New Element - Park - Kukuana

Coaster Ed Offline

Well, I had a long response and I just deleted it by mistake. Arggh. So, well, I'll respond again later.

RMM Offline

The whole codex arguement is a bunch of bullshit emergo. No disrespect to ya or nothing but it really is. The codex doesnt bring any new pieces or scenery to add onto the park like custom scenery did to RCT2. The codex basically helped out a few old problems that couldnt be fixed once messed up. And it helps stack things quicker and more efficiently. I'm sure there is more to do with it but it doesnt in any way bring in new "scenery" or anything to the game.

If ya dont get what I'm sayin I'm sure Ed will write a few paragraphs about how custom scenery in rct2 and the codex for LL are not comparable.

Turtle Offline

OK, I said i'd do a little things post for this, so here it is.

Firstly, I want to concentrate on the mine train.

http://www.rctd.ft6....uploads/111.PNG

Quite apart from this being one of the best stations i've ever seen (thanks man), the sheer number of details here is staggering. The controllers box above the station, like on RMT at Alton Towers, The individual queues for each train, the trains being at station level, the flythrough of the other train while the other one is still in the station, the approach to the lift hills being in a cave under the station, honestly I could rave about this all day long.

http://www.rctd.ft6....uploads/113.PNG

I really like this, too. After such a lovely station, it'd be easy to leave the transfer track and it's surroundings a bit barer, but no. There's lovely architecture, housing a spare train inside (who noticed that?). There's a realistic transfer mechanism, although it's a little confusing at first (I couldn't work it out lol), and even a little employee shed to the bottom left. And at the bottom of the screen there's a little shed housing the on ride photo shop and other memorabilia.

http://www.rctd.ft6....uploads/120.PNG

Staying around the station, here's a little screen showing the two methods of exiting the ride - either via the stairs at the back, or the lift at the front for disabled riders. You can also see a drinks stall, with employee access to the side.

http://www.rctd.ft6....uploads/124.PNG

Imagine being on the river ride, serenely travelling through the tunnel, when all of a sudden this mine train thunders past...

Next the river adventure ride.

http://www.rctd.ft6....uploads/115.PNG

First, the station. Obviously delapidated, with some restoration started but then abandoned at the edges... You can also see the ramps for wheelchairs, or stairs for able bodied individuals. I know we weren't the first to do this (Thankyou, Phatage. I raise my glass to you here.)

http://www.rctd.ft6....uploads/116.PNG

Only a few things here, like the control booth, and the fastpass bridge. That gray thing on the right houses some lockers, although you'll have to remove some rooves to see if you don't trust me.

http://www.rctd.ft6....uploads/114.PNG

I love this section of the ride, Geyser Gully. Here you have copious amounts of underwater land block usage, to create a crystal clear effect for the bottom of the river. You also have underwater jumping fountains and splashes, as well as seaweed. At the top left you can see an example of diagonal pathing using landblocks.

And finally some of the buildings and other features.

http://www.rctd.ft6....uploads/112.PNG

Here's a cute effect. That's an info kiosk in there. You can also see the custom flame lamps that are dotted about the area.

http://www.rctd.ft6....uploads/117.PNG

My favorite ruin in the park, I think. Nestled in amongst the rock formation, there's even an angry native up above.

http://www.rctd.ft6....uploads/119.PNG

Here's another use of that info kiosk hack, but this time to signify a collection point for a kind of "walkthrough" restaurant. You order food at the shops round the corner, then come along to the collection point, then take your food over to the outdoor seating area.

http://www.rctd.ft6....uploads/121.PNG

Here's an example of the beautiful architecture. You see those brown stripes running along the building at certain heights? Those were made by hacking a brown support square inside the building wall.

Well, there's a few screens of some of my favorite parts of this park, highlighting what some of you may have missed. I hope this makes you want to go back to the park again and look for more, there's plenty more hidden around.

RCTFAN Offline

Cheers Jem, I will get round to doing my own as well at some point.

I haven't actually seen the final version yet so if someone could post a screen of the building opposite in that last pic i'd appreciate it

Corkscrewed Offline

Dammit, I'm gonna have to outdo you guys. :'(

Kumba Online

Changed that to links, mind not bragging about your stuff so much, you have made to big a deal about this park, it's enough ok?

Also I think iris said he'd delete anymore posts like this about someones own park, but im not that mean

Corkscrewed Offline

Fuck that shit, Darren.

BTW, for official record keeping purposes, I'm going to record Bandits score as our average, rounded to the nearest number. I will NOT add 10 to the score, because that's really arbitrary. Using our average, however, seems reasonable. If it's 57, then I'll add 57. I'm too lazy/busy to check what we've been averaging, but it will be rounded to the nearest number. Which means rounded down if it's below __.5 and up if it's __.5 or above. You know, basic math.

cBass Offline

Hahaha, Kaukauna!

Gwazi Offline

cBass!

Coaster Ed Offline

@Coaster Ed: however much I (deeply) respect and value your parks, skills and well thought-out, great and in-depth comments/reactions, there's one thing I am puzzled about:

when you make aqcaintance with the codex-trainer for LL, you go wild about it.
Nothing wrong with that as such.

But....ehh...it is a thing that opens special and easier ways to get what you want to get things realized in LL. (just like scenery is in RCT2)

And at the same time you are constantly hammering down on things in RCT2 (which also opens special ways and "easier" ways to get what you want to get realized)

I don't see that much of a difference......at least not the "big" difference that you try to advocate......

Both type of games have their own limitations/development/credits and expectations, don't they......?
Why not trying to "judge" and enjoy them on their own merits instead of focussing on "difference/"more" skill or whatever...?

I made this comparison before somewhere, but why trying to discuss whether a horse-cart-race is so much more better than a Formulae-1 race or v.v.? they both have many things in common, as well as many things that separates them.....just try and see them in their own light, while their goals (winning that race in the best kind of fashion and most beautiful/skillful way for their type) might be the same but with other means....

(and as I explained in the other thread, I still cannot take my eyes off of Kukuana)

Well, here's my response as promised. I could take the easy way out and explain away my recent critisizms of RCT2 custom scenery and my ravings about how cool the Codex trainer is as more evidence of my schizophrenia. But I think I've got a logical reason why the two are not inconsistent, and actually it probably further explains just what exactly my 'different sensibility' is.

Here's the thing with custom scenery -- if you go back in the forum archives and find the posts I made when custom scenery first started coming out you'll find me enthustiastically in favor of it. I think I made several posts to the effect of "this is going to revolutionize the game, soon no one will be playing LL anymore, the potential is limitless" and so on and so forth. And even now I wouldn't really disagree with that assesment. The potential is still there. And you'll hear the same kind of enthusiasm from me whenever I talk about the Codex trainer. And I did the same for the Beast before that. I've always been a big fan of potential. And I think that's because, so long as we're only talking about potential, everything is positive. Talented individuals can produce mindblowing things with the right tools. Give them another tool, and they'll take it even further.

So I'm not really against RCT2 parkmaking in general. On the contrary, some of my favorite parks all-time are RCT2 parks. Mala produced those two RCT2 mini parks and stuffed them full of some of the best parkmaking I've ever seen. When I first saw Escalante River Falls I thought "this is it, from now on I'm an RCT2 parkmaker". And it isn't just about custom scenery, it's about landscape interacting and ride design and creating something memorable like those elaborate 1/4 tile structures which were once upon a time thouroughly unique and original. I wanted Timothy Cross' Fantastic Wonders to win spotlight because of the way it used RCT2 (before most of the custom scenery) to create vivid imaginary worlds like the robot city and the giant garden. And then there's everything Phatage has done. His Six Flags park which riased the bar on realism and custom supports in particular. And Unfriendly Invader and Epica and Fright Nights. And Cork's "the whole map is one ride" creations, and Blitz' and Janus' floating islands, and I loved your Mount St. Michel architecture. That kind of stuff blows me away. And actually, I think I was one of the stronger supporters of RCT2 around here before it came to be the more dominant game at this site. I've also been one of the only real RCT3 supporters as well, and I've tried to get people excited about the awesome RCT3 parks I saw over at the official site, without much success -- though I never really had the time to produce anything in RCT3 myself other than the demo.

As for the codex trainer, well it's easy to see why I'm so excited about that. It really is the most revolutionary new tool in the game's history. For the first time I feel like I'm interacting with the game at it's root level, which could previously only be said by those with enough knowledge to hack the game's code. The Busters and the Adixs and the Evil WMEs. And people are going to see that whenever Gutterflower releases his next solo park. There's a ton of stuff in Kitabasaki Dragonland, if you really spend the time to look at everything, which has never been done before in RCT -- and it barely scratches the surface of what Codex can do. I left out the really radical hacks I came up with because they simply didn't fit the park. But let someone like Blitz use this thing? Or Gutterflower with his awesome ride hacking ability? You're going to be seeing some mind-blowing stuff. Maybe that won't happen until darkfire adapts it to RCT2. But people were still coming up with new LL tricks using the Beast years after it was released and the Codex trainer can do 10 times what the Beast could do.

So then, what's my problem? Well for one thing, a lot of times the annoyance of using custom scenery in RCT2 outweighs the benefit. As with anything, the really great custom scenery is far outweighed by junk custom scenery that just doesn't match up with the quality of the game. So for every one piece of good custom scenery you end up downloading 10 bad pieces. Especially when they come automatically with someone else's park now. I noticed the same thing back when I started downloading other people's saved game files way back in the day. Seperating the wheat from the chaff so to speak becomes a lot of work. And then add to that the incredibly long load times that come with it, the huge file sizes, and the game crashing on every other load attempt, and it really does become a problem. All of those files, most of them unwanted, end up filling up my data folder to the point where picking custom scenery for a new park has become an arduous three-hour ordeal that has caused me to quit every attempted RCT2 park before I even got started. And then when I go back to load an older park I have to sit through the whole uploading, crash, reload process again because the new (crappy) scenery has pushed out some of the old scenery. No wonder people just use the Pro Tour workbenches now. So potentially custom scenery is this great tool that opens up unlimited possibilities, but then practically speaking there are a lot of problems (most of which I just mentioned) that, how to put it, temper my enthusiasm. When playing the game becomes such a hassle, I'm even less likely to devote some of my already limited free time towards makign a park.

But even that isn't what I was writing about before, even that isn't why I'm so critical of a lot of popular RCT2 work, and just RCT work in general. I think I've been critical of everything really, not just RCT2. And part of that is that I left for awhile and when I came back I found a lot of parkmakers I didn't know and in the course of familiarizing myself with the currently active parkmakers, I've noticed a shift towards emphasizing architecture and beauty and screenshots and less of an emphasis on rides. And that's been my slogan for years. Where are the rides? I've been slowly waging my own little quiet war of attrition, picking away at people one at a time trying to get my point across. Every time I see a collection of screenshots with only buildings in them. Every time I see a park released with a lake in the middle and a themed section in each corner with one ride per section -- usually 3 B&Ms and a woodie. If it seems like I'm focusing the bulk of my attack on RCT2 that's probably because the new generation of parkmakers are primarily RCT2 parkmakers. But it's also because custom scenery makes it way easier to create something really beautiful with hardly any 'game content' behind it. Because really, no matter how beautiful something looks, what are you going to do with it other than look at it? What would your average six year old rather get as a present -- some kind of playset or a painting?

But hey, I'm a fan of beauty too. And it's great when you can accomplish it. Mostly I just don't want people to forget that making something beautiful only gets you halfway there. It doesn't excuse you from needing to create a memorable ride experience too. It doesn't excuse you from needing to put some original ideas in there beyond just "no one has made this particular configuration of building scenery before". It doesn't excuse you from needing to put something personal in your work to make it your own. Phatage and Tom-DJ's Kipper Amusement Park is a great example. For years people have been creating 'realistic' parks by arranging buildings around tarmac and putting stalls in there and recreating the coasters and claiming that that's all there is to it. But clearly you can do a lot more. And I'm not really interested in making people feel bad about themselves, as I said before. That's not my goal. Ragging on other people's hard work doesn't make me feel better about myself. I just want to condition people to expect more of themselves. To try harder. Because I want to see more exceptional parks. Parks that are a joy to explore. Parks that force the bar up even higher for everyone else. So yeah, I do often get overly critical, but it's only because I don't want to people settling on the idea that this is the best you can do. I don't want to see people satisfied with only pushing themselves half the way and forgetting about the rides and the ideas too. And I only hold other people to the same standard I hold myself too. It just happens to be a very high standard.

I got a little sidetracked there (as usual) but I hope I answered your question. The custom scenery thing annoys me a lot lately because it can quite easily become a crutch. LL had very limited scenery options and people kept pushing what it could do further by experimenting and being creative. And I hope that kind of experimentation and creativity doesn't get sacrificed when there's a huge variety of scenery available. If it's all about making something look perfect than sure, if you can make the perfect scenery piece instead of hobbling it together out of spare coaster parts, than that's great. That's better even. And that frees you then to use experimentation and creativity to take it much much further than ever before. So that's what I want to see. Don't use RCT past as a standard and copy spotlight parks. Spotlight parks won spotlights because they were great at the time they were released. Copying them isn't going to win you a spotlight now. Go look at all of the old Danimation spotlights. If somebody came out with one of those now it would maybe win runner-up. Maybe. (With some exceptions of course) I want to see people taking the next step, pushing the game even further. And when I see that, I'll be liberal with the praise I promise.

Emergo Offline

Wow ^ impressive post

And oh yes, thanks, you fully more than just answered my question (LoL!), and in fact I can only agree with everything you say. And yes, reading old posts, I see the great consistency in your enthousiasm for potential, for any game.

It sometimes indeed seems that the possibilities of custom scenery, which are great as such imo, are by now also creating a lot of drawbacks, like adding pieces that people only have to stack to get a certain effect and that holds them away from their own creativity to reach for that effect.
(I don't think however that this was the case in Kukuana, for there imo scenery is used with so much skill and creativity to reach certain effects that absolutely where not there from any ready-to-go-scenery. I loved Kipper also a lot, especially for all those rides and the truly amusement-park atmosphere, but have no problem at all in seeing/appreciating other types of parks in which another type of creativity excells, and then especially not in a contest like H2H where so many parks are released in a row)

And yes, keeping control of that evergrowing overload of new scenery and keeping things a bit clean and flowing on your own computer, is getting really something to worry about nowadays.
By now I do have a really good discipline/procedure to keep my ObjData-folder nice and clean, as well as some ways to quickly open imported games, but it all takes extra work, for sure.
Maybe after all the nice utilities we already have (like trainers, ObjExtractor/Datchecker/Datpreview/Dimport and now the new "Dimport"-one) it gets time somene develops an automatic procedure to keep control of the flood of scenery and opening importing parks, instead of having to lie like a watch-dog in front of your ObjData-folder and getting annoyed at the idea to have to open a downloaded park, LoL!
So we can all concentrate again on bringing parks to the next level with mindblowing creativity/ideas.

Emergo

Coaster Ed Offline

I was way too harsh on this park. Looking back at it now, it stands out as one of my favorite RCT2 theming exercises. The attention to detail is really superb.

Austin55 Offline

Pac streamed this tonight and it was amazing, brilliant park this is.

FK+Coastermind Offline

It was a joy to watch Pac stream this, particularly when he literally died about the water-ride station.

This park might be my favorite thing ever made in RCT. The atmosphere, details, ideas, and just brilliant parkmaking makes it one of the most surprisingly clever parks i know of. I have spent hours pulling apart the different buildings to determine how i can mirror my architecture to this park, and even after going on 7 years i would say it still has some of the most complex, yet astoundingly real archy we have seen in RCT. Looking at this park can help explain my 3 year rut of making ancient ruin parks and why Karizima and Nemica look the way they do. I don't know if Turtle is still lurking about, and i'm pretty sure RCTFAN isn't, but thank you both. This park is, simply put, very important to me.

FK

Liampie Fan Online

The Kukuana influence is noticable in your work, FK. To me, the best things in this park are the textures. It's a perfect smooth blend of uncommon/exotic textures. The atmosphere in this park among the best this site has seen. Turtle+RCTFAN, what a dream team! I'd kill to make this happen again.

Favourite structure in the park is probably the station: perfect texture mix (love how the peach roof was used here), perfect colour mix (the park hooked me as soon as I noticed the blue windows), awesome composition (the helices in front, the double lift behind, and that fucking brilliant fly-through; all visible from the path) and flawless execution. Incredible 10/10 work by I assume RCTFAN.

Pacificoaster Offline

This was so damn good! That splash boats station was ace.

Turtle Offline

Why thankyou! RCTFAN really dragged up my level of parkmaking with this park, he was so far ahead of anything anyone else was doing construction wise. However I did make that splash boats station, so thanks!

Pacificoaster Offline

Dude. That was my favorite part as you can hear in the livestream. Fantastic job Turtle.

Turtle Offline

Can I watch this livestream?

Pacificoaster Offline

I just did a quick little edit:

Here

Disclaimer: Not the most mature stream.

Liampie	90%	no
Xeccah	90%	no
G Force	85%	no
Steve	85%	no
trav	85%	no
Coasterbill	80%	no
SSSammy	80%	no
Kumba	75%	no
posix	75%	no
][ntamin22	75%	no
81.88%		0.00%

Park / Kukuana

89 Comments

Coaster Ed Offline

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Turtle Offline

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Corkscrewed Offline

Kumba Online

Corkscrewed Offline

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Coaster Ed Offline

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Liampie Fan Online

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