Ride Facade Editor

[HyperReal]

Hello,

Let me begin by stating that I absolutely love Planet Coaster. It's a creative, feel-good experience, and the satisfaction you get from designing and building your very own park, down to the finest detail, is immense. The construction interface is powerful, and simple to learn yet hard to master.

However, building around flat rides feels unnecessarily complicated and troublesome, especially if you want the result to look neat and symmetrical. Positioning the first piece involves a lot of measurement, some guessing and eventually trial and error. So why not implement a ride facade editor?
Starting the construction would be as simple as it is with coaster stations: a button labeled "Build a facade". Instead of just popping the first piece on a grid, you would first generate an adjustable envelope for the ride. For square rides you would choose which sides to cover. For circular rides, the envelope would be an adjustable arc or a full circle. The height should be adjustable as well. There would be automatic cut-outs for the entrance and exit gates. After this, add building pieces and scenery objects as usual.

Is the game engine capable of something like this? Does anyone else think this would be helpful?

 

[Big Draco]

I like this idea [up]

 

[Ramm]

I've thought about this as wel. When selecting a ride it works exactly the same as "Start building on station grid" when building a coaster.

But many flatrides have different measurements and you can't easily and snug fit some 4x4 wall pieces around it like you can do with a coaster station.

If they add this they would have to resize all flatride bases. For me that's no problem and I would love for this to be added but there are always people who start to complain that then the flatrides won't fit in their park from last year.

Still +1. I am a sucker for symetry and I love to be able to easy build buildings on flat ride bases just how you would do it with normal coaster stations.

 

[KickAir8p]

I just finished a castle built around the teacups -- centering the ride was a serious pain! Just a centered "station grid" for each flat ride would be a big help!

 

[DisneylandFreak]

Great idea[big grin][up][up][up][up][up]

 

[HyperReal]

But many flatrides have different measurements and you can't easily and snug fit some 4x4 wall pieces around it like you can do with a coaster station.

Yes, this would be a problem if all the generated pieces had to be tightly around the ride on all sides. As a workaround, the envelope could always snap to the next free 2m or 4m grids, measured from the center of the ride base. There would be some empty ground between the ride base and the facade, but it could be filled with scenery or, in some cases, queue/path pieces. Most importantly it would be symmetrical! Just let the user choose which sides to extend and which one would be closest to the ride.

I'm not sure I'm making any sense here, so I made a professional-looking MSpaint diagram. In this case the snap size is 2m and the northern wall is closest to the ride.

As for a circular facade, I have no idea how it would work... Lots of snap points?