Custom Scenery Exchange / Custom Rides by X7123M3-256

The woodies may well have too high friction - it's not something I can do anything about unless I do my own wooden trains, however.

 

I don't know how I can compare my car against the original, when the game doesn't have a B&M wing coaster car - so there's nothing to compare against. Obviously I could compare against the B&M floorless (and I have), but I suspect the wing coasters have higher friction in real life (wider cars = more drag, and wing coaster layouts seem to have fewer elements than similarly sized floorless coasters), so just blindly copying the values won't do. I don't 100% trust the values in the original game - without knowing the actual friction and drag coefficients of the car, ensuring it performs well on realistic layouts is the best I can do. A drawback of doing this is that this coaster might not work on layouts designed using floorless cars - which is why if you have a layout that you think is realistic and correctly proportioned, and it doesn't work, I'll consider lowering or redistributing the friction a bit . However, I'm looking to get my values as close as possible to the real thing - not to maintain backward-compatability with old layouts.

I've recently been doing experiments with custom terrain tiles, and in the course of setting up the lighting I've discovered that the game's lighting may not be what I thought it was. I wrote a script to optimize the lighting parameters to match the existing tiles, and I find two close matches: one for the lighting angle I've been using for my custom rides (about 26 degrees; same as gentle slope), and one for an angle of exactly 45 degrees. Unfortunately the two angles are quite different and cannot both be right, but both of them would be reasonable choices (it's not like it's a totally random angle with no particular significance). I don't yet know how I'm going to determine which is the correct one. I've been assuming a lambertian reflectance model for all calculations; if the game was rendered with something else I might never find a perfect match (but given its age I doubt it). Both angles produce correct colors for all grass tiles except the flat tile (which is one palette entry too high). I'll try optimizing the input colors and see if I can get either angle to produce an exact match.

 

In my opinion 26 degrees is an unnaturally low lighting angle, and so I'd be inclined to switch to 45 degrees instead. If I change the lighting setup, all existing rides will need to be redone with the new lighting. The older the ride, the more effort is involved in updating it. This might be justified if it makes them look better though, as I've never been satisfied with the look of my sprites.

It turns out my entire ride generator is based on contradictary assumptions. I assumed that tiles were 3 metres wide. This assumption is wrong - tiles are about 3.7 meters wide. This means that my angles are computed incorrectly (the computation was based on the relationship between the width and height of a tile).

 

I will therefore need to rerender everything, but I'll wait until I've decided whether I'm making changes to the lighting setup before doing this.

Turns out the angles were calculated correctly after all. The flawed assumption was made later, and as far as I know it's only the spacing values that are actually affected. It may not be worth redoing all previous rides just to make this small tweak.

I was just playing around with that wing coaster and I like it a lot. The only problem is now I sort of need a new catwalk object as the Kumba object glitches with it. Oh well, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it I guess. The trains look great though!

I'm aware of the glitches, they occur without a catwalk as well. The z-index is set too low, but if I set it right then I get even worse glitches.

 

The only possible recourse is that I messed up my calculations and put the trains too close together - I will try fixing that, and seeing if that lets me change the z-index without glitches. I'm not too hopeful though - so far, changing z-index has always made things worse. I think the games logic just isn't designed to cope with wide trains - I've noticed the default VDC cars suffer the same problem.

 

EDIT: Well, I've redone the calculations and the trains are actually too far apart. That means there's no chance that fixing it won't glitch them, and I don't think I'll fix it unless I need to update for some other reason, as it could only make things worse. It's a shame about the glitches, but there's nothing I can do without changing the game logic.

Lightning Rod trains pls.

If I'm struggling to model rides that have hundreds of photographs available, I don't think I can model a ride from a couple of concept renderings. Besides, I prefer to avoid doing customized/one off trains because they're only really useful if you want to recreate that one ride, or a ride with a similar theme. I have generic RMC trains in progress though:

 

(these aren't being actively worked on right now - maybe I'll go back and finish them at some point. I'm bored of train modelling after that wing coaster took so long)

For what track type? B&M?

No, standard wooden track. It's not ideal, but close enough. B&M track has more elements but it looks nothing like topper track, so you'd have to merge if you want to use that. To be honest, this is sort of pushing what's reasonable to do without custom track styles.

I'd imagine something like this will have to be merged anyway.

It appears Cedar Point's new dive coaster will have the same restraints as the wing coasters. Would anyone be interested in yet another dive machine CTR? Since I already modelled the wing coaster restraints, it shouldn't be hard to swap them.

Themed trains in general would be amazing if it could be more like the different styles we see in real life rather than the cartoony, surreal ones we got in WW/TT. But it would be really cool if we had a much wider variety in ride styles for designs.

The difficulty with themed trains is that they're often unique to every ride, so the model you want depends on the your intended ride. The wing coaster might be a candidate - most have either generic trains, bird themed trains, or demon themed trains. The other rides I've done so far rarely, if ever, have themed trains. I will at some point release the models I've used, so people can customize them if they have a specific theme in mind.

I don't even necessarily mean themed trains, but stuff like the Giovanola stand-up, maybe floorless with different color schemes (a la Hydra), a Drachen Fire-inspired corkscrew coaster variant (way more rounded), maybe shorter B&M flying trains so 8-car-long ones don't span three zip codes... stuff like that.

Utilizing existing sprites to create new trains with different color schemes and lenghts would be cool. Not sure how much easier or harder that would be than using a new 3d model to start from scratch but it would be cool.

But to answer the question about the Valravn trains, personally I don't think it's worth the effort just to change the harnesses. Its such a miniscule change that the effort probably wouldn't be worth the trouble.

Ling: The issue with those sorts of trains is that it's no easier to model trains that are close to existing trains than it is to model from scratch (I don't have the models for the existing trains), but they're only useful for a very limited set of rides (although the ride I'm working on at the moment is also a very rare coaster, but at least it has simple geometry), and they all have close approximations in game. It's the sort of thing that I would want to do if I already did similar trains for another reason - which is why I was asking if it would be worth changing the harnesses on the dive trains - I already have all the models for that.

 

G Force: Changing train length / spacing is easy, but changing the color schemes requires a 3D model (unless you just want to make it lighter/darker)

Since my scenic railway was a failure I'm planning to start another ride tomorrow. I'll either finish off the RMC I started months ago, or do a Mack mega/launch coaster like Version1 suggested (also months ago). Anyone have any preference as to which?

Mack is my preferred (mostly cause RMC layouts suck in game)

RMC <3