RCT 3 PC RollerCoasterTycoon 3: Soaked! FAQ

[Michael Brookes]

Thank you for playing RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 Soaked!. We've provided the following information to supplement the manual in order to try and help any of you who may have questions or be experiencing problems. Unfortunately our help can't extend to diagnosing or fixing PC-specific problems; Atari customer support is better equipped for those questions (see your game manual for contact details). We may also be making available Updates from time to time that introduce minor new features, modify the games’ behavior based on player feedback and, of course, address any problems which come to light.

How to report Bugs:

If you’d like to help us fix a problem you are seeing that isn’t dealt with in the above list, in the first instance please e-mail us a brief description of the problem to the following e-mail address: rct3game@frontier.co.uk

Frequently Asked Questions

Will my PC run RCT3 Soaked! ?
How can I tweak RCT3 Soaked! to run at its best on my PC?
Why does my game suffer from framerate slowdown / lags, graphical glitches, crashes?
How can I restore my screen resolution after changing it to an unsupported setting?
Why does the game crash when syncing two swimsuit stalls?
Why are there reflections on only one water body?
Why can't I place ride entrances or exits on a custom scenario?
Why won't Soaked install on my computer?
Why do I experience graphical artifacts when running the game on a Radeon 9200?
Why do I experience graphical artifacts when running the game on a Radeon 9000?
Why do I receive an Application error 'Bad Version:4' after reinstalling RCT3/Soaked?

 

[Michael Brookes]

Will my PC run RCT3 Soaked! ?

In order to determine whether your PC system can play the game and how it performs then please download the free demo version of the original RCT3 game from http://www.RollerCoasterTycoon.com/ - this site also lists the minimum and recommended specifications for PCs. The section "How can I tweak RCT3 Saoked! to run at its best on my PC?" immediately below may also provide useful information.

In common with most modern games RCT3 Soaked! requires 3D graphics acceleration – typically with a minimum of a 32MB graphics card that offers support in hardware for Transform & Lighting calculations (‘hardware T&L’) support, such as an Nvidia GeForce 2 and higher or ATI Radeon cards.

There are a couple of error messages which can be seen when the graphics capability of your system is not up to the required specification: Graphics cards provide information to the PC system when they are installed regarding their capabilities, and RCT3 Soaked! reads this information. If the graphics card is not of the required performance then RCT3 Soaked! will not start and will display a message to that effect. In some cases the driver software for the graphics cards can effectively “mis-represent” their capabilities to the PC system, causing RCT3 Soaked! to try and run on a graphics card which does not offer the required functionality. In this case an error message “Cannot create Direct 3D device” is displayed by Direct X. If you see either of these messages they mean that the 3D graphics capability of your system does not meet the game’s requirements. Please be aware that this could well be the case with PCs which are relatively new – even today PCs are sold with on-board graphics systems that do not offer hardware T&L.

 

[Michael Brookes]

How can I tweak RCT3 Soaked! to run at its best on my PC?

Expectations:

The original RCT 1 and 2 games had a low minimum spec and were able to successfully appeal to a very wide audience, many of whom who do not necessarily choose to stay on the bleeding edge of PC technology. Equally, RCT2 can make even today's high-end PCs struggle if the player puts whole bunch of content in a large park.

Similarly with the new 3D release, we have tried to ensure that the game can be enjoyed by as many people as possible on a wide range of PCs. RCT3's minimum spec is pretty low compared to other 3D PC games, especially ones targeted at 'core gamers'. We have worked very hard at keeping the performance up on low spec machines, as well as making the game visually attractive on all machines without necessarily relying on very performance-hungry graphical techniques. So our intention is that players can enjoy the game on the minimum spec machine, but to experience the game looking & running at its absolute best higher end PCs / graphics cards will inevitably be needed.

Even though the individual components of RCT3 Soaked! can be quite simple, the sheer complexity on offer and the number of people, rides and special effects like lighting, water reflections etc. make it an impressive technological and artistic achievement compared to other games, that may use more polygons on each individual component but offer nothing like the richness and diversity of RCT3. RCT3 Soaked! has been designed to allow players to create parks without constraints, but you do need to be aware that your PC has a finite capacity. As with previous versions of RCT everything you place in your park has a small, cumulative impact on the game's performance. Large, dense parks with lots of content require more memory and processor power than a smaller, spaceded-out park. Also some objects and scenes will impact the game more than others; for example: if you build a huge glass building, this will impact on your system more than the same building with a brick wall. This is simply because the glass wall pieces require more resources than the plainer brick ones. Also, the more water you have in your park the more work the game has to do showing the reflections. Obviously these issues will impact lower spec machines more obviously than higher ones. However it is of course possible with RCT3 Soaked! to construct a large park that is rich in animated content and has genuine-sized crowds of individual park guests all interacting with the park and each other, and therefore takes even the best current PC to it's limit.

In terms of park building you will have to 'cut your cloth' to suit your system, but the exact limits for content will depend both on your machine and also how you have the game's graphical settings adjusted - if you set everything to 'max' you will hit your PC's limit of what is acceptable to you sooner (i.e. the content in your park and/or frame rate) than if you trade off some graphics settings for content and/or performance.

Performance tweaking:

The speed of your PC’s CPU, the amount of memory it has and the capability of the graphics card you have in your PC each have a big effect on how the game runs on your PC. The two main things they effect are the frame rate achievable (how many screen updates the game can draw per second) and the amount of graphical detail that can be drawn per update.

RCT3 Soaked! does a large amount of sophisticated graphical and other processing. The game has been designed to run well on both older and more up-to-date systems, and to do this it offers a variety of different settings for different graphical parameters and effects. When it first runs, the game auto-senses your PC’s configuration and sets these parameters to one of 5 default configurations we have chosen – we’ve called them Low, Medium, High, Very High and Extreme. There is also the ability to manually ‘tweak’ these settings using a series of sliders. There is a temptation (understandable!) to experiment with these and push them up to the maximum – please feel free to do this but also be aware that the game will not run at maximum performance and maximum graphical detail on any but the most powerful current PCs and graphics cards in combination. Choosing the “right” settings for your PC system rather than the maximum ones will allow you to enjoy the game at its best on your particular system.



In particular, the following settings can have a big effect on performance:

• Screen Resolution: a 1600 x 1200 screen has four times as many pixels to be calculated for as an 800 x 600 screen, so an 800 x 600 resolution setting will be much faster than a 1600 x 1200 one if your graphics card is the limiting factor in your system.
• Water Reflections: the water effect is achieved by drawing the relevant portions of the scene twice, the second time upside down for the reflection, and then applying the ‘ripple’ effect mathematically using a proportion of the available CPU time.
• Anti-Aliasing: this is applied to reduce the ‘jagged edges’ that can be seen on diagonal lines drawn on computer displays, it does this with techniques which use up a proportion of the available graphics performance.
• Bloom: this lighting effect again uses a significant a proportion of the available graphics performance.
• Landscape Textures: the colouration and detail of the landscape also has a big effect on some graphics cards (systems that are ‘fill-rate’ limited). Selecting ‘Simple Landscape Textures’ will help significantly on some cards.

So we suggest setting your system to:

• 800 x 600 resolution
• Un-check the ‘Reflective Water’ box.
• Select no anti-aliasing
• Un-check the ‘bloom’ box
• Un-check the ‘Shadows’ box (Or select none or static shadows if you have Wild or Update 3 installed)
• Check the ‘Simple Landscape Textures’ box

..and seeing how that runs and looks. Then you can experiment with the effects and consequences of each feature one at a time to assess what is the right compromise between graphical effects and performance for you and your system.

TIP for those with lower-end systems – to see what your parks look like with a higher level of settings, you can set these higher just before you start a coaster-cam video recording session. When the recording is finished, restore the settings. The video is produced with the higher settings at a standard high framerate so you can see what your park looks like in the video with the higher settings.

 

[Michael Brookes]

Why does my game suffer from framerate slowdown / lags, graphical glitches, crashes?

There are a number of possible reasons for this:

1) As well as our own code, the game relies on software provided by Microsoft called Direct X, and device driver software provided by graphics card manufacturers (e.g. ATI and NVidia) for their cards, as well as software drivers for other component parts of your PC such as sound cards. During development a number of bugs were found in the drivers provided by both ATI and NVidia – in general; on ATI cards these driver bugs were related to older cards, and on NVidia cards the driver bugs were related to newer cards...! If you are seeing graphical glitches (such as grey polygons) or crashes and / or periodic frame rate slowdown these are very likely to be either bugs caused by the problems with the drivers or the results of our attempts to work around the problems. ATI and NVidia told us they would release new versions of their drivers to coincide roughly with the release of the game and provided us with early versions of them to test, and so we were able to code the game (using the graphics.fix file) such that when and if newer versions of the drivers are available on your PC then the game will try to operate as intended rather than using the workaround.

So checking for and upgrading to these newer drivers for both ATI and NVidia cards will help the vast majority of people who may experience problems, please ensure you do this as a first step towards resolving any problems.

You can check the device drivers in your system by running the program DxDiag:

Click on the Windows ‘Start’ button
Click ‘Run’
Type dxdiag
Press Return/Enter
Then click the "Save all information" button at the bottom of the window that appears.
Double-click the saved file to open it in a text editor, and look through to find the driver information.

The correct drivers and where to get them from are:

ATI Radeon cards:

Known good driver version: Catalyst 5.7 Latest driver version: Catalyst 5.8 Available now via http://www.ati.com/.

NVIdia GeForce cards:

For Windows XP, Windows 2000:

Known good driver version: ForceWare 77.72 Latest driver version: ForceWare 77.72 Available now via http://www.nvidia.com/.

For Windows 98 and Windows ME:

Known good driver version: ForceWare 56.72 Latest driver version: ForceWare 61.76 (known BAD). Please check http://www.nvidia.com/ for beta and full driver updates for these operating systems.

For other cards please contact your hardware vendor for the latest drivers, your game manual contains contact details for several manufacturers.

Note: Newer drivers are now available for both ATI and NVidia, it is worth downloading the latest drivers. If you encounter any problems with the newest drivers then use the versions as indicated above.

The game also relies upon the DirectX software from Microsoft – this is re-distributed with the game and should have been installed if needed when the game was installed. If for some reason you don’t have Direct X 9.0c on your system you can get it as a free download from Microsoft at www.microsoft.com/windows/directx/default.aspx

Other drivers. If you are STILL experiencing problems, please also consider checking that the drivers for the rest of your system are up-to-date, for example soundcard drivers. Its good practice to make sure these are up-to-date periodically in any case. You will be able to discover what soundcard (and other components) and related driver version you have in your PC from the dxdiag file (see above for instructions on how to obtain this), and look on the vendors’ website for the latest drivers to check you are up-to-date.

2) If you have changed some graphical settings you need to be aware that the game will not run at maximum performance and maximum graphical detail on any but the most powerful current PCs and graphics cards in combination, and it may be that you have chosen some settings which are not suitable / appropriate for your PC. For your convenience we’ve repeated below the performance tweaking section of this FAQ’s ‘How can I tweak RCT3 to run at its best on my PC?’ topic:

The speed of your PC’s CPU, the amount of memory it has and the capability of the graphics card you have in your PC each have a big effect on how the game runs on your PC. The two main things they effect are the framerate achievable (how many screen updates the game can draw per second) and the amount of graphical detail that can be drawn per update.

RCT3 Soaked! does a large amount of sophisticated graphical and other processing. To tailor the game to your PC, the game automatically detects your system configuration the first time it is launched, chooses one of the five presets that is best suited for your computer, and then saves this a configuration file that is loaded each time you launch the game. We called these presets Low, Medium, High, Very High and Extreme. You may adjust any of the graphical parameters to fine tune the efficiency of game's performance on your particular computer after this initial configuration.

There is a temptation (understandable!) to experiment with these settings and to push them up to their maximum levels. But be aware, the game will not run optimally using the highest graphical settings on any PC except those with the highest CPU speeds equipped with the latest graphics cards and large amounts of memory. You'll enjoy the game at its best by choosing the "right" settings for your PC system rather than the maximum ones.

In particular, the following settings can have a big effect on performance:

• Screen Resolution: a 1600 x 1200 screen has four times as many pixels to be calculated for as an 800 x 600 screen, so an 800 x 600 resolution setting will be much faster than a 1600 x 1200 one if your graphics card is the limiting factor in your system.
• Water Reflections: the water effect is achieved by drawing the relevant portions of the scene twice, the second time upside down for the reflection, and then applying the ‘ripple’ effect mathematically using a proportion of the available CPU time.
• Anti-Aliasing: this is applied to reduce the ‘jagged edges’ that can be seen on diagonal lines drawn on computer displays, it does this by using techniques which consume a proportion of the available graphics performance.
• Bloom: this lighting effect again uses a significant a proportion of the available graphics performance.
• Shadows: the game calculates shadowing based on the position of the ‘sun’ in the game, which can impact performance on some systems.
• Landscape Textures: the colouration and detail of the landscape also has a big effect on some graphics cards (systems that are ‘fill-rate’ limited). Selecting ‘Simple Landscape Textures’ will help significantly on some cards.

So we suggest setting your system (via the game options menu, visual settings (eye icon) and landscape (land icon) options):

• 800 x 600 resolution
• Un-check the ‘Reflective Water’ box.
• Set anti-aliasing to ‘none’
• Un-check the ‘bloom’ box
• Un-check the ‘Shadows’ box (Or select static or none if you have Wild or Update 3 installed)
• Check the ‘Simple Landscape Textures’ box

..and seeing how that runs and looks – on the great majority of systems this should produce an acceptable performance. Then you can experiment with the effects and consequences of each feature one at a time to assess what is the right compromise between graphical effects and performance for you and your system.

TIP for those with lower-end systems – to see what your parks look like with a higher level of settings, you can set these higher just before you start a coaster-cam video recording session. When the recording is finished, restore the settings. The video is produced with the higher settings at a standard high framerate so you can see what your park looks like in the video with the higher graphical settings.

3) Some sound cards perform a great deal of processing on the PC’s CPU, rather than on the card itself. This can cause significant framerate slowdown, and the sound can also take on a metallic, echoing character. In these cases, navigate to the:

C:\Documents and Settings\[YOUR USERNAME]\Application Data\Atari\<RCT3> folder, open the options.txt file with a text editor and reduce the MaxSound and MaxMusic parameters from their default values of 100 and 4 to MaxSound 25 and MaxMusic 2, then save your changes and re-run the game. This will significantly reduce the sound processing your CPU is doing and therefore help framerate. You can also experiment with these values to tweak performance. In addition, for cards such as SoundBlaster Live!, you should also try turning off echo and other processing effects that are computed on your PC’s CPU. (For SoundBlaster Live! go to "Creative" >"SB Live" > "Audio HQ", open the "EAX Control Panel" and select "No Effects".)

 

[Michael Brookes]

4) The Scenery Visibility toggle makes all scenery and rides see-through. This can have a substantial effect on framerate so remember to switch it off when you've finished using it.

In the case where you have used the alpha value that is controlled in the options window to make everything solid, UPDATE 1 & later versions automatically switch it off after use when this alpha value is above a certain threshold.

5) It has been noted in some instances that if RCT3 is launched via the Windows ‘Start’ menu rather than waiting for the menu that is AutoRun from the game CD then you can get both the game and the AutoRun.exe running together, and in this case the AutoRun.exe process consumes an increasingly significant amount of CPU time (up to 20% or 25%), resulting in reduced performance of the game. To work around this, in the first instance you can check to see if the Autorun.exe process is running and if necessary shut it down using normal Windows procedures and then always launch the game via the AutoRun menu from CD rather than using Windows’ Start menu. In Update 1 & later versions RCT3 automatically checks to see if the AutoRun.exe process is running unnecessarily and if so terminate it, to defend against this situation.

6)Some sound cards, especially ones that are onboard your motherboard can cause compatibility issues. If you have an onboard sound card and are experiencing 'random' crashes, try setting the hardware acceleration for the card to 'none'. You can do this from within the dxdiag utility:

Click on the Windows ‘Start’ button
Click ‘Run’
Type dxdiag
Press Return/Enter

Then click on the Sound tab at the top of the window. When the Sound tab is opened, there is a slider to the left of the window. Move that slider all the way to the left. Then click Ok to confirm your change.

 

[Michael Brookes]

How can I restore my screen resolution after changing it to an unsupported setting?

If the game won’t run properly because you selected the wrong screen resolution, navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\[YOUR USERNAME]\Application Data\Atari\RCT3 and delete the options.txt file. It will then start up again.

 

[Michael Brookes]

Why does the game crash when syncing two swimsuit stalls?

This issue is caused by the two first scenarios (Captain Blackhearts Cove and Oasis of Fun) having a slightly older version of the swimsuit stall. To prevent this problem, delete the original swimsuit stall when starting these scenarios and replace with a new swimsuit stall.

 

[Michael Brookes]

Why are there reflections on only one water body?

For performance reasons Soaked will only display reflections on the level of the largest body of water. Any water bodies at different heights will not display reflections.

 

[Michael Brookes]

Why can't I place ride entrances or exits on a custom scenario?

In the scenario editor if the park terrain size is changed then the land owned by the park is reset. After modifying the map size you will need to set what land is owned by the park.

 

[Michael Brookes]

Why won't Soaked install on my computer?

In some cases the copy protection software has trouble accessing the CD/DVD drive. This is believed to be a problem with XP and the latest Windows update only. You should try the following steps:

1. With the RCT3: Soaked! CD in, explore it and right-click on the setup.exe file and select properties.
2. At the top of the Properties box select the 'Compatibility' tab.
3. Check the box marked "Run this program in compatibility mode for:".
4. Use the drop-down menu right below this and select Windows 2000.
5. Click apply, then ok, and then try running the setup.exe file.

Thanks to ITinnovations on the Atari forums for the above solution.

http://www.ataricommunity.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=477708

 

[Michael Brookes]

Why do I experience graphical artifacts when running the game on a Radeon 9200?

There is an issue with the memory management in the ATI drivers for these cards. To apply the workaround you need to do the following:

1. Download a new graphics.fix file by clicking here.
2. Browse to your RCT3 installation folder, this is usually C:\Program Files\Atari\RollerCoaster Tycoon® 3
3. In that folder is a file also called graphics.fix, rename that file graphics_old.fix
4. Copy the new graphics.fix which you downloaded into the installation folder.
5. Run RCT3

Note that this workaround may result in slower performance; this is because we have to work around the problems with the ATI drivers. If you encounter any problems then delete the new graphics.fix file and rename the old one back to be the current graphics.fix file.

 

[Michael Brookes]

Why do I experience graphical artifacts when running the game on a Radeon 9000?

The Radeon 9000 experiences similar issues to the Radeon 9200; however the same workaround cannot be used. Changing your anti-aliasing and switching off shadows in game can usually clear the visible artifacts.

 

[Michael Brookes]

Why do I receive an Application error 'Bad Version:4' after reinstalling RCT3/Soaked?

This is usually caused by not uninstalling the beta completely. You should uninstall RCT3 and then ensure that all files and folders have been deleted from the installation folder. You should then reinstall RCT3.