Around 7 years ago, I started with a recreation of Europe's biggest watershow Aquanura in the Efteling in the game RCT3. For the people why might not heard of the show, here a video to give you an impression:
Now you might not expect is, but RCT3 has a very good tool for making particle effects with the Advanced Firework Editor, and to create shows build up with particle effects with the 'MixMaster Display'. The tools have allowed me to come a very long way to with recreating this show as detailed as possible. This comes a long with both remaking the fountain effects, with applied lightning/coloring system, as with recreating the surrounding area of the like with all the building and scenery for which I made use of own made CustomScenery Objects. Most op de progress can still be find on some forums like here:
http://www.shyguysworld.com/index.php/topic,11788.0.html
And some videos of the latest progress (including a never shown video)
Now especially recreating the actual show has been a quite complicated process so far. with the Advanced Firework Editor (AFE), I'm able to create a particle effect which takes the shape of a specific fountain type in the show, and cna apply a certain color pattern on that. Together with that I have to apply movements of the fountains. This is done by both animating the launchers using CustomFlatrides, and applying movements into the particle effects using the AFE.
Now as you can already see, the real show has a lot of different color schemes. As a result of this I have make a lot of different particle effects to make the fountain match with the color scheme it has at that moment. Take for example this part:
At this part, the LEDs have been made to trigger a color transition from red to yellow. This color transition has to be visible in the high fountains as well, but these dont spawn at the same moment. Therefore, the first fountain to spawn turns later from red to yelllow than the last one. In this case, it results that I have to make 85 different particle effects, all containing the same shape, but with a different color scheme. The disadvantage here is that AFE is only an interface where you can create those particle effects with clicking and pulling. Especially the part with color scheme shows only a bar with color blocks along the lifetime of a particle without any timing reference. This means that applying such a color transition over multiple effects is not only very time consuming, but also very much trial and error to see if the timing is correct. Now I can do some calculating on it to have an indication of when the color transition has to happen, but still i would have to use a ruler placed on my desktop to be able to drag one of those blocks to the right place. To give you an impression I put a screenshot below, showing one of the windows in the AFE, in this case one of the LEDs.
Now all this time consuming work has eventually lead to losing a lot of motivation and concentration to working on it. The last time I actually worked on it was around end 2016 / begin 2017. Of course other stuff like my study and other hobbies have also made me more busy to be able to work on it. However, It is still a shame that with all the time and effort I've bene putting in this project, I havent been able to finish it yet. Therefore for the last few days, a lot of inspiration and motivation has been coming back and I would really like to continue again with working on this project. But I would really like to approach it a little different to be able to make it less time consuming and to be able to focus more on actually making the show, then doing some dumb copy paste and pull&drag work, only to make 3 seconds of a show.
The idea what I actually want:
What I ideally want, is that in some way I'm able to automatically generate those particle effects, saved as .frw files', based on a given color transition which i fill in with certain values. I am able to calculate all different life times and duration of colors based on timing-data of the color transitions and fountain-spawning, and If I would be able to convert these calculation in automatically generating the frw files, I could spare a lot of time.
Now unfortunately my knowledge in programming is very limited. To learn java and to learn how to detract the file structure of frw files, and be able to write a program which would be able to save stuff as a frw file would already take a lot of time for me which i could be using on the simple pull&dragging in AFE as well. But what I could do for example is write a program, which based on my own input variables, would generate .txt or .xml files in which the entire shape and color scheme of a particle effect is described. The only thing I would need then is a program which would be able to convert these txt or xml files into frw files so they can be used in RCT3 as particle effects.
If there would be someone with lots of programming experience (or better someone from Frontieryou can always hope/dream) who is willing to help me and make such a program, I would be forever grateful, and I could spare a lot of time and continue on finishing this big project of mine.
Planet Coaster
Now I could imagine some of you would think: Why dont you just use Planet Coaster, RCT3 is outdated. However, there are several reasons not to use it, but basically PlanetCoaster doesnt offer me the same tools to be able to recreate is as detailed as I could in RCT3:
Now you might not expect is, but RCT3 has a very good tool for making particle effects with the Advanced Firework Editor, and to create shows build up with particle effects with the 'MixMaster Display'. The tools have allowed me to come a very long way to with recreating this show as detailed as possible. This comes a long with both remaking the fountain effects, with applied lightning/coloring system, as with recreating the surrounding area of the like with all the building and scenery for which I made use of own made CustomScenery Objects. Most op de progress can still be find on some forums like here:
http://www.shyguysworld.com/index.php/topic,11788.0.html
And some videos of the latest progress (including a never shown video)
Now especially recreating the actual show has been a quite complicated process so far. with the Advanced Firework Editor (AFE), I'm able to create a particle effect which takes the shape of a specific fountain type in the show, and cna apply a certain color pattern on that. Together with that I have to apply movements of the fountains. This is done by both animating the launchers using CustomFlatrides, and applying movements into the particle effects using the AFE.
Now as you can already see, the real show has a lot of different color schemes. As a result of this I have make a lot of different particle effects to make the fountain match with the color scheme it has at that moment. Take for example this part:
At this part, the LEDs have been made to trigger a color transition from red to yellow. This color transition has to be visible in the high fountains as well, but these dont spawn at the same moment. Therefore, the first fountain to spawn turns later from red to yelllow than the last one. In this case, it results that I have to make 85 different particle effects, all containing the same shape, but with a different color scheme. The disadvantage here is that AFE is only an interface where you can create those particle effects with clicking and pulling. Especially the part with color scheme shows only a bar with color blocks along the lifetime of a particle without any timing reference. This means that applying such a color transition over multiple effects is not only very time consuming, but also very much trial and error to see if the timing is correct. Now I can do some calculating on it to have an indication of when the color transition has to happen, but still i would have to use a ruler placed on my desktop to be able to drag one of those blocks to the right place. To give you an impression I put a screenshot below, showing one of the windows in the AFE, in this case one of the LEDs.
Now all this time consuming work has eventually lead to losing a lot of motivation and concentration to working on it. The last time I actually worked on it was around end 2016 / begin 2017. Of course other stuff like my study and other hobbies have also made me more busy to be able to work on it. However, It is still a shame that with all the time and effort I've bene putting in this project, I havent been able to finish it yet. Therefore for the last few days, a lot of inspiration and motivation has been coming back and I would really like to continue again with working on this project. But I would really like to approach it a little different to be able to make it less time consuming and to be able to focus more on actually making the show, then doing some dumb copy paste and pull&drag work, only to make 3 seconds of a show.
The idea what I actually want:
What I ideally want, is that in some way I'm able to automatically generate those particle effects, saved as .frw files', based on a given color transition which i fill in with certain values. I am able to calculate all different life times and duration of colors based on timing-data of the color transitions and fountain-spawning, and If I would be able to convert these calculation in automatically generating the frw files, I could spare a lot of time.
Now unfortunately my knowledge in programming is very limited. To learn java and to learn how to detract the file structure of frw files, and be able to write a program which would be able to save stuff as a frw file would already take a lot of time for me which i could be using on the simple pull&dragging in AFE as well. But what I could do for example is write a program, which based on my own input variables, would generate .txt or .xml files in which the entire shape and color scheme of a particle effect is described. The only thing I would need then is a program which would be able to convert these txt or xml files into frw files so they can be used in RCT3 as particle effects.
If there would be someone with lots of programming experience (or better someone from Frontier
Planet Coaster
Now I could imagine some of you would think: Why dont you just use Planet Coaster, RCT3 is outdated. However, there are several reasons not to use it, but basically PlanetCoaster doesnt offer me the same tools to be able to recreate is as detailed as I could in RCT3:
- PlanetCoaster doesn't have a tool to be able to create your own particle effects. So I would have to stick with the already available fountain effects which are not suitable for an Aquanura remake
- Even if I would have all the different particle effects, the showeditor of PlanetCoaster doesnt allow you to link multiple different particle effects to one launcher. The particle effect is linked to the launcher. Therefore making a show with different particle effects due to different color schemes and animations would be way too complicated.
- The showeditor of PlanetCoaster is less user friendly than in RCT3. Of course in RCT3 it is not ideal as well, where it would be much easier if you had a time bar with more than 7 rows, and where you could select more effects and copy or drag them at the same time instead of one at the time. But it is still more user friendly than in PlanetCoaster where I would only have a list of all the effects and their timing. With the amount of effects going to more than thousand, this would not give a very clear overview of the show.
- And also, the animations would be limited as well because at this moment there are is no possibility to animate particle launches as far as I'm aware, where with RCT3 I have found a trick to do this with perfect timing to the show by importing the animation as a Custom Flatride, and be able to start both the show and the flatride, hence the animation, at the same time
- Furthermore, PlanetCoaster does not give guarantee of running the show problem free without lagging. Now it is already known that PlanetCoaster is not perfectly optimized in terms of performance. And running a lot of particle effects at the same time could cause the game to become more laggy. Now RCT3 has this problem as well, but you can still work with it, and RCT3 has a render option to generate the video, where PlanetCoaster doesnt have this tool. And speaking of recording, in the future for recording the show I am also able to use the flying camera route editor, where in Planet Coaster I wouldnt be able.