(Archive) Advertising District / Six Flags Over Indiana

In my free time I have been working on a small project called Six Flags Over Indiana. The park is planted 30mi. due north of Indiannapolis and will feature ten great coasters and have a Looney Tunes themed area as its special features. In the meantime I have just have screenshots of one of the park's two inverted coasters-Firebird.

Here are all four angles of firebird.








YOUR THOUGHTS?

In order to receive feedback here, I strongly suggest not showing every view of a coaster you designed in the coaster editor. There's nothing really to say.

I don't like the layout. You have to make the halfloops on the Cobra Rolls go inward. It looks much better that way. And come on, don't advertize any scenario editor coasters here. Nobody really wants to see them that much. It's a great way to practice your skill in making coasters, but just for experimenting.

Wait until you actually start the park to advertise it..

Dang, this got my hopes up cause for some reason NE has been very slow in the RCT dept. today..

-Ryan

you forgot to make it a btr clone

you forgot to make it a btr clone

*Cough*

Six Flags only builds BTR and SLC clones... You're allowed to be sorta original with a floorless or stand up though... That is unless you're SFMM...

Ride6

You've got a number of good layout ideas, many of which seem inspired by real-life examples of B&M inverts (no better source to draw from). It's evident in the placement of the loop, zero-g roll, cobra roll and mid-course brake run that you have some idea what you're doing. Unfortunately you need to trim the fat from that layout, a lot. For example, there's essentially no reason why you need to go off on that whole circuit after the cobra roll with all those flat parts. Why not go more directly to the mid-course brake run, perhaps only inserting one concise hill in between? You also need to figure out some way to arrange the corkscrews so that you don't have that big long flat section leading into them. Why not head more directly into them, or if not put a few hills and turns in between and have the corkscrews slightly lower down?

Here are some basic no-nos that you should watch for:
-180-degree shallow turns before the steep part of the drop on first drops
-Sharp bottoms of drops when the drops are like 80 feet high
-Really long straight sections - use very sparingly and only if necessary, don't use them at all if you can help it
-S-bends at anything more than about 15 mph. Particularly in a location like you have it, it just makes it look as though you weren't careful enough to make way for the track.

Since this stuff is rather hard to convey verbally, here is an example of what I mean by trimming the fat, in regards to your coaster.

(The interlocking corkscrews are just personal preference but I think they help to keep the layout more concise and self-contained. After a double corkscrew you're just kind of out there, pretty far from anything.)

Hope this helps (shameless plug not intended ).

Edited by Panic, 14 March 2006 - 08:22 PM.

Woah. Well done Panic. That's a kickass coaster.
Listen to him.

you should win some kind of prize for being so helpful. coasternater, he know's what he's talking about, learn from him. especially if you want the park to turn out realistic like the name of it says you do.

Good idea. Here are some more coasters called Scurge and Batman: The Night Warrior

Batman: The Night Warrior
http://i41.imagethru...age/scr-41.html

Scurge
http://i42.imagethru...age/scr-43.html

Oh god... For the Intamin-style hyper/giga you have to either use the gentle slope up and the normal steep one down or you need to hack on a vertical drop, no two ways about it.

And the Batman coaster is a disaster too. It needs a "B&M dip" to release from the chain, those corkscrews should be interlocking not just near eachother and the last zero-G roll simply shouldn't be there. I know Jojo rolls and all that and it probably wouldn't be done.

For a shred of realism please greatly revise those layouts, that is unless you're not after realism in which case I still don't like it but can accept them for what they are (cruddy, sorry, you can do better I'm sure).

Ride6

Well, I can't ask you to time travel five years back and develop a lasting and near-obsessive interest in real-life roller coasters, which would have been about the most advantageous thing for your coaster-building abilities right now (just look at Gutterflower). The best I can recommend is that you head over to rcdb.com and screamscape.com and the like and just start checking out pictures and diagrams of coaster layouts. Eventually, if you do it long enough, the way those coasters flow and look will become subconscious, to the extent that you'll be designing coasters with real-life flow without even thinking why you're building a certain element a certain way - you'll just know it's the right and real way.

Also, you've said that you dislike many of the Spotlight parks on this site, but I'd recommend that you look at them anyway for the coaster layouts - many years of collective refinement and rising standards within the community went into the design of those coasters. You can learn a lot from them.

These layouts indicate that you have a vague sense as to what goes into making a good coaster at the beginning of designing it, but also that you're kind of stumbling in the dark because you don't have much of a reference while building, as in "is this a good idea to put this here or not?". You need that reference. It can be found by looking at real-life and good RCT coasters.

Edited by Panic, 14 March 2006 - 11:34 PM.

It's good to see a person such as panic being so helpful. There are just so many things people think they know about coasters that.. well, they don't!

Cobra rolls can look nice every way, it depends on the look you're going for.

and straight track makes the coaster! seriously, subtle use of straight track is needed for the coaster to look smooth.. and i'm not talking about just single pieces, whole lengths can really work to your advantage. (it just didn't, here)

Anyways, the designs aren't bad.

manta in thrillmatic is probably the best example of elegant/subtle use of straight track that wme was talking about.

Here are some basic no-nos that you should watch for:
-180-degree shallow turns before the steep part of the drop on first drops
-Sharp bottoms of drops when the drops are like 80 feet high
-Really long straight sections - use very sparingly and only if necessary, don't use them at all if you can help it
-S-bends at anything more than about 15 mph. Particularly in a location like you have it, it just makes it look as though you weren't careful enough to make way for the track.

I agree with most of those except for the first one, and I hope to show that through a screen one day if I can get this thing off the ground.

And tracid, if you're refering to that unnecessary brake run before the helix into the last brake run, imo that was anything but subtle and ride-enhancing.

Well, a coaster designer as skilled as yourself could probably make the 180-degree thing work very well, and in fact it would be rather thrilling from the rider's perspective. I'm just saying in general because it is very tricky to make without looking problematic (and the one he has above doesn't succeed in that regard). In my opinion it's one of those things that you need to have a good enough purpose behind using it so that the risk of being unorthodox doesn't matter.

Edited by Panic, 15 March 2006 - 06:20 PM.

no, phatage, i was talking about the sections before and after first loop, and maybe a few others. where it was a few sections of flat, straight track.

Panic, that layout looks shockingly similar to one I made around 6 months ago. It's really interesting because I too was going for a realistic alteration of BTM. Great minds must think alike.

Another no-no which really bugs me, which sometimes I see top ranked park-makers forget, is never EVER use 9 cars per train on the B&M style inverts. I don't even know why they offer the option.....the ONLY B&M invert to have 9 cars is Alpengeist, and it's just the zero car on the front.

^Totally right. I always go 8 (a lot of real-life inverts are 7 but it looks too short in RCT).

Postit, we should make them into the first accidentally constructed pair of duelers.