"Guests Ignore ride age" cheat, "undo"in certain circumstances, other stuff

[CSEverett]

I've got a whole bunch of suggestions, ranging from "easy and hopefully in next release" to "a guy can dream."

First, the quick and easy ones:

-A new cheat for "guests ignore ride age completely." The "rides don't decrease in value over time" cheat doesn't affect ride popularity, and the "renew all rides" cheat sets the ride age to one year and the reliability to 100%, completely removing the mechanic of needing to periodically refurbish rides and prevent brake failures through either design or maintenance. It's would actually be a pretty major improvement for those who run the same park for game-years on end, so guests can keep riding the existing rides while also having to take care of ride aging, breakdowns and refurbishment. PLEASE include this.

-Joining those making the call for adjustable block brake speeds.

-Fixing the "the drawing engine can't draw lists longer than 32767 pixels" issue.

 

More complicated:

- New Giga coaster track pieces (vertical track), and a Intamin LSM coaster, both using X7123M3-256's track he mostly already has.  (I assuming he provided the Hybrid track, so you'd be already working together. I wouldn't be surprised if this is already in the works.)

 

 

--Something I discovered that would make an easy new track piece - The track sprites for the lay-down coaster in the upright position are exactly identical to the corkscrew coaster, but the lay-down coaster includes an in-line twist, which the corkscrew doesn't.  Currently you can use track merging to add a perfectly seamless in-line twist to the corkscrew coaster - since they are literally identical, the sprites from the lay-down coaster's in-line twists could be used to add an in-line twist to the corkscrew coaster (under "enable all drawable track pieces") using only existing vanilla track sprites. Of course, it's possible to decide the corkscrew coaster -shouldn't- include an in-line twist, so there's that.

 

-Probably harder to implement, and perhaps not worth the trouble:

-Somewhat more difficult, and I don't know how practical it would be, but an "undo" feature for raise/lower land, scenery construction/removal, clear scenery and maybe track construction. There have been plenty of times with highly complex scenery areas where I wish I could have taken back the last click by completely screwing up scenery that was a pain to make in the first place. Even just the last click only would be good, 5 clicks saved would be more than enough.

Edited September 2, 2021 by CSEverett

[jensj12]

6 hours ago, CSEverett said:

First, the quick and easy ones:

-Fixing the "the drawing engine can't draw lists longer than 32767 pixels" issue.

What might seem easy for you, can be a nightmare for developers. This one in particular requires a rewrite of the entire drawing engine.

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-A new cheat for "guests ignore ride age completely." The "rides don't decrease in value over time" cheat doesn't affect ride popularity, and the "renew all rides" cheat sets the ride age to one year and the reliability to 100%, completely removing the mechanic of needing to periodically refurbish rides and prevent brake failures through either design or maintenance. It's would actually be a pretty major improvement for those who run the same park for game-years on end, so guests can keep riding the existing rides while also having to take care of ride aging, breakdowns and refurbishment.

I don't think this justifies a new cheat. Perhaps a better way to handle this would be to make the 'rides don't decrease in value' cheat handle the popularity as well. FYI, the renew rides cheat literally refurbishes every single ride without the usual requirements so you don't have to do that manually.

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-Undo

No: #2256

[CSEverett]

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What might seem easy for you, can be a nightmare for developers. This one in particular requires a rewrite of the entire drawing engine.

Got it. Perhaps put it under the "long term goals" category? Or perhaps add an option for custom filters instead? EDIT: Humm... Allow filtering by scenery group?? That might be the best solution.

 

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I don't think this justifies a new cheat. Perhaps a better way to handle this would be to make the 'rides don't decrease in value' cheat handle the popularity as well.

Sounds good.

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FYI, the renew rides cheat literally refurbishes every single ride without the usual requirements so you don't have to do that manually.

Which is exactly the problem. Taking care of refurbishments is part of the fun, so to speak, of running an old park. I want to have to take care of this manually. Using "renew all rides" removes one of the bigger gameplay mechanics of running the same park for years on end. For example, multiple occasions where there was the need to speed construction of a new large coaster so that the rapidly aging current flagship coaster can be closed for refurbishment without hurting the park;  planning how best to go about closing of one ride at a time for refurbishment while keeping guests in the right area of the park,  or making sure you refurbish the side-friction coasters before reliability drops below 50% due to the lack of block brakes and the possibility of brakes failure. Or mentally scheduling improvements (or in one case of rushed construction final excitement optimization) for the next refurbishment.

 

Just like in real parks, when the rides were closed anyway for refurbishments I've used the opportunity to adjust station design, tweak track profiles, change brake runs, modify block systems, and fiddle with train lengths. in one case operational experience showed that in actual practice with 4 train operations one train was always sitting backed up in the station, so it was changed to three longer trains - just like in real life! (In one case adding a block brake was on the list of scheduled improvements, since when it was built I thought brake failures were so rare as to not be worth considering - that didn't end well.) Refurbishment is really an amazing mechanic that adds tons of dynamics (and fun) to the running of old parks.

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No: #2256

Okay.

 

Any thoughts on the idea of adding an an in-line twist to the corkscrew coaster using the identical lay-down coaster track sprites?

Edited September 2, 2021 by CSEverett