i would like this too, but with beta around the corner im starting to think were going to need a PC2 in a few years [wink]
Option for More Realistic Time System with Park Open & Closing Schedual
- Thread starter breezerHOG1
- Start date
I completely agree with creaper, I always found it weird to have so many years go by so quickly. The gameplay as far as time-based goals could still work great if the game time was slowed down a little.
I also agree with Parkmaker, that giving us the option to set it how we want would be great.
I mean a seemingly very simple way would be even if they just added a "Slow" and "Extra Slow" time button next to the play/fast forward, that'd be nice to use when you're not working at getting something done in a certain amount of in-game time. Whether an in-game day takes a minute or 6 hours, you're still making the same of money per in-game time.
I also agree with Parkmaker, that giving us the option to set it how we want would be great.
I mean a seemingly very simple way would be even if they just added a "Slow" and "Extra Slow" time button next to the play/fast forward, that'd be nice to use when you're not working at getting something done in a certain amount of in-game time. Whether an in-game day takes a minute or 6 hours, you're still making the same of money per in-game time.
How would they tie this sliding time to the economics, that are currently calculated by the month?
BJ calling time a "month" is just a random word representing a digit (X) and in this case X happens to be whatever Frontier decides. Currently a month is approx like an hour? I think, actually I have no idea really, but in RCT a month was about an hour... Finances would still remain the same.
The time of the day and the location of the sun do not have to match the in-game calendar... I tried to explain this in more detail in the OP but I rambled on a lot [cool]
By the way, what should X be? Maybe for a more "intuitive" campaign mode, months should be replaced with WEEKS and days could be replaced with hours, and one week could equal 3 hours (In Real Life) so that every second 2-3 ingame minutes would go by? confusing I know!
The time of the day and the location of the sun do not have to match the in-game calendar... I tried to explain this in more detail in the OP but I rambled on a lot [cool]
By the way, what should X be? Maybe for a more "intuitive" campaign mode, months should be replaced with WEEKS and days could be replaced with hours, and one week could equal 3 hours (In Real Life) so that every second 2-3 ingame minutes would go by? confusing I know!
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like said before...wouldn't it sound stupid if a goal sounds like "Make a profit and get x guests in the park in 1 month"? Like you said, the time of the day is just cosmetic...so, why do we need a year to last longer than before (by the way in every rct game 1 year ~ 1 hour). It's just a much better feeling to work ingame "years" on a park thn just 2 months. And if they include weather effects in the future, most people who play the campaign won't see them because the average consumer wouldn't play one scenario for ~ 10 hours.
I understand that many on this forum play this game like a hobby...but most of the people out there wouldn't be interested in working so long and hard for one single game.
I understand that many on this forum play this game like a hobby...but most of the people out there wouldn't be interested in working so long and hard for one single game.
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To simplify some of the ideas for a managable simulation solution:
The park should have an open/closed schedule to allow inspectors, maintenance and park personal to change behaviour, like repairs and cleanups. Maybe not daily, because the simulation runs too fast for the guests to go in and out in a daycycle. But a weekend closing should be possible.
Of course a game offering guest cycles with a natural day and night behaviour would be far more cool. That would mean tuning the passage of time a bit. Maybe instead of having a standart speedup button, we could get a daycycle/weekcycle button that changes the passage of real time against game time flow to allow visitors to go in and out of a park in a single day or in a single week.
No closing at winter generally, but there are some rides that aren't fit for winter season in real life parks. Especially outdoor water attractions. But a ride could have seasonal restrictions.
Guests remembering might be too extreme for the devs to manage, but a spread of word would mean that some guests enter the park with preknowledge of information they would normally only get at an information booth. Ride mechanics might include a ride itself (not the visitors) "remembering" fun increases or decreases and thus auto-adapting the ride attraction values. Example: If a ride had lots of queue closings and visitors would have decreased fun from it, this is stored into the ride "memory" and lowers the technical ride attraction by remembering how "bad" the good ride was. After some time this memory effect fades.
Queue waiting time might also go into a ride "memory", so a very attractive ride with too much waiting will get less visitors than a less attractive ride with almost no waiting time. This is reflected by real life park decisions of park visitors. Unless of course the queue itself is entertaining, which is another story (talking about queue entertainment possibilities that change people's behaviour).
The park should have an open/closed schedule to allow inspectors, maintenance and park personal to change behaviour, like repairs and cleanups. Maybe not daily, because the simulation runs too fast for the guests to go in and out in a daycycle. But a weekend closing should be possible.
Of course a game offering guest cycles with a natural day and night behaviour would be far more cool. That would mean tuning the passage of time a bit. Maybe instead of having a standart speedup button, we could get a daycycle/weekcycle button that changes the passage of real time against game time flow to allow visitors to go in and out of a park in a single day or in a single week.
No closing at winter generally, but there are some rides that aren't fit for winter season in real life parks. Especially outdoor water attractions. But a ride could have seasonal restrictions.
Guests remembering might be too extreme for the devs to manage, but a spread of word would mean that some guests enter the park with preknowledge of information they would normally only get at an information booth. Ride mechanics might include a ride itself (not the visitors) "remembering" fun increases or decreases and thus auto-adapting the ride attraction values. Example: If a ride had lots of queue closings and visitors would have decreased fun from it, this is stored into the ride "memory" and lowers the technical ride attraction by remembering how "bad" the good ride was. After some time this memory effect fades.
Queue waiting time might also go into a ride "memory", so a very attractive ride with too much waiting will get less visitors than a less attractive ride with almost no waiting time. This is reflected by real life park decisions of park visitors. Unless of course the queue itself is entertaining, which is another story (talking about queue entertainment possibilities that change people's behaviour).
The time seems to be more based upon the time it takes for a park to develop, rather than the speed the game is actually running. So the time the game runs for more closely correlates with the time it takes to build rides and new areas. My park has been running about 40 years now, over that time it's grown to include 5 themed areas, 8 rollercoasters and around 15 flat rides. This time scale seems consistent with parks whose history I am familiar with.
My park actually gets built in a way which mirrors the way parks are built in real life. Rides and attractions are slowly added over the years. Occasionally a ride needs to be moved, rethemed or deteled to fit with how the areas have developed. Rarely i choose to remove an entire area to redesign it. My park has a history which spans years, in a similar way to most parks open now.
I understand wanting to tie the time to the characters in the game, however this makes less sense to me. New coasters aren't started and finished while i'm walking around the park, they takes months if not years to be built. The part of the game that I am playing (the management) is that time should be linked to, in my opinion. The guests are just representative.
My park actually gets built in a way which mirrors the way parks are built in real life. Rides and attractions are slowly added over the years. Occasionally a ride needs to be moved, rethemed or deteled to fit with how the areas have developed. Rarely i choose to remove an entire area to redesign it. My park has a history which spans years, in a similar way to most parks open now.
I understand wanting to tie the time to the characters in the game, however this makes less sense to me. New coasters aren't started and finished while i'm walking around the park, they takes months if not years to be built. The part of the game that I am playing (the management) is that time should be linked to, in my opinion. The guests are just representative.
Well I guess I would just like to see a couple slow time settings that slow time down without making rides and people operate in slo-mo. Then the picky time people can be happy and it doesn't affect gameplay goals at all.
Edit: The "slow time" buttons would obviously be just as optional to use as the fast forward buttons.
Edit: The "slow time" buttons would obviously be just as optional to use as the fast forward buttons.
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Sorry but I am on the opposite side of the fence and ignore the number that is the time (it is just a stated figure) what you are looking at is important, for night to go so fast that you can't enjoy the lighting and the look of the park during this time is frustrating. Assuming weather, to see it ran for 5 seconds and then be over and call that rain will also be frustrating.
It actually means that the game is passing time so quickly that it takes someone to ride a coaster over a week rather than say a day. This is much more immersion breaking to myself than saying that you need to achieve a goal in a month rather than a year.
For a start parks actually have target guest numbers daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly and all would be logged. Reports would generally be monthly or quarterly.
You don't need to work any harder/longer than currently but we just want the timing to be adjusted to allow us to explore our day to day operation and react to things happening accordingly.
For instance I spent a load of time building a coaster with it un-paused to see how long it took and in that time I had made so much money I could place 6 more down straight away without having to worry about anything else happening. It felt like I wasn't aiming at any goal but was in fact just playing sandbox which is not what I want for management.
Yeah in sandbox I can see having any time of day you would choose as a player no issue but the game is way too fast for scenarios. Also I don't want to complete a goal in an hour. That is not a very long period to be playing to achieve a level. I remember when Theme Hospital came out and the initial scenarios take about 20 mins to 30 mins but as you progress you could be doing things for a few hours to achieve the goal. That felt rewarding.
It didn't matter in Theme hospital how fast time went because there was no cycle that was visually different or affected play. Again Frontier also mentioned that night time would affect the guests and how things are in the park so to make it such a short experience would not work if they want this to truly affect the gameplay.
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See I get that but I am finding I can build and decorate a park in either 3 game years or 100 game years depending on how I play. With that comes the fact that money rolls in so easily and prices are so cheap for items that it isn't an issue.
If you kept the time the same then the money rolls in for myself too quickly. I would like to see things cost 3-4x more than they currently are. A coaster costing all of $15k is nothing compared to what it should cost (millions) but a middle ground where we can create a coaster and decorate would cost $500k would at least feel like the cost is weighty to the ride.
Some of the other rides could then at least sit at the $40-50k mark
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That's what I meant with comsmetical day-time...it doesn't affect the lighting or the weather - it would be just like in the older games, it rains for weeks. Daytime could last f(for example) from March to May - nighttime the whole June and so on.
Isn't it much more immersion breaking to build a whole park in one day? And have a succesful park in a month (or even weeks). I've never cared for how long the peeps stayed in my park
Besides that, this system would never work, except you really work with realtime...even an hour per day just give a peep barely enough time to ride on or two rides.
Frontier need to work on this, the game shouldn't be that easy.
Of course the difficulty needs to increase from scenario to scenario...but this hasn't anything to do with longer running days at all.
But in a game you need to work with simplified values...look at sim-city, where a hospital costs only a few hundred dollars
The roblem with realistic prices for rides are, that peeps stay in your park for a long time scale (a year or even longer), so if you really want to work with realistic values you need to increase all the prices to unrealistic values (50.000$ for park-entry/ 5000$ per ride) or the game needs to scale everything up...so that one guest who pay 50$ to enter your park , gives you 50.000 in the game (all values are just examples).
The other possibility to make this working would be, if you'll really go for a day to day sheme. So peeps would leave your park after one day. So a day needs to last at least two hours to make this workable - don't forget the time, they leave your park or do you want them to simply PUFF magically disappear
?But even if you do this and - say you have 1000 peeps the first day, each of them pay 50 dollars to enter the park and buy one ice for 2 $ - you only would earn 52.000 $ a day...so you need to spend many HOURS to build a rollercoaster. That would be horrible.
And don't forget, this is also a game for children...and do you think it's really more rewarding for them to play with million of dollars? It would be way to abstract and complex.
It isn't easy to develop a working simulation - but you need to reflect how something would work - also for a mass market. Too much complexity would kill the game for most gamers.
But let's be realistic, this is all just hypothetical and I'm 100% sure that Frontier won't change their system anymore. But - to me - it's also the only system that works - a game will never work like real-life and that's good. It's entertainment [yesnod]
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I'm not saying that I disagree with anyone else, but I do like pretty much everything curlyriff has been saying.
I also would enjoy slightly more realistic prices on things, but it's probably too late for that to be changed.
I also would enjoy slightly more realistic prices on things, but it's probably too late for that to be changed.
I'm just gonna go ahead and bump this because I love this idea.
In order to improve the realism this is an awesome idea. Guests roaming around for weeks/months in the park just makes no sense at all. They should just come in the morning when the park opens, leave at night when it closes.
I want to add a few points I would find especially appealing to implement:
-The fact that this option would make park entree fee (with free rides) very viable, since guests are forced to leave at a regular interval of time (at the end of each day and you also have a steady stream of income from park entree fees at a fixed time interval, i.e. the majority every morning, and a few trinklets of people coming in the afternoon)
-One could even add facilities such as Park Hotels, which are large buildings the visitors can pay for an overnight stay (which will give you some extra income), they enter there when the park closes instead of leaving the park and the next morning the come out for some more fun in the park, their 2/3/x-day ticket would be more expensive off course (with maybe some promotion deal or something) and then after a few days they leave for good.
-In general, I don't take it would be much of a problem in terms of generating enough finances, since the game simply changes it time scaling and nothing else. But I could perhaps see an issue that there isn't enough time in one day for the guests to visit a lot of rides in one day, because the timescale probably would not be 1:1 (1 in-game second = 1 real second), but something like 6:1 (at normal speeds) and then 12:1 and 30:1 (at the faster speeds), as other people have suggested. My estimate is that this is something unavoidable, because you would new some speeding up, because if you would play in 1:1 it would take forever to finish one day, which would mean it would take WAAAAAAY to long to generate income if you would want to play the park entrance fee (free rides) variant. A way to solve this would be to include an option to simulate days (and perhaps weeks), when you are just waiting to generate money and you're not managing anything or constructing new stuff. You could just pick the option at the start of each day, to simulate one day (or a week) and the game quickly calculates an average day and you skip to the next day with an increased amount of money (and all your other park stats), that is if you're park is doing well and making profits, if you're money is currently losing money you would lose it obviously (but you probably don't want to simulate and skip a day, if that's the case [tongue])
Off-topic:
-Also, I think the game is currently too easy, people are willing to pay way to much for rides and shops as it is and money is way to easy to come by (even in hard/harder mode). The simulation/park management needs attention for the next patch/dlc/expansion. The sandbox/creative aspect is absolutely stunning and amazing, hats of to that, no show the simulation aspect some love too [yesnod]
In order to improve the realism this is an awesome idea. Guests roaming around for weeks/months in the park just makes no sense at all. They should just come in the morning when the park opens, leave at night when it closes.
I want to add a few points I would find especially appealing to implement:
-The fact that this option would make park entree fee (with free rides) very viable, since guests are forced to leave at a regular interval of time (at the end of each day and you also have a steady stream of income from park entree fees at a fixed time interval, i.e. the majority every morning, and a few trinklets of people coming in the afternoon)
-One could even add facilities such as Park Hotels, which are large buildings the visitors can pay for an overnight stay (which will give you some extra income), they enter there when the park closes instead of leaving the park and the next morning the come out for some more fun in the park, their 2/3/x-day ticket would be more expensive off course (with maybe some promotion deal or something) and then after a few days they leave for good.
-In general, I don't take it would be much of a problem in terms of generating enough finances, since the game simply changes it time scaling and nothing else. But I could perhaps see an issue that there isn't enough time in one day for the guests to visit a lot of rides in one day, because the timescale probably would not be 1:1 (1 in-game second = 1 real second), but something like 6:1 (at normal speeds) and then 12:1 and 30:1 (at the faster speeds), as other people have suggested. My estimate is that this is something unavoidable, because you would new some speeding up, because if you would play in 1:1 it would take forever to finish one day, which would mean it would take WAAAAAAY to long to generate income if you would want to play the park entrance fee (free rides) variant. A way to solve this would be to include an option to simulate days (and perhaps weeks), when you are just waiting to generate money and you're not managing anything or constructing new stuff. You could just pick the option at the start of each day, to simulate one day (or a week) and the game quickly calculates an average day and you skip to the next day with an increased amount of money (and all your other park stats), that is if you're park is doing well and making profits, if you're money is currently losing money you would lose it obviously (but you probably don't want to simulate and skip a day, if that's the case [tongue])
Off-topic:
-Also, I think the game is currently too easy, people are willing to pay way to much for rides and shops as it is and money is way to easy to come by (even in hard/harder mode). The simulation/park management needs attention for the next patch/dlc/expansion. The sandbox/creative aspect is absolutely stunning and amazing, hats of to that, no show the simulation aspect some love too [yesnod]
I will update this thread with my idea from this thread https://forums.planetcoaster.com/showthread.php/18862-The-Resort-Update/page2?p=150725#post150725
I updated the timing and the thoughts on how to get finances to match up. It is worth reading the thread as although a little of topic it paints a picture of why time and open/close need to make meaningful affects to the game compared to now.
My updated thoughts:
I updated the timing and the thoughts on how to get finances to match up. It is worth reading the thread as although a little of topic it paints a picture of why time and open/close need to make meaningful affects to the game compared to now.
My updated thoughts:
We were told we could edit "everything" in the Scenario Editor (and it's great, no question) but there's a lot we can't touch that we should have access to. Ride stats (prestige, cost, etc), drill-down to individual scenery items (including per-piece buy'n'sell costs, so we can price tree and debris removal), and time -- not just setting the start date, but adjusting the two game-time rates independently.
that would be awsome
Still surprised people keep bringing this up again and again. One would say it´s clear this is not going to work and wouldn´t be fun. Maybe that´s the reason behind this system was never used in any similar game, or at least I do not recall single one...
This would have much bigger impact on basically every-single gameplay mechanic in the game and in the end, it wouldn´t be fun. Well, maybe for very few people, but the game must be fun for as much people as possible.
If modding is ever possible for PC, maybe those people can make a mod, but that´s about it. I don´t think we will ever see similar thing being done by developers.
This would have much bigger impact on basically every-single gameplay mechanic in the game and in the end, it wouldn´t be fun. Well, maybe for very few people, but the game must be fun for as much people as possible.
If modding is ever possible for PC, maybe those people can make a mod, but that´s about it. I don´t think we will ever see similar thing being done by developers.
well, likely not surprising since they are some interesting concepts that (as far as i can find) still haven't been addressed. I use sandbox hours set from 5am to 9pm, which gives a decent dusky dawn and twilight sequence, and the park's life is currently up to June 19, 2558. What i find weird/funny is when a ride breaks down in some way where no mechanic will address it (usually i delete and undo deleting the coaster), some peeps get stuck for forever in line (well, i have some waiting at 112 hours for a Free Swing Pioneer right now). Thanks curlyriff for reviving this, as i find the discussions interesting. -brett