Roller coasters clip each other

[Typhoon]

I've been experimenting with self interlocking roller coaster designs and I came across unexpected behaviour. After leaving them running they would just stop... Looking at the velocity/time graphs (should be "Speed" instead, right?) showed an abrupt and near instantaneous drop. I wasn't sure why this occurred so I built some test tracks and as far as I can tell, when two coasters pass by one another within an interlocked loop, there is a chance they will clip causing a coaster to lose a lot of speed and so cause a pile up or worse, crash.

I have tried wooden, looping, twister and corkscrew roller coasters, all of which exhibit this behaviour to varying degrees. Oddly, depending on whether you select "test" or "open", the outcome changes somewhat. Both the wooden and looping coasters failed in either scenario though the wooden coaster had to be closed then reopened. The corkscrew also failed on both occasions but getting a result required speeding the game up further using cheat engine (x4 in game x100 CE). I'm not sure if it would still occur under normal circumstances. As for the twister... I have no idea. Every now and again it would crash but can't say for certain so I'll leave it out. Finally the issue is prevalent in the original RCT2 though I only tried the wooden coaster.

The only means to circumvent the behaviour is to make it so that only one coaster occupies the space enclosed by the loop at a time either by altering the waiting behaviour or decreasing the number of coasters.

Feel free to download and test them out. They'll hopefully explain what's going on a bit better.

Corkscrew Roller Coaster interlock test.TD6

Looping Roller Coaster interlock test.TD6

Wooden Roller Coaster interlock test.TD6

Edited February 6, 2016 by Typhoon