Anybody get Soaked! yet?

Three words: God of War. :)

Tommy P.

*SIGH*
And here I was trying to forgot that "God of War" is not available on Xbox :(

I was able to take my mind away from "God of War" when I purchased "Burnout3" on Xbox. That game ROCKS!!! I'll be looking forward to "Burnout Revenge" this fall. With the Xbox-360 of course ;)

I'm going to go ahead and risk becoming a sucker and pick up Soaked! as soon as I can get it (Damn Kansas City Best Buys are behind). I haven't checked any other stores in the area because I have a $25 Best Buy Gift Card I'd rather use for it.

I did read a couple posts on the official RCT3 Atari forums that mentioned an improved FPS on lower end machines. I'll buy the expansion just for that! The lag on my machine really ruins the game for me.

Well here in Akron, Ohio they are sitting on the shelves...had no money but the box isn't very impressive, the pictures they could of added the better stuff...its a nice yellow. I'm still waiting on a buzz as well as saving for many things right now.

Yes there is an improvement on the FPS issue. No lag at all, atleast not anymore for me.

My system:

E-machine (i know, don't laugh)

2.43GZ

512MB Ram

Radeon 126 PCI Card

Not the best system around, but, where I have had major lag before, I don't now. Case in point, a sandbox park with 2 coasters (the roller soaker is really cool), 7 flat rides, 8 stalls, a killer whale show, three pool complexes, a wave pool, 2 slides, a lazy river, a laser light show, and 978 peeps, it runs as smooth as silk. Even a night, though there is very little slow down, it runs good. On my machine, Soaked has had a major improvement on how RCT3 performs. IMO, the best expansion pack to come out for the series since the add-ons to the original RCT.

I guess they hit the East coast first (RCT is from Europe?) and will be slowly spreading across the states east-to-west by air and ground shipments.

Thanks for the feedback SFGamNut68. That's great to hear! I can't wait to brush the dust off my original RCT3 and slap this expansion on.

Describe "smooth as silk" in terms of frames per second and we'll talk.

Jeff - Editor - CoasterBuzz.com - My Blog

Jeff said:
Describe "smooth as silk" in terms of frames per second and we'll talk.

http://img26.echo.cx/img26/6835/orbitnight8xb.jpg

http://img26.echo.cx/img26/5338/parkoverview0cw.jpg

That park above is a park that I had to give up on becuase it became just to hard to play. When I opened that park, I had around 1300 peeps in it, and the game became a slide show. My FPS were around 5-6, and the lag was just imbearable. With Soaked, that same park, with roughly 1000 peeps in it, my FPS are now around 9-11, but the biggest thing that I noticed was that there was no more "studdering", or lag. It ran smooth. I didn't expect it to run at a constant 24fps becuase I have a ton of trees, and custom buildings, and my computer can't handle it, so I have learned to build within my computer limits. I know that sucks, but I like the game, so I have adapted to it. Will it run like this on every computer. I don't know, but the word in other RCT forums, and I can now confirm this for I have seen it, is that just about everybody has noticed a significant performance boost in RCT3.

I hope I explained it ok for you Jeff.

Only for RCT3 is 9-11 FPS an improvement...

--Madison

Well for some systems it makes all the differance! I'd like to see if this boost happens to anyone else....and how it effects pc's.

Is it on sale anywhere yet (or going to be) ?

I'll most likely get the game, but only when it's at least 5 bucks off the MSRP... soooo, when it hits $19.95 or $24.95, then we'll talk. It'd be ashame to say that I spent $29.95 on GTA: Vice City for X-Box on sale a week ago & wind up paying the same money for a game far far inferior (albeit, completely different games).

I picked it up today, but only got to play it for about 30 minutes before going to work.

Didn't see any improvements performance-wise.

Also, I noticed a 'Hershey Stormrunner' coaster-type in the Coaster Designer, so I tried it. Ironic that it's called this (albeit understandable, since the tie in with Hersheypark this go-round) since you can't recreate Storm Runner if you tried. No inversions on the Stratocoaster are allowed.

I think the only reason it got this label is due to a train change (OTSRs instead of lapbar, but I didn't look close enough at the trains to be able to tell).

Eh, I'll have to give it more of a once-over later when time allows.

That frame rate blows. As I've said before, I can get great frame rates on Doom 3 without dropping below 40 fps with all effects on. Until they can get it to run at a minimum of 30 fps, I'm not that interested.

Jeff - Editor - CoasterBuzz.com - My Blog

I'll tell you, the FPS is the downfall of RCT3. I don't care how many expansions they release, It will never fix it. I've played very high end games with extreme graphics and this is the only one that can bog my computer down. Many other games run smooth as silk...not sure about FPS, but I don't have to worry, because I know its a heck of a lot higher than RCT3 (just by gameplay).

The FPS is the most annoying thing with this game. Its a major turn off with this game.

But Jeff, it's not a FPS game. FPS games are all limited in scope and by their very nature will run at a higher FPS simply because there is less going on at any one time.

Then again it's all realitive to what you want. Some purist would say the 40 fps rate you are happy with in Doom blows and would want 50!!!

Jeff said:
That frame rate blows. As I've said before, I can get great frame rates on Doom 3 without dropping below 40 fps with all effects on. Until they can get it to run at a minimum of 30 fps, I'm not that interested.

Yeah it blows, but you have to take a look at the type of computer I am running it on. Not excatly high end, but yet the game performs at a rate that without the FPS counter turned on, I wouldn't be able to tell if it was running at 24fps or the 11fps I have now.

I'm running a (well at the time) a pretty high end graphics card (ATI Radeon 9800 XT w/ 256mb ram) on a computer with 1gb of memory and 1.8ghz processor. FPS for me on a incredibly detailed Vanilla Hills Scenario was anywhere between 11 and 20 fps (11 fps when I was zoomed out, 16-17fps when I was in coastercam mode). In a completely empty Sandbox mode I'm getting 99 fps. All this before Soaked! I haven't purchased Soaked yet and I don't plan to until I finish the scenarios in RCT3 or if I get it for my B-Day.

A day at the park is what you make it!

I have a 3.0 ghz, 1 GB RAM, x600xt video, and on a completely filled Vanilla Hills park, I was getting about 15 fps in RCT3. On Soaked, it's up around 20. It seems like with Soaked, the fps starts lower on an empty park than on the original, but takes a lot longer to drop.

Chris Rettig said:
Also, I noticed a 'Hershey Stormrunner' coaster-type in the Coaster Designer, so I tried it. Ironic that it's called this (albeit understandable, since the tie in with Hersheypark this go-round) since you can't recreate Storm Runner if you tried. No inversions on the Stratocoaster are allowed.

Um...there is a style called "Hershey Stormrunner" with a recreation already created for you. The Stormrunner and Stratocoaster styles are different, and allow different things. So, you can not recreate Stormrunner using Stratocoaster, but you can using the Stormrunner style...

I found "Soaked" at a CompUSA in Columbus (Easton) yesterday.

I haven't seen any improvement in fps either. In fact, when I first opened a sandbox game I had been working prior to Soaked, it CRAWLED. However, I saved the game under a new name (making it a "Soaked game") and reopened it, and performance returned to what it had been before. I've never really tracked actual fps, so I can't give any metrics for comparision. I will say I'm playing on a pretty good system...a P4, 3ghz, with 1gb RAM. (The video card is still one of the standard Intel integrated jobies though...)

So far, I'm enjoying the game. The pool building interface is very well done and very flexible. I think that nothing other than pool related (chairs, lifeguards, etc.) features can be placed within a "pool complex" is kind of dumb...whoever heard of having to get dressed and leave a waterpark just to get a hamburger? Waterfalls will take a lot of practice (it took me five tries and about 45 minutes to successfully create my first one), but then again I've never been great with terrain modification in RCT3 (or really in RCT1 or 2 either).

Joel

Coasterbuf said:
But Jeff, it's not a FPS game. FPS games are all limited in scope and by their very nature will run at a higher FPS simply because there is less going on at any one time.

Are you insane? I don't think you know anything about the code that goes into making these things. (And for those of you playing along, he's referring to "first person shooters" and not "frames per second.") A shooter like Doom 3 is pushing massive amounts of polygons for everything on the screen, dynamic colored lighting, reflections, ambient light reflection, particle physics (blood), etc. Not to mention collision detection, which RCT3 doesn't do. An RCT peep has perhaps a few dozen polygons, and everything else is squarish as well.

If I've learned anything from being a code monkey, it's that there's always a better, more efficient way to do things.

Jeff - Editor - CoasterBuzz.com - My Blog