Codraroll

The ATM is your friend. Let peeps enter the park for a fee they can afford, then use ATMs cleverly and let their stay in the park cost as much as you can manage (that's how real-life parks do it, after all). On-ride photos on all coasters that can have it; they usually manage to cover the maintenance costs. Charge more money than default for food and drink, guests will pay for it after all. And umbrellas can cost as much as you like, the peeps will happily shell out $15 or more for one when rain starts to fall. When playing pay-per-entry rather than pay-per-ride, your strategy has to change accordingly. Your goal isn't to get as many peeps as possible on the rides any more, but to use the rides to draw guests, and luring the guests to pay for services between rides. Coasters and flat rides are no longer your primary sources of revenue, they're just lures to draw people to your park, and to make them spend enough time there to become hungry, thirsty, and/or happy enough to shell out for over-priced souvenirs. Cynical? Sure. But you're giving the guests a good time, and they choose themselves what to pay for. With the right strategy, you can create a money-making machine, even with low gate prices. With the wrong strategy, you get Geauga Lake and 2000's Six Flags, though, so be careful and plan ahead.

Brilliant idea, but I'd tweak the keys for the turns a little. Q for the smallest lef curve radius, A for medium, Z for large. Look at your keyboard to see why. Likewise EDX or EDC for right turns. As for "Build this!", I think the spacebar would be better than Enter, since it's easier to hit with both hands. Del or Backspace for demolishing, either would work. Anyway, I wholly support this idea!

It is nigh impossible to build a good Air-Powered Vertical Coaster. It is, hands down, no competitors, the crappiest coaster in the game. The Heartline Twister Coaster is also a major annoyance. It's boring to build, and the coasters rarely if ever turn out good. However, there is a bug in RCT2 that gives those rides super-crazy excitement ratings (in the 7-800 range), although it seems to be temporary. Mini Suspended Flying Coasters give Air Powered Vertical Coasters a run for their money, though. No special elements outside S-bends and station platforms. No diving turns. No block brakes, or conventional brakes for that matter. And a capacity of a measly ONE rider per car. What purpose can that ride serve in the game? Or in a park, for that matter? It has a worse throughput than most mazes. At least the Mini Suspended Coaster has double the capacity - which is still pretty bad. Steeplechase/Soap Box Derby coasters have several of the same issues - lack of track pieces and terrible capacity - although they do have brakes and block brakes. Still quite crappy and useless, though. Lastly, Wooden Wild Mice and Mine Rides. No block brakes, restrictive parts, horrible capacity, although the steep lift hill is nice, I suppose. But there's not really much you can do with them. Those are, I believe, the worst coasters in the game, and those hardest to build with. But of course, there are honourable mentions too: Stand-up, non-twister. There's a reason those are virtually extinct in the real world, and they're not much more fun in the virtual one either. 4D. Very complex because of seat rotation, exacerbated by a lack of track pieces. If you want to build a functional, decent-looking 4D coaster, you're limited to an "X"-like layout. And there aren't even reversed trains, so you can't build Wing Riders with it. Inverted Impulse Coaster. Not a bad ride type, per se. They fit virtually anywhere, have an amazing capacity and decent excitement/intensity stats. However, you're limited to one or maybe two different layouts, due to a very limited set of track pieces. Reverse Freefall coaster. It has a whooping four different track pieces, and that's if you count the station platform. It is easily the least flexible ride out there, in that you can only build one layout. You can change its proportions, but nothing else. Its variety starts and ends with the possibility to stick two of them next to each other and recreate Superman: The Escape. And it's hogging the one track piece every other coaster would love to have: A gradual, flat launch. Any really big coaster. At some speeds, the transition track pieces the game offers become far too snappy. You can't build big, parabolic hills or smooth transitions from vertical to horizontal, every large hill ends up being quite triangular. Wooden coasters and vertical drop coasters are the worst offenders in my book, since they have a really tall maximum build height, but lacks the big steep-incline-to-horizontal track pieces so enjoyed by, say, Giga Coasters. In recent years, I've found it far more enjoyable to build coasters below the 40 meter treshold than ones above it.

Hello! As far as I'm aware, this little problem is a "feature" in RCT2, so I figured a suggestion to address it goes under Ideas rather than Bugs&Feedback. Anyway, Splash Boats. Interesting attraction. They've got huge boats, steep drops, turns and not much else, but they're popular with peeps and make good money. One little aspect about them kind of bugs me, though: Their lift hill speed is pre-set and stuck at 1 km/h. I propose raising this to a more standard 6-8 km/h, if not making it adjustable. A fully loaded Splash Boat is heavy and taxing on lift hill motors, that's true, but not nearly as heavy as, say, a fully loaded 4D coaster train. We see implications of lift hill motors more than strong enough to accelerate a Splash Boat to a passable speed. So, what do you say? Is there room in the code or save file format somewhere to speed up these boats a little?

@Broxzier, what I meant was essentially swapping out the staff sprite with a cart/scooter that would function like staff does today, only faster or with more area of effect. Moving walking staff around sounds more code-intensive to me. I worded it poorly, but @ziscor seems to have caught my intention, his interpretation is spot-on. I stand by the idea of having higher costs for upgraded staff, though, for balance reasons. Also, while the actual staff wages would go down, you'd have to maintain the cart/scooter, which would drive overall costs up. I like your idea/interpretation of it, though. If you're willing to go to those lengths, I envision a booth-type structure where a mechanic may rest. The booth holds one cart, and when something breaks down the mechanic hops on the cart and buzzes out to the ride in question. I'm not an expert in regular theme park operations, but I assume this is how proper park mechanics do their job, rather than walking around the park waiting for something to break down. You could place these booths in strategic locations around your park, or gather them all in a big "park management center". I've already tried to make maintenance roads using shortcut paths with "no entry" signs, but currently they're too inefficient compared to just having the mechanic patrol near a cluster of rides. Using carts, maintenance roads could get a revival. Then again, I suppose sprite swapping is the easiest way to do it. Click the button, pay the money, and your staff member is now permanently tied to a cart/scooter. Mechanics would go back to their walking sprite when working on a ride station, but when "walking" through the park, he's got a vehicle. Visually, it'd look like the cart is driving full-speed into (and through) people, which is unrealistic yet hilarious enough to let pass. Especially for coasters with separate on- and off-loading stations, where the mechanic has to go through the queue to enter the on-loading station when restraints stuck open.

So... this might require a little spriting work, so I'm not quite sure how feasible it will be. Perhaps it'd even fall under the category of mod content, but oh well. If anything, in my experience this community gives honest and polite feedback even to poor ideas, so I figure it's better to post and see, rather than keeping it to myself. Anyway, a feature I liked in RCT3 was the ability to invest some money in your staff, making them do a better job. It's annoying to see your mechanic trudge his way from that queue line on the far side of his patrol area all the way over to the broken ride, or to watch a handyman walk half a tile, whip out his broom, clear thrash, put the broom away, walk another half tile, and repeat the procedure. So... what if you, for the price of say $500 or so, could buy a maintenance cart for your mechanic? A vehicle that would take him whizzing to the other side of the park at a more appreciable speed than his current leisurely walk? Or even make it a Segway, or a kick bike. Might as well have multiple upgrades with multiple velocities, to make it a little more balanced. The staff member's wage would also increase with every upgrade. As for the handymen, a cart wouldn't be a flat upgrade, but rather a specialization. A path-sweeping broom vehicle that would instantly remove the litter on the tile as the cart drove by. A lawn-mowing tractor. Another cart to empty litter bins, or spray water into flowerbeds. An upgraded handyman would only be able to do one job, but he'd do that job really well. The carts wouldn't need to move much faster than a walking handyman; their strength would be in their ability to do their job without stopping. If even more balance is desired, one could take away the ability to patrol an area with carts. That way, the old foot-trudging staff could still serve a purpose, but the park could also have some "general purpose" staff serving those far-away areas. As for security guards or entertainers, I don't think there would be many ways to improve their performance. Maybe boost their happiness bonuses or area of effect or something, but I don't have any concrete ideas. I think implementation of the feature might be the big hindrance here, so I'm cautious to go overboard with creativity before I know whether it is feasible or not. May I also throw in a second, staff-related idea in here at the end? Give each staff a small box to tick, to toggle whether or not he will ever walk on a queue path. It's very annoying to set a patrol area, for instance along your park's main road or just outside the exit of one ride, only for half the patrol area to be inside queue lines next to the path. Only entertainers ever have anything to do in a queue line, but my mechanics and handimen keep wasting time there all the time.

AquaTrax would be a must, of course. Also, Intamin Inverted coaster track. Kuka RoboArm track would also be neat (as far as I know, it's only used on Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey at Islands of Adventure). Then again, that sort of ride would almost always be indoors anyway, so it's just as good to create a big building around a tracked car ride and pretend there's something more interesting inside. And, of course, Pinfari tracks. For when you want your park to have that unprofessional look. The Junior coaster has much of the same look, but I'd appreciate the ability to add a loop. As for launched coasters, well, it's obvious that launched coasters were in their infancy when RCT2 came out. The lack of launched rides in the game is striking considering how common and varied launched coasters are today - back then, a launch would be the only point of the ride, but now it's almost so common that you could consider it a counterpart to the regular lift hill: just a thrilling way to get the ride up to speed. Either way, I'd love to have a launch track available for every coaster type. RCT3 got it almost right with its Storm Runner track, but then botched the concept so badly it's almost laughable. Using RCT3's Storm Runner track, you could make two coaster layouts, and those two only: A Strata Coaster, or a recreation of Storm Runner itself.

Hello, OpenRCT2 community! I've browsed a few of the ideas threads here, and while many ideas seem exciting and creative, several of them are met with "it's not possible to integrate at the moment", usually regarding the save file format or the game not being fully deconstructed yet. It seems like many veterans of this community are familiar with these limitations, and the current state of the game, and I'm sorry I'm not among them. At the same time, this Ideas subform works like a magnet for new players. Those who go to check out what this "Open RCT 2" thing is all about, and then see there's a place for you to submit your own ideas... that's inherently awesome, and many people will jump straight here before familiarizing themselves with the state of the game's development. And so the veterans have to explain time and time again why the ideas are unfeasible, and the explanations stay inside threads where nobody will look for them. So instead of suggesting a feature for the games, I'm requesting a feature for the forums. A small thread, stickied/pinned to the top of the page, where the developers explain what they are currently able to do with the game, what is and isn't on the table, and addressing a few issues that are frequently brought up (Keyword: Object limits). So if somebody were about to suggest, say, a staff upgrade feature akin to that of RCT3, they could at least check the thread to see if it was within reason and why. Would that be possible? Thanks in advance!

I did have a quick look around the forum, but from thread titles alone it couldn't be seen. Turns out now that it was addressed in an introduction thread, as well as in a thread about something slightly different. Searching for "object limit" yielded no results, but "limit" alone directed me to those two threads plus a bunch of group park threads asking whether or not there was a size limit for the park in question. Not that easy to find, but fair enough. Anyway, glad to see that you plan on addressing it.

As we all know, what made RCT2's expansion packs so mediocre was that most of the new rides on offer were mere re-textures of existing ones - or even just new cars on existing tracks. However, what made the expansion packs bad was how hard they were affected by object limits. Designing a park or scenario in the base game, you had to choose a small handful of themes and rides to exclude from your park. Designing one with the expansion pack, the number of excluded items shot through the roof, ensuring that you could only experience a small part of the total content of the game at one time. Forget about making parks with greater diversity than before - you could make one with a different set of themes, but not more themes. For extra large parks you eventually also ran into an issue limiting the number of signs, rides and eventually scenery pieces you could place. All in all, RCT2 was a game with a great potential, but only up to a certain point. I believe I'm not the only one who hopes to see the object caps lifted as Open RCT2 progresses. At the moment, I believe they are still in effect to the same extent as in the original game. I have to ask, however, how feasible is it? How hard is the limit coded into the game, and how hard will it break if the limit is removed or overruled? Thanks a lot in advance.

Yeah, giving back the entire popularity boost is a little too generous, I think. It's already borderline unreasonable that if you demolish an old ride and put a new, identical one in the same place, with the same themeing, queue lines and ride configuration, people will love it like it's something they've never seen before. When applied to what is essentially the same ride, it'd be even stranger to see people flock to it as if it was brand new. My main beef is with maintenance, and I believe that it could be fixed rather reasonably with a "replace hardware" button. Then again, I suppose it's easier to code it with the full popularity boost. That code would boil down to "remove ride and put an identical one in its place", whereas you'd need a lot more trickery to lower the popularity boost.

Something I've missed sorely from the RCT games, which I think would be quite easy to implement: You know how rides become less reliable over time? Sometimes to the extent that you need a dedicated mechanic on standby to fix it every time it breaks down? To the point of it basically becoming inoperable, because its downtime exceeds its uptime? I'm proposing an option, under the ride's maintenance tab, to put the ride back in "prime condition", at a cost. Say, the monetary difference between its current value and its brand-new-value. It would basically be equivalent to demolishing and rebuilding the ride, but in a single click (plus maybe a yes/no dialog box). There would be little economical gain in refurbishing rides, but it'd remove the hassle of dispatching mechanics all the time, plus reduce the amounts of "Ride X has broken down" messages in the news bar. All in all, a simple QOL feature I'd love to see implemented. Also, hi everybody!