Support locked scenarios in both scenario sorting modes

[Wuzzy]

WARNING: OPINION!

Currently, RCT1 and RCT2 scenarios have to be unlocked by winning scenarios. This reflects RCT1 behavior. (There's also a checkbox to unlock all scenarios for free, which oddly is not considered a cheat.)

This is fine with me. No problem here.

But there is a limitation to this. This only works when scenarios are sorted by game. But if you sort scenarios by difficulty, all scenarios are automatically unlocked. The aforementioned checkbox is grayed out.

But I think this is a strange limitation. Sorting scenarios is purely a GUI thing, not a gameplay thing, so IMHO should not affect the locking state of scenarios. Why? Because sorting has nothing to do with gameplay progress.

My suggestion is to support locked scenarios regardless of sorting.

In both modes, the same unlocking order shall be applied. I mean with this, the same scenarios are being unlocked in both sorting modes, as the scenario sorting is only a different way to display scenarios, not a gameplay change.
For example, winning your first RCT1 scenario will shall unlock Bumbly Beach, no matter where it actually appears in the list.

Because this might be slightly irritating, I also add to my suggestion to add a hover text. When you hover a locked scenario, write in the right of the window what is required to unlock the scenario.

• In “sort by game”, write “Complete X more scenario(s) in this series to unlock”.
• In “sort by difficulty”, write “Complete X more scenario(s) in [game name] to unlock”.

(This has been brought up on GitHub before, but was unsuccessful so far.)

 

 

Edited July 18, 2020 by Wuzzy

[jensj12]

The reason that locking scenarios does not work with difficulty sorting, is that it simply unlocks the first 5 scenarios that are not yet completed. Unlocking the scenarios in a different order than in which they are listed thus requires a lot of additional work, and (warning: opinion) I don’t think that’s worth it (in other words, I won’t code it).

You can open a PR for it on GitHub if you really want it, the good thing is that it doesn’t add another checkbox to the options menu