Making Track Invisible

The best way to make track invisible is to use the ‘Modify Ride’ dialog to change the track type of the ride to that of a flat ride or stall e.g. Crooked House. This however only works for tracked rides that use only the track elements that were in the original RollerCoaster Tycoon game with no expansion packs. You can make other things invisible with the codex memory editor. This doesn’t require any knowledge of hex editing, but you will need to use the hex editing functions of the editor.

This comes with a few warnings and useful information but the actual hack is very simple.

(There may be other ways to make track invisible too)

This hack caused can cause problems if not done correctly,

• Always make sure you are modifying the correct square
• Never do this edit to the last object (the one that appears lowest in the Codex Map Control) on a square
• Always make milestone saves of your park, especially whilst doing complicated modifications such as this.
• Experiment in empty saved games or unimportant copies of your park.

This hack can be undone, but this is a more complicated and painstaking process if you have made a lot of track invisible.

If you run into difficulties here are a few general pieces of advice:

• Loading, and saving (as a new sv4) in the save game modifier will fix a lot of problems in saved games. (Though it may also “fix” something you’ve deliberately hacked)
• Similarly, certain trainer functions that edit the whole map may help too. Like setting the water table, removing trees etc. The Dragons IOA v5 set water table will make the track appear again, so don’t use it.

This is my theory of how the hack works. It isn’t necessary to read this bit.

I came upon this hack by chance; I found it randomly in one of my saved games (everything I built on certain squares were invisible) and inspected it with Winhack to find out how it had happened. Having not reverse engineered the game or anything I can only guess at how it works, but here it goes:

The game map is stored as a series of objects. Some of these are marked as being the last in the square; hence whatever object is next is on the next square of the map. When you delete an object, the object is marked as deleted and moved to the end of that square. (To actually remove it would require shifting all of the following squares along in memory, which would be a very expensive operation.)

However, if a deleted object appears before the last object in the square, the later objects are invisible.

(I think why I seem to be the only person who noticed this is not that I’m the only one who’s ever done it, but that others seeing the objects not present in the game, assumed that they weren’t there)

It’s important that you don’t mark the last object on a square as deleted.

• Build the track you want invisible in LL

• Save

• Start the trainer or restart construction monitoring (set the traffic lights to green)

• Build something underneath the track; I used a piece of grey tarmac

• Open the map control and click the plus sign (circled in orange) for the tarmac (or whatever you built)

• Then change byte 0 circled in pink to FF (ie, Click the number under 0, if you built grey tarmac like me it will say 04 here. And change it by typing ff)

• The track will have disappeared, but if you test the ride the train will go over the track as normal.
  (The contents of the map control may disappear too, select options > refresh from the menu to get them back)

• Save as your next milestone saved game.

Notes: everything above the object you deleted using the hex editor will be invisible, everything below will still be visible. If you’re really clever you can raise things above the deleted object using the map control, so they still appear before it in memory (hence; are visible) but are physically above it in game.

Like I’d said before you should be careful when doing this. Although you can obviously mess around all you want in empty/unimportant saved games to try it out.

To undo this takes more knowledge of hex editing, middle click on the square in the map overview to bring up the hex editor at that square. Change the object with the first byte as FF back to 04 or whatever.