Unlimited booster speed, or significantly increased maximum

[vinesco]

150mph or more perhaps

[X7123M3-256]

The way booster speeds are handled is in need of a redesign as it's a holdover from the old save format.

Currently, there are 16 possible booster speeds for every ride type, so the higher the limit, the further apart these are spaced. That's why you can adjust the junior coaster boosters in 2mph increments but the giga coaster boosters go in 8mph increments. The increment depends on the ride type, and can only be a power of 2 due to the way it works.

This is a mess for a few reasons - changing the ride type also changes the speed of any boosters, ride types with slower boosters cannot be hacked to make them faster., and the speed limits only go in powers of 2 (you can't, for example, have a 75mph speed limit). Since the new save format we have had 8 bits available for storing booster speeds, this could be fixed so boosters work the same way for every ride. It would take 6 bits to allow the giga coaster to have the same increments as the junior coaster with the same max speed.

The other two bits *could* be used to increase the limit beyond the giga coaster's current max. But I'm not in favor of this for two reasons. Firstly, the way boosters work, the acceleration actually drops off with speed - so by the time you reach 130mph, you need an absurdly long launch run to get much faster. It is not really practical to use boosters faster than the current limit. I consider this behavior a bug - but it's consistent with how boosters worked in vanilla, and it can't really be changed without breaking stuff.

Secondly, I would like to use the extra bits for additional booster options - I'd like to have the option to have boosters boost in both directions, instead of only forward, or alternatively, to act as a brake in reverse. This would provide additional possibilities for shuttle and triple launch coasters that I think would be more useful than an absurdly high limit (bear in mind there's only one coaster in the world that exceeds the giga coaster's current speed limit - and it has a hydraulic launch not LSM).