Question, maybe request if it doesnt exist

[FunGaming]

I know we have a day / night cycle in the game but i was wondering if its possible to have the guests really leave the park when its closing time and only come back in when the park re-opens ? Maybe have only those that stay at a hotel stay in the park ? During closing hours rides could be checked, janitors could clean etc. Now maybe this is already in the game but i just havent found it since I only been playing the game for the past couple months. If it doesnt exist maybe it would make for a nice option.

Would love to plan my park with opening hours like 8 AM to 10 PM then have rides being inspected and fixed between like 10 PM and 2 AM and have janitors like clean the park between 5 AM and 7.30 AM so the park is all nice and clean again for opening at 8 AM.

 

[lilibat]

The time scale in the game is so completely whack there is no way to empty a park completely for a few hours of being closed. In game time goes way too fast. I wish we could slow it down actually.

 

[rdrunr7]

In game time goes way too fast. I wish we could slow it down actually.

That would be great! I usually have mine set to a fixed time as I don't like how fast the light changes.

 

[Bullethead]

I know we have a day / night cycle in the game but i was wondering if its possible to have the guests really leave the park when its closing time and only come back in when the park re-opens ?

This has been requested many times since day 1 but it can't happen because of how time works in PC.

See, the game is torn between 2 diametrically opposed timescales. OT1H, when the game is running at 1x speed, the peeps and rides need to move at realistic speeds so the park looks real and you can enjoy POVs. But OTOH, gametime needs to pass rapidly enough on the in-game calendar that a year or 2 will go by in as many hours so you can see long-term progress in a reasonable amount of playtime if you're playing for money. These things don't go together, especially if you need consistent peep behavior over calendrical timescales to make meaningful managerial decisions. Peep behavior is all about them constantly making decisions but the only way to do time acceleration is to skip some decisions. In order to maintain consistent behavior, the game can only skip so many decisions, which is why time acceleration is limited to 3x.

So, if the game ran in real time at 1x, the 3x acceleration would only be 3x real time. So, you if only had 2 real hours to play the game, at most you could only see 6 hours of gametime pass. Thus, it would take you 4 real months to see 1 calendar year go by in the game, which just doesn't work at all for a management game.

Therefore, time in PC must pass MUCH faster than real time. The upshot is, the day/night cycle actually is 1 month on the PC game calendar, with each calendar day corresponding to about 1 hour of the day/night cycle. So basically, when at 1x acceleration and it looks like peeps are moving at normal speed, they're actually moving in EXTREME slow motion compared to the passage of time on the game calendar. It takes them about a week of gametime to walk from the front to the back of the park, and vice versa. This is why parks don't empty out at night---it just doesn't fit with the timescale required for long-term park management.

One of the results of this is that if your park is closed at night, NOTHING happens other than you lose money. When closing time comes, time just instantly jumps ahead to opening time. The rides don't stop, the peeps stay in the park, and you just lose the intervening time when you could still be making money if your park was open 24hrs. The same thing happens at the end of the year. Time jumps from midnight on 31 October to opening time on 1 March without any effect on anything going on in the park, but you can't make your park stay open during the winter. Poor peeps, Christmas never comes for them .

 

[FunGaming]

I wonder how to made it work in RCT1, 2 and 3 then if i remember correctly we had a actual day cycle where people would leave the park during closing hours. Unless im mistaken and it just looked that way. Maybe an option of choice to give us which time cycle we like to use, as in 1 the way it is now and an option 2 use a real time scale where guests actually leave the park during closing hours. No idea if that is possible though

 

[Bullethead]

I wonder how to made it work in RCT1, 2 and 3 then if i remember correctly we had a actual day cycle where people would leave the park during closing hours. Unless im mistaken and it just looked that way. Maybe an option of choice to give us which time cycle we like to use, as in 1 the way it is now and an option 2 use a real time scale where guests actually leave the park during closing hours. No idea if that is possible though

I never played any of the RCT games so I don't know how it worked. From googling a bit just now, it appears that the day/night cycle was introduced in RCT3 and that time acceleration only happened via mods. I can't find how the light cycle synced with the passage of gametime.

Time in PC is really confusing because it keeps track of both real time and game time, and different parts of the game give you data in 1 or the other. And the day/night cycle has nothing to do with either.

Things measured and reported in real time:
* durations of rides
* speeds and accelerations of rides
* queue waiting times
* length of time peeps have been in the park
* ride inspection interval and time since a ride was last inspected
* the time of day corresponding to the current ambient light level of the day/night cycle
* IOW, all the peep- and ride-level stuff

Things measured and reported in game time:
* all monthly park, ride, and shop stats (income, profit, loss, number of customers, etc.)
* number of years the park and each ride have been open
* the promotion frequency of staff (available once per game month of employment)
* IOW, basically all the managerial stuff

Real time and game time tie together as follows (assuming 1x time acceleration):
* 1 game year = 8 game months (1 Mar to 31 Oct) = 96 real minutes = 8 game day/night cycles
* 1 game month = 12 real minutes = 1 game day/night cycle.
* 1 game day is NOT a constant amount of real time because 1 month is always 1 day/night cycle and the 8 months of the game year have 5 with 31 days and 3 with 30 days. So 1 game day is either 0.4 or 0.39 real minutes = 24 or 23.4 seconds.

NOTE: This leads to the interesting observation that the game calendar (what day it is) moves faster than the game clock (what time of day it is): [wacky]
* 1 "hour" on the time of day (light level, position of the sun in the sky) = 12 real minutes / 24 = 30 real seconds.
* 30 real seconds ~= 3/4 of a game day on the calendar or (conceptually) 18 hours of the game calendar.