Option for More Realistic Time System with Park Open & Closing Schedual

[Primello]

A verry big YES for me!

Other supporting threads:
https://forums.planetcoaster.com/sh...stic-Opening-Closing-of-Park-Daily-Seasonally
https://forums.planetcoaster.com/sh...nd-Closing-time-proposal-day-cycle-management
https://forums.planetcoaster.com/sh...s-and-money-management-tool-(Extreme-Realism)
https://forums.planetcoaster.com/sh...k-opening-times-and-varied-park-guest-numbers
https://forums.planetcoaster.com/sh...-Day-Night-Operating-Seasons-Closing-At-Night
https://forums.planetcoaster.com/showthread.php/4092-Outside-the-Park


I never liked seeing parks go 50-100 or more years old, and I always wanted to see these games follow a more realistic time system. The game clock should run on a 24 hour/weekly system, instead of months/years. One day/night cycle should be 48 minutes of real life time (or maybe a little longer) because with 48 mins per day, then two weeks in-game would equate to about 12 hours in real time, which is the same as one year in RCT!

Objectives would still take an equal amount of playtime to complete (a 2 month objective would be 4 years of RCT time), but this way each "month" could match the season/weather that belongs to it. The money/profits system wouldn't have to change, except it would be based on days instead of months, so at the end of each day you are still making money to build new rides. IMO this would not only be more realistic, and interesting to see, but it could also add more depth to park management. (Again, as an OPTION for those who want it). I would also like to see more realistic pricing management with how much guests are willing to spend, but I don't want to get into another topic here.

I'm sure most people would not like to see their parks get closed each night, but maybe this could be an option... IMO it would be realistic/interesting to see parks shutdown around 12pm, saving money on electricity and staff. Employees would continue working for an hour before "resting", and then time could skip ahead a few hours. I realize this might prevent guests from filling the back of large parks, decreasing the level of fun for some people because dark rides and night lighting are awesome!! Maybe the closing of the park isn't necessary, but maybe just as an option for people who want that realism (sandbox mode allows you to keep it night all the time anyway, right? IMO this is more for the objective mode anyway, or just as an OPTION if the player wants it). Park and ride maintenance would occur during closing hours, certain rides should be tested every morning prior to the park being open. Most guests would arrive to the parks earlier in the day, ticket prices would be reduced for guests who come later in the day, and weekly "passes" could be offered at another price.

If the time cycled over hours/days instead of months/years, it would allow additional features to be added. It could allow seasons that actually match the time of year. I'm not sure how snow would work, but if a park is slow due to rain or lightning, maybe closing the park early for the day would prevent players/parkowners from losing too much money, a decision that would be risky to make but also interesting.

Weekends should be busier than weekdays, Busier days should have angrier guests requiring more security/staff, and staff could have certain "tasks" at specific times (I could go on and on about staff management...) Also, holidays could be applied and maybe costumed entertainers could automatically change their outfits to celebrate a specific event for the day. Did you know most parks raise ticket prices during specific times of the year? In real life, I love visiting parks when they are the least busy. Makes me a happier park goer when the lines are short, as I am getting more value for my ticket. But sometimes holiday seasons have parades/special events going on.

Another idea is there could be "returning guests" who visited previously and still retain their favorite ride information, certain items, etc. If too many people leave unhappy in the case of a park having a "bad reputation" and losing guests due to dangerous coasters or vandalism or something, then maybe closing a park for a couple days to do "renovations" would help restore said reputation. Just a thought [praise] thanks

UPDATED: I saw others discussing the possibility of in-game time matching real life, with 24 hours in-game actually taking 24hours IRL. That seems a bit overkill to me, somebody else mentioned 4-6 hours IRL being 1 day in game, but I think 2 hours would be too long. 1 hour per game-day would mean 2 weeks in-game would take 14 hours, I think that's perfect.


Other supporting threads:
https://forums.planetcoaster.com/sh...stic-Opening-Closing-of-Park-Daily-Seasonally
https://forums.planetcoaster.com/sh...nd-Closing-time-proposal-day-cycle-management
https://forums.planetcoaster.com/sh...s-and-money-management-tool-(Extreme-Realism)
https://forums.planetcoaster.com/sh...k-opening-times-and-varied-park-guest-numbers
https://forums.planetcoaster.com/sh...-Day-Night-Operating-Seasons-Closing-At-Night
https://forums.planetcoaster.com/showthread.php/4092-Outside-the-Park

 

[dunkelziffer]

I would suggest having longer individual days (one hour) but shorter months/years. A week should consist of three days (two workdays, one weekend with more visitors) and each month should contain two weeks. So a month would be done in 6 hours.

Also, allow us to determine the park seasons. In which months is our park closed? Maybe we could open it in February already, but some rides would have to stay closed due to low temperatures. Maybe there could be different climates in different scenarios. There could be tropical scenarios which are open all year and arctic ones, that prohibit roller coasters. Or maybe we just have to build more expensive ones? Taron in Phantasialand will be able to work at -10°C. Such a coaster could work in an arctic scenario, but the park might still need to be closed in the "winter".

 

[breezerHOG1]

Also, allow us to determine the park seasons. In which months is our park closed? Maybe we could open it in February already, but some rides would have to stay closed due to low temperatures. Maybe there could be different climates in different scenarios. There could be tropical scenarios which are open all year and arctic ones, that prohibit roller coasters. Or maybe we just have to build more expensive ones? Taron in Phantasialand will be able to work at -10°C. Such a coaster could work in an arctic scenario, but the park might still need to be closed in the "winter".

[up] I really like this idea, but it might be too much to ask for, but yes this is definitely what I would like to see accomplished

I would suggest having longer individual days (one hour) but shorter months/years. A week should consist of three days (two workdays, one weekend with more visitors) and each month should contain two weeks. So a month would be done in 6 hours.

Hmmm, this is really interesting. The game does not have to follow Earth's calendar, but would that be weird? Making up a new calendar allows for more flexibility in playing with how the games time flows, maybe a day doesn't even have to be exactly 24 hours. But that could be really weird too. I think it would be more fun if it seemed accurate/realistic, don't you?

 

[MrCow]

i would say allow different toggles. i would love to see an actual real life timesceme in game where every hour ingame is 1hr in real life(this because now rides are hours and hours long instead of 2-3mins)

 

[Ling]

i would say allow different toggles. i would love to see an actual real life timesceme in game where every hour ingame is 1hr in real life(this because now rides are hours and hours long instead of 2-3mins)

This has never really been a problem though. The in-game time isn't balanced against real-life anything. Not having realistic timescales for things like this only becomes a problem when you're forcing guests in and out of the park. We can debate all day whether having all your guests leave every hour or being able to build an entire theme park start to finish in a single 24-hour day is stranger from a game standpoint. I think the system in RCT3 is probably best - days are reasonably long, you still get a day/night cycle, and the clock only controls that cycle and timed shows/events.

Hmmm, this is really interesting. The game does not have to follow Earth's calendar, but would that be weird? Making up a new calendar allows for more flexibility in playing with how the games time flows, maybe a day doesn't even have to be exactly 24 hours. But that could be really weird too. I think it would be more fun if it seemed accurate/realistic, don't you?

That's an interesting thought, but then we're right back to the issue of why bother letting the park close at all? Just having a day be 14 shorter hours or whatever is equivalent to the park "closing" and skipping right to opening the following morning, a la RCT3.

I really really really would like to have multiplayer support with the ability to have friends walking through parks and riding rides together. That doesn't seem to be mentioned yet at this time. Multiplayer is in the list of possible suggestions, but that's it [knockout]

OpenRCT2 has proved that there is a market for multiplayer theme park sim games, at least in terms of working on the same map as your friends simultaneously. Frontier doesn't even need dedicated servers for it, people will host them themselves. ❤︎❤︎❤︎❤︎, playing it on LAN here in the house with my friends would be awesome. Being able to walk around is really just an issue of adding "peep mode" where it turns on freelook, snaps you to the ground/path, and gives you an invisible (to you) peep model that maybe you can design to some small degree (RCT3 did have a peep creator after all). This fits right in line with the idea of hosting a server, as a creator can agree to open their park at some scheduled time, either in "Viewing" (Peep/camera mode only) or "Editing" (full toolset) mode, and people can join and explore at their leisure. Would be interesting to see if they pull it off.

 

[breezerHOG1]

then we're right back to the issue of why bother letting the park close at all?

I just think it would be neat to see it happen, not even all the time, just sometimes [big grin]

My main point though, even if we were to ignore having the park open/close, lets say they leave it as it is and the parks never close... I still think the game could theoretically run on a daily/weekly schedule and offer deeper game play with weather, holidays, etc. and without effecting the management mechanics in anyway.

 

[MrCow]

This has never really been a problem though. The in-game time isn't balanced against real-life anything. Not having realistic timescales for things like this only becomes a problem when you're forcing guests in and out of the park. We can debate all day whether having all your guests leave every hour or being able to build an entire theme park start to finish in a single 24-hour day is stranger from a game standpoint. I think the system in RCT3 is probably best - days are reasonably long, you still get a day/night cycle, and the clock only controls that cycle and timed shows/events.



That's an interesting thought, but then we're right back to the issue of why bother letting the park close at all? Just having a day be 14 shorter hours or whatever is equivalent to the park "closing" and skipping right to opening the following morning, a la RCT3.


OpenRCT2 has proved that there is a market for multiplayer theme park sim games, at least in terms of working on the same map as your friends simultaneously. Frontier doesn't even need dedicated servers for it, people will host them themselves. ❤︎❤︎❤︎❤︎, playing it on LAN here in the house with my friends would be awesome. Being able to walk around is really just an issue of adding "peep mode" where it turns on freelook, snaps you to the ground/path, and gives you an invisible (to you) peep model that maybe you can design to some small degree (RCT3 did have a peep creator after all). This fits right in line with the idea of hosting a server, as a creator can agree to open their park at some scheduled time, either in "Viewing" (Peep/camera mode only) or "Editing" (full toolset) mode, and people can join and explore at their leisure. Would be interesting to see if they pull it off.

doesnt mean that i would love a reallife timethingy to make everything more realistic and believable. i know im not the only one

 

[widlanquebec]

That's an interesting thought, but then we're right back to the issue of why bother letting the park close at all? Just having a day be 14 shorter hours or whatever is equivalent to the park "closing" and skipping right to opening the following morning, a la RCT3.

I just think that it can add some interesting realism and management ideas with park closing (for example, possibility to have a guest return in park another day with multi-day pass, deeper cleanup of the park, less electricity consumed, stock delivery to shops and restaurants, etc.).

 

[dunkelziffer]

[up]Hmmm, this is really interesting. The game does not have to follow Earth's calendar, but would that be weird? Making up a new calendar allows for more flexibility in playing with how the games time flows, maybe a day doesn't even have to be exactly 24 hours. But that could be really weird too. I think it would be more fun if it seemed accurate/realistic, don't you?

We have three ratios to adjust:
"hours per day": Well, there's really no reason to deviate from 24 hours, but time should probably skip forward from 23:00 to 9:00 or something similar. Maybe, we could toggle the option to close the park ourselves and then would get to play from 8:30 till 24:00, so we had an additional hour and a half to compensate for the time that guests take to enter and leave the park. For the realtime length of such an "extended" day I would suggest 50 minutes.

"days per week": this would control the rhythm of high and low traffic days. I would really appreciate, if such a rhythm would be present in the game. But having a full week of seven days (with days lasting close to an hour in realtime) would either allow for only one week per month, which sounds even stranger to me, or all scenarios would basically have very short ingame durations to be completable in a reasonable amount of realtime.

A shorter week, would allow for a more realistic "calender" with varying seasons and a few holidays. You can't really include holidays with only one week per month. Having a holiday week would then always mean higher visitor numbers for a whole month and would completely skew your finances.

Also, I would propose the following names for the days
-Voxelday (the day of terraforming)
-Gridday (the day of decoration)
-Splineday (the day of coaster building)

"days per month": I suggested two weeks per month, but on second thought I would rather have seven days. That would cause months to begin with different days of the week and creaty a more natural flow. To make it even better, you could have a rhythm of 7,6,7,7,6,7,7,6,7,7,6,7 where each year has 80 days an thus the first day of the year would also shift around within the week.

As your park would probably be closed from Novembre to February (depending on the scenario/climate), you would have 54 playable days per year. With the suggested duration of 50 minutes per day that would give you 45 hours of realtime per ingame year.

That's an interesting thought, but then we're right back to the issue of why bother letting the park close at all? Just having a day be 14 shorter hours or whatever is equivalent to the park "closing" and skipping right to opening the following morning, a la RCT3.

Closing the park would first of all work perfectly in conjunction with hotels and resorts and additionally it would test your infrastructure. Is your path system interconnected enough to allow people to spread out fast? Do you have transportation rides to get your guests to the remote areas of your park early? Do you have shuttle services from resorts/hotels to your park? Do resort guests get the possibility to enter half an hour earlier into your park to enjoy empty queues?

Also, you would have to be efficient in getting the guests out of your park. At what time do you close the queues for your roller coasters? Do you shut down everything at once or is your park big enough to require individual areas being shut down sequentially? Do you organize a fireworks/laser/fountain show close to your park exits to draw people there and then get them out quickly afterwards? Do you close your rides late to squeeze a few extra bucks out but risk having to pay your staff extra for overtime work, if you don't get a high enough percentage of guests out of the park?

There are plenty game mechanics to make it very satisfying to manage the opening and closing yourself. The question is, whether the amount of time to implement them would be worth the effort for Frontier and whether it would fit into their current game architecture or force them to redesign major parts of it.

 

[pwc1]

I prefer to manually open/close my park. Not all play these games with a managment mindset.

 

[DreamMaster]

I don't want the park to ever close but I want moralistic time of day.

8am to 3 am instead of 5am to 8pm (ithink)

I think time was pretty good in beta but a little to fast.

 

[Wobbly]

We had this convo a while back. I'm totally in favour of a way to make it so you can manage the game at more realistic levels. There should be options within the game to play it at the pace you want to play it.

It does annoy me seeing guests in parks for about a week before leaving, I'd like to be able to set opening and closing times, I'd like to see guests moving at the same speed, but the day/night be slower, not asking for real-time, but more of a x4 of real-time. It must be possible to create a way to do it.

Options are key to any games success, It creates more diverse gameplay and attracts new people, so yeah, it should be an option.

 

[Curlyriff]

Tbh I would like longer day/night cycles to be shown in game with around 24mins day and 8 mins night . 7 cycles makes a week up, so a week would take about 3.7 hours thus 4 weeks would be 15 hours.

These are the times I originally suggest but having reviewed other info and information from here and the forum, I think actually I would like this to increase with 36mins day and 12mins night. Therefore the tasks/objectives the game sets just has to provide the task to be complete in say 2 game weeks rather than a game year as an example. I don't know how long you got for objectives to game time in RCT3 for instance but it is just a figure modified accordingly tbh.

This would mean that on average a guest that is in the park for the 34 min day cycle and 10 mins of the night cycle (allowing 2 mins either side for them to leave/arrive or go to a hotel) and would ride around 9 rides during their 1 day visit (also allowing queuing and movement between(4.9 mins per ride) ). Of course a coaster may be shorter/longer but just average it out.

I would not like to see us play an odd calendar tbh, 7 days a week, 365 days in a year is good. If you want time to pass faster while you play you can use the speed up button accordingly. I don't feel options should be in the campaign for tweaking this once set as the objectives are almost always time based. In sandbox then that is fair enough.

Regards,

Adam

 

[Manuel]

We had this convo a while back. I'm totally in favour of a way to make it so you can manage the game at more realistic levels. There should be options within the game to play it at the pace you want to play it.

It does annoy me seeing guests in parks for about a week before leaving, I'd like to be able to set opening and closing times, I'd like to see guests moving at the same speed, but the day/night be slower, not asking for real-time, but more of a x4 of real-time. It must be possible to create a way to do it.

Options are key to any games success, It creates more diverse gameplay and attracts new people, so yeah, it should be an option.

I can agree with you here. I would like to see this as realistic as possible. Of course 24h shift would be to long, but it would be nice to have 'weather'/'seasons' in it as well which forces you to close rides etc.

 

[Wobbly]

I can agree with you here. I would like to see this as realistic as possible. Of course 24h shift would be to long, but it would be nice to have 'weather'/'seasons' in it as well which forces you to close rides etc.

Oh for sure. Realistically, rides close during certain weather for safety, those events should affect your gameplay and income

 

[RollerToaster]

I am a big fan of this idea, I'd love it if each day was longer to about say 10 minutes (five day, five night), but the park doesn't shut at the end of the day so you still get the spread of the crowd. And then you have an off season where the park shuts and you can spend money on new rides, areas and refurb and you could designate construction areas where you could build a ride which would take so much (in game) days to be tested and finished. I also think it would be cool that if you invest in this, that you could equally invest into marketing your new ride/ area and also get made up sponsors to promote the ride and visit the park handing out items, and also use your ride branding to sell items in shops. Went a bit off topic near the end sorry [tongue]

 

[breezerHOG1]

I would really like to see more discussion on this!

 

[MrCow]

this can easily be solved. instead of making easy, normal and hard, you can add realism mode to the game. this will change some things, like instead of fast going minutes, its real time/slower time than it is now. when you build a coaster or a ride, it will be a ghost. once you press accept, a team of builders move in and you can see the ride/coaster being build piece by piece. this will add alot of management into the park, and i think alot of people would love the realism that it involves. i personally hate it to see that sometimes peeps are in a coaster for half a day.. it just feels so odd.

 

[Riddou]

well due to customers speed being realtime speed, a realistic clock would be a 24h a day one. meaning that the speedup options would be something like x10 and x30 to not be too slow.
because as awesome as this idea sound, if the customers don't move at the gametime speed, it cqn't be done at all...
awesome idea though, the money problem is not a real one at all, since the income could be calculated at the end of everyday instead of every year to make that part fine.

 

[Caravaggio]

Oh for sure. Realistically, rides close during certain weather for safety, those events should affect your gameplay and income

I had just mentioned in another thread about employee shifts that the backstage areas of Tokyo Disneysea are absolutely amazing (after a recent visit I pulled up the satelite images). This got me thinking about how interesting park management could be if we were able to create completely separate paths and buildings for use by employees to deliver goods and food, remove trash, tend gardens, maintain rides, get to and from work, and strategically make mascots, performers, and parades appear. Traffic management is a very interesting aspect of Cities Skylines and I can imagine a very congested set of backstage passages affecting how well the park runs. Nightly closings could allow for this congestion to get cleared up and all restocking and maintenance to be completed before the park reopened the next day.

In a similar way, these employee paths could put out 'pollution' like industrial areas in city building games that can be buffered with the use of scenery objects, etc. Busier access paths may cause more noise or other pollution requiring better scenery objects... Anyway, I think there are lots of interesting ways park closings could be used to enhance the management side of the game.