Ask the Experts / 5dave's guide to peep-friendly and reliable tracked rides

Hi!

This hack tutorial is basically to make merged rides go through a circle without using boat hire mode and without having the ride breaking down constantly.
It's very useful if you want to have more cars, realistic and clean cars on another track or just a reliable tracked ride that doesn't break down every 5 minutes.

So this hack can be used on practically every merged ride that goes full circle. Either block brake mode or just continous circle mode.
I show you the simpler way on a rapid ride.

First build the station with the original cars you want to have on the ride. If you use different cars on a track that's not originally meant for the ride, it will break down more often. In times of Gee's invisible ride tutorial that's not necessary anyways.



Then you do the merges you want to have on the ride. Either hacking it on another track you want the ride to have or the elements you want to have in between.



Test the merges via powered launch mode or boat hire mode if you have more than 1 station as in this case.



After that chose a track tile from the original ride track and recolor it in alternative color 2 or so (it has to be another scheme as the one you did the merge).



Raise that tile and build a circuit so it connects the ends of the merge. Recolor those to the same scheme as your raised track. Sink those parts again.



It's important that those parts don't overlap the original track but just close the circle.



Now set the ride mode to continous circuit mode again and voilà - The ride is working as the game originally intended it! The ride 'thinks' it's having a normal circle but goes all the way over the merged parts. Also the ratings used for the rides are from the merge.



But the whole connector track is visible, what can you do?
Simple. Either use crooked house on the original track (considering of course it has no diagonal/special parts whatsoever) or you just trick the game again:
Open/Test the ride, switch to 8cars and sink the connector track while it's operating! (Don't forget to recolor the original tracktile you used for raising the track before)



Now it works and the connector ride isn't visible. If you want to edit the ride, just raise the connector track again and it should work.

The trickier part is to get this working with block brakes. But it is possible with this method. Just use the original track for the block brakes, connect everything and sink it down. Easy as that.

Hope this tutorial was helpful. From now on I don't want to see boat hire mode rides ever again

"MFG"

Thanks for this Dave, actually very helpful for me with my design (though, eff everything, I'll have to switch back to my home desktop, the slowest computer in the world...)

FK

What exactly does this do? Just correct the more frequent breakdowns?

I believe it also allows you to have a Larger number of cars on a merged ride. When u make a rapids that is merged you often end up with a small amount of boats because the track is so small. This tricks the ride into thinking it has a huge track, thus allowing you to have a great deal of cars.

FK

^There's an easier way of doing just that (See my log flume in Disney New Fantasyland). Ling hit the nail on the head, this also removes the frequent breakdowns.

So here's a step-by-step tutorial for Fredd:

 

 1.jpg (282.23KB)
downloads: 86

First you merge the ride so that each block is merged correctly. Keep in mind that the highest piece of the lifthill is the 'block brake' of the lift segment.

 2.jpg (280.86KB)
downloads: 97

Then try if the car goes around the track with powered launch mode. If it does - you can raise a neutral track piece high above the course to do the next step.

 3.jpg (297.39KB)
downloads: 84

You connect all merge endings so that the ride is a full course again. Then lower the track again.

 4.jpg (287.13KB)
downloads: 95

Now the track works with continous block section mode. To hide the dummy track just lower the yellow track (watch out for the neutral track piece from step 2!) while the ride is operating.

 5.jpg (279.6KB)
downloads: 92

And it should look like this. you can do some cleaning ups with the invisible hack to get the track you want on those ugly merge spots. (building against the ride direction of course)

 

here's a basic scheme of how it works:

 

Hope that helps.

 

"MFG"

Thank you very much for writing this, I know this comes very helpful for me and other who are struggling with this hack. Xtreme97 was so kind to execute the hack for me, which he succeeded. But now I have problems getting the dummy track out of the visible: tried to lower it while track was open/testing but after it was lowered train was blocked on the lift. Tried to make it invisible: first via 8cars checking the 'make invisible' box, but got an error trapper when I returned in-game. Tried Geewhzz's method, it worked to get it invisible but above the parts that were invisible things got glitchy and got error trapper while I wanted to try to complete the track by building dummy elements for the invisible parts.

 

I just give up on this. Then it just has to run on boat hire mode with just one train. Thanks 5Dave for the tutorial and thanks Xtreme97 for doing the hack. 

Glad I could help more or less.

Maybe this method helps (although I dunno how it works with a MCBR):

http://www.nedesigns...ation-tutorial/

 

"MFG"

I'm still not quite sure if I understand how this actually works, but how do you have to handle this if you have say 3 different track types on a ride and for eaxample the two non-original tracks are merged together?