Parachute Drop Tower - Part 1 - OpenRCT2 Tutorials 

This is very true! It’s a beauty!

Thanks! I was surprised how well it turned out ❄️

Congratulations! You’re almost there! And you’re right, I forgot to show that I use the 1x multiplier when adjusting the vehicle track progress. I probably forgot since every time you close and reopen the plugin, the multiplier resets to 1x. You’re almost there…you got this!

@@openRCT2tutorials I don't got this, and have given up for today (it's getting late). I don't know what happened. The ride seemed to run OK, but got absolutely lousy stats (which I don't care about ... ride editor plug-in fixes that in a jiffy). It worked properly, but for some reason there were constant artifacts remaining on screen of the cars going up and down. They were so terrible (like 50 artifacts left on screen at a time) that I gave up for today. Another day or two and I'll try again. Considering I'm working on something almost completely new for me (shoe-stringing) I'm not brought down too much by the problem.

The artifact issue is caused by the graphics. If you go to options and under hardware, change the drawing engine to OpenGL experimental. This should fix the issue of artifacts.

The weight of the train draws the control car back to the station. The train consists of the control cars and the chairlift cars on the tower so the mass of the cars on the tower is always going to be pulling the train downward. The block brakes on the lift section aren’t necessary but slow the train down if you want as it reaches the top of the lift (as long as the chain lift speed is higher than 4mph). You could use a 9-car train but with only one control car, the mass of the 8 other cars on the towers pulls the train down with a lot of force so that the brakes don’t control the train speed as well. I find adding a few cars for the control car allows better management of the speed on the brakes. There is a part 2 of this video (link in description) that improves upon this method and might help you understand it even more. I hope these answers help. Let me know if you have anymore questions. 😊

@@openRCT2tutorials Definitely helped! Thanks for the great explanation. I sort of forget gravity exists 😂

Glad it helped! It’s funny how the game follows the laws of physics sometimes while other times it defies them! I recommend watching the part 2 of this tutorial because you won’t even need to have a huge train. I show how to let each tower operate individually so your trains only need to be two cars long. The whole ride is much more fun!

I rode the one at Six Flags Great Adventure and it was quite a gentle drop. No free fall, but it sadly was taken down. I think Disney now has ones that bounce a bit.

@@openRCT2tutorials I looked up the disney one, but it doesn't look very bouncy on the drops 😞 The ride up to the top on it looks quite fast too 😢

Yeah, and the ride vehicles are huge. It’s made for a high capacity I imagine

I think it must depend on your machine, but I play on macOS using OpenGL graphics. For me the game runs better and with less glitches in OpenGL. The glitches are caused by software mode and I’m not sure if there is any solution other than using OpenGL. I did make a part 2 for this video where I expand on the ride so that the vehicles can operate independently and I mention the graphics glitch. I hope that helps!

A) Thank you! I really appreciate it! B) I completely understand. It took me a long time before I felt confident tackling shoe strings! C) The parachute would actually slow the speed down to less than true freefall. I did a bit of research and found that true paratroopers fall at about 11mph so the 13mph here is actually faster. But you could definitely use a higher brake speed for a faster drop. You could also slow the lift speed for slower ascents. D) the chairlift cars hold 2 peeps but with the plugin you could change it to as many as 32 peeps per car even though they will only appear as 2 peeps visually. You could also try the flying coaster or lay down roller coaster cars with the reversed box checked in the plugin since they each seat 4 peeps. As for multiple jumps, I don’t think it would be possible with this design. E) You could definitely do something like that. The peeps would enter and exit from the ground and teleport. I’m not sure if they teleport to the exit or just fall slowly down. Otherwise you could build an elevator ride and have a tower platform at the top instead of the observation tower. Even add a launched free fall on top! Endless possibilities. F) Yes, this is the last ride of my Cliffside Park series. But don’t worry, I have an even longer list of rides, tutorials, and park tours to show you!

@@openRCT2tutorials I went with 4 people. I'm comparing this to Knott's, and they ran 12 gondolas instead of 8, at 3 people that would be 36. I put it at 4 for 32, close enough. Especially since they only get one drop, instead of 2. So ... what would happen if I set it for 2 laps instead of one? Completely break it? Godzilla stomps on you?

You can try. It doesn’t allow me to add multiple circuits under that operating mode.

I’m sorry you’re having trouble. What vehicle type are you using? The jet skis are powered so they need to be changed in the vehicle editor first. Also make sure there isn’t any chain lift on the towers by accident as well. And make sure the ride is in the correct operating mode.

Thanks for pointing that out@@openRCT2tutorials ! I went back and I realised I had made a mess when I accidentally started testing the ride with jetskis instead of a coaster vehicle. Now it works perfectly fine! You are the best! ;-)

@oriolat2 Yay!! I probably should have used a different vehicle as an example rather than the jet skis. They aren’t necessary but allow for single riders if the queue line isn’t full.

Answering my own question, probably not (on needing to change anything on the control track or it's cars). I did run into one problem that ticked me off (and yet oddly, not very much) which probably means I am going to have to do the whole placing the cars thing, all over again. So here's what I managed to successfully do, this time. I set up the ride with 12 cars instead of eight. I got all the cars properly in position and perfectly lined up (unlike last time.) The ride ran properly, without glitching or artifacting (thank you for the hint about changing the drawing setting.) The one place I had a problem was this. As soon as I started testing the ride, the chairlift cars that had been almost perfectly on the ground jumped a unit or two in the air. And they never returned completely to the ground. I should have gone in with the ride vehicle editor and manually lowered them back to the ground with track progress, and just left them at a lower track progress starting spot. What should I not have done? DON'T EVER DO THIS when shoe-stringing: Don't double-close the ride to attempt to reset it. Don't EVER double-close a shoe-stringed ride. Suddenly all my cars were back in the station, and were all jetskis again. I have to go to work now, so I'm going to have to save this and work on it again tonight, but I'm going to have to lower the ground again, and reposition all the vehicles from scratch. At least I don't have to build the tracks again. This brings up another kind of important question. Does this kind of thing happen if the ride breaks down? Do I have to put any of these custom-built rides to never break down? Do I have to avoid ever closing a ride, or just make sure I don't ever double-close a ride? Because at this point, I don't think I will ever double-close anything but a boat hire that's gotten stuck/lost. Still loving what I've managed to accomplish, following your video, even with this extra delay!

Negative thing about working for yourself ... it's entirely too easy to decide not to work. Third time, I tried to set it for two laps, just to try it, and as soon as the control train got back to the station the first time, the ride crashed. So time to do it a fourth time, now that it's set for the single lap again. I WILL get this working. (And oddly, I'm still not very upset, so can keep working on it without needing to take a break.)

So I finally got almost everything working. (There's no way to show a picture in a RU-vid comment, is there? But at least I've got a picture on the OpenRCT2 Discord) I have my 12 tower parachute drop working just fine, with the observation tower thrown in. Only negative is it still gave me incredbly low ratings (of like .60/.03/.07 or something) and even when I use the plug-in to change them to 4.5/5.5/3.5, the game won't let me charge more than like $3.60 for rides without peeps being unhappy. Still, very happy with my progress on this!

I’m so glad you got it to work! Your journey sounds a lot like mine when I first tried to design this ride and get it working! 12 cars sounds impressive. The reason I use 6 cars on the control track is so the trains slow down on the brakes. Otherwise the 8 falling vehicles over power the brakes more than I’d like. As for two laps, I don’t think that’s possible on this operating mode. Lastly, for the pricing, whatever ride type you choose when the ride is calculating stats and those stats that it calculates are what the price is tied to. So when you change the ride type and the stats update or if you manually change them in the plugin, the pricing seems to ignore this. You could try changing the lift speed so that the ride starts recalculating but set the ride type to roto drop maybe or something and see if it gives absurdly high intensity. Then change it back to river rafts or something and it might let you charge higher prices. Obviously save before tinkering with all this just in case. Also, with this shoe string rides, you can never double close the ride. But with the jet skis, the only brake downs I believe are safety cut out and vehicle malfunctions. So it should never crash from brake failure. At least not as a river raft ride type.

Not yet. That park is Applewood and has been a work in progress for the last 20 years. I intend to make a video series showing how the park has evolved slowly but surely. So stay tuned, I’ll release it eventually.

@@openRCT2tutorialsSounds good. I was fascinated by the motor boats pulling the inner tubes and wanted to check them out. I'm pretty sure I can recreate that but it's always nice to see the source 🙂

@iuerik6 I should make a tutorial for those. I’ll have to add it to my long list! But yeah, it’s basically using a plugin to make the first car on a train the river rapids boat to get the splash effect, then moving it behind the rear car which is the coaster boat.

I’m sure there is a custom ride vehicle out there somewhere that resembles a parachute. But I don’t know if it would be possible for the vehicle to look any different when ascending vs descending. As for extra guests, the best I can think of is the lay down roller coaster or flying coaster vehicles set to reversed so they face outward. They each hold 4 persons. If you wanted to make this a bit more complicated, you could try adding an extra vehicle above each chair lift car and make it the submarine. This looks a bit like an airship or balloon if you wanted a better visual but still doesn’t look quite like a parachute.

Of course you could create a custom vehicle for this. A few people have made custom vehicles explicitly for the purpose of shoestringing flat rides but I don't know if anyone has made a parachute. However, I don't think there is any way to make it show different sprites when going forward or backward.

Unfortunately with this method there is no way to achieve that. They have to all be together. A much more complicated system could be used to have them operate separately or you could make each tower its own ride but that would require multiple queue lines.

@@openRCT2tutorials Oh! Cool!

Actually I figured out a way to have the vehicles operate separately. It wasn’t as difficult as I thought. I’ll have to make another video

@@openRCT2tutorials NO WAY! Definitely!