Ok. I caved in and grabbed a copy.

The newest of my desktops is at least 5 years old, and that's probably a generous estimate. I just got a new laptop for work and hoped it'd be capable, but the video card has only 128MB of dedicated RAM (minimum for the game is 2GB). Also says the Intel i7-7500U @ 2.70GHz processor isn't compatible...

Ok, so I think I'm done messing with this inverted coaster. It's rough and basic and could be "finished" but I'm wanting to mess with other stuff.

The coaster is solid with middling ratings. It's 3300 feet long with a 119 foot drop and 6 inversions. It runs three trains consistently and with a minimal stack.

As a first "learning" effort, I'm ok with what's there. I tried some stuff with lighting and triggering. Created a sort of strobe effect on the down side of the batwing and four spots that 'chase' the coaster on the low banked turn along the water. During the day water shoots follow it in that area instead.

The video has a short overview of one cycle, then a night run and a day run.

Your frame rate is choppy. Turn off some options, dude!

That's pretty satisfying when you have a ride that's timed that well. Love it.

I like this ride. The block/final brake is an interesting choice. I don't know how effective that would be in real life as far as operations and loading would go, but your peeps are apparently quick and ready to go.

I'm gonna let you guys iron this game out before I give it a try.
Oh, I guess I have to get a 'puter, too...

Jeff said:

Your frame rate is choppy. Turn off some options, dude!

That's everything maxed. I got about 22 fps give or take on that file normally. When I screen capture, it drops to about 16fps. Anyone have a good way to capture?

Next up. A chance to play with terraforming and trying to be a little creative with scenery.

Work in progress. I'm obsessed with lighting.

CPU's just haven't improved that much in the last 4 or 5 years. The improvements have been in electricity consumption and the integrated graphics. My 5 year old i5-2500k (2nd gen i5) just died, and I was surprised that the equivalent 6th gen i5-6500 is barely 10% better in some benchmarks and no cheaper than I paid for the old setup.

Gonch, are you looking for software or hardware capture? The AverMedia Live Gamer Portable has a PC-free mode where it captures the HDMI out to an SD card without taxing the PC being recorded. I know someone using it that way with fairly good results, but I haven't seen anything they've done for high-frame rate gaming.

I'm using an Elgato for screen capture, but we do the capture on a separate PC.

Software. Some simple program that will use minimal resources in the background.

Thankfully, in 6 months or so, Intel will no longer have a monopoly on CPUs, making the price go down.

Have you tried VLC? http://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html

I have VLC. Can I capture gameplay with that?

As far as the game...another mood swing.

After a week and almost 30 hours...meh. It's a decent time waster. Still lots of shortcomings & weirdness and overly detailed & complicated in some places. It's not horrible by any stretch, but I'm not in love. There's just something there that doesn't "hook" me about it. Building coasters is fun visually, but the ratings don't seem to make sense to me. In fact, a lot of it doesn't in terms of the machine making it run. It all feels a little arbitrary. Then again, maybe the sheer openess of it is causing that. With the grid based games pieces are limited. A few variations and you can get a feel for how things work. I still have no idea how to tweak a coaster to improve the ratings...and the real time stats during testing just make it worse because they don't seem to correlate to the final ratings in any meaningful way.

I feel about it much like I felt about RCT3. There's lots of neat ideas in there, it's a step forward in this kind of game, I can't really pin down much that is "wrong" with it, yet somehow the whole is less than the sum of its parts. People played that for a long time and did really cool things. I dropped it early.

On the flip side I have even more respect for some of the stuff I've seen created with the game (nitro104's Quarry again deserves mention as it's easily among the best), but I'm not sure I like the game enough to get there. It's on my hard drive and not going anywhere...maybe I'll have an "aha!" moment somewhere down the line and suddenly it will click.

As a follow-up to the coaster ratings thing. I don't get why this coaster gets a 6.48 excitement to begin with, but I understand even less why when I switch the position of the coaster from lying to flying at the bottom, that it changes so much.

Some of the things you can do in the game are amazing, but yeah I can see it being a huuuuge time sink. (un)fortunately, I don't have access to a beefy enough computer to run it, so I'm not tempted to go down that rabbit hole anytime soon.

That said, a lot of impressive stuff on YouTube already. This guy's work is usually top notch:

The ratings system leaves a lot to be desired. From what I understand, it just takes a cumulative average of each individual rating throughout the course of the ride from the heat maps. So, if you have a lift hill or a brake segment where the train is sitting idle, it's just sucking the life out of our ratings. That's why the ratings are so good on that simple coaster you just posted and most launched coasters. The train is constantly moving and the ratings never have time to settle down.

jonnytips said:

That said, a lot of impressive stuff on YouTube already.

There are people doing simply amazing things.

This is one of my favorites so far:

It's even crazier if you download the file and start digging it. The time and patience something like that takes is insane.

Good God. That is amazing and quite humbling at the same time. Makes me feel pretty silly for the simple stuff I've been trying to do.

Wow, that's ridiculous.I mean, if you have the time and desire, cool, but that's some serious commitment.

Silvarret is the gold standard for me with pretty much anything he creates, but this remains one of the most impressive creations in the game to me...

nitro104 said:

The ratings system leaves a lot to be desired.

To say the least. You're definitely right in that lifts and brakes kill ratings...which is moronic as a correctly blocked coaster will have a lower rating than the same coaster with no blocks slamming into the station at 30 miles per hour.

And just to test it, I tried the following (and it really is bad...like stupid bad):

I built this woodie based on the idea that a short, fast layout would deliver high ratings. It did. The lift is 147ft high and the ratings are 6.80 - 4.46 - 1.48

So if we're right and it's just speed over distance, simply pulling the lift higher should increase the ratings. I pulled the lift up to 162ft high and didn't change a single thing. I didnt even resmooth anything and the piece between the lift and station is all goofy now. New ratings: 7.18 - 5.15 - 2.16

That's just dumb. So I pulled it higher. I could only go to 168ft because of the track circling the lift. So just six more feet on the lift moved the ratings to 7.32 - 5.36 - 2.48

So yeah, the coaster ratings aren't really complex or thought out at all. If anything they seem mostly like an afterthought. The game is clearly about making pretty things. And there's value in that...just not necessarily for me. It's everything I suspected and I still bought the damn game.

Then again, this seems to be the trend in this sort of genre of gaming. People raved about Cities: Skylines. I never played it but from what I understand it was a dumbed down SimCity that was more about pretty than anything. This feels the same way. I don't know. I don't get it. A tool to make pretty things just isn't interesting on its own. There has to be some sort of game involved. At the height of the RCT2 stuff around here, it was never about just making the prettiest coaster, it was about making the best coasters and making them as visually interesting as possible. It was sort of two fold. Planet Coaster feels so shallow in it's complexity.

I think those are all very fair points. It purely comes down to what you want out of a "game," and there are a lot of people that are up in arms on Reddit over the fact that it's geared so much towards creation and not much about being a management challenge. I enjoyed scenarios in RCT, but I always ended up gravitating towards the sandbox mode and trying to create realistic rides and parks. NoLimits was all the rage for me because of the ability to create any type of layout possible, but I grew tired of just how much time and effort it took to create a ride. Given those points, PC is a perfect happy medium for someone like myself, but it seems to be a pretty split decision for others.

It will be interesting to see what else the devs do with this game. There have already been a bunch of ride updates and management updates and it doesn't sound like that is going to slow down any time soon.