A.J.

Sorry, I had to look up what the word "Metallurgical" meant.

Second-to-last row is where it's at. One thing though - Blue Streak is missing a car on its train! I hope that's not because they can't run the fourth car anymore. All four cars just got completely re-upholstered at the end of last year!

Inventor isn't really built for creating environments - it makes things, not places, and dealing with simple object groups is much easier than dealing with parts and assemblies. You'd be better off using AutoCAD or even Rhinoceros if you're inclined to nail the close-to-exact measurements for your recreation. You'd have an easier time with your environment as a whole methinks. I'm not sure how it works in 3DS Max, but in Maya you're able to pretty easily change the location of the rotate / scale pivot of an object. If you know the position of your object relative to the origin you can just input those X, Y and Z values and have your pivot in the correct positions. Changing the rotate / scale pivot effectively changes the location of your object's coordinate system.

You need to make sure that your model is placed near the origin point in Inventor and / or 3DS Max before you export it. When you place the object into NoLimits 2 it's going to rotate around wherever the origin point is.

That's debatable. It's not like two original Batman coasters opened in the same year - Great America's opened first, and it wasn't even considered a "Batman model" at the time. Being B&M's first inverted coaster, it was completely custom. Great Adventure's didn't open until a year later, and even Top Gun / Flight Deck opened before that.

I don't see using Oculus / Morpheus / etc on an actual roller coaster video for a very long time - you'd pretty much have to mount a spherical camera at eye level in a coaster car, shoot basically a bunch of videos at once, and composite them all together in a spherical viewport to get the effect right. To do it on a regular mounted on-ride video, you'd have to restrain the viewer's head to a fixed position otherwise they could get motion sick. On the other hand, software applications like NoLimits Coaster and / or Theme Park Studio can easily make this happen.

I believe that X2 was kind of marketed as having an "extra dimension" compared to X because of the on-board audio and special effects.

This. I'm hoping enough people get Mario Kart 8 so that we can do TPR tournaments.

Hi everyone! So, I finally got to my first park this season. Can you guess which one?!? This afternoon at Knoebels was warm and humid - great for coaster-riding, terrible for queuing. Still, I was able to ride what I wanted with a $20 ticket pack (which wasn't a lot but I was only there for several hours). Let's get this one out of the way - Flying Turns. The capacity on this thing is just as bad as (if not worse than) Black Diamond, which is a bit weird considering that Black Diamond was a walk-on today! The paper sign at the entrance said the wait was 45 minutes but it felt like at least an hour. The majority of riders, myself included, rode solo in the cars. This made it easy for the people on the platform but it made the queue absolutely crawl. It's a slightly ridiculous process - You wait at the top of the platform stairs for the attendant to ask you your party size. Then, he / she assigns you or your pair to a "gate", where you wait. When the next train loads, you're allowed to step onto the scales and if you're not too heavy you're cleared to ride. Then, when the next train loads you move into a "pen". Finally, when the next train arrives the air gate opens and you can board. Unfortunately, it's the only way they can really do it because of the weight limit per car (recap: 400 pounds). It works pretty flawlessly though. The coaster itself is fantastically good fun. The turns are insanely tight - you're banked at eighty to NINETY DEGREES (!!!!) during almost every turn. The transitions between the turns are pretty quick but they're really smooth and fluid. You're not supposed to lean in either direction during the ride but I did so unintentionally because I was having that much fun - like flying a plane. It certainly won't make anyone's top ten lists because it's not a crazy airtime machine, terrain coaster or whatever kind of coaster Rocky Mountain is building. However, it was worth the wait and it's worth a drive out to Knoebels because it's a kind of ride that you can't experience anywhere else even if you've ridden other bobsled coasters. The coaster just has this sort of "out-of-control" feeling. It looks incredibly tame and slow from the queue line but it takes those turns so blindingly fast. It all makes for a wacky, interesting and fun experience! Hey Larry, how's everything been? This is not the kind of "video surveillance" where there are just some little cameras around. They had security cameras probably every fifteen to twenty feet of the circuit. They were really serious about guest behavior and loose article possession during the ride. Remember, don't shoot on-ride videos without a park's prior permission! Hey, look at me, I can do artsy photographs too! They had these cool historical signs in the queue. Just as safe as a baby carriage! Zooooom! The ride was pretty quiet actually. One of the things that I really like about Knoebels coasters is that the queue lines are routed within the rides themselves. It's pretty cool! Control tower, we're beginning our initial ascent now. Can we have our in-flight meals yet? While the ride isn't "themed", the park staff play up the "flying" thing a lot. I really like it because it helps the staff and the guests enjoy the experience even more. And now, other park happenings... Look at that. It's like seeing an old friend. Phoenix was running wonderfully as always. Four rides total, and I even got one in the pouring rain! It was so much fun! They were only running one train all day which made queue times kind of long early but they fizzled out as the hours went by. Did the nice-looking dancer that drives the ride break her leg or something? Fandango was down. Twister is...incredibly aggressive this year. It's not "totally rough" but it basically takes your body and whips it around in every horizontal direction possible. It's great fun if you like lateral Gs on coasters but it can be kind of painful for everyone else. But there's GOOD NEWS because Twister hasn't just been re-tracked, it's been completely rebuilt in certain places! Look at that nice new structure! It rides pretty well. There's something missing here... I wonder what it could be? It's the Power Surge! Power Surge is currently sitting folded up in the parking lot near one of the pavilions. It looks like it's been freshly painted, but I didn't want to get any closer because I wasn't sure if I was allowed to or not. But it does look like they are definitely working on it. Maybe it will get new seats with the thinner, less intrusive shoulder harnesses from Zamperla? THIS, on the other hand... They also put in this nostalgia trip...last year I think? I wasn't aware that toddlers knew who the Beatles were... Hey Larry! Have enough material yet? No trip to Knoebels is complete without a ride on this bee-auty. The coaster enthusiast's favorite directional sign. I want to find the person who made this sign and give them a high five. Thanks for reading!

I'm hoping that the crowds will be a bit lighter today. Finally going to get my turn on the Turns! Get it?!?

Airtime moments =/= airtime. I'd rather have a nice and long pop of airtime (like going over El Toro's big hills) than a bunch of super-intense but super-quick jolts (Lightning Run's bunny hops). I feel like the only "good" hill in the layout is the one between the big curve and the dive loop. Also, by your logic, Phoenix should be ranked higher than Outlaw Run, as it has at least thirteen "moments of airtime"... Watching the on-ride video again, the transitions into the curves (and probably out in the back seats) look pretty vicious (in a good way). It seems like the lift is so slow for good reason.

I wouldn't say facing straight down would be the best (with the exception of Falcon's Fury because you're actually facing the ground) angle for on-ride videos of drop towers. Maybe if the camera was tilted a little bit down like the tilting parts of Apocalypse and Acrophobia it would be good - it would look more like watching the ride through someone's eyes. You'd still be able to see most of the great drop tower view but you'd get a greater impression of the height. I definitely agree that a rider cam angle is great though.

Goliath looks like a metric ton of fun, but it doesn't look like my kind of coaster.

Being a 3D visualization guy, it's times like these that make me want to learn AutoCAD and Revit again. I hope I can be a part of a team making stuff like that some day.

This sort of thing is a thing, but it really only applies to parks that are local to you. Generally families already have vacations / weekend trips planned ahead of time and will go regardless of wait times posted on the website which will probably be different the day they actually set foot into the park. What a park smartphone app and / or something like RideHopper can do for guests is let them come up with a "battle plan" of sorts, and not have to resort to asking a park employee or scouring the park for a wait times board which I rarely see in parks at all anymore.

That's the biggest issue with RideHopper. It's crowdsourced, and in reality only theme park and coaster enthusiasts are willing to submit wait times on a regular basis. Everyone else just wants to know what the wait time is.

This sort of thing is what I'm researching for one of the components of my thesis project. I really think that Disney is doing it right - I really like how they're finding ways to change the way we experience theme parks rather than what we experience inside them. I don't know if anyone knows about what Apple is doing with its iOS7 iBeacons - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6048?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US Instead of relying on GPS location iBeacons use a really low-power signal, kind of like Bluetooth. Based on how close you get to a certain iBeacon in a certain time, software could relay that as like, five minutes of wait time.

I swear, if the track color turns out to be orange I'm going to figuratively shoot myself.

If Phantasialand can make a Top Spin looks like it belongs in...whatever time period and location Talocan takes place in, Silver Dollar City can certainly make any flat ride fit their theme. Spinning tower rides can be themed to gigantic trees, a Zamperla Air Race can be themed to barnstormer or crop-dusting planes, a Huss Breakdance can be themed to anything that you can sit in or on - it's really only limited to their imaginations and budget.

Sorry, but remind me again why a brand-new coaster already has "good" and "bad" trains? I generally prefer the orange train on Phoenix for some reason I can't comprehend (perhaps it's because it matches my hair color), but that coaster is over fifty years old.

Same.

Anaconda merely goes below the water level (you can see how the concrete part of the tunnel stays above the water), not actually underwater like those water slides at Aquatica, but I see your point.

Great. Another awesome wooden coaster that I won't ever be able to ride...

I agree with this.

Please be sure to add more screenshots to your updates.