EastBayDre

• Offline
• United States

Idles at 22% on 2 gigs of ram?
Damn, that's pathetic.
I'm trying to switch to Linux, but it's not going smoothly.
Not a fan of Macs.

If that's just normal background load, pathetic is the *polite* word. I'm sure there's a military saying for that kind of performance, perhaps one involving urine. Was it re-building its disk indices in the background or something? Please tell me that's not really idle load, is it?

I switched to Linux in '03. It was a learning experience, to say the least. But I'm glad I did it now. Happy to help if I can.

High-end Mac desktops are sweet, but their laptops seem a little flimsy. OSX is amazing. I'm not a fan of sole-source vendors in general, but at least Apple's products generally perform quite well at the tasks for which they are designed, which is more than I can say for their #1 competitor. What MS customers pay to put up with is beyond absurd.

Hmm...well, like others said: 4D and flyer. I'll add this one ...I don't remember its name.

Yeah, like the others said, 4D and Flyer. All the really big designs, for that matter - hard to keep them coherent, and prevent them from sprawling aimlessly. I am more comfy with the old-school designs, Allen-inspired woodies, Schwarzkopf loopers, stuff like that. But like ACE above said, I can feel my way through all of them, except the 4D. That one takes a pad and paper and a lot of thoughtwork to get a really good ride built. I rarely bother with it.

Speaking of old-school, the coaster in the picture is a Reverser. It's a side-friction coaster with slightly different wheel layout to allow an extra track section that turns the cars around. The design dates back a hundred years or so. There still might be one or two Hooper Reversers standing in the world - anyone know?

Design Reversers just like any other side-friction: Use the large turns, and hit them at no more than 22 MPH, give or take. NO negative Gs are allowed, ever. The reversing sections are meant for 13-16 MPH, 18 with a full train is the absolute max. When the train is facing backward, things are more intense for the riders, so Positive Gs should ideally be +2 or below, and Lateral Gs near 1.00 in parts where riders are facing backward. Facing forward, you can increase the Vertical Gs to +2.5 or so, and the Laterals to +1.25. But still no negative Gs. Try to keep the intensity around 5 or so, and the nausea will take care of itself. It's really just another slow, boring old side-friction, but the "kick" of turning around backward can turn it into a fairly good attraction with a great price/profit ratio. And it's a great way to get semi-timid peeps ready to go ride your big on-ride-photo-seller coaster, or give the real timid peeps something to work up to.

Though cheap to build, when placed in the park, you should still be able to get a 7.0+ EX rating out of this coaster, which is quite enough to keep the queue full and the cuddly toys flying out of the souvenir stall at the exit. Bonus excitement is awarded if the track crosses over itself, and if there is a head-chop, just like with the normal Side-Friction coaster. Reversers also expect you to have at least one backward-facing portion during the ride. Note that head-chops are ineffective if the riders are facing backward. All the other EX-pumping strategies apply.

You can build Reversers bigger, faster, and more intense than I've described above, but like their Side-Friction cousins, they will not age well (frequent breakdowns, sometimes fatal if you've really overdone it) and are a waste of money. So I keep them quite small, maybe a 45' lift hill.... The other free-floating car type coasters (VA Reels and Bobsled/Flying Turns) have a very similar design strategy, but with higher lateral G tolerances.

If anyone knows a tried-and-true method for 4D design, I'd love to hear about it.

EDIT: I had the right-button problem with RCT2/Wine also. Installing a Win98-native copy of system32/dinput.dll, and running the emulator as NT 4.0, has fixed everything up for me. Can't tell if I'm in Windows or Linux while playing any more.

My original post is now kinda irrelevant, bit I'm going to leave the rest intact here, for reference in case anyone follows in these footsteps.
---

For some reason [Wine's necessary trial/error approach to cloning the undocumented parts of DirectX], the game doesn't see right-button releases correctly most of the time. The screen scrolls because that's what right-dragging does. Clicking the right mouse button a second time should both clear this, and delete whatever's under the cursor at that time. At least it does for me. Why only that button? Who knows...

So, known (to me) possible solutions:

The quick-n-dirty, play-right-now workaround is just to watch what you're doing, and if the scenery didn't disappear, right click again real quick. It takes a steady hand, but a habitual right double-click will soon develop, and you'll only occasionally accidentally delete a piece of scenery.

If/when you actually feel like fixing things for real, you'll first need to make sure that your kernel has preemption enabled. Games need to be able to tell the rest of Linux to Back Off. I checked out PCLinuxOS and noticed that it does not install a preemptible kernel by default. They do appear to ship with one available; they call it "realtime" or somesuch from what I can gather about their installer. You want it - it smoothes out video playback a lot, and emulators can't really work right unless they have very high priority. Low latency is key.

If the problem is still there afterward, and you have Windows 98, you could try installing some native Windows DLLs. Using the Win98 dinput.dll in particular, instead of Wine's emulated one, has solved the issue for some people in the past. I haven't tried it, but the XP version didn't work for me, that I did try. The PCLinuxOS website actually has really good instructions for this kind of thing in their "Configuring Wine" section. Using native DLLs might be worth a shot at that point, and easy enough to undo if it doesn't help.

After that, I'm out of ideas. Let me know how it goes if you don't mind.