Head-2-Head Classic / Round 3 | Match 3

To address a few other questions/comments, we did indeed try blood water, but the contrast against the sea of red supports and track was not good.  The yellow popped the best against the supports and made it the easiest to read.  And who doesn't love a little mystery? Is it sulfur, beer, or piss?  Just kidding its definitely piss.

Sulfurbeerpiss.

1kjungle: The classical Kumba park we all wanted to see. Loving the themes and the sculpture work, the adventure atmosphere feels quite great. I agree with Liam about the satirising, a bit too much for my taste.

Riff Valley: This is so much fun! Im Loving the sculptures and the color choices you made on this. The music also works really well. Parts of it felt a bit too messy for my taste, but awesome park nonetheless.

@Gustav - Thank you for all your support and editing the reply to not declare us Hawaii 2-1 early, I thought you jinxed us!

Riff Valley
 
... The highlight of the park for me was the pick of destiny. That hack to have it hop on the spinning reel was amazing,

I had written my review for both parks aside and I thought I had posted it but didn't! Apologies.

Riff Valley

This appeals to me as a guitarist, but also the sheer chaos and darkness everywhere. I think the acid water is a sick choice, I love that contrast. Colors overall I am a huge fan of. It's dark and edgy with some nice pops in the sculptures. Pick of destiny is so cool to watch. The coasters and ride hacks on the whole are a lot of fun, the park comes together like a labyrinth of moving parts which I enjoy a lot. Loud and sound.

1k jungle

This is one of the most perfect kind of submissions for this contest. It is funny, meta but it's a display of really good parkmaking. I like the coaster and the hard primary clash against the brown/green theme. This carries onto some of the really interesting architecture colors that I really dig. I love stuff like the large landscape feature, the really clever use of decorative corner stones, and those iguanas are mint!

Nice job teams, another in a series of tough matches. 

Well I finally have some time to do a proper write up about this park.
Coming back into rct2 was easier then I first expected it. It was nice to be able to work together with cam as we worked together before so I knew kind of what to expect.
I felt a lot of pressure on me when starting to work on this because I knew people expected me to come up with some wacky idea’s but I did still need to learn a completely new toolset and game. Allthough openrct2 feels a lot the same then the original there are slight differences and in the background things work differently. Often my best hacks involved mistakes/glitches in the base game or things involving timing. Both of these things are a bit different in OpenRCT2 and therefore I couldn’t easily reuse some of the things I did in the past.

I started out with just designing something simple, by combining some dodgem rides I felt it was nice to create the moshpit area. I made a first version of this on a separate map just to see if I was till able to build stuff. Adding some details in It came quite easily still so eventually I decided to help with this park as I felt comfortable enough that I should be able to deliver at least a certain level of polish which would work with the work of Cam.

I was also nice working together with CC9. I knew coaster designs and foiliage weren’t my strongest suits so being able to just ask the others to do this allowed me to focus more on creating interactions between different elements and making more wacky ideas. One of the first things we came up with was the drop coaster stage dive which happened to not align with the stage I build due to how wide it was, so we decided to make it a double drop. This way it would be nice and centered. I did some small tests to see if it was still possible to make dual stations etc like I did in the past. I actually had to search for my own tutorials from the past to remember how exactly I did it, but eventually I made it work in openrct2. But this was when I noticed that there was no easy way to lower complete parts of tracks easily. As I knew I had to lower/heigher a complete track for this hack to work I decided that it was time to dive into the plugins. Later I found out that I could have done it also by just building it on a invalid height but at the time I had some issues with the game and a certain cheat option being disabled while me thinking it was enabled.

Getting into plugins also gave me the opportunity to look a bit more behind the curtain and get a feeling of how the map data was set up now. Due to my programming experience it was quite easy to get into and within a couple of hours I had a plugin which could do what I needed so that was nice. At this point I was still getting to grips with running openrct2 in a way with console output so testing the plugin was a lot harder as getting just simple console logs wasn’t possible as I didn’t know how to get them yet, once I figured that out later developing the plugins got a lot easier again.

Some things in the park are still reused from earlier idea’s. I knew that eventhough I released TOMB at one point, not many people looked at it very closely, so I would be able to reuse some idea’s from TOMB and still have them feel a bit fresh. This is where the rapids in boat hire mode came from. One of the things I figured out a long time ago is that you can have a free roaming part in any ride if you have the track stop on water level, you can place the other part of the track somewhere else on the water and the cars will find a way eventually and continue on the track. It was something I was quite surprised to still see working in TOMB as I didn’t expect it to work, I even had a chat with one of the developers from openrct2 who was also surprised this actually worked. Still it was nice and I could use this trick again. After playing a bit with it at one point it did find a bug in openrct2 with the pathfinding on the water. The code written for this clearly wasn’t intended for this usecase and had some loopholes I had to jump though to make sure the cars would find their way to the track again, but eventually by some train and error and observing what was happening I was able to fix this.

Another things I wanted to include in this park was a timing based hack as people do seem to like these ones a lot and not many people attempt them. By this time the map was getting more and more filled. I felt that that we where missing a nice dark ride in the park. We also originally planned the back corner to be mostly empty, but it started to look more and more out of place with everything else filled to the brim with stuff, so I decided to attempt a sculpture of the pick of destiny. Making sculptures in rct2 used to be one of my stronger points in the past so I hoped I would still be able to do this. After I had some practice with the dueling guitars at the entrance I attempted the pick which I think turned out better then expected. Having the scenery manager here helpt me a lot as I only had to make one half and could then mirror it to create the other half. After designing a ride around it I had to get the timing of the platforms right. This is when I was reintroduced to one of my enemies in rct2. The physics are actually done quite well with guests adding weights to the coasters. So where my hack was working perfectly while testing, once we made the park peepfriendly and started to let them in the hack just broke down due to the timing being off because of weights affecting the timing. So I had to go back to my plugin development. I wanted to make sure the whole track had chains on them, if I made sure that until the part where I wanted to have the platform ride there was no downward part in the ride it could work. Because as long as the trains where on chains I could control their speed exactly. So with my ride editor improved to also easily apply chains (and me not having to rebuild the whole tracks with chains) I could get the timing right again. Eventually I think I nailed it quite good and the result was very nice.

By this time cam and cc9 also added more and more of their parts to the park and I started to mostly fill up small gabs till open and adding details here and there until cam was done with theming the whole dueler. In the entrance area I felt we needed some kind of kiddy coaster or something like this. So this is where the crazy train idea was born. I remembered in TOMB I used a back where the train would accelerate on every straight piece and after relearning how to do that I was able to implement it in here too. In the end the effect was not as good as I hoped, mostly because the friction of the track was not that high so I didn’t need much acceleration, and also because now making track pieces like boosters invisible was a lot easier, so people would probably not spot this hack as it could have easily be done with an invisible booster too. I think people like Kumba noticed it but for most it just felt like a launched minetrain coaster. So I also decided to add some trains around it and a floating train in a church like building to at least make it a bit more interesting for people less interested in the technical side of the game.

I did feel that at one point our park to got cluttered and it became hard to read, but by that point we were in that much already that it was hard to back down. Something you just have this issue where things don’t turn out exactly as you wanted. Still I think having this chaotic park has it’s own charm too and call back to some of the older parks where this was more normal too as people cared a bit less about the overall picture and just wanted to have a lot of wonderful things together.

I don’t have more time now to also talk about 1kjungle so I leave that for another time. But with the park getting a gold accolade I did feel obliged to at least give a bit more background. I hope people like this small insight in how the park was made.