RCT Discussion / New LL Memory Editor/Trainer

... which really sucks.

Don't quote be on this; but I think EverQuest just has 'glitchy-semi-visible' track and it's perfectly visible when the train goes over it.

As I remember it, it's the vertical incline on the end of a shuttle loop type coaster that's semi-visible.

How can you remember that?

Oh, and if there's a market for glitchey semi-visible track, here's an easy no-fail way to do it:

1) Build land, build ride through land, zero clearances and lower land (this is the same as the no supports hack)

2) Raise water over the land tile where you built the track

It'll be glitchey and half-visible, especially if something goes on the water underneath it or the train goes over the track. This happened to me on the bridge in Cajamarca until I got smart and just built chairlift track underwater.

^^Well I was wrong about the track reappearing when the train goes over it. I've just had a look.
But I was right about everything else.

I think it's more likely that the park was brought up in some other conversation about invisible track (like when unfriendly invader was released perhaps) and I checked it out again, or that I had searched to see if anyone had found the invisible track hack before. Rather than remembering the park first time around.
But even so it would have been a long time ago

^The track in everquest is over water, so I guess that's how it's done.

edit: ps Changing the track type to coffee shop/crooked house etc was first posted on the rct2.com forums, before appearing in parks I believe. Although it really comes down to 8 cars allowing you to change the track type.

Edited by darkfire, 08 August 2006 - 12:51 PM.

so this is changing into "who gets credit for being the first to do invisible track"?

in that case, i can tell you. it's midnight aurora
really, it isn't important. and truly invisible track is, as stated by someone else above, not the same as just hiding the track somewhere underground, which, with, first 4cars and now codex, just shouldn't be done ever again.

to get back on topic.
holy shit at that cool tuts site, darkfire!
your map editor looks so good?!?
why's mine all black and blue? am i having an old version?

^Yeah but people had to sink track if they wanted to have verticle or diagonal track before because they caused error trappers with crooked house mode. But like you said, just use the Codex now.

Edited by OLE, 08 August 2006 - 03:18 PM.

what exactly does codex do differently than set it to crooked house?

Well in my opinion the most important thing isn’t being the first to use a hack, it’s using it well. And I’m not sure if anyone has that accolade for invisible track in ll. I don’t think we were debating who was first anyway, but if it predated Erwindale and that’s not on topic either haha not that I mind.

your map editor looks so good?!?
why's mine all black and blue? am i having an old version?

The map editor can display the map in several ways. You can change them with the map type menu at the top. But now I’ve changed what the default is.
The default one is now: squares with rides on are highlighted orange, squares with several (non-ride) objects on are highlighted green and all other squares are (roughly) the colour of the land. The brightness of the colours depends on the object density or the height of the land respectively.

holy shit at that cool tuts site, darkfire!

Thanks, I think I mentioned it in OLE’s topic. They’re created with a program called wink. It takes screenshots every time you press a mouse button or a key and creates a slide show of them. Giving the effect of a movie, except a really small file size (partly as rct is only 256 colours too, but even so, the dual station one is 421KB!) and it’s really easy to edit, as it’s actually only a few frames (the dual station one is 38).

I don’t know if it would be useful for your rctmv’s? Probably not as the frame rates will be too low, but I haven’t tried to do anything like that so I don’t know. There is a feature to take screens at certain intervals but I haven’t tried that either.

----------

UPDATED VERSION

I think it’s going to be next Tuesday when I have a day off again, so the next version may take a while to finish. So I’ve uploaded the nightly build again. There might be some prominent bugs in it; I’ve tested it quite a lot but my main worry is that the bugs I’ve found might not have been fixed completely.
But having said that, it fixes bugs that were in the previous versions. So overall might be more stable.
A bug I think I've fixed, but you should look out for is when you select another square in the overview map. The height of one of the land tiles is set to that of the other. I'm pretty sure it's fixed, I just don't want anyone messing up their parks not realising.

I’ve overhauled the code for the map control to fix the flaw causing certain squares to not appear in it. The very first thing may still not appear in the construction map control though. There are several small changes too.

I’ve also added better error handling including a more useful error message will be displayed on fatal errors. You can easily copy and paste the errors from the text box into this thread for me and it won’t crash the trainer (just not do what ever you wanted).

I’ve also added a couple of circles that show the colours of rides and scenery. All info in the map control is updated every second or so, no need to do a total refresh now to see some changes. So paint the track piece you want to edit and within a couple of seconds you should be able to see which it is in the map control.

These colours are still shown for scenery objects even if they aren’t colourable, which seems a bit odd at first I imagine. Bushes/shrubs always show up as dark red for example.
I haven’t done multi-tile scenery at all yet.
If thinks have invalid colours the trainer will crash, there is no proper error handling for this yet.

I’ve changed what each mouse button does when clicking the overview map:
Left clicking is now used to select single or multiple squares.
Right is used to drag the map to pan around.
Middle is used to bring up the square in the hex editor. This seems to have a random bug of showing the last object in the square, even though it’s passed the same address as the map control.

One word of warning though, it now uses another system file now. So if your already using codex-nightly.exe then create a backup of it in case you don’t have it.
If you are missing a dll then let me now and I’ll update the installer. Thanks.

I think that's everything. So here’s the good stuff:
Zip 175K | Exe 540K

Enjoy, and let me know if you get any errors. Thanks.

df

edit: ^you can't make diagonal and vertical track invisible that way. You get an error trapper. You can also do it another way with codex, in which you can make diagonal and vertical track invisible.
Also posix, as I said above I think I was mistaken about being able to build layer upon layer of track in the same place. You can have as many layers as you like, but a train can only go along one of them.
So what I said on msn yesterday was wrong.

Important edit: I forgot something at the end of the dual station tutorial; the height of each station is recorded in the ride data structures. So you'll need to increase that by 1 too to avoid getting error trappers when opening the ride. I'll add to the ride options window so you can change these.
This should be done after I get home from work tonight. Sorry about this, I should have tested it more thoroughly.

Edited by darkfire, 09 August 2006 - 06:21 AM.

what exactly does codex do differently than set it to crooked house?

Um, because I use the other way. The one where you can make any track invisible by making scenery under it invisible.

Oh, and this is great as usual darkfire.

Edited by OLE, 09 August 2006 - 02:12 PM.

I’ve added the option to the modify ride options window to correct the value of the station(s) height variable after raising or lowering the entire ride.
Just open the modify ride options window,
-Select the ride you’ve moved
-Select the advanced tab
-Set the station height to the right value. There are 4 boxes, one for each station; you only need to change the ones where the ride actually has a station.
-Press OK

I’ll update the dual-station tutorial, so the second station is actually a working one, asap.

Exe | Zipped

df

Edited by darkfire, 10 August 2006 - 04:09 PM.

I've updated the tutorial for dual station rides: Here it is.

OLE has informed me that the chain lift button in the map control doesn't work. This appears to have been me closing Visual Studio without saving everything. I've made the button call the procedure again. I also noticed that typo in the map control toolbox \/

and fixed that too .

Exe | Zipped

df

It just keeps getting better. The color feature looks cool. And the option to raise the stations with one click from the ride options tab.

It is curious that you would get an error trapper though if the stations are at a different height from the track when we've been using the beast to sink the stations for years. And you can also just replace the stations with paths and delete them without interrupting the ride. Is there something else this changes? Can't you still delete the stations all-together with the cloning feature or do you have to raise them to the right height first. (Granted I could just test this myself, and I probably will once I get home, but I was wondering if you could elaborate a bit on why this was necessary)

I don’t think I've explained this well. RCT stores the coordinates of (the first piece of) each of the rides stations. These are stored in the part of the sv4 file with all the other information about each ride like ride type, car type, operating mode, ratings etc. After raising the ride with the trainer, you have to correct the z-axis/height coordinate (and for each station if there is more than one).

That’s what I have added the ability to change to the ride options window. If the values are incorrect you seem to get error trappers when opening/testing or demolishing the ride.
This is true with sinking stations with the beast is it not; you can’t open or demolish them.

So with this you may also be able to demolish sunk stations as normal after correcting the coordinate. I say ‘may’ as if I remember correctly you can’t actually build at height 0 in game, 1 is the lowest allowed and so there may be errors because of this.

I’ve thought about making an ‘auto-correct’ feature, where the trainer scans the map for the coordinates of each ride’s station(s) and checks they’re correct. But if I made a mistake or there was a bug in it, it would do a lot more harm than good. (Though it could just ask the user for conformation before changing the coords for a ride.)
This feature would also be one step closer to being able to move things around in parks. Which comes in useful after spending a long time building something, and then wishing you could move it over a few squares.
Actually moving land & objects around wouldn’t be difficult. It’s changing all these coordinates that causes the headaches (and error trappers ). In addition to rides; all animated objects also have coordinates stored elsewhere and so do all the sprites (ride cars, peeps etc).

Edited by darkfire, 10 August 2006 - 05:20 PM.

I get it now. And I believe you're right about rides error trappering before when you've used the 'sink stations' feature if you try to edit the track or test or open it. You could open the ride before sinking the stations though and it would stay open.

so i was getting to work more on my solo last night and really got to use codex more seriously for the first time.
i don't know how often i checked msn if you were online darkfire

if i made a list of possible things to add, would it be useful for you?

one thing i kept searching for a while but couldn't find. maybe you took it out?
i remember in one of the earlier versions i was in a menu where it'd let you choose in which direction a tile was slanted. i could really use this because i sunk a ride and now those sqaures are "locked".

To get the menu to change the slant of a tile you click on the + sign next to the tile in the map control.

I would very much like to hear your list. I welcome any ideas for features.

I'm at work again today, but off tomorrow and will probably be on msn pretty much all day then

I get an error trapper when I try to use the invisible track hex-editing trick. The error is in the game, and it crashes RCT not the trainer. I was using the grey tarmac path like you used. There were objects underneath the path I was trying to make invisible though. Maybe that was the problem?

I've just had a play around and I too get an error trapper when there are objects underneath the path.
The same happens when I make the track invisible, then build things underneath it. It might be more specific than that though as I've not had this problem in the past, although as said in the tutorial I have had other problems.

The reason I kept quite about how I did the invisible track in falcon was that it was so problematic and I didn't (and still don't) fully understand it. So I felt posting it on the forums would have been a bad idea, and that I should only tell people if they asked and I could warn them of the problems I had.

When writing the tutorial for it and playing around with it a few weeks ago, I didn't have any problems at all. So perhaps it comes across, as being it's more reliable than it really is.
I can't stress to everyone enough that if you don't need to do it this way (i.e. your not using diagonal, vertical track etc) then you should just use the crooked house track method.

If anyone can shine any light on what they can get invisible and what they get error trappers for, it would be greatly appreciated.
So far things that seem to cause errors are
-When the path or whatever’s being deleted is the last item in the square (generally highest in game/appears last in map control)
-That includes empty squares
-When there’re objects below the path, (although in falcon I can build things directly under the track with no problems)

--
Seeing as I’m posting I might as well add what I’ve been doing since the last update.
I haven’t done much work on this as I’ve been working on a trainer for rct2.
But I have been trying out a new interface for the trainer (using a third party package, it’s not all my work ). It’s basically the same, but all of the windows can be clipped together, so you can move, minimise and resize them together. The positions of all the windows are saved too, so they are in the position you left them when you last used the trainer.

It’s also possible to have multiple ‘perspectives’ of the same windows and switch between these as you wish. For example you could have one where it’s just showing the game and a simple toolbox with lower raise clearances etc (for things like building coasters etc), another like the one shown which is for using the map control (for making things that require a lot of hacking) and a third which shows the map editor and ride options without the game (for editing things you’ve already built).
It’s probably better to make one of my flash movies of the interface when it’s more finished to give people an idea of whether it’s useful.
The major problem with it is that it greatly adds to the overall complexity of the code, hence makes it more error prone. But it’s not actually adding any features.

df

wow, i think it looks great.
where can i download this?
rct2 trainer?
might gonna make me play it.