A.J.

RollerCoaster Tycoon / 2 Wineskin builds are kind of unstable sometimes, and there's always a chance of the build not working when a new update is made to Mac OS X, so be careful!

Probably using a Wineskin. I wrote a tutorial about it a while ago but I haven't been able to update it and test it on Mac OS 10.9.X because I've been too busy with other projects...

What does the steepness of the lift hill have to do with that?

This is the first time an outside-manufacturer train has been fitted to a Giant Inverted Boomerang. The trains are four-across in one row as opposed to staggered so theoretically it will make load and unload happen more quickly.

NoLimits 2 "standard" licenses are limited to a certain video quality (360 pixels max height I believe). You have to get a pro license to record high-resolution. As for the logo thing, you can just use car textures like in NoLimits 1. Though, not all of the new texture maps are available as templates, but apparently the development team is working on that.

Here's a dumb question - Does anyone think that Sustainable Playland - as a concept - would work for a brand-new mixed-use development somewhere? A green park, entertainment district and sort of small amusement area with a several marquee attractions? I was thinking about this last night and I was wondering what the reaction would be if Sustainable Playland was announced as a brand new park instead of a "revitalization" of a historic one.

You mean like...expansion packs? What a revelation! They could have made a killing releasing the game like they did way back in the day - release the original game, with the two expansion packs as downloadable content. You make the combined cost equal to or a bit less than RCT Deluxe / RCT2 Triple Thrill do on Good Old Games or Steam and, wham! You'd have my purchase, especially considering that I used to play RollerCoaster Tycoon on a 640x480 screen, which is of a lower resolution than the iPhone I carry in my pocket.

In fairness, the uploading and sharing of parks is one of those "social feature" things...

Sorry, I got bored. If that's a quick summary, I don't even want to think about what the full-length version is like. In my opinion, too much backstory at once just isn't fun and isn't easily communicated to guests. It's okay for a story to be gradually unfolded through an intimate and controlled environment like a queue line, but you can't expect your guests to know the entire story behind the park immediately if it's so elaborate like that.

Progress update! I'm almost there! I'm currently working on foliage and other small details. The release of finished renders is imminent. Because of this I won't be updating the thread next week, as I want there to be a distinct difference between the renders I show today and the "final" renders. So enjoy these while they last.

But then, if the coaster is going to open next year, they would have designed it AFTER Banshee, right?

Yeah, that makes more sense now. This is the kind of stuff that helps those new Chinese coasters like the Mega Lites and those new wooden coasters, right? It just goes to show you how close the top steel coaster competition really is as well.

The number is fifty, right? Fifty coasters to be considered an "experienced" rider? I thought that that was the only difference between the weight of votes - those with under fifty, and those with more.

That's a really substantial ride. Kind of fitting considering Liserbegbanan is itself a substantial ride as well.

I really think that the Intamin Mega Lites should be grouped together for next year's poll. I feel like keeping them separate is doing other equally-good coasters a disservice. Fly over Mediterranean and Kawasemi would have placed 7 and 8 respectively if Fly over Mediterranean would have been included.

I know that there's the big chart on the website, but here's a quick comparison between 2013's poll and 2012's poll...

I guess I don't see the full picture because I'm merely a 3D artist, so please excuse me if I come off as unfair. I'm just still a little disappointed with the whole "launch". Yes, plans change and yes, things happen and yes, it's probably been a whole lot of hard and exhausting work for Pantera to get Theme Park Studio out there. My own 3D work mentally exhausts me on a daily basis and drives me insane sometimes. I pledged my $50 on Kickstarter way back last year with the expectation that I would be part of a closed beta test and that I would receive a physical copy of the game (with the extra "platinum" feature content) in several months, which I thought would have probably been $40-50 MSRP when it hit store shelves anyway. They made it sound like development was pretty much nearing completion and I understand that that's what you have to do to promote your game, but here we are today. I'm just not entirely sure that the game in its current form, as it sits on Steam Early Access, is worth the $30 that they're charging for it. Will it be worth that $30 down the road? Most likely. I'm not trying to hate because the game is what fans have been wanting for years and that it shows a heck of a lot of promise, but I'm a little let down. I also certainly hope that RollerCoaster Tycoon 4 publicly releases as a finished game too, but I wouldn't put this past Atari based on how RollerCoaster Tycoon 4 Mobile apparently has ended up...

The acceleration due to gravity means absolutely diddly squat when the drop is controlled, as Falcon's Fury appears to be.

That''s because people there are smart enough to not step on the big red-painted area that says "DANGER" in big block letters...

No we won't. Theme Park Studio is NOT the same kind of game the RollerCoaster Tycoon series is. The whole point of the original RollerCoaster Tycoon was to play through the levels and get to the end (Mega Park). RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 let you make custom scenarios for the game, but that was it. All of this custom content stuff was a result of the community basically hacking into the game and figuring it out. That wasn't the intention of the developers, I'm sure. Also, we already have Theme Park Studio. They put it on Early Access instead of doing a traditional beta test, which means they essentially released it to the public and are making money off of it. Because of that it should be reviewed as a finished game, which in that regard it's woefully incomplete, and if RollerCoaster Tycoon 4 gets put on Early Access and turns out to be garbage I will have lost all hope in humanity...

Yeah, I definitely can relate to dealing with that kind of stuff in a real-time environment. It so freakishly difficult getting everything to look exactly the same especially when some areas of scenes are more CPU/GPU-heavy than others. I even get frame rate issues when I'm batch rendering in Maya sometimes, and that isn't even in real-time! No worries though, it still is very polished and you're doing good work.

It looks pretty good, but a lot of the "hand held recorded" parts have a bit of Uncanny Valley-ness going on in terms of the camera work. They kind of feel like they're in between keyframing and actual footage and it's a little bit awkward. EDIT: Are some of the shots using different frame rates?

Here you go. CLICK. Your definition of a "theme park" isn't exactly the same as everyone else's. There are also regular old amusement parks worldwide that are mixed-use developments or have lots of green space, so if you were to take the rides out of those places the space would still be usable.

We better hope that Atari has been paying attention to what happened with the new SimCity. The launch of that game was absolutely dreadful.

I would have done this as a Private Message but it's beneficial to everyone, so here we go: We instituted the "Preview Thread rule" initially because we would consistently be getting new threads with very little content. Theme Park Review is a real-life coasters / parks site first, and a games community second. If you haven't noticed, we don't have a whole lot of threads in the Theme Parks, Roller Coasters and Donkeys forum dedicated to single attractions - we usually merge them into a single "big" discussion thread for a single park. Example: instead of creating a thread for "Banshee: New for 2014 at Kings Island" we have Banshee discussion in the "Kings Island Discussion Thread". Also, most trip report threads are archived by TPR moderator larrygator, then moved from the main forum to the archive forum - again to reduce clutter. We have a lot of threads to manage so we like to consolidate. Because coaster games / simulation projects are so diverse it's hard to keep them in "big" threads. We instituted the title tag system ([RCT2], [RCT3], [NL2] and so on) so we could manage them more easily. Over the past few months I have become a lot less stringent on the Preview Thread rule due to real life getting in the way. But in all seriousness, you really should have a large amount of content ready if you want to make a project public. I don't care who you are or what projects you've done previously. We especially dislike bumps of several-month old threads with single images. Videos are great because they typically provide users with a much better idea of your project than a few screenshots would. I don't know if you're into NoLimits, but the NoLimits Exchange also has a "preview" thread called "The Uber Idea Thread" which follows basically the same principle. So do NOT think under any circumstances that we're the only ones that do this, even if we may be more strict about it. On the topic of presentation, we have and have always had two ways to put up images - either attach them to your post from your desktop using the panel located at the bottom of the Post a Reply page, or link them externally using tags. When you actually attach an image it's put on Theme Park Review's servers so you don't have to worry about crap like running out of Photobucket bandwidth. You can use the "place inline" button to plop the attached image as text code in your post so you can write paragraphs in between images. Please understand that we (I) don't do this out of hate or dislike for creativity. Theme Park Review is a really huge site to run and manage on a daily basis, for everyone involved. When a process is streamlined it makes it all the easier. Now, on topic: I can definitely appreciate your sense for detail in your work. You obviously put a lot of time, effort, love and care into it. However, the environment is incredibly hard to look at - not because it's bad, but we really don't get a sense of where we're supposed to go. How does the queue lead to the station platform? What does it look like on the inside? Where's the exit? That sort of stuff makes us think more of your attraction as more of a complete experience as opposed to nice screenshots.