New Screenshots 4/17/04

I don't know if I'll like it it depends on how it goes, I'm open to the idea of 3D RCT we'll see, I'm not one to make judgements right away, it looks pretty good though! :)

This still looks to me like they took the original 2 and made it completely 3D. In other words, I noticed the same silly tube ride that I've never seen in a real amusement park, yet still no waterpark slides.

I'm waiting to see the log ride or a river rapids or shoot-the-chutes which are absent from all the shots thus far...

...but this is by long & far THE game to look forward to for the fall season. I really hope they have the demo coming out in late Summer & don't have any delays which will push the game back any further. Most PC games are so-so now (except Painkiller), so this is something to definately look forward to (Doom3 & Half-Life 2... who knows if/when they'll be out).

And if anyone is *****ing about the graphics... you think if they made it more realistic where the peeps & other animated characters had a more realistic look would run smoothly on a 2ghz machine? I don't think so. C'mon people... they're trying to fit at LEAST 2000 peeps & objects in the park at once all animated & moving at the same time. You think that's easy for your typical computer? Yea... if they make sacrafices... and the sacrafice is a more cartoonish look with the reduction in polygons which = less processing power.

So what if the 4-d is backwards. Spam them with e-mail telling them of their fatal error, and maybe they'll fix it. The vast majority of people don't even know what a 4-d coaster is, so they won't know the difference. I don't think of the game as a way to design realistic rollercoasters, and I certainly don't view it as a way to create realistic parks. It was meant to be a representation of a park not a recreation.

I don't want to have to refill my park everyday. I don't care if i can ever see my park at night. I don't even care if i can walk through the park and get a first-person view of my rides. That's what your imagination is for. Those of you who have kids will know that kids want the toys with all flashing lights, and make the neat sounds, but how long do they play with toy that does everything? The toys that are the most fun are the ones that require an imagination. We don't really grow out of that when we grow up either.

I loved the original because I had to imagine what it was like to look at the rides from the midway level. Somehow a little bit of the charm of the original was lost in the sequel, and i'm afraid that if all the things that you ask for were added then the game would lose all it's charm and become nothing more than Sim Theme Park.

The only thing that i thought was missing from the original was block brakes and I would have been happy to have seen only those added to the sequel.

I'm buying it, but I still think it looks more like a SimThemePark game than it does RCT. Looks too cartoony for my liking, but im still buying...

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coasterMNguy... said:
The graphics look really N-64-ish. I don't understand why the graphics can't be as good as they are in X-box.

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First off, the N64 could never push that many polygons. Second, the Xbox hardware doesn't even approach what a current PC CPU/GPU combination can do today, especially considering that the Xbox isn't doing 1024x768 or 1280x1024.

The resolution and detail in the screens we've seen so far is plenty high, with more going on in a shot than virtually any game I've seen. Notice they don't even have a visible clipping plane!

Is that a thrill shot ride I see, with the thurst coaster it is in the background, the 3 towers. I love it, the graphics are really smooth, how cares if they are cartoonish!

There are really only a few things that look cartoonish to me. First of all, the peeps. Yes, they look cartoony. What did you expect? Build without them if you don't like them. Second, some of the flats, such as the snake slide. Well, it looks like at least some rides will have multiple skins, as there is both a "normal" ferris wheel and a "stagecoach" wild west one. I am assuming that the snake slide is like the "jungle" skin of the slide. If you look at some of the default flats like the carousel, they are actually much more realistic than RCT2.

The more screenshots I see, the more I think that much of the cartoony quality is coming from the ride choices and shot perspectives (lots of shots of the peeps). I think in the right hands, you will be able to create some pretty realistic stuff. Think about the candy/wonderland scenery in RCT2. No one uses that crap. You, the designer, can choose whether you want a realistic or cartoony park.

And as Dawgbyte mentioned, it will be interesting to see how they do the water rides. The water pics look so realistic...I guess they will have to use the same graphic effects on the water rides. I wonder if you could actually position a "splash zone" path over a log flume drop...that would be great.

Jeff is right, He has good points! :) and to add to his comment just so you all know that most tv's including cubes, playstations, and xbox don't have the resolution that monitors can support even are coming out with better graphics cards, most tv's don't even support 800 X 600 which is sad unless its HDTV which is expensive. I do hope there is a demo, but I imagine if they do have one that this will not be a small demo I say the demo will at least be 300MB or more because its 3D!

Have you looked at some of the rides? Have you looked at the supports? They aren't realistic and I'm really surprised that so many of you are happy with the new version after barely anything but the 3D engine are (from what we can see) going to be incorperated into the game.

What the game really neads is for the graphics to be smoothed off

**smacks self in the forehead**

That's not going to happen! In order to maximize the number of customers that can actually play the game, they can't make the game be as smooth as say NoLimits. It's not going to happen, so stop whining about it.

No kidding! This is not a landscape with a dozen high-poly figures on it, this is a landscape with hundreds of little people, scenery, animated rides, etc. That's asking a lot of a 3D engine as it is!

As it is, RCT2 won't run on my laptop without serious slowdown, while RCT1 is fine. Now add in all the 3d stuff, and we're talking about a VERY demanding game. Yes, first person shooters are striving for extreme realism, but they suck up the resources like there's no tomorrow without having to also calculate the actions and "thoughts" of 2000+ people, *AND* it's become acceptable for the first person shooter marketplace to aim high with the system requirements.

In other words, no comparison. RCT3 is looking promising, but even with the "cartoony simple" graphics it's going to leave a LOT of interested gamers crambling for new computers.

I don't know...since they are gearing towards such a wide audience, I figure they will probably not be too demanding. The views in this thread are those of a very small percentage of RCT's target audience, so I would imagine they are aiming to keep it compatible with most people's existing systems.

However, most of you guys are more computer-savvy than I am, so I could be totally wrong here.

I don't like the new pics. I don't like the 3-d enviroment.

But i'm not making any assumptions about the gameplay until I download.....er....buy it...:)

Not something to joke about on a site owned by a software developer...

Graphics are a bonus. Fun gameplay is what really makes a game addictive, and a 3D/walk through view of your own park seems pretty awesome to me.

If you made it Jeff i'd buy 20 copies of it!

I always buy stuff, cracked versions never work properly. Just a little british humour...

I'm sure it will be optimized to handle slower machines. Don't forget, when you're zooming around, building or checking out a bunch of peeps, I'm sure the detail will be fine in your immediate surrounds, as the program won't be calculating animation/polgyons, etc. that are much further away. You'll probably get to look at some coasters in the distance while your at peep level, but you won't be viewing as far down as the opposite side of the park. Distant objects (my guess) willl probably be silhoutteed or fogged out I imagine.

The idea of seeing everything that's going on in the entire park simultaneously, is probably what's causing people to think in terms of a steep PC requirement. I doubt that will happen -- as we'll probably be playing and viewing small chunks of the park at once. If you're focusing in on a coaster, we'll probably get to see the surrounding objects in action (any nearby coasters flat rides, peeps, shops, etc.)

It doesn't look like there will be any silhouetting from the screenshots posted...

Could be, but I'm sure Frontier isn't using 700 mhz PCs either for teaser material. *** Edited 4/23/2004 12:02:31 AM UTC by JCat***