Why so many nodes?

I just downloaded update 1.7 tonight and I began to look at the three roller coasters that came with the update. I'm wondering why many of the designs that come with the update have almost literally a blue node for every little segment of track? I know the more you have, the smoother it is. But is it really that necessary to have that many? I make designs with just a fraction of those blue nodes and my designs are just as smooth.

Those are tracks that have been run through the Automatic Heartline Generator tool.

Ohh now I see. And I can't use that on Vista :(

I saw the first example of that in 1.6 with the Hydra recreation. It significantly slows things down as well, but my video card is only an ATI Rage 128 Pro.

I'm very excited that they're saying that the Mac version should be coming out very soon, like in the next few days. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

The first design I ever made in 1.5 was a family coaster that was meant to be like a minetrain, and the only train at the time that made sense was the Schwarzkopf train.

pkidelirium, is the Automatic Heartline Generator tool a third-party tool, or is it in the program somewhere? I don't ever remember coming across it.

The Automatic Heartline Generator is third party. You can get it here:
http://www.nolimitsdevcenter.net/pageid-6.html

PC only. Oh well, it looked way too complicated anyway.