of those.

No idea if this is too much effort, but do you see any way to implement an easy way to change friction values in OpenRCT2 by adding in an option via a patch or something like that? I'd love to make use of a function like that, since the water coaster isn't the only ride suffering from maladjusted friction values. 

Yes, I will probably implement a console command or something, but I won't have time until early June. If you need it done before then, send me your save file and I can lower the friction until it makes the circuit. Make sure you're satisfied with the layout beforehand though - entering construction mode will reset the friction back to default

Thanks for the offer, but I can wait. I'd rather tinker around with different layouts once the partch is done. BTW, is the friction value a universal value that is constant on the entire track, or do regular brakes just increase the friction value on their allocated place, slowing down the train to a certain value? 

The friction value is associated with the train, not the track. The friction is constant througought the ride. You can have seperate friction values per car, but I will probably just implement a console command to set the friction for every vehicle on a ride to a single value, as I don't see much use for anything more specific.

 

Brakes are a seperate track piece, and the brake speed is a distinct value from the friction. The brake speed is stored in the higher four bits of the sequence number for the track element. That means that every track element has a brake speed, even those that are not brakes - it just has no effect for those.

I just realized Friday was exactly a year since I released my Intamin wing coaster. I originally planned to have something released by that date, but it didn't happen because I got stuck trying to fix the drawing code. Oh well, I'm sure I'll get something done over the summer.

I've finally resumed work on this. I now have support for encoding and decoding small scenery and walls. I've not actually created any yet, just testing the encoder at the moment. Since a lot of the code is shared adding support for the remaining object types should become easier now - although getting rides fully working is still a difficult task because of the amount I still don't know about them.

 

The new renderer remains incomplete, as the correct lighting parameters have yet to be determined and I haven't decided how to handle animation - whether it should be part of the renderer or something else entirely, and what changes need making in order to make it flexible enough to be used for scenery. However, I'm hoping to have it ready for some simple tasks soon - I am thinking of a tool that can take an image texture and/or relief map and make a wall or path from it.

 

The next custom train I make will be most likely be either a Timberliner or Intamin Accelerator train, haven't decided which, but I don't plan to start that until after this refactor. I'm also thinking about trying to do an Intamin drop tower (the one with individual cars, not the rotating one that's already in the game). However, my last attempt at a tower ride was a disaster so I'll see how that goes.

I was asked to render a train model sent to me by geewhzz. I'm told it's not a real design. It looks similar to the Mack trains but has some differences. I don't know if it'll be useful for anyone but geewhzz, but here it is anyway.

Somebody on another forum wanted an alpine coaster, so here's one I threw together. It's pretty poor quality and not realistic since it isn't based on a real alpine coaster (modelling from photographs is the most time consuming part of the process, so I simply skipped it). Because of this it's probably not suitable for use in a park where realism is the goal. Nonetheless, I thought I would post it here as well.