Screenshot / Maverick Unfinished
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04-March 16
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Silver Hills Amusement Park
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Sweet loop. Is that made in the same way that Xetc. made the RMC track?
The loop sprite was made in paint, the Giga coaster was merged with a twister coaster to add the looping. The idea was to make the twister track invisible with hex editing and replace it with the looping sprite. However I haven't had time for this yet, will probably do this later. The loop sprite also isn't 100% finished yet.
Ah okay, so it's closer to how you made the diagonal loop. I must say the paint-made sprites look incredibly accurate.
Thanks, I make them pixel by pixel for the most part. It's quite relaxing, however the downside is that it takes a shitload of time.
you should post the object once it's refined cause that would be amazing to use.
Otsdarva Offline
Nice custom loop. I see a bit of the corkscrew at the top right of the screen. Are you going to make a custom corkscrew piece too?
that loop is fantastic.
Yep will do, but I don't have much time in the coming weeks, so don't expect it all too soon.
Yes that was the plan, however X7123M3-256 is working on a program that could make track pieces for you (so you don't have to make them individually yourself). So if that is the case it probably isn't much use if I make custom the custom corkscrews myself as we will be able to make all the track pieces we need pretty easily.
No it was done differently. It could be done by using the g1.dat, however since I'm also just making a park (this is the same park as the diagonal loop coaster) I want everything to be backwards compatible so other people can also open the park when I submit it. So it was done in the following way:
Step 1: Merge twister looping with the giga track
Step 2: Make the twister looping invisible using hex editing
Step 3: Put the loop sprite (which is scenery) at the spot of the loop.
Step 3 I haven't done yet, since you can't place scenery on a spot where you deleted a piece of track (using normal methods). I know that it can be done and that it is possible as I have done it before, however this was a couple years ago and I don't remember how I did it. So I will have to figure that out again and then it will work. Basically it is a trick, but it will make the park backwards compatible, which is something I find important.
Also, thanks to everyone else for their nice comments
. I will post a GIF later showing how the loop was constructed. Also, some stuff will still need to be changed, for example the right rail of the track is much lighter on the near side than the giga track it is connected to, and near the other side it is much darker and doesn't perfectly align. The problem is that the rail of the looping is made with the colourable greens in paint. However the colourable greens are all very close together so it is pretty difficult to see if you have the right shades, as the contrast is much bigger when you convert it to other colours.
EDIT GIF:
It's a bit small but gives a general idea.
It worked fine for me just now. Does this have to do with the fact that RCT2 treats corrupt objects differently? (I tested it in OpenRCT2, and I know there are issues with invisible objects being handled differently.)
My suggestion is to color the track yellow. Seems to have greater contrast between the light and dark shades so you'll notice if your colors are off more easily. This is what I did when I first set the lighting for my rides, though with my most recent one it has been changed.
Does the train glitch at all when it passes through the loop? Track sprites are split up in fairly specific ways, whereas large scenery is just one sprite per tile. I encountered glitching on my RMC track where I split the sprites wrong, and I'd have expected to see the same thing here.
It's also interesting to see your process for making the track sprites - it differs substantially from my approach, and it seems to get very good results. I need to revisit my track rendering code - I thought of a way to greatly simplify it a few months ago but I've yet to implement it.
I'm not sure, I'm relatively unfamiliar with openRCT2. However it may also have to do with the fact that I'm working on windows 7 and RCT is kinda iffy when it comes to windows 7, a lot of 8cars functions for example don't work properly on windows 7 and the amount of error trappers I get for no reason is also just ridiculous.
Yes but I don't think the yellow allows you to remap your colours when using James Hughes object editor, because from what I understand it only allows greens and pinks to be remapped if the object only consists of 2 different colour schemes. But I could be wrong about this.
I just tried the loop with a train in OpenRCT2 and the train does indeed glitch a bit on the loop. Especially on the left part where the train goes up the loop. However in the top and in the downwards going part the train behaves relatively nicely. So it sure isn't perfect, but it's something I guess. I think this problem may be solvable by making the loop sprite multiple objects in the game and place them separately. However one thing that I found interesting is that I can make a piece of track go through the looping itself (or a path or any other object) and it does not glitch (by going through the loop I mean similar as the blue fire roller coaster in Europa Park where another piece of track goes through the looping). I'm not really sure why this is, I would not have expected that to work but it does, so that's pretty cool.
Thanks, the clue to my approach (I think) is to try to use as many references from the game itself, and try to make the sprite similar to things already in the game. And I don't mean copying things from the game itself (because that will give pretty poor results if you're making new stuff I think), but look at how the sprites in the game are constructed, and then construct your own sprite in a similar way, look at the way the shading is done, how the illusion of the shapes is created. This way you avoid making the sprite look alien. Also, I'm very excited to see where you're track rendering code goes. If it works, together with you're ride editing program, it could be a revolution for RCT on a scale we haven't seen before
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Yellow is a remappable color (but you need to enable remap 3, like you say), but that's not what I meant. I mean that when you test it in game, set the track color to yellow. If the sprite is too dark, the darker yellow looks more brown than yellow, and if the sprite is too light then the lighter yellow will appear almost white. It is quite hard to get a good balance, but the fact that you're editing this per-pixel means you have a bit more flexibility than I do.
Large scenery objects consist of one sprite per tile - so in effect, the game already does that for you, and splitting it up into multiple objects yourself is unlikely to help things. The actual track sprites in game are not split along tile boundaries (but I'm not clear how exactly they are split - I still need to work on that.
This contrasts with my approach. I open up the sprite in GIMP, and copy down coordinates of points lying on the track center line into a spreadsheet. Then, I take a guess at the shape of the track (for example, I might assume it can be parameterized by a polynomial), and then plug in known constraints like the angle of the train at the start and end of the track, and the difference in height between the start and end. Then I try to find parameters that best fit the coordinates taken from the sprite. For some track pieces this gives very good results - for the flat to gentle slope, and most of the turn pieces, there is no guesswork involved - applying the necessary constraints immediately gives you the shape of the track piece. For others, this doesn't work so well because it's not immediately clear what form the solution should take. I'm expecting to run into difficulties with loops and s-bends in particular.
Ah okay, yes I usually test it in game in multiple colours to make sure it looks good in roughly every colour. But thanks for the tip.
What if you make it a small scenery object, or what if you make the object outside the boundary of where it is actually "placed" according to the game? I will try to play around a bit with this. Don't think it would work but it is at least worth a try.
This sounds interesting. I actually tried something similar before by modeling the sprites in CATIA using a polynomial. But the thing is that it gets complicated really fast, but more importantly it is in my opinion also less fun.
How I do it now it is more like making a drawing, and I love that. It may not be the best approach but I feel like it is very relaxing and it gets the job done, I do it more for the enjoyment rather than getting the perfect sprite. Because of course you could be more accurate if you 3d-model it. If I recall correctly the original RCT sprites were also all made by fitting 3d-models using polynomials.
Also, to everyone I would like to ask. The looping is cool and all, but in the end I also want to submit this park, so what do you guys think about the rest of the screenshot? I know it's very unfinished but what do you guys think about for example the foliage? The rainbow ride, the supports and the overall composition etc?
So many years Ive wanted this
Could you give me some pointers on where improvement is needed? I know that especially the track colours don't line up perfectly with the surrounding track, and also that there are some slight alignment issues at the backside and this will be improved. However while creating objects you can become kind of "blinded" in the process and not see your own mistakes so feedback is definitely appreciated.
I would have to disagree. While ideally you would like to have a program like X7123M3-256 is making, I think for now making it in paint is a pretty good approach, mainly because anyone could do it, it just takes a bit of practice and if you put a bit of time into it the only limitation in the sprite you make is your imagination. If I may say so myself I think the sprites look pretty decent, they are surely not perfect but almost no custom object is perfect. An alternative method would be to render the sprite using a 3d program, however this would also take a lot of skill and time, and in my opinion this is also less fun.
Furthermore about it not being ideal in game I would like to point out that any method available at the moment suffers the same problems as making it in paint. The problems lie with the implementation into the game, and not with the creation of the sprite. It simply is going to be very hard to add new functions into the game while maintaining backwards compatibility.
I'm not Steve, but look at the left hand side of the loop - where the track goes vertical the spine is missing - it looks like it switches to two rail track. Just below that point, the rails appear to bulge out slightly. Those are main issues I saw with the sprite.
I think you're getting good results with it, and you will probably get something released long before I do - but in the long term I don't believe hand drawn sprites are the best approach. There's a number of issues to think about:
I think you will get results before I do, probably long before I do. But if true custom track styles are ever properly supported, I think this method will rapidly become impractical because of the large volume of sprites involved.
It's not just hard, but impossible to add new track pieces to the game while maintaining backward compatability. You don't need to change the file format - a giga coaster loop can be represented in the SV6 file - but if opened with the original game it would segfault immediately. There is a jump table that points to individual draw functions for every sprite - and the unused track pieces contain an invalid address. In theory, adding a new track draw function is all that would be needed to implement a new track piece properly, but it's easier said than done. At the moment, your scenery item approach is the only option for a park intended for release.