NE 20th Anniversary / History of New Element - 2020
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24-June 22
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Liampie
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The History of NE
< 2019 2020 2021 > We started 2020 full of excitement for the RCT to come, but something was brewing in the East that would throw a real spanner in the works. During the first two months of the year, Covid-19 had the appearance of yet another potential pandemic like we had seen several of before; mostly staying around where it began, on another continent, far away from most of us. It was business as usual for NE. New promising members emerged, and some members who disappeared after the H2H8 drama started trickling in again. G Force and ][ntamin22 stepped down as admins, and from many applicants, CoasterCreator9 was chosen to join the admin team.
January belonged to the up and coming. Secondrun919 and ar2910 had both been impressing on the site with screens and releases for a year now; the former with creative, fantastical scenarios, and the latter with very simple but elegant ncso non-parks. Originating from the Deurklink Multiplayer discord community, Skiffa and maddkattunge (also known as Mekkit) provided a lot of high quality ncso releases. Most of these releases either did not qualify for an accolade or were submitted non-competitively - mostly the latter. Ar2910’s Fenimore Hall became the first accolade of the year, a nice precursor to Alex’s Evergreen Gardens that was released a year later. Ar2910 would have several more similar releases later in the year: Autvale Airport which is exactly what it sounds like, and Xanadu, a massive botanical garden.
Later that month, the established members started showing up. RWE had been slowly carving out his own niche of elaborately themed, twisty, flowing mid sized wooden coasters, of which Anaconda was the latest example. Camarillas was a rare group design by four former Icons members, including RWE again, though the majority of the map was made before H2H8. It paved the way from some of the exiled Icons members to return to the community, with the H2H8 dust now having settled. FredD, yet another Icon, released his new solo San Esteban Fiesta Village in February, and soon after Jene followed with Kingdom of the Moon and Stars, his largest park that showed significant improvement over his last creations, while showing the same imagination and unique aesthetic. Both parks won gold, but this was only the beginning of what would be a non-stop barrage of high calibre parks.
March brought the first spotlight candidates. The LL wave of around 2015-16 had run its course by now, but csw still had a park started in 2016 up his sleeve, which saw the light of day at last: The Good Earth is csw’s crowning achievement, his best and most content rich work, exhibiting csw’s usual mix of classic LL styles, mixed with modern techniques and a good dose of vibrant colours and other unique choices. Despite being eclectic and esoteric (I’ll stop with the vague descriptions now), the park was well received by the accolade panel, missing out on spotlight by just a single vote.
Four days after The Good Earth, Six Flags World of Discovery hit - a park that is exactly what it sounds like, but also much more than that. Nin and Pacificoaster joined forces, supported by Steve, to create the next great Six Flags park in the realism genre. Spotlight seemed a likely outcome for this. The advertising screens showing an intricate Giant Inverted Boomerang design, a beautiful flowing Superman: Ride of Steel interpretation, and deceptively well made blue roofed architecture, definitely contributed to a hype surrounding this park. In the end, the park missed out on spotlight just like The Good Earth did. Unlike the aforementioned park though, this caused some controversy that still resurfaces every now and then, several years later.
By the end of the month, most of the western world was in lockdown. BarnNID, a newer player who started blipping on people’s radar last year, released Walley’s World. A nice Silver-winning park, but mostly notable for being the first post-pandemic park to prominently reference Covid-19 in the form of an alternative savegame with the park and its surroundings in lockdown. The first corona spotlight was In:Cities's Sea World Barcelona. Though a long time member, In:Cities was only recently become a top tier player, and Sea World Barcelona was his first solo accolade since 2011! The park grew from a smaller group built map for a contest outside NE; which is also why some of the park is somewhat clumsily cut off the map. Expanding the park clearly was the right move though. Sea World Barcelona is another realistic park, but it’s not yet another realistic park. In:Cities infused what could be a pretty vanilla park with his own creative touches and a distinct colour palette. It won spotlight unanimously, with a whopping 86% score, promoting In:Cities to the ‘Elite Parkmaker’ rank!
Wow, what a month it had been! And the community was not slowing down in April. Jappy, who builds full scale solo parks for a living judging by his output rate, released Everland Discovery Kingdom, his much anticipated park that would be his first close brush with the spotlight accolade and a green NE Parkmaker name. As you will either know or can guess, it missed spotlight by a bunch of ‘no’ votes, but most notable it scored a painful 79.50%. Despite this, the park was popular upon its release, lauded for creative ride design, it’s autumnal foliage and the rarely seen Halloween setting. Roygbiv’s Geauga Ocean City fared a bit better, with a strong 82% score and multiple ‘yes’ votes. This park like Sea World give a unique aesthetic spin on familiar realism tropes. Geauga took it a bit further, and can be called ‘strange’, though in an intriguing way rather than a bad way. The park’s best argument for spotlight would be its strong coaster line-up, including a spectacular Intamin giga coaster with creative support work. No spotlight, but still a parkmaker status for roygbiv!
Again, to counter the two spotlight misses, there was one instant hit: Ancient Worlds by alex. Fully ncso, but done so well that even the grumpiest ncso-skeptic wouldn’t even notice. Featuring four ancient civilization themed areas, arranged in a way that calls back to the spotlights from the heydays of classic NE, the park married current RCT trends to classic NE tropes such as the big center lake. Ancient Worlds was hailed as somewhat of a successor to sacoasterfreak’s Rivers of Babylon, and alex became the first player to get a 90%+ spotlight in both games.
RWE wrote: Corona will kill us all but because of boredom. Jappy wrote: With Corona forcing people to stay homes, at least we all have some more time for RCT... Who's got some progress screens? While all these parks were being released, the pandemic continued to rage, claiming casualties in the millions, and keeping people at home, detached from civilization other than the occasional supermarket run and our online life. This unique situation led to NE organising a new lockdown inspired contest, something light and easy to distract from the nastiness in the world and to combat this season of boredom. This was the New Element Flash Challenge, with ‘flash’ referring to the spontaneous nature of the contest as well as the desired quality of the maps. The objective of this single round contest was to create a small map using no custom scenery, as well as no hacks - both were firsts for NE contests - using the keyword ‘connectivity’, which was chosen in the light of our current social predicament. Players could interpret it in any way they wanted, though.
After three weeks, we had received 26 entries - a record amount for a single round contest. Two parks by Cocoa and AvanineCommuter were disqualified, meaning the public only had to choose from 24 parks… Taking into account both the general quality of parkmaking as well as the interpretation of the keyword as a separate criterium, Pacificoaster won with his New Element Kingdom, a pretty simple looking park full of fun references to NE culture. Interestingly, it won despite being the #3 most favourite and #4 best interpretation of the keyword. Nin’s Payload and Steve and roygbiv’s Ghost TowNE were elected to be of higher RCT quality, while CoasterCreator9’s NE Central Servers, Kumba’s We Overcome and my own Melting Pot fared better in the keyword department. Other parks like alex’s Rainbow Valley and WhosLeon’s Nile River Delta were also popular contenders.
The large quantity of parks and the variety therein, the casualness of the building, and the unpredictable nature of the voting made the NEFC quite an unexpected success, not easily replicated again. The fact that even a retired posix submitted a park (in RCT2!) illustrates the serendipity of this contest.
posix wrote: [...] Our host has disabled our account because we've used more server CPU % than we're allowed for too long. [...] The picture that paints to me is that the increased server load stems from stronger community activity, perhaps especially lockdown boosted. While it's sad the site isn't accessible now, this to me would be a positive reason. [...] Fingers crossed, and thanks for bearing with us There were some less positive developments as well. The website had seen some spotty episodes before - sometimes the site would be down for a few minutes, an hour or even a day. It rarely happened, but it did. In May, a few weeks after the conclusion of the NEFC, the site went down, and it did not get back up as easily as it did before. One theory is that traffic increased due to the majority of the community being stuck at home with not much to do other than pursuing hobbies and pastimes, exceeding the server’s limits. The host did in fact pull the plug on us. The realisation that NE had outgrown the host, and the fact that our tech guy geewhzz only has limited availability, was quite worrying, adding further darkness to an already pretty grim time, depriving us of some of the connectivity we all craved during our lockdowns. We still had Discord, fortunately - but all of the lurkers and other people who did not join Discord were temporarily locked out of the community with no communication.
After some talks, the host reluctantly switched the site back on, but with limited access for admins only. With some help from people like janisozaur and IntelOrca of the OpenRCT2 team, we set up an extensive back-up project that took several days, with the sole intention of backing up all the data and moving to a server more suitable to our needs. Geewhzz did show up to help us move to a new host, when we eventually found one. Over three weeks after the site went down, New Element was up and running again. And to make things better: the site was faster than before!
posix wrote: ! New Element is now back online !
And it's back with a vengeance. Thanks to the new server the site feels noticeably faster on my end, and I hope you will confirm this. After a long period of backing it up, uploading to the new host, and undertaking countless little fixes to ensure everything works right, we are super super happy to finally set it live again for everybody!! The main credit over these last couple of days goes to @geewhzz for seeing through the transition, which wasn't as seamless as we'd hoped.
[...]
With that, we end the longest downtime the site has ever witnessed in its 18 years history. Thank you all for sticking around, helping out where you could, being positive, and patient, most of all.
Long live NEW ELEMENT
Meanwhile, the community did not stop building, and there was a small backlog of parks that were submitted prior to the downtime, that still needed reviewing and scoring. Version1’s Heckengäupark was one of the releases that had to sit ignored for a few weeks, but fortunately it got picked up again eventually. Version1 recruited some master coaster designers in Pacificoaster and Cedarpoint6 among other helpers, which he skillfully sewed together into a large, Asian themed park that the accolade panel awarded with a gold accolade. Version1 had come a long way, and in some years it could’ve been a top 5 park perhaps!
Unfortunately for Version1, it was the year 2020 and there were many more high calibre gold parks to come. The next close brush with spotlight came from StormRunnerFan, who submitted Disney’s Glacier Cove, over seven years after his last release. Containing no mechanical rides other than a chairlift, Disney’s Glacier Cove was a water park inspired by the real life Blizzard Beach water park, combined with many ideas from StormRunnerFan himself. A great feature of the release was the in-depth readme, in which StormRunnerFan masterfully embeds the map into a real life location, adding further credibility and realism to the park. Personally I feel that if there had to be one more spotlight from all the golds this year, it should’ve been Disney’s Glacier Cove.
Speaking of comebacks, do you remember colby? Famous for submitting five LL solos simultaneously, ten years ago. Going further back, he even had two Danimation spotlights under his belt, the first being from February 2000! Out of nowhere, we came across a new park from him in the submission queue: Disney’s Animal Kingdom Spain. This park was absolutely massive, and showed good development in colby’s skills, though his roots in classic RCT were still evident. One of those classic RCT aspects at play here is the rides. Disney’s Animal Kingdom Spain has a better coaster line-up than all real world Disney parks combined, including several B&Ms, two mine trains, a wooden coaster and a large Intamin. Colby did not forget our roots: this is Roller Coaster Tycoon, and any concept we choose can be just an excuse to build cool rides. The park scored 78.5%, even including a few ‘yes’ votes!
The summer season also saw a number of nice designs. Inthemanual took a risk by submitting a spaghetti bowl type coaster, Warlock, but it worked out well for him. Recurious was inspired by a new GCI concept shown at the 2018 IAAPA and built Kongamato. Among these and others, the highest scoring design came out of left field. Former enfant terrible Jaguar submitted his belated NEDC5 entry, Phototrophian. As we could all expect of Jaguar by now, there was nothing else like it, and robbie92’s suspended coaster layout was hardly recognizable in this colourful soup that could perhaps best be described as maximalist solarpunk.
Many years ago, after most of the RCT2 communities of old had died, there was one website that still managed to organise successful contests alongside NE: RCTSpace and their Road Rallies continued to be a draw for people due to the nice format. The Road Rallies stopped in 2009, but I had always wanted to see more of those, and with real life travel being restricted, the time was ripe. Enter The Grand Tour. The contest was similar to Road Rallies: one country per round. Six rounds, with the winner qualifying for a final round, which would be held in 2021. Aside from the location, there were additional objectives regarding rides or other features, often related to the country of that round. Like in the NEFC, submissions were scored both on RCT quality and execution of the objectives.
First, we went to Cuba. 11 parks were submitted, which made for a great start to the contest. The winning entry was Carnaval de Maravillas, a seaside funfair full of life and good vibes by hydroportal and 6crazy6king6 (also known as Henkert). Carnaval de Maravillas was quite a shocking winner. The two creators were not very prolific in the community, so how did they suddenly produce an 80%+ park? This winner made it clear to anyone, especially the established names, that they cannot just join and expect to sweep the competition… The game was on.
The next stop on the Grand Tour was Namibia - a sparsely popular desert country that most people know little about, but that has some of the most distinct landscapes in the world; including a striking landscape feature was one of the objectives for that reason. Two submissions stood out. Tolsimir and AvanineCommuter joined forces to produce the fantastical Eye of Namibia, with an exaggerated landscape and two enormous coasters. Ombezi Basin National Preserve by CoasterCreator9 and In:Cities took a more subtle route. The highlight was a jeep tour through a landscape full of mud and flamingoes. Doesn’t that sound exciting? It was exciting. This was a landscape like we’d never seen it before in RCT. This was the most detailed, textured mud in the game. You could say it was ‘crunchy’. Ombezi gave the start signal to a period of intense crunchification and meta developments in the way landscaping was done in the game. Naturally, it won its round.
Of course, we wouldn’t allow things to get boring, so the third round shook things up a bit: instead of having a single country setting, the theme was ‘microstates’, and players could choose their own microcountry to depict on a tiny 500 tile map with only a week to go. 18 submissions were received; two were disqualified. AvanineCommuter topped the ranking this time, now paired with WhosLeon, producing Gardens by the Bay which depicted the park of the same name in Singapore. They left behind Xtreme97 and Steve’s Anchor Bay (Malta), hydroportal’s Circuit de Monaco, and FK+Coasterminds Sistini (Vatican City). The latter took a mind blowing fantasy approach to the round, literally turning the painted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel upside down to bring the depicted scenes to life in RCT.
After the quick third round, we continued on a more conventional path, on to Croatia. In this round, the AvanineCommuter-WhosLeon-Tolsimir triangle was completed, as WhosLeon and Tolsimir joined up to build Rovinj i Plitvice, a non-park submission that combined the town of Rovinj with the waterfalls of the Plitvice national park. Through screenshots of his Valencia recreation, Tolsimir had already introduced what we now know as ‘half diagonals’. In Rovinj i Plitvice, we saw these new objects in person for the first time. A true game changer! The Croatia round only had five submissions, but it was still a close competition between Rovinj, In:Cities and ][ntamin22’s Domovina, and Pula i Hrvatska by Sulakke and myself.
Round 5, set in Nepal, saw a similar number of entries. Despite valiant efforts by shogo and roygbiv with Julburi Bazaar, and newcomer Coaster-GEOFF outdoing himself with a striking rice terrace landscape called Balthali Terrace, FK+Coastermind sweeped the competition with Linga Sarira at Changu Narayan Temple, which again emphasised that we were now living in the era of C R U N C H. Like before, FK+Coastermind figured out a way to combine the realism of its Nepalese setting with more fantastical, finding an opportunity to do so in the spiritual side of Nepalese culture.
Round 6 saw a tiny uptick in submissions with the appropriate number of six. Chile is such a diverse country, that its most well known quality is probably its extremely elongated shape. An elongated map shape was the secondary objective here, with an extremely long coaster being the third. The submissions showed appropriate diversity, depicting the country from its arid Northern regions to the colder southern tip of the continent, as well as the subtropical regions inbetween. Two submissions chose to build Valparaiso. I did it as an experiment to play with the new scenery manager by Sadret, an OpenRCT2 plugin that lets you copy and paste entire buildings or even sections of a park. I took three days to build it, and I was not unhappy with the result. However, it was no competition for inthemanual and Xtreme97’s Whispering Cliffs Valparaiso; though the park is not entirely finished, it shows much more refinement and attention to detail, with an elaborately built cliff following the new trend of landscaping innovation, and a theme park full of uniquely executed rides on top. It was a comfortable win for them.
While all of this was happening, the stream of accolade submissions did not stop. In August, Liampie and Faas wrapped up their timeline park project. De Bedriegertjes and Slot Swaffelhoeve had seen extensive advertising as separately built but closely neighbouring parks some years prior, but now they were released as part of a single nine map project covering an entire region, connecting the two parks with their surrounding towns, forests and fields, in the classic Dutch parkmaking tradition. My park won gold with 73%, which I was happy with.
Already having full scale parks under their belt this year, both csw and Jappy both added another release to this already chuck-full year. Csw’s Fort Anachronism was a more simple park compared to The Good Earth, though the park being peepable must’ve been a tough undertaking. Jappy released Canary Mines, a park that was also different from his previous park. Whereas Everland Kingdom was another instance of Jappy just missing the 80% mark, Canary Mines finally broke it, earning Jappy his long desired parkmaker status!
Ottersalad hasn’t been mentioned in this write-up so far, but despite having been an active member for a relatively long time, he was only now rapidly developing his skills in the ncso genre showing affection for old school NE styled parks. Anitiquita won him his first gold accolade back in March, and five months later, Caer Hywel showed another jump in quality, scoring an impressive 78.50%. In the 2020 NE Awards, it came in third after Ancient Worlds and the surprising Flags Fiesta by SWAGTITTIES, despite its initial 67% panelist score.
There golden tsunami was at last slowing down after the summer, with only a couple of parks left. Corona resulted in some old timers crawling out of the woodworks. LL veteran Prince came back to the site, and with him resurfaced some old submissions that were stuck in the queue for unknown reasons, all the way back around 2005. EverQuest: the Resort at last saw the light of day, though its release did not have too much of an impact. All the more impact had Splitvision’s revitalised RCT career, starting in 2019, but now enhanced by lockdown enhanced productivity. Realms of Dragonball was a unique park themed to the famous anime; its most notable feature being an interactive minigame built into the park: find all seven dragonballs hidden in the park, and the game will trigger a surprise. We had evidence of Splitvision’s creativity before, for example with Journey to Eos released in March, but this was next level. In the Grand Tour, Splitvision also made an impact with Efundja, built together with similarly creative Jaguar. Spoiler alert: watching the coaster symbolising a rain dance, the weather will turn and a flash flood made with custom coaster trains will engulf the land. Minds were blown, and the foundations were laid for more mindblowing inventions to come in 2021.
As said before, 2020 was also the season of ‘crunch’, and FK+Coastermind was spearheading this movement. Seasons was a park left over from H2H8, and thankfully FK had the motivation and dedication to complete the park. The donut shaped map has four sections, each themed to a season. A pretty common theme, but rarely executed to this high level. Unlike FK, Maverix had been quiet so far this year, but in the background he was working on finishing his latest solo: Silver Lake Amusement Park. Though reminiscent of some real world places, such as Lake Compounce and Fuji-Q Highland, Silver Lake was a park with a stronger identity than many other realistic parks. With rides such as the Boulder Dash reminiscent terrain woodie, the gigantic 4d-coaster Xsanity, and the twisty B&M hyper Champion, Maverix showed himself to be a champion of coaster design.
BelgianGuy was the last player to flirt with the spotlight tier. Timber Valley Amusement Park was a huge, coaster filled park, generally themed to the boreal American Northwest. BelgianGuy, always eager to propose and exploit new mechanics in the game, and always a fast builder included many modern coaster types. X7123M3-256’s new RMC track type was recently added to the game, and BelgianGuy wasted no time to include it in this park. Sadly, both him and X7 himself missed the official premiere of this coaster type on the site, as Coaster-GEOFF had featured one in his Croatian Grand Tour entry, Sjleme Mountain Park. Too late for the scoop, too early for that one crucial OpenRCT innovation that he desperately needed: the expanded object limits. BelgianGuy inevitably hit the limit with Timber Valley, and as a result he had to cut some corners. Perhaps this is why the park missed spotlight, with a 83.50% score and 2 ‘yes’ votes too few.
AvanineCommuter wrote: [...] I’m sure I’m not the only one that has seen the recent slew of high golds / barely spotlight parks that had a big contingent of NE thinking parks or parkmakers were robbed of certain accolades due to the voting body. Is it solely due to a different standard of judging now that parks havent evolved to meet, or is it something to do with the voting body and a mismatch with general community consensus? I think it’s rather telling when we hace SFWOD, EKD, Glacier, and Geauga all being spotlight contenders that missed out in recent times to controversial reactions from the community With so many gold parks just barely missing spotlight, a great debate on the functioning of the accolade panel was to be expected, as it does from time to time. Time to reflect and discussion are two ways to recalibrate one’s accolade meter. As the NE Awards came around in 2021, the results for ‘Best Park’ indeed did not reflect which parks won spotlight and which won gold. Ancient Worlds still led, but Six Flags Worlds of Discovery and Disney’s Glacier Cove followed, with Sea World Barcelona trailing behind in fourth place.
Panel debate also took place concerning the lower end of the spectrum, with Jaguar’s Glove World sparking some controversy. Glove World was one of many oddball releases that are easy to overlook among all the golden violence. We’ve seen unique coasters, for example CHE’s Sommerrodelbarh Zullerhorn - an alpine coaster design, hamburger industry themed rides (MK98’s Cow Factory), and a six minute coaster by Chuggers, synchronised to Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, which went viral on youtube. Battle boy gave us one more silly park with Palaces & Places, and all the way from South Korea, windflower submitted Monument Park. Kumba had attempted to initiate another instance of his Survivor contest, which was an unexpected success in 2016, but sadly it did not really take off, leading to some excellent work by nin, among others, to be released in relative obscurity.
Releases from promising new members included RobDedede and his Rob’s Rusty Railyard, Waffles with his interesting take on a Universal Studios park. RaunchyRussell made a good case for himself as one of the most promising new members, with his December gold (yes, there was one more!) Quarry Adventure - an excellent debut park.
All in all, 2020 had been a year of extremes. Bleak real world developments, but all the more rich in RCT.
< 2019 2021 > -
Cocoa
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another year, another great writeup. thanks for doing all these, it is fun to look back. I wasn't super present this year, kind of settling into my PhD and being an adult and things I guess. But its hard to understate how successful grand tour was. some serious, h2h-level steps up in objects and style, especially from tolsimir. (who perhaps remains maybe the most underrated but greatest rct2 players of all time?)
I guess you didn't feel like writing about the finals controversy? or did you get sidetracked and forget to return haha.
I'm also disappointed you didn't say why you disqualified aki and I...coward
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Gustav Goblin
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Grand Tour was definitely a pivotal moment in the RCT2 meta for sure. FK and Hydro and all them really started pushing crunch to the forefront while dudes like Split were blowing minds with the Efundja flood effect. Was a really fun contest to participate in and seeing how many renowned parkmakers helped me out with my first entry gave me a great impression on what this community is truly like.
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Tolsimir
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@Cocoa, the finals were in 2021!
Yeah, starting my project and then working on grand tour really helped me to improve. Working with AVC and Leon were some really chill builds (apart maybe from deadline day on Rovinj lol).
The invention of half diagonals was more of an unplanned incident. But it's always like this I guess. You start something where you think it has only small use and then it takes off with other people making more and more objects. It's crazy.
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