RCT2 - Ride overview - Transport rides 

Rides that can't go uphill at all? Yikes! You should do a video on them anyway. "Worst 'rides' in the game!" would be a fun topic for a video I'd say. Rock on sir!

Hi Marcel, I'm the guy who messaged you on twitter a while back about crashing chairlifts. I'm still having that happen to this day so I'm commenting here to see if anyone else has had problems with this in the latest stable or development builds. Basically when a chairlift car gets to the second station it flies off the end instead of going around the turning part. Two cars do this each time and then the rest stall behind it. Only happens on certain areas of the map, seemingly randomly but mostly concentrated in the north-eastern part. If anybody has additional information on this please let me know, I'm kind of put off by this because I do quite like to use chairlifts since they have a nice look in scenic areas.

@@AissurDrol Hey! I had the same issue and posted it in the openrct2 subreddit a while back. The devs were unable to recreate my issue, even with the save file, but it seemed to fix itself when I updated to a newer build. I've updated with the development edition since and the problem has not occurred since. For note: I use chairlifts frequently (at least one per park).

Last time we spoke you had a broken computer. i have seen your videos since the new setup. they are much better quality. thank you for the hard work you put into this channel. i have learned so much i never knew. Keep up the good work.

I like/ ik vind leuk !

No, they did it once, it broke the game, guests lost the entrance/exit and broke other pathing etc.

Warren Cash That only tells me that particular implementation as is wasn't suitable. Not denying it could be very difficult to properly implement it without rewriting a lot of other logic but I'm also not denying it's certainly achievable.

You can still trap guests by accident with any pathfinder implementation by just removing a path to an "island" that's still connected by paid transport ride. (Guests without money will be stuck.) So from there, you could either let lost peeps take transport rides for free (this could break stuff if always on: so it should be an option, and also the ride data structure needs to store this new flag) or you could provide a reasoning for lost peeps so the player knows to fix these peeps themselves. But that also would only really work with a pathfinder where guests only perform actions if they can leave the park afterwards (or if transport rides only cost once per peep or something - an infinite use ticket). Oh, and how do you handle staff? Should specific staff be stuck to their placed zone, or should they be able to take transport rides? Should this option be per staff member or per staff type? Should they queue or not? Should an entertainer be able to entertain guests in the same train? How do non-enclosed rides work with that? Surely an entertainer shouldn't work on a raft... What happens if staff is on a ride that breaks down? Do they teleport off the train? Do they get stuck? Can a repairman fix the ride that they're currently riding on? Should they always fully repair the ride that they're riding on? Should there be staff only transport rides? Then there's the big question of: how do you even determine the time it takes a transport ride to go from two locations? Distance and average speed? Or does each train need store the last travel, and then pass that data to the stations to save? tldr: you'll basically have to rewrite a lot of how peeps/guests/rides work overall. and openrct2 is programmed with a lot of several thousand line files, so good luck with that. also localisation

@MegaFelicks Hi, OpenRCT2 Dev here - The existing pathfinding is incredibly simple, by necessity and because that's how Chris Sawyer did it. Implementing new pathing can and has been done, but it has some major disadvantages - mostly performance related. Smart pathfinding is easyish. Doing it without reducing the game to 2 fps is considerably harder, and that's before you run into pathfinding bugs.

Anyone know if that was fixed on Rct3¿? or transport its still a... ride...¿?

Yeah, would be crazy if they couldn't do that.

@@0106johnny Imagine having to use a helicopter or crane to move a locomotive (and not a turn-table)

It's not even that unusual, I used to live next to a vintage steam railway.

It mainly looks strange because modern diesel locomotives you see doing this all the time look alot pretty similar forwards or backwards and how common it is to have engines in the front and back of the train.

Not only that but for tender engines it illegal unless they can't turn around

And that's why I use them.

I used it For reducing number of "I need to go the bathroom!

JVMMs - The pathfinding is simple by design as smarter pathfinding tends to drop performance to single-digit numbers when there’s lots of guests in the park.

@@Davtwan Technically you could reuse a LOT of the logic to save on performance

Still a good way to spread guests out around the park quickly

It’s too crowded here and I’ve run out of money. The tru RCT pro doesn’t actually max charge, you can fleece them while keeping them happy and that = more guests, kinda like real life. Sawyer needed a business partner but something was clearly wrong with him to program RCT in Assembly himself then go live in a cave, that way he would have never got involved with Atari as well and wouldn’t have had to sue everyone after the fact. A business mind would have had him as a full creative control role in the company and he wouldn’t have to write a single line of code, just overview the codemonkey, graphics and design teams and tell them what’s right and not right.

​@@rmac3217 Nothing was "wrong with him." He's just more of an artist mind than a business mind, and that's respectable. His rock solid artistry is why we still talk about the game over 20 years later.

*Shakes violently* H-How about nooowww-*faints*

Very high

Comment Section 1 is too intense for me

@@seanwalters1977 Just looking at Comment Section 1 makes me feel sick!

I want to go on something more thrilling than RU-vid.

Yeah, they're cool to watch. TTD can do that too

I always include a transport ride with stations at each end of the park. Usually one of the first rides I make. I like the role-playing aspect of having quick transport for guests to get around the park quickly

even though 99% of the time when the guests get dropped off at a station they go right back into the queue line

And now, 20 years later, I finally have the answer to "Do the peeps treat transport rides different than ordinary rides?"

@@keiyakins ttd?

Yeah that is a great quality of life changed that I always thought was weird when I played the RCT games as a kid. Several theme parks I had been to had train rides but all of them also had level crossings with the pathways.

Sounds like you might want to try OpenTTD... Transport Tycoon Deluxe is the game Chris Sawyer made before he made RollerCoaster Tycoon. OpenTTD is basically the equivalent of OpenRCT2.

@@sethmoyer i really think locomotion is the better game. Its pretty much rtc2 mixed with TTD logic

@@matsv201 I haven't tried TTD/OpenTTD but I was a bit underwhelmed by Locomotion ... As far as I've understood, Passengers don't have an actual destination, they don't use interchanges, just go to the next random stop/station and try to get on any vehicle. The only thing that really impressed me was that buses use the opposite lane for overtaking. I haven't seen that in any modern transport game.

@@23nine locomotion is a old game now. Much older than openTTD. The main benefit of locomotion is very high playability more than it would be super realistic

sounds like someone is a civic transport engineer.

What'd I say?

@@xirabolt Monorail!

@Hugh Jass Monorail!

@@dantyson851 I hear those things are awfully loud!

I don't get this reference :(

That is only in OpenRCT2 though, although it is indeed great.

@@MarcelVos I've been playing Vanilla RCT1, but I might have to upgrade just for that!

I DIDN'T KNOW THAT! This comment section to the rescue once again! (Thank you)

That would be so awesome. I have to consider switching to OpenRCT now.

@@scottthewaterwarrior how are you living with vanilla RCT1??? After you play OpenRCT2 you'll never be able to go back, trust me.

Or grass

Or coshtersh.

That's because the point is to enjoy the ride, quite literally.

Aieeeeee!

My favourite part about snowboarding is the chairlifts, so many lifts, so many memories.

@@TheRojo387 I enjoy watching videos of chairlifts freaking out and going faster than they should, it's quite funny.

Though TBF steam trains also tended to run round to the back of the train and only then run in reverse

@@HolyKhaaaaan Yes, most trains did that, assuming they had side track at the station. To be honest I'm not that much of a train buff so I'm not sure.

@@Lucatin as a proud lifelong Thomas the Tank Engine fan, the artwork of the Reverend W Awdry's books generally shows that, for single line miniature railways, there is usually a loop or a second line with a turntable that goes around the station so the locomotive can always be at the front of the train.

I've ridden on trains that operated that way, more or less. The Sumpter Valley Railroad in Oregon while they do run the engine around the opposite end of the train, they don't turn the engine around. As well, at the western end of the line, the don't have a siding at the station, so after unloading, they run back down the line to switch the engine, and then back into the station.

I worked at the Ecomuseum of Marquèze in France, where we have a 4km historic train line leading from the museum's entrance to the historical village in the forest. While at the entrance, wich is the old train station, we have switches and side tracks, at the "terminus" we don't, so for return trips we just roll backwards with the engine pushing the train, and with someone at the rear being the eyes of the driver. The first trains I did as driver were kinda strange lol

Remember that this game came out in 2002 and there can be thousands of guests in a park ... more sophisticated pathfinding algorithms might have been too expensive.

A track height cost increases are at most one byte of disc space per ride type and a few extra words of assembly. Excitement ratings may be more complicated and stored in two bytes per ride, but it's an intermediate value for figuring out if a peep will ride or not. Better path finding for a 1999 game, even with an algorithm first developed in 2006 would require a few bits per tile for each of the 64k tiles per ride, and several more bits per tile to handle things like bathrooms, food stalls, seating, and garbage cans. This would require at least 4 megabytes of RAM for pathfinding maps alone, using current pathfinding algorithms that weren't invented until three years after RCT3 came out. That does not include the variable but enormous numbers of cycles used to recalculate the flow field when placing or destroying a path tile, attaching a queue to a path, building a new shop, bench, or trash can. Not does it include the likely dozens of cycles used reading and updating path movement per peep per square moved through in about a half-second. 1999-available pathfinding would need quite a bit of RAM for the path finding and perhaps thousands of cycles to utilize the paths for each of the thousands of peeps in an amusement park. TL,DR: The pathfinding algorithm used by the peeps in RCT2 was almost optimal for the scope and hardware limitations. The theoretically best of 1999 is what made Simcity 2013 so slow.

2006 algorithm? Curious as to which that is.

@@Extramrdo -- Probably en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_tree_search It's good for branching paths of arbitrary complexity, and can be halted before it's finished for the best guess. In many ways, it's good for guests trying to figure out the amorphous 3D snake game that keeps changing under their feet, potentially without reducing the game to a slog.

Mono... DOH!!!

The irony of it... Is that monorail is a pretty good mode of transport

Idk, sounds like more of a Shelbyville idea...

The ring came off my pudding can!

Please explain the joke to a peasant like.myself

If I am correct, the best thing you can do is a lake with a path around it. And never have a path having a dead end, so a path always needs to end on an other path

And block a exit with a no entry sign, because otherwise it is a dead end

that would be really interesting. all these years later and im still amazed by the amount of little details this game has

Make sure there are no multiple square-wide sized roads.

Avoid paths too far away of your rides.

Really?? Nice tip! I might look pretty too.

That's only through cheats/avoiding clearance checks though, right?

heyheyodelay No, as far as I know it’s a feature of the ride. Only works on straight track though, so no turns etc.

@@heyheyodelay not on open rct in a recent patch.

heyheyodelay No, you can build a railway straight through a path, or lay path directly on the track. No cheats required.

either delete the lift or create a spiral staircase down the side / around it. It will look fine when themed with walls etc to be either a big tower or you can use the steel wall pieces to make it look part of the structure :)

You could build other ride(s) to get the guests off, or just delete all the path and let them fall on the ground and walk away

@samdaboss Gaming No, leave them to rot forever. The ultimate fate of his park

Delete the paths so they all spend 30 seconds plummeting down to ground level, where they'll continue walking around

Only in OpenRCT2, it's a feature they added a while ago.

But it’s just a regular train... Monorails shit down for a reason, miniature railroads are iconic and it’s an open air experience.

The Sandbox modes allow you to try out different rides and figure out the metrics on your own. Marcel does a lot of prework in making screenshots, but it's also neat to try to sometimes do it yourself (and maybe find something new).

You should get into RTS games then. The designers have one vision and that keeps completely changing with the meta, because it’s competitive it never ends as well.

@@rmac3217 I struggle with some of the min-maxing of RTS's, but I actually really enjoy Warhammer 40k Dawn of War. Squad based real time tactics make it easier for me to keep up in casual games. I've also heard Company of Heroes is similar.

@@tatertot64 Yeah AOE2 on normal speed is good, I really like wc3 for the slow pace and lack of crazy clicking.

That one operates on a pulley line to make the shuttle.

@@JCBro-yg8vd Yes, I realize that it's not really a train in the traditional sense, but the main gripe the Marcel had with shuttle mode on the train was aesthetics and how it looks silly. And it does look silly. But aesthetically speaking, the Hogwarts Express does the same thing. It looks like a steam train and it goes backwards when going from one of the parks to the other.

Hence, it looks stupid. Think of it as pushing a trailer at the front of your car, looks stupid to anyone with the most basic knowledge of physics.

That's very much possible. I didn't look at the ratings at all besides the stat requirements because they don't matter 99% of the time.

True, the chairlift is so "slim/narrow" that one tile has two tracks. Only way you can sort of do that with the others is if you stack them on top of each other (even then it's not the same).

I don't think it'd be that bad, actually. We can already put multiple track pieces in the same place, so all we would really have to do is make an activator rail (á la Minecraft) which sends a signal to pieces like that.

I've tried a couple of things and steamtrains and monorail trains seem to be immune to fast chainlifts and booster pieces, so that doesn't work. You could always use the minigolf holes to make it teleport to the next station, which is even faster.

In OpenRCT2 there is actually a cheat to apply a chain lift to any track type and another cheat to allow for any speed on chain lifts. Doing that you can essentially force your ride to go any speed you want over the ride even when going uphill.

@@MarcelVos It is possible to directly edit the speed and acceleration values of the vehicles directly (you could even have each train on the track go a different speed if you wanted to) - but you need to do it manually as there's no cheat in OpenRCT2 to do this

It is, and you can use it to fake faster running speeds for your vehicles.

Yes the sight, sound, and smell is the draw of the railroad