RCT 3 PC Hmm, One think I have noticed with AI

[daboywunda]

Hiya guys.

It's my first ever post here, so please spank me if I'm double posting.

I've been reading through all of your posts for an hour and am intregued to read some of them. I also have come to the conclusion that this is a very intelligent forum with some very bright people on here and I'm not going to pretend to know about half the stuff mentioned on here.

I've also been playing RCT3 (plus expansions) for a while (well, since it's release) and to start with, I prefered RCT2, but like most people I have spoken to, I now prefere RCT3... however, there are 2 things that I miss from RCT2 that I thought the game did very well.

The first was to advertise seperate rides to increase their popularity. I was very surprised that this was left out of the current release..

The second was the little piece of AI that tells guests when a new ride has openned and their desire to rush and ride the new ride... So, when I open a coaster that I have spent litterally days building, there is no interest. Where-as in RCT2, you could guarentee that at least for a year people would flock to the new ride.

Could this not be fixed by a patch?

And if so, would it also be possible to have peeps queue for the major rides and establish a queue like those seen at major parks like Alton Towers or Thorpe Park. However, having seen the game performing, I realise that this would be a task and a half as the way I understand the AI to work is that even if a peep is not seen, their journey and location has to be calculated. I just feel that the peep generation in RCT3 is 4th rate when compared to RCT2 and lets the game down considerably. I personally feel that the guest generation rate should be 4 or 5 (or even more) times what it is now, but again, I know that the resource drain that that many peeps would have on the game is mahoosive.

But if there ever is an update 4, I would love to see this improved (as in the advertising a seperate ride and openning a new ride that every-one wants to ride)

Any-ways, I guess patches take a long time to surface and would be quite costly to do so, so I don't expect you to create one for just this problem.. but I would defo love to see this included in a new patch / add-on pack.

 

[rosscoe(au)]

Welcome aboard,


"The first was to advertise seperate rides to increase their popularity. I was very surprised that this was left out of the current release.."

Was a great way to make money in rct 1 & 2 , why it was taken out we will never know.


"The second was the little piece of AI that tells guests when a new ride has openned and their desire to rush and ride the new ride... So, when I open a coaster that I have spent litterally days building, there is no interest. Where-as in RCT2, you could guarentee that at least for a year people would flock to the new ride."

As you know from reading this forum, some people find the AI in this game strange, it was one thing that left me amazed the first time i built a Giga coaster with a rating over 9.00, and nobody would enter the line.

We can only hope that more patches are coming andsome of the most glaring game play issues are fixed..

 

[Nuclear Fish]

I also have come to the conclusion that this is a very intelligent forum with some very bright people on here...

Thank you very much!

Anyway, I agree that the peep AI should be fixed. It would be better if you could have a more realistic amount of guests in the park so that the majority of them are in the queues and not randomly standing around doing nothing. Would produce too much lag though... oh well...

 

[daboywunda]

What I dont understand is why they cant use parts of the AI from RCT2.. again, knowing nothing about the logistics, it may not be possible.. but they managed it in that game, but didnt transfer accross to RCT3.

Would there not be a way to reduce the resources that the peeps need to animate?

I wouldnt change anything else on the game.. it's just the fact that the peeps are so thick when the game apparently has the best AI of the 3. I agree that the peeps spend more time wandering to food stalls than they do in queues like real theme parks.

 

[Jimpy]

The second was the little piece of AI that tells guests when a new ride has openned and their desire to rush and ride the new ride... So, when I open a coaster that I have spent litterally days building, there is no interest. Where-as in RCT2, you could guarentee that at least for a year people would flock to the new ride.

I built an extremely popular coaster in one of my parks and saved it. When I put it in another park, I noticed it took a while to get peeps to ride it, not a huge time, but a slight delay. Once it got going, it quickly became the most popular ride. I wondered about that and tried an experiment. I had a park with over 3000 peeps, 2700 of which were custom peeps. So I could watch them that way, plus I pulled up the peep window and watched what they were doing that way too.

Let's say you build a great coaster and open it. If a group (or solo peep) is going to another ride, or stall (or whatever), it keeps doing that until it's done. Only after that, when it's thinking of what to do next, will it decide there is a new exciting ride and go to it. In a big park, especially, this can cause a huge delay between the opening of a ride and when an appreciable number of peeps ride it.

In the original RCT3 release, there was a problem with groups constantly breaking up and reforming. Now, the groups are more focused on what there are doing and not even the most exciting ride in the world, will make them lose focus. And once they do, they then have to walk to the new ride, even if it is on the complete opposite side of the park. In megaparks, your peeps spend an ungodly amount of time walking from ride to rise (or stall).

Now that I've figured that out, I'm can live with it. It's changed the way I design my parks, I tend now to build parks with a compact core, and have the coasters radiating from the core.

A bigger problem with the AI, in my opinion, is that the peeps will go up to stall they have no use for, like a sunscreen stall, if they already have some, or a drink stall if they are not thirsty. This has two negative effects. First, they are not engaging in more useful activities, like riding rides, when they are doing that and secondly, they are potentially blocking the stall from being used by someone who has a need for it.

AI programming is very tricky. It's quite easy to fix one thing and in the process, change something else to make things worse. This type of change requires a lot of care and testing.

 

[daboywunda]

Is there not any way that we can edit game files (dont do it unless you know how) to change the peep generation rate at least?

 

[Jimpy]

Is there not any way that we can edit game files (dont do it unless you know how) to change the peep generation rate at least?

There's a way in the scenerio editor. I use the scenerio editor rather than sandbox mode when I'm playing around because you can change things like that and the average happiness of your peeps and the average amount of money they have, etc. I don't remember how right off the top of my head and I'm in the process of moving and my RCT3 disc is in one of the boxes off to my left and I don't have time to find it before work today.

Also it won't help you if you are playing one of the premade scenerios.

 

[daboywunda]

yeh, i know that u can have a guest gen rate of 50% - 200% in scenario editor... as I gave up on sandbox and used that. Especially as you have more control.

But is not a little bit of code that says how many guests a ride will generate once openned? If you can change that, then you would surely have control over the 50 - 200% bit too?

Ive seen this kind of edit used for allsorts (technologies in Locomotion, money in Sim City, building availibility in Beach Life etc)