Go-Karts

[ziscor]

I hope I'm not the only one who finds this unusual. The Go-Karts cars in Roller Coaster Tycoon don't take up all the marked spaces for cars in the station sprite(the station blocks at the very end, I mean) So usually you get about 5 less cars than what you could have. Perhaps later on this could be corrected? I'm not aware if this was done by Chris Sawyer intentionally due to some technological reason, but I feel like that all that extra space could be utilised.

As it is, Go-Karts garner a lot of guests to it, so this could be helpful.  

[jensj12]

Karts enter the station randomly left or right, so there is a chance they will all go to the same side. To prevent karts stopping outside the station you must have some extra room in the station. Improving the peeps-on-go-karts-AI can 'fix' that issue and allow more karts than we have now.

[ziscor]

That would be good. What if before the race started, the game randomly generated a sequence of every guest to go to a station spot in such a way that all spots were used? Making a rudimentary permutation formula to factor in all possibilities and then randomly selecting one each turn would be one way to go about it. But then, this might clearly be harder to make than talk about it. Also, the gains might be too less for any dev to do this kind of work. 

At least now I know why the excess space was needed. 

PS: Also, another annoying problem with the Go-Karts is that in every turn, there's always one guest who will take one lap more than the rest. This kept all the guests(who were waiting "since ages" to get on it in the first place) waiting for that guy to get done so the race could begin for the next round of people. I've tried preventing this from happening, but it always happens none the less...

Edited February 17, 2016 by ziscor

[jensj12]

The game currently uses the extra lap to determine the winner. Once the winner passes the line the round is finished, the lights turn red (just look at them while playing) and anyone who enters the station stops. This means that the race winner races one more lap. You can't prevent it, but you can make the track short and allow them to race multiple laps. It might already look better if all racers could do that out-lap, but that takes even more time. Best solution would be to have the finish line at the start of the station, but that might require new graphics to be drawn.

[ziscor]

Thanks for the tip! This becomes especially annoying when you're specifically trying to build a track that essentially wraps around your entire park. The scenario Karts and Coasters must be a queuing nightmare for guests!

[NightHawk]

I always thought it was a "Victory Lap" the winner did. *g*

[Broxzier]

Go-Karts should have the option to disable the winning-lap completely. I doubt this can be done yet, because the data can probably not be stored in the saved game easily without breaking anything else.