RCT Discussion / OpenRCT: advantages and disadvantages

I think he's asking if you are still planning on having OpenRCT run rct1 and LL eventually?

Well, we currently support RCT1 as much as is possible within the constraints of RCT2 and SV6. You can open SV4 and SC4 files with rides intact. If you run into any bugs with this, please report them on Github.

 

When OpenRCT2 is fully independent of RCT2 and uses its own save format, further progress can be booked in supporting SV4 and SC4.

Yea, we need OpenRCTLL next to OpenRCT2, or better yet bundled into one and the same application. LL is a significant part of the site's heritage and culture, and still practiced by a few here. More so, it would be necessary to have a potent park viewer, as is OpenRCT2 for RCT2, created for contemporary devices.

 

When this project started, I had envisioned a possible integration with NE server access, to create a live database and catalogue of parks, browsable and openable directly from within the application, cross-platform. Much like how media centres handle movies and tv series, with nice graphical representations and all metadata readily presented. But without LL too many significant releases are missing.

no offense posix but for the few 10people still building in LL I think it is a lot to ask that the have to implement it... I agree that it'd be cool to see but I can't think of one good reason why it should be a main priority for the developers.

Having OpenLL (or whatever it will be called), should be higher priority than adding in game lights or some of the other things that are on the horizon.  

 

To me Open should be about increasing the functionality of the game, the new zero clearance, and object section are incredible additions that make the game much more enjoyable and less tedious to play.

 

Doing this for LL would be much more preferable to adding new features to RCT2 that in reality are not all that groundbreaking and are more gimmicky than an actual improvement.

I'd say finish OpenRCT2 entirely before starting on anything LL-related. Hacking in LL is easier than in RCT2 to begin with, so streamlining it in an "OpenLL" format wouldn't be as impressive or necessary. I for one don't mind still using trainers with LL. 

There are a few things LL has that RCT2 doesn't... there's a wider variety of terrain, cliff surfaces, and a few types of coaster cars. Instead of making an entire openLL, couldn't these assets just be added into the game? It wouldn't be LL but it could potentially look like LL.

What exactly do you want? There are already plans to add in all the features from RCT1 and support loading of RCT1 savegames, but some of this has to wait until OpenRCT2 has a new save format - SV6 will not support extra land textures or new track pieces, for example.

If it's the rides you want, that doesn't require anything to be done to OpenRCT2 as it only requires the sprites to be extracted and repackaged as .DAT files. This was possible long before OpenRCT2 arrived.

If you want an entirely seperate OpenRCT1, based on the RCT1 code instead of RCT2, I doubt that will happen. It's an awful lot of work to essentially start from scratch for the sake of a few differences.

LL is pretty much obsolete.

LL is pretty much obsolete.

 

What? Both are equally good games, and LL has a lot of stuff RCT2 doesn't. 

So are you, nicman.

damn, Liam with the knockout ...

What exactly do you want? There are already plans to add in all the features from RCT1 and support loading of RCT1 savegames, but some of this has to wait until OpenRCT2 has a new save format - SV6 will not support extra land textures or new track pieces, for example.

If it's the rides you want, that doesn't require anything to be done to OpenRCT2 as it only requires the sprites to be extracted and repackaged as .DAT files. This was possible long before OpenRCT2 arrived.

If you want an entirely seperate OpenRCT1, based on the RCT1 code instead of RCT2, I doubt that will happen. It's an awful lot of work to essentially start from scratch for the sake of a few differences.

 

The fundamental difference to the games is the fact architecture is made using land in LL. Without the land textures it's pointless trying to achieve any kind of OpenRCT1. The same textures can be emulated of course, with walls/roofs but the process and enjoyment of building isn't the same.

That said, the prospect of the "post .SV6" openrct is pretty exciting if custom land textures can be incorporated. This would be like CSO for LL.

There are already plans to add in all the features from RCT1 and support loading of RCT1 savegames, but some of this has to wait until OpenRCT2 has a new save format

Considering this is what has been said all along, personally I think we should all calm down a bit and let the devs do their work. Coming up with an entirely new save format to handle both RCT2 and LL features can't be all that easy, after all, and they do this in their spare time. And while I agree including LL-features should be higher priority than implementing things like lights, those small, "useless" things are probably a lot easier and quicker to implement than full LL-compatibility, which I trust will happen eventually. In the meantime, I see a certain charm from a historical point of view in people actually still running such an old game as LL on modern machines!

 

nicman: stfu.

What exactly do you want?

My problem is that I can't run LL on Win10 in fullscreen anymore on either my devices - only windowed mode works, which is jerky and slow, and far from enjoyable to use. It's literally made me stop looking at LL parks altogether, as I'm used to the smoothness and uncapped framerate of OpenRCT2, combined with its support for higher resolutions and pixel scaling. These basic display features are what I would look for essentially - as I said like a proper "viewer" for SV4. Is it really that hard to code?

 

Bringing old LL-only features to RCT2 gameplay seems pointless to me. Each game is its own. The project should be about hardware compatibility and performance enhancement, and as its own new features most prominently the multiplayer, and perhaps later the aforementioned in-game organisation of community assets.

I know that zero clearance works different in Open RCT than it did with 8cars, but I'd love to have another clearance mode that works like the 8cars version. Building tall structures with a lot of stacked scenery would be much easier with that. 

These basic display features are what I would look for essentially - as I said like a proper "viewer" for SV4. Is it really that hard to code?

 

Support for loading SV4 files is planned (already present to a certain extent) - but it can't be fully supported until a new file format is created, because RCT1 had features that can't be added to RCT2 without changing the data structures. The other problem is that the SV4 format isn't fully documented anywhere, so working out how to load the files is not trivial. This is a difficult problem - fully supporting SV4 could be compared to removing the object limit.

 

Bringing old LL-only features to RCT2 gameplay seems pointless to me.

 

If you want to be able to support SV4 fully, you have to implement those features. At the moment, if you try to load a track that had boosters for example they just get replaced by invisible track sections. You can load something resembling the original file by making substitutions like this but if you want the park to look the same as it does when loaded in RCT1, you have to support that stuff. Also, I don't see why adding extra features is pointless - people clearly find them useful enough that they still play RCT1 over RCT2.

I love how people here can have total disregard of someone's opinion because they think otherwise. it's nicman's every right to think LL is obsolete and I feel like people play it just to be different instead of putting in the hours of really detailing stuff you'd do in RCT2, not saying that people shouldn't but I feel like the limits of LL are often used as an excuse. good parks where built in the game and I'll never disagree on that but it has become rather pointless to port that game for the as I said 10people in existence still using it. making it less of a priority if it'll ever be truly a priority.

I play LL because it's way too easy to get lost in a sea of custom objects. 

I play LL because it's way too easy to get lost in a sea of custom objects. 

 

That's why I play NCSO