Custom Scenery Exchange / Custom Rides by X7123M3-256

Just wanted to stop by and continue to thank you for all you've done in the rides department here. Good stuff. Keep it up. I'm trying to squeeze in some rct time into life again thanks to people like you.

would it be possible to one day the following?

 

Eurofighter cars.

Inverted spinning (just think the idea would be very cool on a inverted spinning coaster with loops and inversions

maurer sohne xcars

Inverted spinning? I take it you mean this? I don't think you can have spinning and swinging enabled on one ride, but I could make it swinging with the spinning tied to the turns, as I did on the raft ride.

 

The others are all possible, but the Eurofighter would really need a greatly expanded Intamin track to justify it, otherwise there is no suitable track. I might revisit some of the rides that would run on that track because OpenRCT2 is nearing the point where the missing elements could be implemented. The Intamin accelerator coaster will probably be the next major project I do.

Anyone know if there's a significant difference between Intamin Accelerator trains and Intamin LSM coaster trains (other than the launch mechanism)?

 

EDIT: There is, LSM coasters have the guide wheels spaced further apart on the zero car than the rest of the train, for one thing. It appears Fahrenheight (which Intamin lists as a seperate model) uses the same train design as the LSMs however. It seems that though most Intamin trains look similar from a distance, there are quite a lot of different designs in use.

I have finished modelling an Intamin train as used on their LSM launched coasters and their (so far only) vertical lift coaster. This appears to be the generic version, though there's about as many variants as there are installations, so this gets confusing. This exact version is seen on Fahrenheit and Maverick - the others have either different restraints or added theming, and Taron appears to be an entirely new design. This is not an accelerator coaster, but I hope to do one of those at some point as well.
 
 intaminlsmrender.png (74.07KB)
downloads: 27

Taron seems to be the Mack Mega Coaster trains with added theming.

I looked it up - Phantasialand's website says they were custom designed specifically for the ride, by Intamin. There's no mention of Mack anywhere. They do look similar though.

This train is now completed  - download link is here

Well, this was todays project:

 

 gigavertical.png.635f0b17e8123cbedeb301c3a9a03e44.png (14.51KB)
downloads: 62

 

Currently, the only extra piece I've implemented is the straight vertical piece. I've been able to match the geometry pretty closely - the rails are pixel perfect and the ties are pretty close. However, the shading is still very hard to get right - the game's rails have much better contrast.

 

Looks good! Now that OpenRCT2 is independent of vanilla code, how long do you expect it to take until we can see new track pieces implemented?

With the track paint implemented it can be done right now, which is what I'm trying to do. It's easy to add a track piece once you've got the sprites - just copy the appropriate draw function from another ride and change the sprite indices.

 

I expect Recurious will probably implement his log flume pieces at some point, because he already has the sprites. I have only just started with mine - but once I the track renderer working I should be able to switch out the models easily, so I hope to fill in other missing elements at some point, like banked turns on the suspended and dinghy slide, and heartline rolls and large half loops on the Premier.

Can updates to your RCT2RideGenerator be expected?

I have been meaning to update it for more than a year now but the truth is it's looking at a major refactor, or possibly even a total rewrite. The code is a buggy, unmaintainable mess.

 

The root cause of the problem is the way I implemented the interface - event handlers that directly modify data structures that might as well be global through stored pointers. There is no way for the pointer to be updated if the memory gets moved, so I can't ever move it. I wanted to have the ability to reload a model from a source file, but this just cannot be implemented because it would invalidate all pointers into that memory. Therefore, I still rely on manually editing the JSON file to do that.

 

Another problem is that this uncontrolled mutation easily breaks invariants that may not have existed when the code was first written. The animation window needs to update to show changes in real time - but there is no way for it to be informed of changes. The result is that I have an event handler hooked to every widget that might change something, that triggers a redraw every time the user interacts with it just in case something changed. This is a very inelegant solution.

 

The problem is, I am not exactly sure how best to fix this. I suck at GUI programming, and every time I sit down to try and work on the ride generator I give up shortly afterward. If I'm going to refactor it, I have to come up with an alternative way to do it.

I have now uploaded the source files for some custom trains here. The older ones aren't included because they will take some updating to make work with the current version of the code.

 

In the file, each car is placed one behind the other, but the spacing is not correct since that has to be specified seperately anyway (I have included the JSON file with all of this information). Instead, each car has been moved an integer number of units away from the origin. They should be moved back before exporting - the origin of the coordinate system is taken as the pivot point.

 

Some of the rides have two sets of restraints; one made to match the real ride as closely as possible, and one adjusted to fit the RCT2 peeps. In this case, the one that was actually used is on the front car and the more realistic one is placed on the second car.

 

The models are not necessarily identical to the ones from which the rides were originally rendered - particularly, the wing coaster suffered badly because I didn't know how to make sharp edges in Blender, but I do now so I fixed that. The JSON files that are supplied have not been updated in this manner though, they are the actual files from which the ride was rendered, with original models. That's mostly because updating them is time-consuming; it's something I might do another time.

 

These might be useful if you want to make themed versions of the trains, to use as a base for a new train, or if you want to import them into another game (although they are not textured and not nearly detailed enough for something like NoLimits).

A bit more progress on the Intamin track pieces. They look awful but they work (sort of - there was a glitch I had to fix with the tile inspector which is certainly not ideal).

 

 

Definitely not awful! It looks very promising! 

I don't know how I never saw those track pieces you made! They look great, especially considering that you have to change track type for a drop like that ATM.

Looks like I never posted my other screenshot here either so here it is:

 

 

This was as far as I got with the project - adding track pieces is easy but getting them to blend in with the existing ones is downright impossible.

They're similar enough to me. These are actually track pieces right? Would be awesome to see these implemented.

These are functioning track pieces, not scenery objects. I did actually implement them, screenshots are taken in game. All it takes to add a track piece now is to provide the relevant sprites and a track paint function to draw them (which you can, in most cases, copy and paste from another ride that already has that piece).

 

However, actually producing sprites of sufficient quality isn't easy. Recurious and YoloSweggLord have both had success drawing sprites by hand, but because of the large number of sprites I want to create (and the fact that I suck at drawing), I don't consider this method viable. These screenshots (like most screenshots I post) are taken from the angle that looks the best - viewed from other angles, the shading is off by enough that you would think they had been painted a different color.