Gondola Lift (better chairlift)

[Sp0ngeb0b]

First of all, I would like to say 'Hello' to all you RCT maniacs out there - I was really amazed to find an open source development of this old treasure. I've enjoyed this game back when I was a child and still launch it up every now and then.

Second of all, this is not really about new 'custom' content, but more about a thing I found when discovering all the new possibilities with openRCT2.  However, I haven't seen this idea posted anywhere, that's why I want to share it with you.

 

The whole idea is about replacing the default chairlift with something more exciting and representing up-to-date concept. Especially regarding the transport-Capacity  - instead of having the 2 persons chairs, imagine a lift system with 16 peeps per gondola! Something similar to this picture:

 

 

This is indeed possible in openRCT2; however, it requires quite a bit of work.

First of, you want to have the actual gondola - fortunately, the Elevator Car is perfectly suited for this:

With the correct cheat activated, you can change the chairlift cars to the elevator car. However, you'll notice that the car itself is almost the size of one whole square cube unit; this wont look good with the default chairlift track. Besides that, the car will not be able to turn at the chairlift stations and crash. Now, the idea is to use a different track than the chairlift for the actual gondola; using the Monorail turned out to give good results:

By deactivating the clearance checks, and building an additional cablecar track two units above the monorai track results in the optical effect of the elevator car beeing connected to the two ropes.

You'll probably know where this is going now; build the monorail track as a loop between two (or more) stations, cover it with the cable car track and then make the monorail track invisible:

 

That's basically it. It will already look and function like you would expect a real gondola lift to do with free choice of number of gondolas and timing. You'll probably want to make it look more realisting though, by building own supports and probably some better stations. Even corners are possible:

 

You can grab the example park from the last two screenshots here: gondolaLift.sv6

The most time consuming work is definitely making the monorail track invisible via the Tile Inspector; I haven't found a proper way yet to instantly hide ALL track parts by the click of a button. If you are aware of a method, please let me know!

I hope this might be useful for some of you; have a great day!

Sp0ngeb0b

[X7123M3-256]

This is the sort of thing where I would prefer to use a custom ride, but then I tend to use those quite heavily. I think the elevator car looks a bit big to be a chairlift car. You could try a middle monorail car, but I'm not sure that's much better.

1 hour ago, Sp0ngeb0b said:

I haven't found a proper way yet to instantly hide ALL track parts by the click of a button.
 

Change the track type to crooked house. This will make the entire track invisible.

Edited August 11, 2017 by X7123M3-256

[SpiffyJack]

Welcome to the forum!

I like the concept of your idea! Although I don't see the need for 16 passenger car for the simple reason that unless the this type of ride can be recognized as a transport ride and a ride to be used for as such, then the cars will seldom fill with peeps using it for the purpose which it was designed. 

So now my question is... Can the ride be designed with an elevator car, then changed to a standard enclosed tram car and still retain the 16 count? I haven't played with that thought yet, but now i'm curious. 

[X7123M3-256]

1 hour ago, SpiffyJack said:

the simple reason that unless the this type of ride can be recognized as a transport ride and a ride to be used for as such, then the cars will seldom fill with peeps using it for the purpose which it was designed.

Depends on the scenario and peep intensity preferences. Peeps never use transport rides for transport, but peeps preferring gentle rides will ride them anyway. Also, covered rides are popular in the rain. The steam trains and monorail can carry far more than 16 passengers (the monorail has the highest per-train capacity in the base game),  and those don't run almost empty because of it.

 

1 hour ago, SpiffyJack said:

Can the ride be designed with an elevator car, then changed to a standard enclosed tram car and still retain the 16 count? I haven't played with that thought yet, but now i'm curious. 

I don't know what you're trying to achieve by switching the car to the tram cars - IMO that would look worse than the elevator in this situation. But in answer to the question, if you switch the car type using the in-game cheat, then you also change the capacity. The cheat doesn't let you set them independently. If you modify the vehicle structures directly, you can specify whatever capacity you like (no idea what happens if you set a higher capacity than the train has sprites for, but the trams don't show sprites for peeps anyway so you should be OK).

[SpiffyJack]

7 hours ago, X7123M3-256 said:

I don't know what you're trying to achieve by switching the car to the tram cars

My bad... Tram car was wrong type. i agree .... my post was rushed and not specific enough..  . i will elaborate when i get a chance breath lol