X7123M3-256

Then why don't you make it happen.

I suggest you check that first, because it looks like your ride is built at half height which is why you can't connect anything to it. The most likely reason for this is that you have the "Allow building at invalid heights" cheat turned on - although, if the game is letting you build this without cheats then that would be a bug.

Do you have the "Allow building at invalid heights" cheat enabled?

We don't have the other three angles

It was always 120, hasn't been changed since it was added to OpenRCT2.

I think it's extremely unlikely anyone would add these pieces to the wooden coaster, especially when there are many ride types in game that are missing pieces that would be far more useful (like the Intamin track not having any inversion pieces). Maybe it'd happen once OpenGraphics has finished remaking all the vanilla ride types, but that's not likely to be any time soon. You could consider using the hybrid coaster track instead, it has most of these pieces except for the large and small half loops.

Yes, the Mac version has the same functionality as the Windows version.

You need to go into the object selection, and under the station types tab, select "No Entrance, No Platform". It's not enabled by default.

Yes. That has been a feature since, like OpenRCT2 became a thing. Just go to Cheats -> Object Selection and select whatever you want. If you want to be able to select more objects than the base game allows, you'll need to be on the develop version, the release build still has the old limits. That's exactly what the "download objects" feature does. Specifically, it looks for the objects on the New Element server, which is the largest database of custom objects currently in existence. If it doesn't download the missing objects, it's because the server doesn't have them. It has a lot of objects but it doesn't have every object ever created, and no server does. If you are sharing a park for others to download you should make sure "export custom objects with saved games" is checked in the options - that will include the custom objects with the save file so anyone can open it.

Changing the filename does not change the file in any way. There is no supported way to convert a .park file into an SV6 file, because the new format supports things that the original format cannot handle. You will need to be on the develop build in order to open .park files.

They should be, IIRC, but some of them are stupidly difficult so don't worry if you can't complete them all.

It is if you enable it, but the default is not to allow it because the original game didn't.

Anyone can create a server. What people build on servers is nothing to do with OpenRCT2 - it's up to the individual server owners what they will allow and how effectively they moderate it. I suggest picking a server that isn't run by racists. Many open servers are frequently vandalized. If a server allows anyone to build, then that means anyone can come in and build a swastika on the map and you can't really stop it, you can only ban the user after the fact (and it's trivial to create a new user, so bans are ineffective unless they are IP bans). The only way to prevent this is to play on a server that only allows trusted users to build, but of course that means you first have to gain their trust. Some servers have an associated Discord channel which you need to join to request permissions.

Very unlikely, no new ride types are being actively worked on as far as I'm aware, and the hybrid and single rail coasters were added by me, and I am not expecting to have anything new ready for the next release. There definitely won't be new track pieces - those require the new save format so they can't be merged until after the new save format is. Strictly speaking, it requires a new track design format as well, but I think a temporary solution would be to simply disable saving track designs if the new pieces are used, as many people don't save many track designs and probably wouldn't mind this if it meant the new pieces could be added sooner. I am not sure if the OpenRCT2 developers would be OK with this solution though. Other than that, new track pieces are very doable with the new save format, I already have several custom track pieces working on the new save format branch.

The file you linked is only 37 bytes long, so it contains no useful data. If that's the only file you have, the save is not recoverable. The only thing that might work is to use data recovery software to try to locate an old copy of the file that may have been deleted, but there's no guarantee that one exists or that it is recoverable if it does. If you are not using autosaves, it's a good idea to save regular backups of your park manually so you don't lose everything if a save gets corrupted.

No, they aren't distributing any of the original assets, but they did reverse engineer, decompile, and modify the code, which the EULA tells you not to do. It is not a clean room implementation. My point is not that I give a shit what the EULA says, I'm just saying that if the OpenRCT2 developers had followed @jensj12's advice, we wouldn't have OpenRCT2.

The RCT2 EULA also has that wording, but that didn't stop the OpenRCT2 project.

You need to enable the cheat menu in the options.

The PR also mentions that you can revert to the original pricing via a compiler flag, so you can have it be exactly the same if you want that.

Pay per ride is usually easier. You generate a steady income that's proportional to the number of rides you have - the small number of guests that might not pay anything is easily offset by the fact that most guests are spending hundreds over the time they're in the park. Coasters are highly profitable - guests will often pay £15 or even £20 for a brand new coaster, and if you're running three trains of 20-30 riders each, you're looking at upwards of £1000 income per ride cycle. In pay per entry parks, you get money when guests enter the park, but you're limited in how much you can charge because they only spawn with so much cash - and once in the park, they're spending very little. There's a soft cap on the number of guest in your park, so once your park fills up, your income becomes severely limited as new guests won't enter until existing ones leave. Therefore, it's harder to make steady profits - you either have to expand rapidly and advertise aggressively so you always have new guests coming in, or try to encourage guests to leave sooner (like by not building food stalls or toilets). You can also profit from food and drink sales, but guests won't buy food as often or pay as nearly as much as they would for rides. They won't refuse to pay for rides, but the amount that they're willing to pay for rides is a lot lower if they had to pay any amount to enter, which makes sense, although it's a bit simplistic - whether they paid £1 or £50 to enter, the amount they'll pay for rides is the same.

You must have had a very old version if that worked before - that was changed years ago.

If you want to try generating new assets with AI, go ahead. But since you still have to develop and train the AI, it's not exactly "automatic" - even if you can make it work this is still a ton of work to pull off. Every ride has its own set of peep sprites, on top of the basic set for walking, sitting etc. That's literally tens of thousands of sprites you'd have to add for every peep variant you want. Not only that, but currently, the ride sprites contain pairs of peeps - you'd have to split those in two.

You're right, it wasn't like this in the original RCT2. IIRC, this is how it was in RCT1, and the feature used to be optional but the option was eventually removed in order to simplify the code. There's no longer the option to have the vehicles displayed as separate rides like they were in vanilla.

Here's the link to their Discord server. Any questions about that server specifically should go here - I doubt the people who run that server are on this forum, and they're the only people who are likely to be able answer. They sometimes set the default role to "spectator" to prevent trolling. When they do this, you should still be able to connect, but won't be able to build unless you have been granted additional permissions. If you don't see the server in the list at all, then the server is probably down, and if you want to know why you'll have to ask the admins. If you can't connect to the server at all, first make sure you're on the right version (the Mozar servers use the release builds). If you still can't connect, check if you can connect to other servers - that way you can tell if the issue is with you or the server. If it's a problem with the server, then again only the admins are going to be able to help.

OpenRCT2 needs the RCT2 assets to run. You can either transfer the files across from a machine that does have a CD reader, or download the demo version and use that instead.