Demo Released
I don't care if it's sunny out all day, I dont care if it's going to be 75, I'm gonna be glued to this screen, picking this thing apart for how good it really is....
I'll give my impressions in a bit when I check this bad-boy out.
> The demo has pre-built paths, buildings, a coaster & a flat or two. Not bad, but I would have preferred a small sand-box.
> The graphics are also really great, but I'm going to skip the nice & talk about what I found bad with the demo which left me with a slight bad taste in my mouth...
1) When I put the settings on Extreme, the game crashed my computer & I had to reboot. Keep in mind, I got a 3.0ghz & a nice ATI Radion card. So I kept it to Very High & it worked fine
2) It was EXTREMELY difficult to rotate the camera clockwise or counter-clockwise. You are supposed to use the Q or E key, and it sputters. Took like 3 minutes to turn it 45 degrees. I could not easily swing around as needed to get a good view of the terrian.
3) The music during the demo is annoying! You cannot control the volume in-game, so therefore, you cannot hear the other sound effects. It repeats after a couple of minutes. My advice to you is to mute your speakers or keep the volume down.
Also: The night/day senario seems to occur just a little too quickly. Before you finish building a ride, it's already night time, which sometimes makes it more difficult to see.
4) Building paths can be a pain in the arse. You got 3 different slopes: Flat, angled, & stairs... but it's just very picky when you want to build on an angle & stairs with terrian in the way. I had to smoothen the land and still didn't connect correctly. It's either got a learning curve or it needs to be tweeked before final release.
5) Coaster building: You get 2 coasters, an B&M Invert & a Wooden... I tried to Invert quickly to see what I could come up with. There's no immediate markers to tell you how high or low you are so it makes it difficult to judge where you are to the ground. Also, the whole interface on laying out the track is a little clunky compared to RCT1&2, meaning you don't curve the track, put a loop & then click on the "add track" button. Instead, you click on that particular curve, loop, bend or whatever once to show what it looks like, and a 2nd time to lay it out. Again, it might be me that it'll take a little getting used to.. but I found it a little clunky this way & can't build insta-coasters like I could with the first 2 games.
I did manage to create a successful basic wooden coaster with the limited funds... but just like the first two games in RCT series... your pieces are very limited. It takes a lot of getting used to.
6) Just a few minor graphical glitches where-as there's these streaks that appear out of nowhere like a stretched path or something. Nothing big, but just worth mentioning.
That's all I found for now...
...Im not going to judge the game entirely on that hour I got to mess with it, but so far... it leaves me a little annoyed, especially for a game demo which should represent about 80 to 90% of the game.
...I'll have more time to mess with it later.
...anyone else find similar problems?
*** Edited 9/27/2004 1:35:34 PM UTC by DawgByte II***
I develop Superior Solitaire when not riding coasters.
2) It was EXTREMELY difficult to rotate the camera clockwise or counter-clockwise. You are supposed to use the Q or E key, and it sputters. Took like 3 minutes to turn it 45 degrees. I could not easily swing around as needed to get a good view of the terrian.
The rotate wasn't slow for me - I found a combo of the Q & E buttons along with holding both mouse buttons and rotating gave tons of control.
3) The music during the demo is annoying! You cannot control the volume in-game, so therefore, you cannot hear the other sound effects. It repeats after a couple of minutes. My advice to you is to mute your speakers or keep the volume down.
Sure there is. Under the 'options' button.
4) Building paths can be a pain in the arse. You got 3 different slopes: Flat, angled, & stairs... but it's just very picky when you want to build on an angle & stairs with terrian in the way. I had to smoothen the land and still didn't connect correctly. It's either got a learning curve or it needs to be tweeked before final release.
Kind of. I didn't run into terrain problems, but when you get close to the ground, it sometimes doesn't look quite like it's 'connected' from the last angled or stairs piece to the flat ground piece. Although I see how it could be interpreted as a single step down.
There's no immediate markers to tell you how high or low you are so it makes it difficult to judge where you are to the ground. Also, the whole interface on laying out the track is a little clunky compared to RCT1&2, meaning you don't curve the track, put a loop & then click on the "add track" button. Instead, you click on that particular curve, loop, bend or whatever once to show what it looks like, and a 2nd time to lay it out. Again, it might be me that it'll take a little getting used to.. but I found it a little clunky this way & can't build insta-coasters like I could with the first 2 games.
All you have to do it toggle on the ride height markers. Makes it mnuch easier to 'see' how high you are. I also think in the long run the new building interface will feel much better, but like DawgByte it didn't feel nearly as 'easy' to slap together a ride. Just think this is a change that will need some time to get used to - after that I think it'll feel superior to the RCT1&2 method.
6) Just a few minor graphical glitches where-as there's these streaks that appear out of nowhere like a stretched path or something. Nothing big, but just worth mentioning.
None of this either. Between this and the jerky rotating you got, I'm wondering if it's something specific to your system. Sounds like you're bottlenecking somewhere. I ran a very high with none of the video problems you mention. I might have to see if I can kick it up to 'extreme' or not.
Over all, it's cool but with the limited demo features, it feels very 'meh' - it's certainly not going to be the big time killer I thought it'd be until the full release comes out.
1. It does get easier and more intuitive the more you play with the demo.
2. Scenarios didn't get any harder. :(
3. Was able to run with no noticable problems with all the settings maxed at 1024x768 fullscreen. However, when I deleted everything in the scenario and all the peeps were now lost, the game slowed to a crawl. Perhaps the processing of hundreds of lost peeps crippled me? Who knows.
For the record, I'm running an AMD Athlon at 2.14Ghz, a vid card with the ATI 9600 chipset and 1GB of RAM and doing ok with those maxed settings.
Still playing around with it...
LIKES
I like that a coaster's stats now has a "Total AIR Time" record. The control does take some getting used to. I found using both buttons to rotate far easier than I thought it would be. Works very well. A lot of the flat rides are very detailed and the peeps actually walk and sit down on them unlike the coasters where they just sort of plop down on. The exception to that is the Ferris Wheels which the peeps magically hop up to. The mechanic fixing a flat is very funny. Opens up a panel, presses a button and poof...no more smoke! Thought the demo loaded reasonably fast. And I liked the Frontier logo/splash screen with the coaster train.
Dislikes:
Think the coasters are a little unrealistic in the stations. Especially when compared to the flat rides. Flat ride cycle cannot be changed. I could change the speed of the observation tower though. (Which was WAY cool riding it). The fireworks music cannot be heard throughout the park. Maybe if you had the shells located throughout the park perhaps?
TIP for everyone, when the fireworks are going off, click on the flashing icon at the top of the screen right after the date and time. Then you can view the fireworks easily.
The biggest issue I found though is that it does not tell you why something cannot be placed. It's too vague. Is a tree in the way? Something else? What? That's my only real beef so far.
It crashed on me a few times too. Once after I had built a train all the way around and another time on the main menu (which was no big deal). Still...it's working better than I thought it would so I'm not complaining. :)
*** Edited 9/27/2004 3:05:04 PM UTC by Coasterbuf***
I find the "W-S-A-D" controls pretty intuitive. Same controls and any 3d first person game. I like using both hands. I can move the camera via the keyboard and build with the mouse. Already able to slap coasters together relatively easily using this method.
Is there a way to see the trains speed throughout the course? In RCT1&2, you could just open the ride window, choose to view the train and see how fast it went throughout the layout. I haven't stumbled across that yet and it's an invaluable tool in building.
Might I suggest a Sky Wheel done up in pink and yellow tones? Wonderful!
Sorry for the stream of posts and random musings, but I'm adding things as I mess with them.
I fixed the "problem"--apparently the download doesn't support Netscape. Go figure. *** Edited 9/27/2004 4:07:17 PM UTC by CPgenius***
Richard Bannister said:
It wouldn't run at all for me. Got an assertion failure listing an invalid call in ge_surface.cpp.
I am having the same problem, does anyone know how to fix this problem.
At first it seemed like a huge oversight, but it appears that the water slows the train considerably, so if the physics are incorporated, maybe it isn't an oversight?
Kind of sadistic to do with the invert :)
Anyway, The game part is pretty awesome. Love the flat rides and especially loved the coasters. Mostly, The ones that aren't available yet. Mainly the Stratacoaster with the TTD style trains which just made me drool.
Disappointed by sounds, The coaster sounds are ok. There are NO sounds for brakes and stuff, Whats up with that?
Anyway, Back to the game...I still haven't gotten to play it that much.
-Dennis
www.XtremeCoasters.com
There are NO sounds for brakes and stuff, Whats up with that?
Now that you mention it, there are no sounds on standard brakes. Block brakes make the "kooossshhhh" sound though.
Not really an issue to me, I usually turn the sound off and listen to music when I play RCT.
Still looking for a way to see how fast the train is going on any given part of the track.
Anyone figured how to build underground/tunnels?
Overall at this point I dig the game, but it feels like a lot of the control I had over coasters and building them is lost in the quest for silly things like full 3D and on-ride views and fireworks.
Between the lack of details, the way it force feeds you coaster pieces and the autocomplete feature anyone should be able to build a solid coaster with little effort...sigh.
Still seems a little "unfinshed" to me overall, but it's cool.
*** Edited 9/27/2004 5:41:41 PM UTC by Lord Gonchar***
You must be logged in to post
