36 replies to this topic

[Woodpecker]

OK, sorry. I suppose I should have googled Epcot's Test Track because in all honesty I don't know what that is (having never been to America). Also, I didn't say there were any videos but I did post a direct link to a site with photos. Perhaps I should have clarified that the walkthrough was by photos and not by video. There are however links to bits of video from that site on page one, the first of the molten rock monster and the second a panorama of the caldera, but they come in low bandwidth and high bandwidth versions so you may as well use the appropriate links from that page.

EDIT: I've seen a video of Epcot's test track on youtube, and agree that it is similar.

EDIT 2: The closest resemblance for the car in RCT2 is the Flying Turns car, or the 6-seater wooden coaster car, and the track could be partially simulated by a racing ghost train. However as you said, there's no ride that combines the two and allows 45 degree drops. I may have a go later today and see if I can tweak some ideas for the track shape/layout.

Edited by Woodpecker, 11 May 2009 - 10:36 AM.

[Woodpecker]

I had a little play and here's what I built:



It's badly designed in places and has inversions (which you don't want) but the idea was to show how a large-scale steel twister could be compacted. I've also sent you a copy of the track file via email. The long tongue-like loop is the shuttle section at the end of the ride, designed to hold 10 trains. There are various chain blocks and MCBR sections throughout the layout. Your transition track from the station to the launched lift is very good - I tried to extend it a bit to give them an intitial burst of adrenaline, but also to allow trains to leave more frequently than every 10 seconds. The idea is that the station, lift, and transition track would all be compacted into the cone of the volcano, and the long sections with the bunny hop and spirals would form two sides of the caldera.

[Wolfman]

Unfortunatly, the use of block brakes before the lift hill just triggers the station to empty itself of trains, one after another. While I like the additional track placed before the lift, I think that after the trains have covered a prdetermined length of track, a short one-level-drop, could be used to keep the trains moving. And possibly using a normal brake to keep the trains moving at "tour the cavern" speeds.

I wasn't concerned much with the space that the coaster takes up. The actual ride, as you had discovered, is around three minutes long. And by putting some slow travel trackage before the lift, is going to go far to streatch out the time towards that goal. We could break up the "slow bit" a little, and put in the major thrilling part of the track. Afterwards, the brake run and shuttle blocks will do a lot more to obtain the 3 minute mark.

As far as it's actual footprint is concerned, I don't think that we'll get anywhere closer to the final design until I actually create the mountain itself, in the scenario in which it will be used. So I might as well start terraforming the park. A lot of the mountain will be made of objects (dirt blocks) because water is supposed to flow through the larger rimmed crater.

You brought up "Why not inversions?"

As you probably already know, the large loop is 85 ft. tall. While the tallest that the land tiles can be pulled up to is 120 ft. that's just 35 ft. from the height of the highest edge of the crater. And if you reflect upon the distance that the track that is exposed closest to the smaller crater, and the height that the exposed track is at. Then you might realize that it's pretty much impossible for a large virtical loop to be contained completely within the mountain. That's a nice way of saying... "It ain't gonna fit Jack!"

And just because I'm using a coaster, doesn't give me license to put inversions in an attraction that doesn't have any. I think it's "bad enough" that I'm using a coaster. And for Disney purists, adding inversions to an attraction isn't going to impress anyone. Believe me. I tried to make a Space Mountain, and I had used inversions, and I'm still getting flack for including them, when everyone knows that the original US versions of Space Mountain has no inversions.

Although, nobody seemed to complain when I designed a second version, and designed tracks that made numerous "fly-by" encounters. So, I guess theres some sort of limit that can't be crossed, or the Disneyphiles get their fur ruffled.

[Wolfman]

I had to show you guys this. Usually, I don't let my imagination get the best of me. But this just so freaked me out.

From the classic horror movies, do you see a familliar face, stairing out of the crater in this image?



As you can see, from the compas in the upper right corner.
The image is True North.

[Woodpecker]

Unfortunately, the use of block brakes before the lift hill just triggers the station to empty itself of trains, one after another. While I like the additional track placed before the lift, I think that after the trains have covered a prdetermined length of track, a short one-level-drop, could be used to keep the trains moving. And possibly using a normal brake to keep the trains moving at "tour the cavern" speeds.

Like I said, badly designed in parts. This is one of them, though I thought with careful station timings it would be possible to prevent a build up and emptying of the station like that. The problem was that on your larger version with my modifications, the 10 seconds between dispatches was too much to prevent stacking behind the offload platform, which would hit your throughput and defeat the object of more trains. Of course, this could have been because I used an eighth train. Anyway, as you observed with my 'Shockwave 2' rollercoaster, I wanted to keep as many trains moving as possible AND smoothly leaving the station to prevent stacking.

I wasn't concerned much with the space that the coaster takes up. The actual ride, as you had discovered, is around three minutes long. And by putting some slow travel trackage before the lift, is going to go far to streatch out the time towards that goal. We could break up the "slow bit" a little, and put in the major thrilling part of the track. Afterwards, the brake run and shuttle blocks will do a lot more to obtain the 3 minute mark.

That's a very good point. You will have noticed the fast figure-of-eight I put in before the lift to get the riders' adrenalin flowing, but a sandwich formation as you describe may be better.

As far as it's actual footprint is concerned, I don't think that we'll get anywhere closer to the final design until I actually create the mountain itself, in the scenario in which it will be used. So I might as well start terraforming the park. A lot of the mountain will be made of objects (dirt blocks) because water is supposed to flow through the larger rimmed crater.

You brought up "Why not inversions?"

As you probably already know, the large loop is 85 ft. tall. While the tallest that the land tiles can be pulled up to is 120 ft. that's just 35 ft. from the height of the highest edge of the crater. And if you reflect upon the distance that the track that is exposed closest to the smaller crater, and the height that the exposed track is at. Then you might realize that it's pretty much impossible for a large virtical loop to be contained completely within the mountain. That's a nice way of saying... "It ain't gonna fit Jack!"

Not neccessarily. According to the walkthrough site I linked for you, the exposed track is the last section before the brake run which would be your finale and shuttle section. A big drop and large loop early on would therefore be fine, as long as the required momentum to get the train back to the station was maintained.

And just because I'm using a coaster, doesn't give me license to put inversions in an attraction that doesn't have any. I think it's "bad enough" that I'm using a coaster. And for Disney purists, adding inversions to an attraction isn't going to impress anyone. Believe me. I tried to make a Space Mountain, and I had used inversions, and I'm still getting flack for including them, when everyone knows that the original US versions of Space Mountain has no inversions.

Although, nobody seemed to complain when I designed a second version, and designed tracks that made numerous "fly-by" encounters. So, I guess theres some sort of limit that can't be crossed, or the Disneyphiles get their fur ruffled.

True, but you insisted you weren't trying to recreate this ride. Still, putting inversions in does go against the spirit of the original, so I see where you are coming from. I'm just not that original with non-looping track anymore, at least not on long drawn-out layouts such as this one, so I put them in to vary the experience a bit. As I said, my idea was not to produce a prototype as such, but to show how a large-scale ride could be fitted into a small-scale space: in short, how to avoid creating a 'space waster'. Shockwave 2 was a better example of this, but I'm sure you get my point. It'll be interesting to see how big your mountain ends up as it'll have a strong impact on the ride's final footprint.

Edited by Woodpecker, 12 May 2009 - 12:50 AM.

[Wolfman]

If it wasn't for your desin, I wouldn't of thought of an alternative for that part of the track. I wanted to make sure the crater was sized appropriatly. So I went back to Google Earth, and used the measurement tool to find out. It's roughly 33 ft. across. Which is, more or less close to about 10 meters. Which got me to thinking... what are the dementions of the tiles anyway? I've heard anything from 8 to 10 feet. As soon as I know the dementions of the tiles, I'll be able to create a more accurate crater.

The larger opening in the mountain is about 111 yards at it's widest point. At least, from what I've been able to determine.

And that link to all those truely amazing photos was so cool! I wish I could incorporate that into the attraction. But it gives me nore than enough material to understand what the area actually looks like.

Funny...

Or should I say "amazing" that we're able to see these details from halfway around the globe, and try and work out a ride in RCT 2 based on it.

[Woodpecker]

If it wasn't for your design, I wouldn't have thought of an alternative for that part of the track. I wanted to make sure the crater was sized appropriately. So I went back to Google Earth, and used the measurement tool to find out. It's roughly 33 ft. across, which is more or less 10 meters. Which got me thinking... what are the dimensions of the tiles anyway? I've heard anything from 8 to 10 feet. As soon as I know the dimensions of the tiles, I'll be able to create a more accurate crater.

Time for some serious number-crunching.

Here's how I worked it out:


I built a coaster lift hill to see how many squares of supports (up the side) a given height would generate, and started with 100 feet. Conveniently, each square up the side is equal to each square of the rct land tiles – the total area is the same. You can see this by comparing the horizontal squares and the vertical squares: they have an identical criss-cross pattern, and therefore an identical size. The problem with rct lift hills is that the entrance and exit ramps take up a different amount of space. To compensate for this , I brought down the lift hill until it looked like it took up a whole-number multiple of squares (remember the bottom one is only half the height of the subsequent ones) and then built a flat section to test my idea.

At 90 feet, the structure has 8 full-size squares and 2 half-size squares, equal to 9 full-size squares. Now the calculation is a simple 90/9 = 10, so the side of each rct tile is 10 feet. So, how big is the crater in rct2 terms? Well, 33/10 = 3.3 squares. That’s not a very useful number because the crater is going to be more or less round (using curved edges).

To calculate the circumference of the crater, we use pi * diameter. For the real crater, this is 3.142 * 33 = 103.7 feet (approx). For our rct2 crater, it is 3.142*3.3 = 10.37 squares. Because we need 4 rct curves to produce a round crater, we need each curve to take up 10.37/4 = 2.6 squares.

So there you have it. Your rct tile is 10 feet square, the crater is 3.3 squares across, and the total circumference is 10.37 squares, with each curved piece needing to take up 2.6 squares. The good news is that in practise you don’t need to worry about the 0.3 of a square. Simply build a 3-square path, and another 3-square path intersecting that to form a cross. Build a straight wall at each end and a curved wall next to each of them. Delete the paths, and hey presto, there’s your 30-foot crater.

Of course, you then have to find out how high the real crater is and budget your land accordingly. As an experiment, I built the crater at 25 feet high. To create a smooth slope down to 0 feet, it requires 5 squares long and 3 squares wide from each end of the cross. For the intervening slopes, you need 10 whole squares plus 5 triangles = 12.5 squares. The total area you will have to budget for a 25 ft cone is therefore (12.5*4) + (15*4) = 50+60 = 110 squares, and the cone itself has a diameter of 13 squares at its widest point. However, the rct land tool does not create a smooth curve at the base, but instead a large hexagon. The result is a huge circumference of (5*4)+ (3*4) = 20+12 = 32 squares, so be careful. Your volcano may be a lot bigger than you think.



The modest 25-foot cone. There's not much space inside, but it has a large footprint!


EDIT: I just had a thought. You said that the maximum land height is 120 feet, so let's pretend you build a volcano that high. How big will the circumference of the hexagon be? We know how big a 25 ft volcano is, so 120 / 25 = 4.8 which is how many of my volcanoes will fit into yours. Therefore, the total circumference will be 32 squares times 4.8 volcanoes = 32*48 = 1,536 squares. That's an impractical number to visualise, so how wide is the 120 ft volcano across? Answer: 13*4.8 = 62.4 squares. We'll round that up to 63 squares for rct practicality - it's better to budget 1 square over than 1 square under. If you went for a 100 ft cone, to comfortably contain your 90 foot drop, this works out to 90/25 = 3.6 therefore 13*3.6 = 46.8 or 47 squares. That produces a hexagonal circumference of 32*3.6 = 115.2 or 116 squares to budget. Wow. That's a lot of land.

So now you can work out exactly how big the footprint of your volcano will be, depending on the height, by comparing it to mine. The scary thing is that this is the calculation for the actual cone, without taking the caldera into account. My guess is that you will be able to fit a pretty big rollercoaster into that volcano, whatever size you pick.

Edited by Woodpecker, 12 May 2009 - 02:48 PM.

[Wolfman]

Well, that is if you think that a volcano has naturally flat sides and is perfectly formed. But taking under consideration of the mountain itself. Some slopes are steep and others are gradual. Taking that under consideration, the style that is made by simply using the land tool, is going to create a mountain cone, that is far too large.

So what I usually end up doing is stepping the sides, so that the top of the mountain would get taller along the horizontal line. This not only makes the mountain taller in a smaller area, but makes the mountain side appear jagged and rocky.

Technically, the mountain can't be built to the 120 ft. height. Because sloping the land tiles, (as I've done here,) inevitably displays the level below it. If you can make it out visually, the land tile with the white edge around it is flat, and drawn to the 120 ft. height. But notice that SOME of the edges & corners of the remaining tiles around the edge of the crater, are also at that same height, but display 115 ft. instead. Even though the tile is actually reaching the 120 ft. height.

Just thought I would show you some of the Argonath objects that I use for a volcano effect. Unfortunately, I wasn't actually planning to put a pool of lava inside the crater, so I didn't select a colorable water tile object in the bench, because I didn't think I would be creating a lava flow. (Water tiles aren't "transparent". So their perfect to use for lava, because they appear solid.) So I used the full tile steel base block instead. (The rivets kinda look like bubbling lava)

A piece of bad news, I was trying to build the coaster, and I started on the outside of the crater, and built backwards. I got up to the crest of the launched lift hill, placed the chain block, deselected the chain lift, selected a steeper hill, placed the steeper hill, then transitioned to a gentle slope, and started to build the launched lift hill backwards, and WHAM! Error Trapper.

So I lost everything you see here. Shoulda saved it before I started in on the coaster. So don't build a launched lift hill going back wards, or down the lift hill. I knew this, but didn't remember it at the time.

Kicking myself.

[Woodpecker]

Yes, I was calculating for a perfect cone, which most are not. Nevermind.

The steel base block idea is good because it frees up the water tool for your submarine ride, which wouldn't look realistic if it travelled through magma. I like the look of the finished volcano too, but how are you arranging the coaster inside? Is that just for the lifthill and you'll work the rest of the ride and the station into the caldera? Also, how high is the final lifthill? Anyway, good work. Pity you lost it all.

Regarding saving, I save extremely often. For Shockwave 2 I have over 20 different saves just for all the tweaks and tests between tweaks, plus another 20 or so for all my day and overnight tests. It's ridiculous! However it does mean that if I do something really cool and then the subsequent tweak ruins the ratings, I can start again with the old ratings. For some reason, rebuilding the old track back again doesn't always give the same test results. The good thing is that you only had the mountain there as far as I can see - it's not as if you lost an entire park's worth or work - but I don't envy you having to select all those scenery items all over again.

Edited by Woodpecker, 12 May 2009 - 05:46 PM.

[Wolfman]

Well, you may have noticed that the crater is sort of a tower of landtiles. And I really don't have to start completely from scratch. I simply lost the one side, and the jagged edge along the top of the crater. Thankfully, the crater is off to the side of the waterway which seems to pass through the cauldera. (which I can probably build using landblocks over the waterway.)

As I look over the GE image, (Google Earth) I don't think I plotted out the area as well as I thought I had. I'm glad that I'm creating a prototype now, as it would be a tougher job to change things once the rest of the park starts to take shape around it. It is a sort of island, afterall. And the waterway around the island is going to dictate the landspace on the shores on either side, and how large those structures can be. So it seems that the entire park is dependant on how large the island turns out to be.

So, getting the island right is a pivital area that the rest of the park depends upon. Once I get the island terraformed, I'll be posting more pics on it.