Mixed trains

[X7123M3-256]

I was experimenting with the train code, and I found you can have vehicles taken from different rides in the same train.  You can also override the normal vehicle order, e.g to create a train that consists entirely of zero cars. I don't know if this has been done before, nor do I have a use for it, but I thought it was interesting:

 

 

 

[Broxzier]

Cool, haven't seen this before.

[X7123M3-256]

I've not seen it done before either. I'd be surprised if this was the first time it's been done, but then before OpenRCT2 this hack would have been very difficult to pull off, and it wouldn't have been obvious that it was possible. There's a lot more that could be done with this, like messing with spacing or friction, but none of it seems particularly useful, except for certain hacked flat rides and shoestring coasters.

Edited April 15, 2016 by X7123M3-256

[YoloSweggLord]

What I want to know is, what would happen if you mixed a train with, say, steel twister cars and side friction cars, and run that train at high enough speed over a hill that the side friction cars fly off the track, would the whole train crash, would the game crash, or would the train separate in some weird way?

[Broxzier]

I don't think that's possible. You can have different cars from different car types on the same track, but not from different tracks. If you would use a side friction car on a looping coaster for example, it doesn't fly off either. Okay, nevermind that, I thought it was going to behave like how the track was designed, but the vehicle code is being used for the crashes of course, not the tracks.

Edited April 17, 2016 by Broxzier

[X7123M3-256]

1 hour ago, Broxzier said:

I don't think that's possible. You can have different cars from different car types on the same track, but not from different tracks.

Not sure what you mean by this. You can have any vehicle from any of the available objects in your park on any track. As far as I'm aware, you can have different trains with different vehicle types on the same (though this is untested). You can even put some of the vehicles of the same train on one track and some on another (this is known as a shoestring).

 

2 hours ago, YoloSweggLord said:

What I want to know is, what would happen if you mixed a train with, say, steel twister cars and side friction cars, and run that train at high enough speed over a hill that the side friction cars fly off the track, would the whole train crash, would the game crash, or would the train separate in some weird way?

IIRC the front car is used - so if the front car is side friction, the whole train crashes. If the front car is twister, no crash occurs. There's a couple of other parameters that are specified per-vehicle but only the front car matters (such as sound effects) - I'm not sure why these weren't specified per-ride instead, but that's the way it is. I don't think theres any way to set it up so that only part of a train crashes - even if you split the front car off onto a different track and crash that, the rest of the train just randomly explodes in the middle of it's course.

Edited April 17, 2016 by X7123M3-256

[simaticable]

Do you know if it would be possible to have a train be turned around like the 6 seater wooden coaster with this method? Like, instead of facing forward when a ride begins, you're facing backwards, like what Six Flags did to Batman, etc.

[X7123M3-256]

I don't know, but I think the answer is probably not. It seems trains have to face the same direction as the track. You could build the whole ride backward, but then things like chain lifts would go in the wrong direction.

I think the easiest way to reverse a train is to create a new DAT with the original seats reversed, like Sawyer did for the 6 seater wooden coaster. Once you have such a reversed train, this hack could be used if you wanted to reverse individual cars rather than the whole train.

[simaticable]

On 4/19/2016 at 03:36, X7123M3-256 said:

I think the easiest way to reverse a train is to create a new DAT with the original seats reversed, like Sawyer did for the 6 seater wooden coaster.

Do you think this could be something you'd be interested in doing at some point to some of the other coaster trains? I'm not experienced with DATs in any way, and I know you certainly know a lot when it comes to making custom trains.

[X7123M3-256]

It's not hard to create a reversed version of a train, because you just need to reorder the existing sprites, not render any new ones. In fact, I would probably just write a script to take a DAT and produce one with reversed trains automatically. However, there's so many DATs out there that I'm not just going to make a reversed version of every DAT I find unless someone specifically requests it, or I need it for a park.

[YoloSweggLord]

Is it possible to remove the front end of a train without splitting the train using this, or a related, method? I'd like to remove the front end of Steel Twister Coaster cars to leave me with something similar to Gerstlauer 4-seater Infinity of Eurofighter cars

[X7123M3-256]

Yup, absolutely.  There are two ways to do it:

• Make the train one car shorter than it would otherwise be and then change the zero car subtype back to a normal car. You will also need to set the capacity back to 4 to get guests to board it.
• Make the zero car invisible. This has some difficulties; the Twister coaster does not have an invisible car type, which isn't itself a problem because you can use the invisible car from any other object you have loaded (most single car coasters have them).

I'm not sure which of these I'd prefer - the main difference is that an invisible car would give you control over the spacing between the trains, but also, your train is one car longer than it appears to be which affects friction (you can adjust this though).

 

Alterations to friction, capacity, and subtype may take place after the trains have been spawned and you may find that easier. If you want to change spacing, it is easiest to do it while the train is being created (i.e actually in vehicle_create_train).  If you do it after that, it will have no effect.

All of these hacks will be reset if you respawn the trains - I usually create a seperate branch with the modifications needed to perform this hack. Then, if I need to redo it later I can switch back easily.