Ok. I caved in and grabbed a copy.

So I finally caved in and snagged a copy of Planet Coaster.

According to Steam, I have five hours under my belt. Not sure how I spent it exactly, but here's what I've done so far:

1. Spent time screwing around with the various tools and tabs in sandbox mode trying to get a feel for the game.

2. Completed the first two parks in career mode meeting the "hard" goal in each.

3. Dozed off from the sheer boredom of the career mode.

4. Slapped myself in the face to wake back up and decided to just build a coaster and see what I could cobble together. Went with a Floorless as B&M steel is easy. Added a boxy station and a winding queue. Some trees, bushes and a fountain thingy later, I had it pretty much done. Terraformed a tunnel because I had a long straightaway there.

5. Threw together this video:

Great first ride! I'd be curious to know how motivated you're feeling to continue playing? Based on the above it doesn't sound like the game is doing much for you from a simulation standpoint, but back in the day you were pretty much untouchable in RCT2 when it came to creating one-off rides. With all of the customization options available in this game, I'd be interested to see what you could come up with as you get more familiar with the tools.

Welcome to where the flavor is. :)

I see it didn't take you long to figure out how to put catwalks around mid-course blocks and such. I suspect you'll get to where I am much faster. What I've learned is to embrace unchecking the "snap to angle" box in certain cases. The other thing that wasn't obvious was going back to smooth out the track by pulling out the end markers to obvious places and then using the smooth buttons. I'm surprised at just how fluid you can make the rides.

I don't know if it's just a little overwhelming like you guys were saying in the other thread or it's just kind of tedious.

I'm not in love with it at this point. I never enjoyed No Limits because it just felt like work. This sort has some of that feel. The other thing about NL that lost me was lack of "game" involved. It's less fun to make pretty things if there's no "game" involved.

The "game" definitely doesn't feel like there's much of anything there to me. Much too simple and it seems like it was meant as a way of getting familiar with the interface more than anything. So we have a sandbox. That's fine, I guess...but even that wears thin. There's a reason I haven't really toyed with Parkitect in months. There is a lot of flexibility in PC though, but that amount of freedom and flexibility comes with a cost...and that cost is effort. I'm a lazy gamer.

I'll stick with it for a while. I still don't think I really "get" the whole thing yet - building structures still feels hard to me and I'm sure there's some settings I'm missing on some basic things like path laying.

I also still think I identify more (and I've said this in the past) with the RCT/Parkitect POV of 'looking down' on your world more like a model than the RCT3/Planet Coaster persepctive of being immersed in it.

I'm still too new to it to call it not for me. But it's not love at first sight. I need to spend some time with it.

Some of the scenarios are tough. Aside from me not paying attention to my employees (when they quit a food stand, it closes), there are some pretty challenging coaster scenario goals. One requires excitement of 8, an average speed of 35 mph, but a fear below some threshold. It's hard to hit, because you go too fast for too long and the fear goes sky high. And you have the usual things about guest satisfaction (they're always thirsty) and paying off your loans and stuff... all the stuff that was in RCT.

I wasn't crazy about it at first either, but it grew on me when I started to get the ride construction and watching those little dick employees complain. You can build perfectly good rides by having boxes checked and using the constraints, but you can get NoLimits crazy if you want to. I like that flexibility, because I never cared for NL.

Spent a little more time this afternoon.

Coaster building is coaster building. It's common sense if you're familiar with coasters at all.

Where I'm totally lost is building strutcures and paths and shops...specifically combining the three.

It seems like you can individually put walls/building pieces on a grid, you can build paths on a grid, you can even place shops on a grid. But when you start combining to create one cohesive building, they don't all work on the same grid.

If I build walls first, then the shops don't snap inside the walls neatly on the grid. If I build shops first, the paths don't connect neatly on the grid. If I build paths first, the shops won't connect on the grid.

I have to be missing something here.

The giant corkscrew looks dope. Get B&M on that element stat.

Also the steep upward helix at the end. Nice!

I figured out the grid thing. Order seems to matter...at least the way I do things.

I can get them all on the same grid if I build the path on a grid first. Then drop shops - which don't look like they're going on the grid, but do square up once you add more shops. From there walls can be placed on the same grid the shops are aligned to.

I need to try to put together a simple little shop building later.

I don't get how I have an RMC that has the excitement heatmap over 7 everywhere until the break run, even hitting 10 at most places, and the excitement is still 5.

That's something else I don't like - the realtime stats when you test. To me, it pulls back the curtain too much. Part of the fun was always trying to get a feel for what made for better coaster ratings and going back and tweaking and stuff. Now it just shows you.

Seems like it'd be too easy to game the system and make crap like this: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=831794660

Ok, so more thoughts after a few more hours with the game.

Building coasters is pretty fun and addictive.

Everything else is a lesson in frustration. No idea how the hell you're supposed to stick things together, nothing seems to snap into place and when it does, stuff tries to stick together at weird angles. Building more than a simple box makes me want to whip my mouse across the room. There's tons of pieces, but they all feel useless. It's just not how my mind works. Terraforming feels "loose" and I'm not finding the precision. I'm wanting to resize things - like signs and rocks and bushes and trees. Paths make nice swooping shapes on their own. The also square off on a grid nicely. But trying to create a specific curve or radius or layout beyond simple lines feels like the game is doing it's own thing.

I'm just not getting it. I have nothing but supreme respect for things like nitro104's Quarry park. I finally had a chance to look at the file and it's incredible. I don't even understand how you put things into place, let alone found the patience to sit through something like that wooden bridge. I'd be smacking my wife, yelling at the kids and kicking the dog if I had to build just a fraction of that. Seriously, you're a f'n rockstar with that park.

There's enough detail in the game that you really can't get away with the same vaugeties (is that a word?) that you can with the 3rd person grid games (RCT, Parkitect). In those you can create the impression of detail with some quick layering and it all snaps into place. With Planet Coaster a box looks like a ****ty box. It requires actual architectural consideration because of the detail. You're not just building the "idea" of a station or structure - you have to build it. I just don't have the patience to deal with the effort required, nor the learning curve. Seriously, am I missing something?

So yeah, not sure if it's just going to click for me all of a sudden and I'm going to laugh at these thoughts or what, but my initial opinion seems to be holding true. It's just not grabbing me. I need something quicker and easier to screw with.

With that said, here's a fun little woodie (POV first, then off-ride):

If you don't speed up your lifts, of course it's not fun. :)

The thing I've found about building stuff that isn't a ride is that you need to zoom way the hell in and adjust the camera (middle mouse button) to an angle that shows where to put stuff. Sometimes for height, you need to hold shift and drop it below the target surface to really get where it's going, then pull it back out.

Don't know if this will help but the best tips/tutorial videos I've seen were by Geekism on YouTube. Give him a watch.

Finally got my copy and new pc and I've been drunk on the coaster builder but I'm also having the same issues of patience that Gonch is having. Will keep working at it.

Lord Gonchar said:

I'm just not getting it. I have nothing but supreme respect for things like nitro104's Quarry park. I finally had a chance to look at the file and it's incredible. I don't even understand how you put things into place, let alone found the patience to sit through something like that wooden bridge. I'd be smacking my wife, yelling at the kids and kicking the dog if I had to build just a fraction of that. Seriously, you're a f'n rockstar with that park.

I appreciate the kind words on that. The "Advanced Move" tool (X) was the gamechanger for me on all of the pieces that aren't bound to the grid. For all intents and purposes, none of that stuff happened fast either. As you see in the workshop file, I uploaded the on year 36. Granted, I did a bunch of experimenting to learn how to do things and I would be able to work much faster this time around, but there were definitely some trying times putting that thing together.

Gonch,

I created a building with 10 shops (4 food drink stalls, 2 info stalls, one first aid and 3 bathrooms) that turned out pretty well. I'm not sure if the order necessarily matters, but I started by placing my shops all at once on a grid, then built the paths and walls on the same grid. The key is understanding that a "building" isn't a single shop, but rather anything that you build at the same time. So all 10 of my shops are actually part of the same building, as well as the walls and roof. When you build your paths on the same grid as your building, then they should line up. There was one little things that I noticed, which was that when you lay down the initial path "tile" on your grid, they won't connect to adjacent shops automatically. You'll see a little gap between the path and the front of the stall. If you then go in with your path tool (off grid I believe, and minimum width) and hover over the gap, it will fill it in and connect the shop to the path. I'll try to post a screenshot at some point.

The thing I've been most frustrated with is building paths on terrain. It seems that once a path (or a ride for that matter) is elevated, it will stay elevated even if you pull the ground up underneath. So if you want a path that follows some irregular topography, you have to sculpt the topography first. If you elevate something first and then try to sculpt, that supporting structure won't go away entirely and you'll be left with a weird valley of land underneath your path or ride. I tried using the sculpt to ride foundation tool but couldn't get it to do what I wanted.

Lord Gonchar said:

With that said, here's a fun little woodie (POV first, then off-ride):

"Bastard" is a good name for that, considering you gave it headrests and individual ratcheting lap bars, you bastard. :)

Ok, here's some examples of what I'm talking about. (heavy pics)

When you place a wall piece it creates a grid that other wall pieces adhere to. This is great.

If you move the second wall piece to the first, it jumps on top like a good little wall. This is outstanding...usually.

But now I want to use a decor piece to run along the top like a railing. And the game logic does this:

This is not great. It is monumentally stupid. So I uncheck "align to surface" to see what happens and now it does this:

This makes even less sense. And even if I use the advanced move to set it vertical, it still won't snap to the wall or grid or anything. (more on that later)

So I say, "Screw it" and decide to add a latern/light to my wall. I recheck "align to surface" and pick a lantern and this happens:

I got the prank version of the game didn't I? So I uncheck "align to surface" and get this:

Which is better, I suppose. But now there is no snap. It doesn't adhere to anything. You can sink it into the wall. Centering it in any direction requires eyeballing it. That would be a great advanced option, but there doesn't seem to be a setting that snaps these pieces. Which leads me to a greater frustration...

Everything works like that. Even a door or window or anything. EVERYTHING! Why on Earth wouldn't the deafault for a door to be to snap to the bottom of the grid (or ground level in this case) and centered horizontally? The door adheres to the vertical wall surface, but lining it up is not automatic and requires eyeballing it. Terrible.

So guys, am I missing a simple basic setting? Or do you really have to do all of this manually, piece by piece?

Take your lamp/rail and hold it over the wall again while holding "F." That will align it to the center of the piece. Hitting "X' will then allow you to move it with precision.

You can then use commands like "Ctr+X" to duplicate the piece and it will be placed in the same spot and you can continue with the precision move process.

In my workflow, I generally don't use "Align to Surface" for anything other than foliage.

Well, that's intuitive. ;)

Dude! Thanks! Just that little bit helps a ton. I still think it's exactly backwards though. That behavior should be the default and the 'free move" should require advanced keyboard prowess.

For sure! I definitely agree that there is a decent amount to be desired in areas and some "what the..?!" moments when figuring things out. I watched countless "Top # things I wish I knew before playing PC" videos on YouTube and that helped a lot. But, it's also a lot of time to invest in learning how to play a game, and that's obviously not ideal.

This little cheat sheet is quick way to get up to speed on all of the controls too: http://www.sorki.be/reddit/Planet_Coaster_Cheat_Sheet.pdf