X7123M3-256

Paths can be placed at half height, but two paths must meet at the same height to properly connect. If you use half height paths anywhere, you effectively have to use them everywhere if you want peeps to be able to use them. I prefer to keep the paths normal and just elevate the ride, if needed. I don't do this often; it's a pain in the ass because entrances can't be moved away from the station platform using the existing cheats, so you have to manually tweak the map data to do it.

Peeps usually can brake on alpine slides the same way they can on alpine coasters. I don't know if the speed is limited in the same way, but I'd guess it probably is. They're very similar rides, though alpine slides are of course not locked to the track and can sometimes derail if the brake is not used. Neither functionality works in the ride above - I just set the friction higher than normal. I thought about animating the brake on turns (which would be purely aesthetic) but it would be more effort than it was worth for such a subtle effect.

Oh, they can be. The entrance has to be the same height as the path, but the entrance doesn't have to connect with the platform (it doesn't even have to be on an adjacent tile). Still an annoying glitch, but if you for some reason wanted a ride placed at half height, it can be made to work.

The cars are too small for the track - they were made to fit the peeps rather than the track. Alpine coasters use a different, narrower and sometimes single rail track that doesn't have a close match in RCT2, so I didn't worry too much about getting the track to fit well.

OK, well, if anyone wants it here's a quick alpine coaster I made this evening. It's really quickly put together and not great quality - it's not a recreation of any real alpine coaster car - that's a project for another day. Because it's an alpine coaster, the height restriction is set to 35 feet, since this is supposed to follow the terrain. Excitement was boosted substantially simply because any realistic alpine coaster layout will be pretty boring by the game's standards. However, I did not bother to disable steep slopes, and even rendered sprites for them, so you can put this on any wild mouse layout if you really want. Sprites for banked turns are also provided, but the wild mouse track is default. You can override it with the cheats in game if you want. ALPCSTS0.DAT

This looks useful. I didn't realize the 1 tile wide restriction persisted in OpenRCT2, I thought it was only in RCT1. It would explain some of the issues I had in one of my parks. At least it seems there's a fix now.

Someone on NE sent me a model of a coaster train to make into a ride. I've been told it's not a model of a real train, and so it probably isn't much use, but I thought I might as well post it here also. Somebody may find it useful. All sprites are rendered, including inversions, but the default track type is Intamin (I thought it the best fit for the train...not really wide enough for B&M). GWHZZTRN.DAT

I was planning to do this last summer but gave up because I couldn't find the information I needed. I could easily make a fictional one though (i.e not modelled off the real ride).

No, the limit is still 255 rides

~/.config/OpenRCT2 is the location on Linux, on Windows it's probably in your Documents folder.

Those directories don't exist until you save a scenario or track. Just create them manually and then put the required files in there.

It can also mean that, but in an amusement park context the term "Scenic Railway" refers to a specific type of early rollercoaster, especially those built by LaMarcus Thompson (who is widely credited with inventing the modern roller coaster). Scenic Railways usually ran on flanged wheels with no upstops (the scenic railway predates John Miller's invention of the upstop wheel in 1919, but scenic railways continued to be built by L.A Thompson and others beyond this date) and featured gentle dips and slopes, often with painted backdrops and tunnels. The train would usually be equipped with a brakeman who would manually control the speed (though many surviving examples have since been converted to modern track-based braking). A good example of a scenic railway is Hochschaubahn. If anyone is interested, I made a version of L.A Thompson's scenic railway for RCT2. I never added it to my webpage because it is really, really glitchy (trains way longer than the game is designed to handle), but it can still be downloaded here. It features an animated brakeman, but it's sadly not visible amongst all the glitching.

If you mean the turnaround immediately after the drop (which is the only thing that looks like a helix), there was a similar element on Son Of Beast - I believe it was referred to as a rose bowl. I've not heard the term "Inverted helix" used to refer to this element though, so maybe you meant something else.

If I revisit this project I'd likely take a different approach to the sprite generation. For those sprites, I extruded a 2D cross section of the track shape along the shape of the track. It works for relatively simple tracks, but doesn't generalize well. A better approach would be to start with a full 3D model of a straight section of track and transform it to match the desired track profile. Another issue is the splitting of the sprites - that code assumes it's one sprite per tile, like for large scenery, but I know now that that's not the case - track pieces have their own draw logic. I don't fully understand what that is yet.

I don't think the object editor can edit g1.dat, it is, as the name suggests, meant for editing object files. The images themselves are in the same format, but object files contain a lot of additional data on top of that. Also, some g1.dat sprites use several flags not used in object files, so a loader for object files may not be able to handle them correctly (mine did not, and I only found out what was wrong fairly recently). I am not sure if Trigger's Graphics Extractor can modify the file either, but it's something that could probably be added if you wanted to do that. The way recolorability is handled is that certain palette indices are marked recolorable - wherever those colors appear, they can be substituted for another according to a lookup table that I can post here if you want. The primary two remap colors are always remapped and never show up in the game, while the third set of remap colors doubles as the yellow pixels. Usually, there are flags to set on the object to enable each remap color, but not in g1.dat - it is sufficient to use the correct palette indices. Here's a dump of all files associated with that project. This includes the modified g1.dat and the code used to generate it. Be aware that this will break your terrain sprites, because they are missing a field I did not know was required. I know how to fix it now, but this code is unchanged from what I had when I did this originally. Do back up your original g1.dat somewhere before trying this out.

Most people get custom scenery by downloading parks. Many parks are available for download at New Element. I would recommend downloading the Xtreme97 workbench, as it has a decent selection of the most important objects. NE also has a large database of individual object files available for download, but it carries very little information about them, so it's only really useful if you already know the name of the object you're looking for.

I implemented that command. I didn't document it because I'm not sure where documentation for console commands is supposed to go (I think the help command could do with extending to include descriptions of commands instead of just a list) The command is "rides set friction <ride index> <friction value>". The appropriate ride index for your ride can be determined by typing "rides list" at the console. This command will loop over every ride vehicle and set the friction to the supplied value; this means it can only be applied once the ride is testing and doing anything that causes the trains to respawn (e.g changing train length) will reset the friction back to default. Lower values mean higher friction, the maximum is 65535, and very low values can sometimes cause bugs, especially in vanilla. Saving before using this command is advisable.

In RCT3 objects are represented by actual meshes, there is no pre-rendering and no use of sprites. The need to split objects across multiple map elements is gone because you have a depth buffer (I have no idea how RCT3 stores the map, but it certainly doesn't need to do it the way RCT2 does). While you can argue that RCT2 is a 3D game since the objects have coordinates in three dimensional space, the sprites themselves carry no depth information and the rendering techniques are closer to what you would see in a 2D game than something like RCT3. The image RCT2 produces is the same as what you'd get if you replaced the sprites with 3D models, yes, but in order to make that so the game has to be designed around certain restrictions: The impossibility of correctly sorting objects for rendering using the painter's algorithm forces the objects to be organised into a grid, and objects that take up more than one grid square have to be split up into multiple sprites to avoid violating the constraint. To dispense with the grid you'd have to use an expensive topological sort, and you would get rendering glitches in cases of cyclic dependencies. Without any depth information, you can't resolve this problem - that's why you can't just place objects anywhere in RCT2 and why circumventing these restrictions with zero clearance will frequently cause rendering glitches. In RCT3, this restriction is artificial - there's no fundamental reason you should be confined to a grid. You are limited to one viewpoint. To get the other four viewpoints, the object has to be rendered from four angles. You could add more viewpoints at the cost of rendering more sprites but there is no way to change the viewpoint arbitrarily. You cannot use a perspective projection, because then you wouldn't be able to pre-render a sprite even with a fixed viewpoint - the object is distorted according to it's position in relation to the camera. A consequence of this is that RCT2 can never have a first person viewpoint. Real time lighting isn't possible. The implementation floating around is a post-process where pixels near a light are brightened - it doesn't properly shade objects and it cannot computer proper occlusion or shadows.

Are you sure the game is actually installed? Some people have tried to point OpenRCT2 at the installer or the disk mount point- OpenRCT2 can't make use of those files directly as they are in compressd format, you need to actually run the installer. For me, the game was located at C:/Program Files/Infogrames/RollerCoaster Tycoon 2. This was the disk version, if you got the game online it might be installed somewhere else. If you have a shortcut for RCT2 somewhere on your desktop, you should be able to right click it and see where it points to. If all else fails you could try reinstalling RCT2 and making a note of where it's installing files to.

The log flume and splash boats do not actually have a lift hill. That's why you don't see a chain lift button in the editor. What looks like the lift hill is actually the normal upward slope sprite for that track. The boats climb the hills because it is treated as a powered ride. This is also why they do not slow down on long flat sections. Therefore, there are two ways to speed up the lift: You can either enable "Allow chain lift on all track pieces" to put an actual lift on the ride, or you can increase the acceleration and/or the speed of the boats (there is no cheat in OpenRCT2 to do this yet, however).

That wasn't the first time someone was confused by the preview image - I think at least 4 people have asked how to get the IBox, but you do not want it - it's glitchy and incomplete. I thought it was common knowledge that custom track styles weren't possible, but apparently not. If anyone wants to see just how bad it is, I could upload the file. Also, you can put anything you want in a preview image, you could put a photo of a real ride in there if you want. It does not have to be a screenshot of the game, that's just convention. I generally avoid using anything custom in the preview images except for the trains themselves, but the RMC just looks so awful on wooden track I chose to keep the IBox, even though I never released it because it was not usable.

I'm hoping that when there is a new save format this will be possible. I still have the code used to render the IBox track for the that video, but I've since thought of a much easier way to do it that's flexible enough to handle more complex track styles. @Duncans_pumpkin has now completed reverse-engineering of the Junior coaster track, so we have an example coaster that's fully implemented (but lacking many track pieces). In theory, you could do it without a new save format but at the cost of permanently breaking backward compatibility - by changing the dive machine to use twister track, adding the elements from the dive machine to the twister track instead, and you'd free up a ride type to be used for a new track type. However, this would result in all savegames prior to the change being loaded incorrectly, and all new savegames with a vertical drop coaster being incompatible with vanilla. I think it's best to wait until there's a new format.

I had a go - but ultimately this would require a new save format to do properly as there's no way to create custom track types at the moment (the linked video used a modified g1.dat). Therefore, I would say RMCs are easily one of the hardest coaster types to build - they have unusual elements hard to reproduce with the current set of pieces, and the track style differs so dramatically from anything else that nothing really works as a substiture, even with extensive hacks. A decent RMC can just about be done, but you'll need zero clearance, at least three different track types, and custom scenery.

While technically true, the amount you could earn this way is tiny - and the problem could be solved by deducting the cost of the item from your money whenever your guests purchases something.

It was possible, there was a hidden option for it. You had to edit a file called options.txt somewhere in the game directory to enable it. I can't remember the specifics, it's a long time since I played RCT3. There isn't much need for hacks in RCT3 because the game engine is more flexible and so a lot can be done with custom content without relying on hacks, but this was one that's useful to have.