RCT Discussion / NCSO and its viability

Simply put, do you see NCSO becoming as viable as what LL and RCT2 CS are today, and not just a novelty thing?

 

I think so, honestly. That or I feel a lot of guys are gonna go back to an earlier bench that is a ton less stress than the stuff we have now, but again with NCSO it all depends on your playstyle. I see NCSO as a bridge between two extremes- In CS, literally any object that you'd ever need to make anything is at your disposal, and a lot of times it takes out the creativity and fun of it for being able to put X object on a building and make it pretty all of a sudden. This, of course, led into hyperdetailing; thank you, Rob. But LL, while having those challenges that boggle your mind to figure out how to get something looking a certain way, a lot of LL is more of a representation of what the maker had in mind rather than exactly what the parkmaker wanted. Though some like Pierrot and Loopy were able to close that gap, It still exists for all at varying degrees.

 

That's where NCSO comes in. Challenging to come up with exactly you want, and a ton more experimental than what CSO is nowadays, but you're still able to make things with relatively good detail and accuracy and with the ease of being able to actually raise walls and stuff.

 

 

I know i'm probably the most biased perspective one can get on the issue, and that probably all the work i've done in NCSO can be seen as 'pointless' as CS can do it just as good or better, but whatever. I wanted to see what you guys think about it

I've personally never really been able to 'get into' the NCSO scene, purely because I don't really have the patience or creativity to come up with innovative ways to create something that can rival the current high-detail CSO scene. Whilst it doesn't mean that I can't appreciate good NCSO work when it comes out, there is always a part of me that thinks "that could have been done easier and better with CSO." I have huge admiration and respect for the people like yourself, RCT2Day, and Fizzix who create some amazing stuff that does look really great but just can't grasp, in my own mind, the appeal of limiting oneself by creating something that isn't as good despite having all the necessary tools to do so.

 

I see general NCSO work more as a nostalgic way of building [similar to minimalistic CSO] as a means of getting away from the hyper-detailing that seems to be almost required for something to be good. But then, similar to how Pierrot and Loopy build in LL, there's people who are pushing the limits of NCSO to create things that reach towards high gold and spotlight quality.

 

I do think that NCSO will still be viable in future, but probably not to the extend of LL and certainly not CSO. Just because, at heart, RCT2 on NE is essentially a sandbox where people want to build what they want without limitations. CSO is as close as people will get to this complete sandbox so unless for nostalgic reasons or purposeful limitation for the sake of a challenge I just can't see NCSO gaining a strong foothold.

I don't see it going anywhere special. People will build it as they please. It for sure won't go away and I doubt it will get much more popular in the high quality segment of it like you and nin buid at.

I think it's been around long enough now that it is becoming a 'staple' rather than a phase.

 

That being said, I don't think it is going to have any much more of a following than it does. People appreciate it, it is RCT, but a lot of people don't want to build like it or can't get into it, much like LL.

 

The difference with LL is that people want to play it because it is nostalgic. But with NCSO, the way it is played, isn't nostalgic, it's new, it's different. Which is great, but it doesn't attract many people for it's nostalgic value.

 

I think the only way NCSO is going to be boosted here is if more reddit players come over and rather than build with CSO, start to increase their NCSO skills and use trainers to do what you guys do at the moment.

Building with CSO doesn't make everything you do in RCT look pretty. Take my screenshots as an example.

I never appreciated or liked NCSO until I built Whispering Pines for the Reddit Contest. I was suprised to see how difficult it was and foud it really rewarding whenever I built anything in that park that I felt like I could put in a CSO park and not have it look awful. I also learned a little bit about trackitecture in the process (though I overused it in that particular park).

 

It's challenging to build but it's fun, and I now have a whole new appreciaton for it.

I never appreciated or liked NCSO until I built Whispering Pines for the Reddit Contest. I was suprised to see how difficult it was and foud it really rewarding whenever I built anything in that park that I felt like I could put in a CSO park and not have it look awful. I also learned a little bit about trackitecture in the process (though I overused it in that particular park).

 

It's challenging to build but it's fun, and I now have a whole new appreciaton for it.

 

Well, I played ncso at first beacuse on the surface it seems way easier than to dabble with hundreds of deco objectls like i have to with custom scenery. I played it somewhat in a nostalgic sense, bastardizing older works like RoB and such. Then I guess I actually applied myself  to learning how to really play, and here i am

I build with NCSO because I don't feel like messing around with all of the "1/8 deco block" and "1/16 trim piece" objects. It's also a challenge to build something new and exciting with the same pieces. Don't think I will ever have the patience to build with CSO, so if any of you were expecting it from me (doubtful), I guess you'll be disappointed.

^You just keep doing what you're doing. Particularly in LL.

I'll throw in my two cents concerning NCSO and its future.

 

I've almost always built NCSO throughout the years with some exceptions (see my first screen posted on NE5).  That is because I never cared for experimenting with CS as I play on a very old computer and I was afraid it couldn't handle things like trainers, CS, etc.  Consequently, I was able to refine my style in NCSO until I finally began experimenting with 8cars.  Two years later, I'm still playing NCSO because I enjoy it more than any other style.  As csw said, with CS you have too many options that it hinders how you think and use the materials you have. With NCSO, you are severely limited, which forces you to use some creativity and makes for clean, amazing parks at the best of times.  

 

Do I think its viable?  Currently, no.  We only have a handful of solid NCSO players around whereas there are plenty of CS and LL guys.  Realistically, some of us will leave the game in a few years.  However, I think the few of us who play NCSO really well can enable more people to experiment with it.  Like Louis said, reddit can offer a lot to this community here so I think expanding to there with NCSO would be hugely beneficial.  I am optimistic for the future and I think, with the core NCSO guys continuing to produce good parks, we can make it into its own genre of RCT like LL or CS.

 

To Louis, I think you need to add a "best NCSO player" and "best NCSO park" category to the yearly awards.  That'll encourage more people to play the style.

We did have a NCSO park award last year, and I think we may have had an NCSO player award too, I can't remember.

 

Our awards change year in and year out depending on how viable the categories are, for example some years we have LL awards, sometimes we don't.

 

I'm not sure there has been enough NCSO parks this year to justify an award, but we'll see when it comes to compiling the nominations.

I think people should just play how they want.

I agree poke that people should play the way they want; this thread in no way is a plea for others to play a style they don't like to.

I also, first and foremost, think people should play how they want, and do what they enjoy most. And I think people should also post stuff on the site that they just do for fun, without competition in mind. But when it comes to competition on the site (which is what the site was founded on, and what has allowed it to survive as the home of the elite), I don't think it should be expected that special consideration be granted to a park because it's NCSO. 

 

That said, I think it's potentially viable. But, I don't think we've seen an NCSO project on the spotlight level quite yet. And to get there, it needs to be some NCSO that rivals CSO without a rose-colored lens. For example, Siege of Jerusalem is an exceptional park, and were it a typical release and larger, would easily be a spotlight imo. But that's not because it "looks amazing for LL". It's simply because "it looks amazing." Or like Kumba said, regardless of game or style: "Some of the best themeing ever in RCT"

 

I so often see people say things of the nature: "Wow that's some amazing NCSO!!" or "This really good for being NCSO"

 

It will be fully viable once it becomes, "Wow that's some amazing parkmaking!" And the fact that it's NCSO is an afterthought. 

tldr; Possibly verbose, I know, but basically, NCSO is potentially viable. But it's not there yet. People should keep playing it, if that's what they have fun with, but should not expect special consideration because they've challenged themselves by limiting their choices.

 

(also, I think the idea that NCSO is more challenging or more experimental than CSO is a myth. NCSO has its own unique challenges and opportunities for experimentation, namely limitation, just as CSO has the challenge of liberation. They're at the opposite end of the spectrum and each is unique, neither type of challenge is better than the other. I find the challenge that CSO offers more entertaining than NCSO personally. But that's just my preference. I'm glad others like you Shogo enjoy NCSO, because the thing that makes this site truly strong is PEOPLE HAVING FUN PLAYING RCT!)

The thing that gets me liking NCSO is the ease of use. It's so quick and 'easy' to get a park going, filled with working rides and peeps roaming about compared to doing the same with CSO, or even LL for that matter (at least for me). It's almost like a sort of sketchbook, seeing what the full park (or simply a ride/building) would look like before you spend hours on the thing. Now, I hardly ever build the same thing twice (except for boomerangs and jurassic park buildings), but I have done so before with my NCSO sketch in mind.

 

Also, like mentioned before, it's the ease of use that's so appealing. Obviously I (among many others) have been pushing the boundaries with the medium, but even so my work tends to be more simple for that very reason. Hacking and whatnot can get annoying to me, and the constant back-and-forth with 8cars gets tiring. Sometimes I just want to BUILD, you know? I don't care for details, for trackitecture, for intense peepability. I just want to place a few buildings, making a midway and put some coasters in it. Build a few blue queue lines and blue-berried shrubs and call it a day. See those peeps? They don't care if it's made out of 4 walls or 5000 deco pieces. They're having damn fun down there. Perhaps that's why I haven't "intensified" my ncso work as much as some of these current guys, because once you start pushing for intense trackitecture and map object manipulation, the fun starts to disappear. If I wanted to work hard to make something look really great, I might as well just play CSO and get the full picture in my head out there.

 

Now, I'm not trying to dog anyone that plays it that way, because what Shogo, Fizzix and RCT2Day are doing is great, and I know that it really doesn't take as long as I make it out to be to build something cool. Maybe I'm just lazy or whatnot, but I almost never finish anything so anything that pushes myself away from building is something I tend to avoid. Obviously I still hack and whatnot to get a better looking ncso park, and I'm thankful the community is fond of it, but I don't think I'll ever go so far as to have this intensified ncso work, but rather stay in the happy medium that I'm in now.

That is exactly how I feel, nin. Couldn't have said it better.

I'll try to bring a new thought into the CSO vs NCSO debate we've been having for years and years.

I find it interesting to look at when NSCO was ever popular. I think it's rather clear CSO has ruled the way for almost all of RCT2's day. NCSO existed for a couple of months (weeks?) just when the game came out, without producing a single popular release. It then didn't take long until someone like ToonTowner created good and not what had so far been shitty CSO, and everbody wanted it. This brought a shift in the nature of playing RCT to treating it purely as a modelling tool. The method applied was (and largely is) to have detailed but yet flexible tools (CSO) at hand to create realistically accurate parks. Even if they are fictional, the motivation is still to model them after real life as closely as possible. You can see this by the ever growing prevalence of realistic style parks in the past 5-7 years, which I find correlates with the intricacy of available CSO.

However, my generation of NE1 and NE2, especially with LL and its lack of CSO, was much more excited by building visually pleasant "parks" that lived in RCT's own aesthetic world and were only quite loosely based on real life parks. It didn't matter that much. You just wanted to create visuals and atmospheres. Or let's say, that's the extreme where I was at. But an example would be what people used to call "NE Style" that had very little to do with accurate recreation, but was still immensely popular. And great!

What LL had to parallel CSO was codex. And you can see what pierrot and Loopy have done with it. pierrot being especially interesting because he often completely lost the park aspect without losing the recreation aspect.

Perhaps both ways of seeing RCT have always co-existed. Even RCT1 parks that attempt to model as accurately as possible do exist with mr_ice and some old Danimation spotlights, that today look ugly but back then were probably hailed for capturing something really well.

I would see the NCSO parks of post-2010 to be somewhere in between both paradigms, and as a result often look quite undecided, because their builders have so many years of park history to be influenced by. It takes a strong will and conviction now to do your thing, because with every click you make in the game you can be almost aware of what category this will put you in in the community's eye.

So I'd say it's healthy to learn how to exclude yourself from the community and grow a bigger head to do what you feel is right with RCT. Be passionate with the game. Then come back and present.

 

First interesting RCT discussion in ages.

Reading your entire post, you consider this a debate? Do other people consider this a debate?

 

RCT is a game, not some sort of discussion. Do we really need discussion about wether or not to use scenery objects? Both NCSO and CSO are cool.

This is much deeper than just whether NCSO or CSO is prettier. Why would a discussion ever be bad? I don't really understand this at all.

 

I haven't been around as long as posix has (obviously) but I have been around a while. The NE style is something I have never been able to properly put into words before, but it is definitely what first drew me to NewElement. I had dabbled with recreating stuff in RCT as well as making aesthetic stuff before, but the NE style was neither, strictly speaking. It was a way of playing RCT that I couldn't even wrap my head around. Composition on a huge scale, with concessions to strong color palettes and well-represented themes without necessarily "stretching the limits" of what RCT could do (minimal hacking). Codex stuff is fascinating and now we could never live without it, but it's not what made the old parks great.

 

CSO is great because it changes the aesthetic of the game. Modern RCT2 is starkly different to RCTLL, and NCSO RCT2 just doesn't look all that different from LL generally. This is probably why there was such quick gravitation to CSO upon RCT2's release. I've always wanted to get into the older style (which was what I tried with Skyline) but generally when I build I feel utterly compelled to make sure I'm getting as many realistic details as possible in. It's true what posix says - you have so many years of prior RCT history influencing everything you do. It can be overwhelming sometimes. Having people like Shotguns pushing the envelope with regards to NCSO is great but will fundamentally change how everyone perceives other NCSO work going forward.