Hi everyone!
The addition of moving platforms to planet coaster gives players a lot of freedom to make their own animated scenery pieces, especially when you realize you can attach other animated objects, including other moving platforms, to them. Not only are we able to make a custom door that opens, we can combine different moving platforms to make things like a character hopping along the path by combining a vertical and horizontal moving platform, or even extend or shorten the distance a prop travels by chaining multiple horizontal platforms together. This also means we can attach 3 rotating platforms to each other.
My hope was that these three rotating Moving Platforms, attached one after another, partnered with an event sequencer, would allow me to dynamically rotate the prop in 3 dimensions along any of the 3 axis: red, blue, and green. This could lead to creating intricate light shows with precise movements synced to music, or making actual character animatronics that can move and talk
Unfortunately, 2 problems presented themselves during my testing.
(If you'd like to view the example shown and discussed in this post in-game, you can download it from the workshop, submission code BMN1MLD89)
The first and largest problem is caused by the inability to pause, interrupt, or end an object's animation early. If you start the animation for an object, it has to be completed from start to finish. This is most apparent when cycling through the different animation options for an object, such as the options for the rotating platform.
Even though the Event Sequencer lets you choose how many seconds until an object's animation begins, you can't control how long the animation is, or when the animation should end. If Frontier added a variable to control the duration of an animation, we could control what direction a prop would point at any given time, and by stacking 3 of these moving platforms on top of each other, each controlling a different dimension, our only limit would be what we can imagine, and knowing how to use a calculator, but this also leads to the 2nd problem I mentioned before.
The Second problem will show itself if you try recreating the setup I made. I've connected a king coaster statue to the red moving platform, which is connected to the blue moving platform, which is connected to the green moving platform. I hope you followed that, because if you did it in the wrong order, or placed one of the objects not perfectly centered, there's no easy way to fix it.
I originally thought there was no way to go back and edit the red or blue moving platforms, but it turns out you have to click the piece's direct parent first, and then you can click into the object you actually want to edit. For example: to edit anything about this red moving platform (color, position, rotation, anything), I have to double-click the blue moving platform first and then single click the red one. If there was a way to directly click into and edit the item you want to adjust, or a way to view what objects are parented where, this would make the process much less tedious and not rely on the user's memory for which objects to click into next.
Limitations breed creativity, so I'm sure this community will come up with incredible ways to utilize these new tools regardless, but I truly think that incorporating solutions to one or both of these problems would firmly cement Planet Coaster 2 to be unlike any other sandbox game, let alone rollercoaster game.
I'd love to hear what kind of things y'all might create using this technique if it becomes accessible! and thank you for reading!
The addition of moving platforms to planet coaster gives players a lot of freedom to make their own animated scenery pieces, especially when you realize you can attach other animated objects, including other moving platforms, to them. Not only are we able to make a custom door that opens, we can combine different moving platforms to make things like a character hopping along the path by combining a vertical and horizontal moving platform, or even extend or shorten the distance a prop travels by chaining multiple horizontal platforms together. This also means we can attach 3 rotating platforms to each other.
My hope was that these three rotating Moving Platforms, attached one after another, partnered with an event sequencer, would allow me to dynamically rotate the prop in 3 dimensions along any of the 3 axis: red, blue, and green. This could lead to creating intricate light shows with precise movements synced to music, or making actual character animatronics that can move and talk
Unfortunately, 2 problems presented themselves during my testing.
(If you'd like to view the example shown and discussed in this post in-game, you can download it from the workshop, submission code BMN1MLD89)
The first and largest problem is caused by the inability to pause, interrupt, or end an object's animation early. If you start the animation for an object, it has to be completed from start to finish. This is most apparent when cycling through the different animation options for an object, such as the options for the rotating platform.
Even though the Event Sequencer lets you choose how many seconds until an object's animation begins, you can't control how long the animation is, or when the animation should end. If Frontier added a variable to control the duration of an animation, we could control what direction a prop would point at any given time, and by stacking 3 of these moving platforms on top of each other, each controlling a different dimension, our only limit would be what we can imagine, and knowing how to use a calculator, but this also leads to the 2nd problem I mentioned before.
The Second problem will show itself if you try recreating the setup I made. I've connected a king coaster statue to the red moving platform, which is connected to the blue moving platform, which is connected to the green moving platform. I hope you followed that, because if you did it in the wrong order, or placed one of the objects not perfectly centered, there's no easy way to fix it.
I originally thought there was no way to go back and edit the red or blue moving platforms, but it turns out you have to click the piece's direct parent first, and then you can click into the object you actually want to edit. For example: to edit anything about this red moving platform (color, position, rotation, anything), I have to double-click the blue moving platform first and then single click the red one. If there was a way to directly click into and edit the item you want to adjust, or a way to view what objects are parented where, this would make the process much less tedious and not rely on the user's memory for which objects to click into next.
Limitations breed creativity, so I'm sure this community will come up with incredible ways to utilize these new tools regardless, but I truly think that incorporating solutions to one or both of these problems would firmly cement Planet Coaster 2 to be unlike any other sandbox game, let alone rollercoaster game.
I'd love to hear what kind of things y'all might create using this technique if it becomes accessible! and thank you for reading!