The Lost World of RCT2

[Zygorator]

Like all video games, they had to make change before releasing the final version. RCT2 is no exception. 

Side friction coaster were going to feature curved drop, and a steep drop. Side friction coaster was going to derail off the track if it took a turn too fast.

Heartline Coasters were going to have a vertical lift, loops, and a dive loop, as well taking corners. Feel free to add your own if you discover somethings in OpenRCT2 that didn't make it to the final version of RCT2, and its' expansions.

 

[imlegos]

My thoughts on Side Friction are not official facts, just my thoughts.

(The too fast on a turn was my thought in the unofficial official ORCT2 skype group.)

 

Also, the basis for these claims is unused sprites that are triggered from using the ride vehicles cheat or track merging.

Edited September 13, 2016 by imlegos

[imlegos]

Just a heads up; ALL rides in the game have sprites for going around a corner, including Heart-line cars, this is due to the spinning image in the ride window where you select the ride vehicle or view information on the currently selected vehicle.

Now, if the ride had sprites for banked turns or curved hills, then we would have something interesting.

[X7123M3-256]

Where are you getting this information from? Because it sounds to me like you're just looking at the sprites these rides have. If that's the case, then it does not provide evidence these rides were ever going to have these things. RCT2 uses a 16 bit bitfield to specify which sprites are present in a file. A ride file may have thousands of sprites. Therefore, they are divided into groups, each corresponding to one bit in the bitfield. If the ride needs one sprite from a group, it has to have all the sprites in that group.

 

• Flat slopes. This includes a 32 frame rotation of the car on level ground. All tracked rides have this even if they don't have turns, because they need this available to display the car on level track.
• Gentle slopes. This also includes a rotation of the car; any ride with sprites for gentle slopes also has sprites for curved slopes (except the Spinning Wild Mouse, for some strange reason)
• Steep slopes. Again, this includes a rotation of the car so every ride with steep slopes can do curved steep slopes as well (but not diagonal steep slopes).
• Vertical slopes. Again, there's a full rotation of the car, and this group also includes sprites for loops, so any ride with verticals has loops.
• Diagonal slopes. Diagonal slopes have different angles to the non-diagonal pieces, so all diagonal slope pieces are in this group.
• Banked turns. Includes sprites for banked turns, on level track.
• Inline twist. Includes sprites for inline twists, but not those already included with the banked turns (as far as I can tell, every ride with inline twist sprite has to also have banked turns in order to not glitch).
• Sloped banked transitions. Includes sprites for a transition between an unbanked slope and banked level track, and vice-versa.
• Diagonal banked transitions. Same as previous, but for diagonal track.
• Sloped banked transitions. Includes sprites for a transition between an unbanked slope piece and a banked one.
• Sloped banked turns. Includes sprites for banked curved slopes.
• Banked slope transitions. Includes sprites for a transition between banked level track and banked sloped track.
• Corkscrews. Sprites for corkscrews. IIRC to properly show a corkscrew, a ride should also have banked sloped turns as these sprites are also used.
• Restraint animations. Includes an animation of the restraints opening and closing, from four angles.
• This leaves one sprite group, which is only used on the elevator, and I still haven't figured out what it's for.

 

 

You can see from this that a lot of coasters have to have more sprites than they use - the Air Powered Vertical Coaster and Reverse Freefall Coaster both have way more sprites than they use, but they do use at least one sprite from each group. It doesn't mean they were originally going to have those track pieces - the extra sprites could have been left blank, I suppose, but so far the only coaster I've seen that does this is the multidimensional coaster. The others all just include the extra sprites.

 

But, on the subject of stuff that didn't make it into the final game, this page might be of interest, though it is RCT1, not RCT2.

Edited September 13, 2016 by X7123M3-256

[imlegos]

Looking at that page, the pyramid mentioned breifly looks as though it could have been the one used in the Egyptian Themeing tab's image, which is gray instead of the tanish color seen in-game.

[imlegos]

Also, some of those rides would be pretty neat as custom content...

[imlegos]

Also, interesting note: In White Knuckle, a Suspended Swinging Coaster appears to have a Steep Slope Chain lift, which is not available in RCT2