Ask the Experts / Invisible vehicles?

Is there a way to make ride vehicles invisible? It's easily done with a new DAT but I want it for the Reddit contest where that's not allowed. I have a potential method lined up, but it's going to be very tricky to pull off so I wondered if there's a standard way of doing this.

Why would you need that if I may ask?

I want to make the water coaster train invisible and sync it with the dive coaster so it throws up a splash behind it. Splash will be the wrong shape, of course, but I can't do it properly without adding a new DAT, and some splash is better than no splash.

lol as soon as you said this I figured that was your plan. I want to do the exact same thing.

This is the closest I could come up with. It's far from perfect but if it happens fast enough your brain sort of ignores the boats.

I've tried setting the train length to 2 - water coaster trains have invisible front and rear vehicles already so with a train length of 2 the boat doesn't show - but this gives a floating point exception. I am currently looking for the source of the problem to see if it's something I can work around - there's no reason why an all-invisible train should crash, as my body slide is like that and works fine (but it's not available in the bench).

I wonder if you merged the dive coaster to the wooden coaster element that dips under water. I've never tried this but in this case the water splash is from the track, not the car. 

It's from both. Each car has a "splash type" field (which is normally left unset), and for certain splash types (the wooden and water coasters), the splash only shows when it's on a special track piece. Merging a train that does not normally splash onto wooden or water track will not create the splash.

I've decided to go the long way around - I will first set the train type to the dive coaster (because it contains an invisible car), then override the normal car order so that the invisible car (which is normally at the back) is the first and only car in the train. Then I need to set the splash flag without modifying the DAT, which is the hard part because I don't yet know where in memory that value ends up. I've discovered a few other interesting things you can do while messing around with this - for example, you can mix and match vehicles from different rides in the same train:

Well, I've solved the original problem - I can make any train invisible - but it doesn't help with what I wanted to do. It seems the game always reads the splashes from the original DAT, so I would need an invisible vehicle with the splash flag set to substitute, and there doesn't appear to be one in the provided map. I'll have to make do without splashes.

I've discovered a few other interesting things you can do while messing around with this - for example, you can mix and match vehicles from different rides in the same train:

Internally, trains are represented as a linked list of vehicles. Each vehicle carries it's own index which is the object to use for that vehicle, and a second index which is the vehicle index (each object file can have up to 4 vehicle types).

Normally, every vehicle in the train would point at the same object, and the vehicle types follow a regular pattern that's set in the DAT file - but because these values are stored seperately for each vehicle you can change them individually. You can mix vehicles from different ride types, or rearrange the normal order (for example, you can make a whole train composed of front cars, or all invisible cars).

There are other values in these vehicle structures as well - for example, you can also change the friction of cars, their maximum speed (for powered rides), the sound effect to use, and various other parameters.

Each vehicle also has it's own associated ride, so you can create a train that belongs to two different rides at once - but in my tests that quickly crashed the game.