RCT Discussion / Jungle/African area in a park i can look at?

LOL @ cork.

Wait I thought the monkeys thing was not about evolution of thought, but about some monkey randomly typing out the script of Hamlet entirely on accident one day, because there are infinite combinations of letters and words that the monkeys will go through and one of them has to be that of Hamlet.

That would be interesting if that were to happen. "Oops, I typed this random combination of letters and now I've accidentally become fucking Kenneth Branagh."

Let's agree with fatha' here...



If you think about it, the monkey/hamlet thing is absurd. The chance is so incredibly little, it would take a ton monkeys more than a billion years to get as much as a random page of hamlet, honestly.

And by then, the planet will be controlled by the apes, thus making such an achievement quite admirable....


Altho Fatha does put it best. That's why he's coming to USC.

we ought to kidnap some 10 year old and make him play rct, create a ll park and see what happens.
i do not believe that over time he would come to what we are at today.

actually i that's not what posix or I want to say (at least i think so posix. correct me if i'm wrong)

if there is somebody not knowing NE and any other rct site. no internet, nothing, he could still have fun making realistic parks.
if he now shows us his work (after a long time of playing the game) he will not come up with something that looks like most of the NE work (at least in most cases), but he could still come up with an amazing park.
and i guess this park would be even better than most of the NE work, cause he really has to use his own creativity.
he can use his creativity much better (more freely), cause he doesn't have to fit the NE-sheme of parkmaking.

learning by copying just makes you famous on NE or any other site sooner, but I'm totally sure learning by doing will bring up better results in the end.
and i play rct for fun not the be the best as soon as possible and to me it's the most fun to come up with own ideas, with something i can call my own.

but I'm totally sure learning by doing will bring up better results in the end.

wow, it's like, you are talking about me or something

if there is somebody not knowing NE and any other rct site. no internet, nothing, he could still have fun making realistic parks.
if he now shows us his work (after a long time of playing the game) he will not come up with something that looks like most of the NE work (at least in most cases), but he could still come up with an amazing park.
and i guess this park would be even better than most of the NE work, cause he really has to use his own creativity.
he can use his creativity much better  (more freely), cause he doesn't have to fit the NE-sheme of parkmaking.

learning by copying just makes you famous on NE or any other site sooner, but I'm totally sure learning by doing will bring up better results in the end.
and i play rct for fun not the be the best as soon as possible and to me it's the most fun to come up with own ideas, with something i can call my own.

If every subsequent generation had to reinvent the wheel all over again would we ever have gotten to the point where we have personal computers? Certainly not. Recording knowledge so that it can be preserved and passed on is what drives technology, it drives progress, it enables us to strengthen our position in the world. We now have technology to defend ourselves against predators, so much so that it isn't even a concern of a large majority of the population (which is I guess what makes War of the Worlds such a frightening scenario). We can limit the damage done by natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes. We can see storms developing in the middle of the ocean and pepare for them. The communication of knowledge from one person to another and from one generation to the next allows us to become more than ourselves. Our engineers are working on ideas right now that are the product of hundreds of lifetimes worth of research.

You're suggesting that one person on his own could create something better than millions of people working together over thousands of years. Now to be fair, you're speaking about creativity not technology. And your point is that the product of that one person would be more creative. And again I have to disagree. Here's why:

The imagination is not something that operates on it's own like some eternal spark of inspiration or a bottomless pit of ideas. It is a subconscious process which sorts and reorganizes the information in our head into new groups and new categories which in turn creates new ideas out of them. It's a kind of assemblyline which takes apart our stored knowledge and uses it to construct new thouhts and ideas. The capability of that system to create new ideas is limited by the supply of knowledge you put into it. So the person working on his own who has to work out for himself what a wheel is and why it would be useful might create a better wheel than anyone else, but he's never going to create an Apache helicopter. And the reason he isn't going to create that helicopter isn't because he's any less 'creative' than the inventor of that helicopter, but because his world is more limited. He has to first work out on his own the concept of aerodynamics and then he has to work out electricity and then he has to work out a way of refining steel and then manufacturing. It's an impossible task. It's never going to happen, and that person would never even know of the possibility of it happening. As far as he's concerned, the wheel is the best advancement in technology the world will ever see. The greater your body of incoming knowledge is, whether it's gained by personal obervation or the recorded observations of others, the more resources your imagination has to work with.

Now, that's all very generalized so I'll come back to RCT and qualify it. It could be said that with RCT there are artificial restraints that allow the individual to achieve as much as the group. After all, the tools are the same for everybody. The processes by which we make things are controlled by the game, and therefore we all have to follow them. A steel rollercoaster is always a steel rollercoaster, the loop is always the same size, etc. And you could go on to site the example of ghost train windows as perhaps limiting innovation because it was an idea that most people who saw it once started to apply to their own work instead of trying to find their own way to make windows.

However, the evidence mounts rather overwhelmingly on the other side of the issue. The various trainers created throughout the history of RCT by a dozen or so talented programmers has allowed us to bend those game rules in ways which have impacted the game enormously. They removed the cost requirment, they allowed us to own all land, they allowed us to have access to every ride and every piece of scenery in the game. I know every person building LL parks today (which admittedly is not very much anymore) has benefitted from those advancements whether they realize it or not. I don't know of anyone who's running parks to make money to build rides and do landscaping anymore. And if somebody does do that, they would be so severely limited that there probably wouldn't be much landscaping at all (unless they cheated and used some pre-existing landscape).

There's also the innovative use of bjects in new ways. The use of covered stations as queue lines and rapids track as steps and minigolf stations as buildings. Those ideas didn't come from one person. Each of them was an individual innovation that sparked another one by someone else and another one and so on. I contributed a couple of those ideas myself and I borrowed quite a few from other parks in much the same way that common knowledge becomes public domain. Once the idea is out there, anyone who wants to use it can. There's an unofficialy but commonly acceted line drawn here between ideas in unreleased parks and those in released parks. Once a park has been released, it's out there for anyone to use. If all you are doing with it is copying it, obviously that doesn't draw a lot of respect. But if, on the other hand, you take that idea and build off it and add an idea or two of your own, that draws more respect and it contributes something else to the public domain for other people to play around with and improve.

Then there's the whole issue of stacking and zeroing clearances, and merging. I was making parks for a long time before any of those tools were possible and I made some stuff I was really happy with. But I never would have concieved of something like Sandstorm Rally, or a Luge Machine or a working shuttle coaster (which goes backwards through the station). Those things were literally impossibilities. How much excitement and fun have we gotten out of discovering those ideas that we never would have had without trainers? I'm almost 100% sure I would have stopped playing RCT a long time ago if not for these trainers because I simply would have gotten bored with the limited options in the game.

Look at RCT2 and that's even more apparent. Go back and look at some parks that came out before custom scnery was possible. Sure there was some terrific stuff being made, I don't doubt that. But the limitations were already apparent. People were hitting the wall in terms of what RCT2 could do much quicker because of their years of experience with LL. RCT2 wouldn't have been nearly as popular without the custom scenery. That innovation pretty much saved the game and made it into what it is today.

There are some aspects of the game which haven't changed, such as basic coaster design and landscaping and tree placement, etc -- which anyone can hone to a high level on their own. And if you talk about Blitz, for example (if I can use you as an example, ah too late I'm gonna do it anyway) the aspects of his parks that really stand out as being uniquely his own are those aspects that he developed to a high degree before becoming a part of NE. His coaster design and his use of scenery objects and bushes and landscaping. Those are the skills that haven't changed much over time. But Ghost Cell Crisis is built upon the innovations of others - Toon's scenery blocks and cBass' blank tiles (I think they were his). It's also a collaborative park with building designs by Darkjanus.

Basically, your argument comes down to the basic argument against all innovation and progress and globalization in the world. To what extent does this homogenizing process of innovation hamper the individual characteristics which make us unique? If we bring McDonald's into Beijing, for example, are we squeezing out the local family owned restaurants and ultimately the whole local Chinese restaurant industry? I don't think there's a yes or no answer to a question like that (inside joke ). It's a complicated issue that we are seeing played out on a global scale right now. Anyway, I don't think the answer is to stop innovating and stop collaborating and pooling our knowledge. We just have to find a way to preserve individual identity while being part of a global, connected community.

(As a footnote to all of this, this discussion highlights for me how valuable a community like NE has been. This little community is like a microcosm of the world at large and what we learn here can be applied to finding solutions in more global problems. We've got people here from all different parts of the world - limited by the English language of course, and internet access - but that's changing too. This isn't just some black hole where we go to waste our time. We are participating in the globalization of the world right now and discussions like this mirror the ones that are going to be taking place and are already taking place amongst the people who will determine the future of our planet. Pretty exciting I think.)

if there is somebody not knowing NE and any other rct site. no internet, nothing, he could still have fun making realistic parks.
if he now shows us his work (after a long time of playing the game) he will not come up with something that looks like most of the NE work (at least in most cases), but he could still come up with an amazing park.
and i guess this park would be even better than most of the NE work, cause he really has to use his own creativity.
he can use his creativity much better  (more freely), cause he doesn't have to fit the NE-sheme of parkmaking.

learning by copying just makes you famous on NE or any other site sooner, but I'm totally sure learning by doing will bring up better results in the end.
and i play rct for fun not the be the best as soon as possible and to me it's the most fun to come up with own ideas, with something i can call my own.

If every subsequent generation had to reinvent the wheel all over again would we ever have gotten to the point where we have personal computers? Certainly not. Recording knowledge so that it can be preserved and passed on is what drives technology, it drives progress, it enables us to strengthen our position in the world. We now have technology to defend ourselves against predators, so much so that it isn't even a concern of a large majority of the population (which is I guess what makes War of the Worlds such a frightening scenario). We can limit the damage done by natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes. We can see storms developing in the middle of the ocean and pepare for them. The communication of knowledge from one person to another and from one generation to the next allows us to become more than ourselves. Our engineers are working on ideas right now that are the product of hundreds of lifetimes worth of research.

You're suggesting that one person on his own could create something better than millions of people working together over thousands of years. Now to be fair, you're speaking about creativity not technology. And your point is that the product of that one person would be more creative. And again I have to disagree. Here's why:

The imagination is not something that operates on it's own like some eternal spark of inspiration or a bottomless pit of ideas. It is a subconscious process which sorts and reorganizes the information in our head into new groups and new categories which in turn creates new ideas out of them. It's a kind of assemblyline which takes apart our stored knowledge and uses it to construct new thouhts and ideas. The capability of that system to create new ideas is limited by the supply of knowledge you put into it. So the person working on his own who has to work out for himself what a wheel is and why it would be useful might create a better wheel than anyone else, but he's never going to create an Apache helicopter. And the reason he isn't going to create that helicopter isn't because he's any less 'creative' than the inventor of that helicopter, but because his world is more limited. He has to first work out on his own the concept of aerodynamics and then he has to work out electricity and then he has to work out a way of refining steel and then manufacturing. It's an impossible task. It's never going to happen, and that person would never even know of the possibility of it happening. As far as he's concerned, the wheel is the best advancement in technology the world will ever see. The greater your body of incoming knowledge is, whether it's gained by personal obervation or the recorded observations of others, the more resources your imagination has to work with.

Now, that's all very generalized so I'll come back to RCT and qualify it. It could be said that with RCT there are artificial restraints that allow the individual to achieve as much as the group. After all, the tools are the same for everybody. The processes by which we make things are controlled by the game, and therefore we all have to follow them. A steel rollercoaster is always a steel rollercoaster, the loop is always the same size, etc. And you could go on to site the example of ghost train windows as perhaps limiting innovation because it was an idea that most people who saw it once started to apply to their own work instead of trying to find their own way to make windows.

However, the evidence mounts rather overwhelmingly on the other side of the issue. The various trainers created throughout the history of RCT by a dozen or so talented programmers has allowed us to bend those game rules in ways which have impacted the game enormously. They removed the cost requirment, they allowed us to own all land, they allowed us to have access to every ride and every piece of scenery in the game. I know every person building LL parks today (which admittedly is not very much anymore) has benefitted from those advancements whether they realize it or not. I don't know of anyone who's running parks to make money to build rides and do landscaping anymore. And if somebody does do that, they would be so severely limited that there probably wouldn't be much landscaping at all (unless they cheated and used some pre-existing landscape).

There's also the innovative use of bjects in new ways. The use of covered stations as queue lines and rapids track as steps and minigolf stations as buildings. Those ideas didn't come from one person. Each of them was an individual innovation that sparked another one by someone else and another one and so on. I contributed a couple of those ideas myself and I borrowed quite a few from other parks in much the same way that common knowledge becomes public domain. Once the idea is out there, anyone who wants to use it can. There's an unofficialy but commonly acceted line drawn here between ideas in unreleased parks and those in released parks. Once a park has been released, it's out there for anyone to use. If all you are doing with it is copying it, obviously that doesn't draw a lot of respect. But if, on the other hand, you take that idea and build off it and add an idea or two of your own, that draws more respect and it contributes something else to the public domain for other people to play around with and improve.

Then there's the whole issue of stacking and zeroing clearances, and merging. I was making parks for a long time before any of those tools were possible and I made some stuff I was really happy with. But I never would have concieved of something like Sandstorm Rally, or a Luge Machine or a working shuttle coaster (which goes backwards through the station). Those things were literally impossibilities. How much excitement and fun have we gotten out of discovering those ideas that we never would have had without trainers? I'm almost 100% sure I would have stopped playing RCT a long time ago if not for these trainers because I simply would have gotten bored with the limited options in the game.

Look at RCT2 and that's even more apparent. Go back and look at some parks that came out before custom scnery was possible. Sure there was some terrific stuff being made, I don't doubt that. But the limitations were already apparent. People were hitting the wall in terms of what RCT2 could do much quicker because of their years of experience with LL. RCT2 wouldn't have been nearly as popular without the custom scenery. That innovation pretty much saved the game and made it into what it is today.

There are some aspects of the game which haven't changed, such as basic coaster design and landscaping and tree placement, etc -- which anyone can hone to a high level on their own. And if you talk about Blitz, for example (if I can use you as an example, ah too late I'm gonna do it anyway) the aspects of his parks that really stand out as being uniquely his own are those aspects that he developed to a high degree before becoming a part of NE. His coaster design and his use of scenery objects and bushes and landscaping. Those are the skills that haven't changed much over time. But Ghost Cell Crisis is built upon the innovations of others - Toon's scenery blocks and cBass' blank tiles (I think they were his). It's also a collaborative park with building designs by Darkjanus.

Basically, your argument comes down to the basic argument against all innovation and progress and globalization in the world. To what extent does this homogenizing process of innovation hamper the individual characteristics which make us unique? If we bring McDonald's into Beijing, for example, are we squeezing out the local family owned restaurants and ultimately the whole local Chinese restaurant industry? I don't think there's a yes or no answer to a question like that (inside joke ). It's a complicated issue that we are seeing played out on a global scale right now. Anyway, I don't think the answer is to stop innovating and stop collaborating and pooling our knowledge. We just have to find a way to preserve individual identity while being part of a global, connected community.

(As a footnote to all of this, this discussion highlights for me how valuable a community like NE has been. This little community is like a microcosm of the world at large and what we learn here can be applied to finding solutions in more global problems. We've got people here from all different parts of the world - limited by the English language of course, and internet access - but that's changing too. This isn't just some black hole where we go to waste our time. We are participating in the globalization of the world right now and discussions like this mirror the ones that are going to be taking place and are already taking place amongst the people who will determine the future of our planet. Pretty exciting I think.)

The entire issue I have (and I think magnus has) is that generally speaking, taking focus away from the individual creates a situation where progress becomes linear, and attention is easily gained from simply copying, or nearly copying others. However, in a community that stresses individuality and uniqueness, the problem changes to the quality of construction being overlooked for the uniqueness of the idea and execution. In this situation, technical prowess is belittled. It's sad that a community is rarely ever mature enough to focus on both equally, but what ya gonna do?

[quote name='Magnus' date='Aug 6 2005, 11:13 AM'][QUOTE=J

if there is somebody not knowing NE and any other rct site. no internet, nothing, he could still have fun making realistic parks.
if he now shows us his work (after a long time of playing the game) he will not come up with something that looks like most of the NE work (at least in most cases), but he could still come up with an amazing park.
and i guess this park would be even better than most of the NE work, cause he really has to use his own creativity.
he can use his creativity much better  (more freely), cause he doesn't have to fit the NE-sheme of parkmaking.

learning by copying just makes you famous on NE or any other site sooner, but I'm totally sure learning by doing will bring up better results in the end.
and i play rct for fun not the be the best as soon as possible and to me it's the most fun to come up with own ideas, with something i can call my own.[/quote]
Think (hope) I recognise what you are saying.
I spite of answers/comments to this one, I totally agree with you, Magnus.

I just wrote a 3.000+ characters post until i found out what blitz's post means. (next time you better use english words I understand. saves me lots of time)

I guess he sums it up pretty well.
Today most people just copy other ideas without thinking and don't come up with own ideas. Instead they build parks for making them look good and tell us it's art, cause they are of the opinion art is only meant to look good, but in fact every piece of art has to have a meaning and some sort of background.
(I better stop talking here. you might see why in 3 months and 8 days.)

Still this person without internet might not get the apache and come up with wonderful hacks, but he will have the best wheel and that's what I want to see. He might be able to open our eyes, but most people would just call him a noob cause he doesn't fit the NE-standarts.

This convesation tought me a lot about parkmaking thanks Ed and all the others. Ed I need to talk to you on aim.

wow, it's like, you are talking about me or something

Actually, Blitz.. you don't do all that much...

heeeey, lay off me =(

So I go at my own pace, kay?