Tornado @ Coney Island

[CharlieP]

A question I hope someone can answer. I have in my track file a ride named Tornado @ Coney Island. It was locally known as the "Bobs" and was scary as hell (I rode it once upon a time in 1965). It is (track wise) an excellant reproduction of the actual ride. The track Designs manager shows the ride WITH scenery so I know that all the scenery dats are already in my ObjData file, problem is I can't identify all the dats required. Can anyone help me figure out what dats to use.

Thanks - ahead of time

Tornado @ Coney Island.TD6

[X7123M3-256]

The hacky way of doing this is to open the file in a text editor. The DAT file names are just about the only plain text in there so they stand out - however, the RLE compression will alter some names (particularly those with double letters), so you'll struggle to find them all this way. Therefore I'll just give you the DAT file names (which I got by decompressing and parsing the file, so this list should be complete):

MFT (Articulated wooden coaster; you can substitute another train but this is the one in the file)

WALLLT32
WALLBB33
WALLWD33
CORROOF2
WALLWD32
MINROOF1
TCC
WALLGL32
TARMAC
WALLSK32
WALLTN32
TNTROOF1
SSIG2
SSIG4
PATHSPCE
WALLBB32
WDBASE
WALLJN32
WALLPOST
WALLSIGN
WALLCFPC
WGW2
WFWG
WALLBRDR
WFW1
BRBASE
WALLCBDR
WALLBR8
WALLBR16
WALLWD16
SKTBASE
CORROOF
TARMACB
WALLCF32
WALLBB16
WALLWD8
WALLBB8
PATHCRZY
WALLCFDR
WALLPR34
ROOF3
WALLCB16
WALLCB8
WALLCFAR
TMJ
WALLBR32
WALLCB32
WALLCZ32
WALLPR32
SUMRF
PAGROOF1
SSIG3

 

EDIT: I was wondering why the Millenium Flyer train was chosen since they didn't come into use until 1999, but then I realized what ride you're talking about. Tornado ran Prior & Church trains, which were articulated and very similar to the modern GCI design. As far as I know, there are only two rides left operating with those trains.

 

 

 

Edited May 15, 2016 by X7123M3-256

[CharlieP]

The tornado was shut down and demolished in 1978 after a fire started by an arsonist in 1977.

 

Thanks for the info, so a standard text editor will work?

[X7123M3-256]

Using a text editor can work, as most names are unchanged by the RLE compression used (not all though). However, short names may be mistaken for random noise and it's quite tedious to go through all the scenery items this way. I found it easier to write a script to parse the file.

[CharlieP]

I downloaded a text editor (TextPad 8) and I see what you mean by tedious and confusing. I am very computer literate but not machine language literate, Could you explain how to do this?

[X7123M3-256]

What you see is not machine language - the file is a binary file so it contains characters text editors can't handle. What you see will depend on the editor and character set you're using - some don't show them at all, some show a placeholder, and some show the hex code in a little box. However, the names you're looking for are actually text - and they are pretty much the only actual text to be found in the file.

You're just looking for anything that's not garbled nonsense. Take a look at this screenshot:

Highlighted in red are the names of scenery objects included in the file. The blue circles are also scenery objects, but the names have been changed by the compression. Those names all begin with "WALL", and the double L is RLE compressed which means there's a length specifier before and after. Knowing this, and comparing with the list above, you can work out which objects these are, but unless you've memorized the contents of your ObjData folder you probably won't be able to do this for every object.

Once again, I don't seriously recommend this method - it was the first thing I thought to try so I casually mentioned it. Between the fact that some names will be compressed, and the fact that even a fairly small design might have a lot of scenery objects to work through, you aren't likely to get a comprehensive list this way, even if you spend the time to pick through the whole file. I gave up after picking out just a handful of objects, and then decompressed the file and read out the scenery items with a script.

The list I've given you above is every DAT file needed to build this track - just use that.

[CharlieP]

Thank you