balidani

Sorry for the late reply, I had to go through some steps at work before sharing my code. I posted everything here, along with a short description of what everything is: https://github.com/balidani/coaster_generator Hope you don't find it too ugly

Hello! Thanks for the suggestions, jensj12! I did a very simple attempt at restricting height as the track grows. It kinda sorta works, but I'll have to think about a more accurate model. The nuclear option would be to take OpenRCT2's code that actually simulates the coaster across the track and measure everything. But the code seems complicated enough, and with the current bruteforce-like approach I'm sure it would be super slow. In the meantime I converted my Python code to C++ so everything happens in a single step, producing a td6 file that I can test. I created a large coaster that can do a full lap with some cheating (I changed some flat pieces to boosters). Here is what it looks like. You can see that I also added loops. Then I added banked turns. To try and get better stats I removed any non-banked turns for now. There are some issues with this, one of them is that I don't restrict banking and sometimes the track wobbles from left to right and back. I'll have to add another state machine that dictates which states are legal, so that once it banks in one direction it commits for at least a few track pieces or until a turn is made, etc. I generated some super tiny 14x6 coasters, the stats are surprisingly not that bad: That's it for now, I'll generate more interesting coasters when I have a better model Cheers!

Yeah, I did not cheat I do need to run many iterations before stumbling on something that can get back to the station. It's a very simple backtracking approach so if it starts out wrong it can get stuck. I am planning on creating something more sophisticated but first I want to make sure the generated coaster is valid, in that it can actually do a full lap.

I made some progress! The generated coasters always get stuck somewhere though, so more work is needed.

Hello! A long time ago I have seen a talk about somebody attempting to auto-generate coasters for RCT using genetic programming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUBYTcVjp7I The talk is interesting but unfortunately the results were not very impressive. I was thinking about doing something similar either using SMT solvers or using a regular dynamic programming approach. I have 2 quick questions: - Does anyone here know about any more research on this topic? - Does anyone know what would be the easiest way to data mine all track pieces (ie. for steel coasters) and their boundaries, the clearances needed, etc.? I started working them out by hand but they are not intuitive, for example it's hard to say how the height increases on large inclined curves. Thanks, Daniel