Dark Ride Idea, park piping and property maps (park map mode)

Restless Bohemian · Jul 9, 2016

I was thinking it would be cool to design highly detailed dark rides and/or create multiple parks through park piping.

Your dark rides would be created in a separate game save and imported in your park. Each ride could be as detailed as an entire park without killing your CPU while playing in the main park. When a saved ride is imported into your park, the game would generate only the outside portions and guest would use the attraction just like all the others -- much like the circus or haunted house in RCT3. You can even ride it with a slight pause as the park file transitions into the ride file only it's not a movie, but a separate fully immersive and editable environment. You could still create a dark ride as we do now, only this way, you could have 30 highly detailed dark rides and it wouldn't slow your game down as the inside details are not be generated in your main park. The ride looks and behave exactly as you would want them too and the guests are still affected in the same way, but if you go to edit any imported attraction you will be directed to exit the park to edit the ride blue print file.

Another use would to be able to have a park property map that you can create as large as you want to. It's very much like the world map on the game menu, only it's a simplified, non animated overview. You click on your park and it opens in the game as we know it know. If you have a park build right next door to another, it appears statically and without peeps outside of your playable boundary. If you build a parking lot, hotel or water park, you can see but have to switch game files to edit or play it. You could even build a town around your park and it would give the back grounds a "life" they have never had before.

It would be great to simply build everything as we do now -- but we could far larger real life sized parks,crowds and environments with park piping.

If this is mentioned elsewhere -- sorry -- I did search but I missed it. Could be a fun expansion for those who want to create huge resort complexes and a headache for those who don't but could still play the game exactly as it is now.

breezerHOG1 · Jul 9, 2016

Every park made in PC is neighboring technically, especially once we get park sharing features [big grin] Id rather not have more loading screens for each ride though, loading parks is enough as is. More dark/indoor ride features and property management are in the works, so things will improve. Even if this were possible as an option, Id think this would require a lot of time spent on the DEV side, extra work from the games engine etc, and IMO theres so many other things they could be adding/improving. Having more realistic crowds, environments, "piping", and building towns/hotels parkinglots etc outside of the park all sounds great and would look great if we all had super computers and if the DEVs had years to program everything. Fortunately with UGC there is a good chance we will see many of these things like hotels [up]

SplashMountain · Jul 9, 2016

I like the idea about each ride being a separate file, but this would only work with dark rides. A normal ride would look odd if it was just a shell in your park, and I doubt many people would build a park full of dark rides for this to be viable. It's a nice idea though, just not one that would benefit us enough to implement such a big feature in my opinion. There may be other ways in which this could be useful though.

isukun · Jul 9, 2016

As the game currently is, dark rides will be a massive drain on system resources. There's too much construction involved in creating the interior environments. This would seriously reduce strain by removing a few hundred objects from your park environment for each dark ride you decide to include. It seems like a good compromise to me. The only time you'd have loading screens is if you decide to ride or edit the dark ride. Otherwise, you're just seeing the exterior and people go in and out like they would in the classic RTC haunted house. And creaper, a lot of what he's suggesting would take strain OFF your computer, not make it worse. It reduces a lot of the crowds and activity in the park to simple calculations rather than trying to actually keep track of every individual person wandering around the park. I may not agree with the idea of having all these elements visible in the background, but I can definitely see something like this resolving a lot of problems with performance and allowing for more expansion in the future.

gregorburns · Jul 9, 2016

I like this idea and with the loading times in this game I don't think it would bother me to have to load a dark ride.

Bitter Jeweler · Jul 9, 2016

I think Planet Coaster needs to create a plug-in for City Skylines, such that PC will generate a "map" that could be placed into city in City Skylines. So when you want to work on your resorts and parking and stuff, you load City Skylines. Your employees would live in your city, and peeps would visit from your city, so you would have to build the proper infrastructures needed. The better you build your city, the more park guests you would get.

Abletudu · Jul 9, 2016

Bitter Jeweler said:
I think Planet Coaster needs to create a plug-in for City Skylines, such that PC will generate a "map" that could be placed into city in City Skylines. So when you want to work on your resorts and parking and stuff, you load City Skylines. Your employees would live in your city, and peeps would visit from your city, so you would have to build the proper infrastructures needed. The better you build your city, the more park guests you would get.

I don't think this would be possible because Cities Skylines was made by Colossal Order.

breezerHOG1 · Jul 9, 2016

NOT specifically With City Skylines, but I could see this actually working as a full expansion. I'd like to see a lot of other features added into PC first though, like game stalls, waterrides/pools, and multiplayer. I'm also hoping for a Planet Coaster Safari expansion. And then if they could do it, Planet Coaster Downtown could possibly work as a whole expansion including many features other people want to see like hotels, or backstage tours. But they would really have to make it feature rich for me to care about it in that way. Like would I beable to see my coasters/parks from the "city" view? Also, having the "city" mode effect park mode and guest #s sounds a bit complicated (but interesting) [up]

Abletudu · Jul 9, 2016

The reason I pointed that out was because of this:

I think Planet Coaster needs to create a plug-in for City Skylines

Restless Bohemian · Jul 9, 2016

If this idea where to be an expansion, part of the additional content could be half sized building features so you could build scaled down sets. This was also be handy for that Disney forced prospective used on Main Street and castles.

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creaper said:
NOT specifically With City Skylines, but I could see this actually working as a full expansion. I'd like to see a lot of other features added into PC first though, like game stalls, waterrides/pools, and multiplayer. I'm also hoping for a Planet Coaster Safari expansion. And then if they could do it, Planet Coaster Downtown could possibly work as a whole expansion including many features other people want to see like hotels, or backstage tours. But they would really have to make it feature rich for me to care about it in that way. Like would I beable to see my coasters/parks from the "city" view? Also, having the "city" mode effect park mode and guest #s sounds a bit complicated (but interesting) [up]

I would be totally down with all of this and I need my water rides yesterday.