Custom Scenery Exchange / Custom Rides by X7123M3-256

Google Maps has imagery of 3 Twisted Colossus trains sitting in the transfer track. The length is measured as 12 meters which works out as 2 meters per car; slightly larger than what I have currently (1.8 meters). I think the issue is that the guide wheels do not necessarily have the same gauge as the inside edge of the track, because RMC guide wheels are spring-loaded in order to keep them in contact with the rail at all times. It appears the trains are slightly too small but not by much - RMC trains probably do have the same gauge as the PTC trains, but the train body appears to be slightly narrower (assuming, of course, that the in game PTC trains are to scale)

Just wanted to add how amazing all these are, very good work and much appreciated! Keep it up and thank you

Holy crap this thread is awesome. Im not in here much but youre fuckn legit

Well, my attempts to render some new track sprites have failed. It turns out the track sprites are not split exactly on tile boundaries - the splitting is apparently arbitrary and I still haven't figured out what some of the splits are for. This makes the process all but impossible to automate, and it's not worth it when there's no way of putting the result into the game permanently.

Reading that makes me sad.

I know nothing about this stuff. What do you mean no way of putting the result into the game permanently? Is there put it there temporarily or something? Just curious 

 

That's really too bad though, I cant even imagine how much new track pieces would revolutionize the game.

What I mean is, I'm writing these track sprites into g1.dat, overwriting the twister track. Unless you're prepared to lose that track this clearly isn't a permanent thing, more an experiment to test the possibilities and to get an idea of what custom track styles may look like. Actually implementing them is a big task - probably somewhere in line with removing the object limit, and I'm not sure OpenRCT2 is far enough along to do this yet - though adding more sprites to existing track styles is likely to be a bit easier (but still hard).

What I haven't yet tried is putting the sprites in as scenery pieces. That way I'm not bound by how the game chooses to split the sprites (and splitting them tile by tile is quite a neat fit here). However, even if it works, expect it to use up a lot of object slots (and to be more glitchy than real track). I don't yet have code for creating scenery objects though so testing this out is still some way away - most likely after my ride generator is done.

I may yet come back to this project and try to find a pattern in the way the sprites are handled that would allow me to continue (maybe they're split in screen space rather than world space?) but only if I feel like I've got a decent shot at implementing custom track styles properly within OpenRCT2 - I don't want to spend much more time on this if it's just a temporary thing, and like I said that's some way off.

I did, however, get some nice images of my trains running on IBox track, and while the layouts were necessarily limited (I was only able to render a subset of the pieces), with careful cropping they look much better than any of the game's tracks (though mine train track wasn't too bad - shame about the limited pieces). I'll post those tomorrow; I wanted to post today but I ran ou of time.

I'm hoping images of the trains on the correct track might convince some of the "your trains are too small" people that the trains are in fact the correct size.

I was hoping to finish my RMC trains today but my ride generator seems to be broken. All newly exported rides crash the game. According to valgrind there's an invalid write being made somewhere, and that could be the cause, but it isn't in my code so there's nothing I can do about it.

The invalid write is not the cause. Even when run without the GUI (which was causing the issue), the game still crashes when loading the ride.

So far I've established that the bug is not in dat.c nor in the GUI code, so it must be in project.c, but that's as far as I've got. I don't recall changing anything since I last rendered the ride

OK, so it turns out the issue is with rides that don't have any default colors set. Previously it would default to black, but now it just crashes. It could be a bug in OpenRCT2, or it could be that not setting default colors would always cause an invalid read but it's only now causing problems. In any case, I will have to ensure that new projects always have at least one default color scheme.

Yay, actual data for calibrating friction (found this on an SSCoasters thread):

 

 

 

This has the speed at the end of the ride as well as the elevations of every element - values that I usually have to take vague guesses at in order to get any meaningful value. The friction turned out not to need much calibrating -my initial guess is just about was about as accurate as I can hope for - maximum speed was 72 mph and the speed before the final climb was 62. That's slightly fast but it's consistently so - always about 4mph faster than the real thing.

 

It's strange because I thought the friction would be too low - I set it initially high so the friction wouldn't interfere with the train length limit, a problem I ran into before. I think the games default friction values are all too low - so far I've had to increase the value drastically for almost every ride I've done.

Yay, actual data for calibrating friction (found this on an SSCoasters thread):

 
 
 
This has the speed at the end of the ride as well as the elevations of every element - values that I usually have to take vague guesses at in order to get any meaningful value. The friction turned out not to need much calibrating -my initial guess is just about was about as accurate as I can hope for - maximum speed was 72 mph and the speed before the final climb was 62. That's slightly fast but it's consistently so - always about 4mph faster than the real thing.
 
It's strange because I thought the friction would be too low - I set it initially high so the friction wouldn't interfere with the train length limit, a problem I ran into before. I think the games default friction values are all too low - so far I've had to increase the value drastically for almost every ride I've done.

Interesting point you bring up about friction, most people have always felt that wooden coasters have friction values that are far to high. Is it possible to adjust the friction values of trains that are already in the game without creating completely new dats?

It would still be cool to see the in game GCI and PTC trains adjusted to give lower friction values that would allow for better pacing and layouts.

It should be possible to alter friction values with a trainer. My justification for this assumption is that when I change friction values and then reload a save, the old value of friction persists until the train length is changed. This suggests that a duplicate of the friction value is being stored in the save file somewhere, where it could be altered.

I know nothing about the save file though - I can't tell you where the value is stored or how to edit it directly. What I can do is modify the existing DAT in place without creating a new one, but the change would then take effect globally and in particular may break rides that depended on the original value of friction.

However, there is a way to have it take effect on a per-file basis and that's to swap the DAT, build the ride and then swap it back again. As previously mentioned, the ride should keep the altered value of friction as long as you don't close the ride. I've successfully used this trick to get extremely long train lengths, and it should work for friction as well. It's a needlessly complex approach - it would be better done with a trainer or by editing the .SV6 directly, but I don't know enough to implement either approach.

My RMC train is now uploaded to my website. Please tell me if it doesn't work right. I put it on the wooden track in the end, because even if it looks like shit it's still the closest match in the game. For the preview image I used the custom IBox track sprites. I've not bothered with screenshots for this, as I would either be using the ones from my track experiment, which don't reflect the ride that's been released, or that hacked one I did which looks awful. Plus, I've already posted all the screenshots I have on here so many people will have seen them already.

 

 

The version on the website has normal sized trains; I know some people wanted enlarged versions so I'll work on that now.

I'm having issues with the friction on it. It seems like the friction on loaded trains is just about right but the empty trains are are barely clearing elements which the loaded trains clear by over 20mph. Not sure, but that extreme a difference between loaded and empty seems strange.

The friction tests were all done on empty trains. I'll have to retest with loaded trains - such an extreme difference does seem off, but I can't change that. I can only calibrate it so loaded trains are right instead of unloaded. It might have to wait until next weekend though, unless I can get the ride generator to build on Windows

I know this is dumb, but I feel you should make  some old school First Generation Intamin drop tower cars, or Tower of Terror cars. I have so many ideas I have, but I feel they're impossible to do. Like I feel you should try to make some flats like the Flight Commanders, or a big ass Top Spin. Or some Arrow Trains Drachen Fire had or the Backward Arrow Trains the Joker had at SFFT. Which I understand that it would be hard to do, but seriously it would be so cool. 

 

I know this is dumb, but I feel you should make  some old school First Generation Intamin drop tower cars, or Tower of Terror cars. I have so many ideas I have, but I feel they're impossible to do. Like I feel you should try to make some flats like the Flight Commanders, or a big ass Top Spin. Or some Arrow Trains Drachen Fire had or the Backward Arrow Trains the Joker had at SFFT. Which I understand that it would be hard to do, but seriously it would be so cool. 

 

 

*Intamin Freefall 

Same thing, they were meant to drop you.