It turns out that not all of things I discussed in the video are true for RCT vanilla and RCT classic. The 'synchronization range' is only a thing in OpenRCT2. In vanilla and classic it only works if both first tiles are right next to each other. They can still be in opposite directions, but they have to be next to each other, otherwise it will not work. Everything discussed in this video is true to OpenRCT2, so if you play that you don't have to worry about anything.
From my personal experience a couple of decades ago with the original retail release of RCT2 (and its expansions), station heads do not have to be at exactly the same height to synch up. They will also synch if the stations are exactly 1 height unit apart (i.e., they share at least one edge of the cubes that they occupy in 3D space). I don't know if this can be extended, say, to have a coaster with two synchronized stations at significantly different heights, perhaps even one directly above the other (as I never thought to try it), but it definitely works to have horizontally separated stations at the same height +/- 1. I know this from a four-track synchronized wooden coaster I built that had its stations in two pairs, separated by 4 tiles using 4 station heads of a wooden wild mouse coaster in between them, one level lower so I could hide them underground. This made it a lot easier to get the entrances/exits and paths into and out of the coaster with optimal placement for maximum throughput. I do not know whether or not OpenRCT2 emulates this.
When you talk about the "first tile" of each station, do you mean the back tile where the station begins which is the first tile that returning vehicles come back to, or the tile that leads to the start of the ride itself that departing vehicles leave the station from?
@@tifforo1 based on watching the video, the first tile is the start of the station that trains will leave (I.e. the tile that leads to the start of the ride itself). Trains will need to be in that first tile so that they can start in sync.
it's cool that the steeplechase gets so much extra excitement from this - in real life, most steeplechase coasters were "racing" coasters themselves, so reflecting that in the game's mechanics is a nice touch.
I’ve always had an odd love of this feature. I’m not sure why seeing two coasters launch at once is so appealing. I swear in one of the original versions, there was a park that came with three steel coasters. One yellow, one orange, and one red. Those things were the shit!
I remember that park. Was one of my favorites, as it was one of the only scenarios where you had 3 coasters synchronized. I also remember that park always annoyed me since you had no food stalls until you researched them.
Thank you for the excellent channel. RCT2 is very old now but it's great still seeing new videos about the game appear. I've learnt so much new stuff about the game from you, keep it coming and Merry Christmas!!!
Holyshit you're right. Me and some other people have been working on logic gates a while back but I think these are a lot easier to work with. The main problem we encountered was making a NOT gate though. If you have no signal coming through somewhere it has to turn into a signal. There were some designs but no reliable ones as of yet.
@@aphenioxPDWtechnology I think you need a NOT gate to make NAND and NOR gates. NOT gates are tricky because it requires a good and reliable way to create something out of nothing.
Very useful info. I struggled to get a steeplechase coaster over 7 excitement but now I know I could have just made it synchronized and saved myself the stress.
I suspect what’s going on at 5:46 is that communication is somewhat bidirectional. A station not only looks for adjacent stations and whether a train is ready to leave there, but it also tells them to release their train when everything it can see looks ready. The yellow station doesn’t see anything so the train never waits. The blue station can see the yellow station. When its train is ready and it can see yellow’s train is also ready, blue releases its own train and (redundantly) sends a signal to yellow to release its train at the same time. Red can see blue, but only looks further to the side from the tile near the rear of the blue station that it sees, so it won’t notice yellow as seen from the tile blue itself uses. As soon as the red and blue trains are ready, red releases its train and sends a signal to blue to do the same, which blue obeys even when yellow isn’t ready. After extending the red station so it can see the yellow station (directly and through blue, but either by itself should suffice), the whole shebang works as you initially expected. I’m just hypothesizing based on this video and my sense for how a programmer might have implemented it. It would be interesting if I’m right. It would also be interesting to be proven wrong and learn the true mechanic.
Now I really want to make some dual coasters with this, though they'll probably be terrible lol. I never actually knew about this or like half the stuff you talk about on this channel. Thanks for the informative videos, and Happy Holidays!
i am addicted to building coasters with 4 stations next to one another such that they race and/or duel and end up in the next station over so that they keep looping through them and still always start 4 abreast
Using one ride waiting and one ride not in a sync would probably help if the non waiting ride was shorter, because the shorter ride could complete multiple circuits on it's own before the longer ride returned to launch with it. The end result wouldn't bring any profit benefit other than making sure the rides are balanced and aren't wasting time idling, but you could potentially make some awesome designs with that though! Thanks for sharing that; I might use that trick in my next game! :D
The blue coaster only needs one coaster to synchronize with. Thus, if either the red or yellow line up with it, it meets all conditions needed for launch.
when i was a kid, there was a lot of time wasted with making three station synchronized coasters, and they had to be perfect where they all return to the station at the same time, give or take half a second. i'm glad i didn't know back then that you could synchronize up to 16 stations, cuz 11 year old me would never see the light of day ever again lmfao
This may show my naivety when it comes to game programming: but I think it should be quite possible, if you have two trains that leave synchronized, to keep track of the distance between the two trains throughout the whole ride, and then calculate the excitement boost based on when the trains are in proximity to one another. Before the rides are tested you do some quick trigonometry between each piece of ride relative to each piece of the other ride and store these values to look up later when the trains are moving. This would have the added "side effect" of not being able to cheat the system by placing an unused station piece, because it has no train, no bonus.
You can also do a single coaster that syncs to itself if the two sets of stations on a single coaster are adjacent. You have to have double the amount of trains then test and close one coaster until it makes a complete loop. Then the single coaster will be synced with its other station. This gives the neat effect that the train will always come u p on the opposite side.
6:14 I think, based on what we see here, we could assume this: If a coaster is set to synchronize it will check its related coasters. If some are not synchronized, it will go when ANY of the coasters are ready. If they all are, it will wait until ALL of them are ready.
I wonder how the devs determined all these numbers? Did they go to a theme park with a bobsleigh coaster and another one with a synchronised bobsleigh coaster and think "hmm, I'd say that was .2 more exciting, because of the the syncing"
What do you think about using sychronised stations on your pre build coaster design? (aside from your mobius designs) For a lot of your pre build designs it's possible to build a mirrored version and place them side by side. For example the coaster in your Extreme Heights Tutorial. Furthermore in this example you would save space becaus two coaster would share the path. Perhaps in your next ride overview videos you can mention which designs are good for sincronised station. (e.g. spiral coaster medium, with sincronised station the excitement would raise above 6.)
Ah, the synchronised coasters from one of the early stages of the original RCT... I tried to import those into RCT3 once, since I thought they'd be interesting to experience from first person... Turns out they're built in a way that violates the rules for RCT3... So much for being able to import old rides. XD
Could you explain how the Park Value (PV) mechanic works? I'm having trouble completing Dinky Park on the original RCT because I don't know exactly what helps or hurts the value, or how it can decay or increase over time. Edit: Diamond Heights!
The biggest factor affecting park value is your rides. For maximum park value, your rides need to be totally new and have high stats. Note that those stats don't necessarily need to be excitement: a coaster with less than 2 excitement but over 20 intensity and 15 nausea would have great park value, for example. You also get more value from a particular ride if it's the only one of its type in your park. There are many other factors to park value, but ride stats and age are the main factors.
The way to get rid of the "crashed" status of a ride is to reset the ride. Once the mechanic has fixed the brakes (assuming a brakes failure was responsible for the crash), click the construction tab or, in RCT1 and 2, click the Close Ride button twice. Reopening a crashed ride isn't a good idea, though: its popularity will probably never recover, and you'll be ineligible for the Safest Park Award so long as it remains in your park. You should aim to prevent crashes by doing two things: running shorter trains or adding length to your track to reduce the station entry speed to below 30 MPH (48 km/h) or, if playing RCT2 or Classic, using block brakes.
on 6:44 it's simple, the blue coaster falls under both rules now so it will wait for red but it will also move when yellow tells blue it arrived, in that way when all 3 collide you get 2 rules at the same time, though when the first rule goes of just before the other (wich will happen in 99% of the cases it will follow the rule of the one to ocure first.
I’ll never forget one time I try and synchronizing with adjacent stations and there was one across the map that it seemed to be waiting for because despite having one right next to it, it wasn’t going even though they were both ready, and the one across the map wasn’t going either 🤷🏿♀️
I bet the logic is "if station A is ready and all stations it's synchronized to are ready, send A and all stations it's synchronized to". This would explain 6:30, where it checks red (synced to blue) and will say red is ready, blue is ready, so send them. Disregarding yellow.
In a general purpose park challenge (the whole 'park rating/guests' or 'park value' challenges) are these worth doing or is it worth just having a new coaster? and when you have multiple next to each other, is there a point where it isn't worth adding another one? (ex: Steel Roller Coaster's Shuttle Rocket prebuild. if you have two going in tandem I get it, but if you add a third, a fourth, etc when does it become more trouble then it's worth)
It looks like on the three synchronized setup at 5:47, the yellow coaster will go whenever there is a train to synchronize with, no matter which train it is.
RCT Classic synchronization doesn't work at all unless the main stations on both coasters are adjacent. Meaning that from these examples 2:16 only the left two and the one on the far right will work, the other 3 will just have both coasters not moving at all
Thanks, I just built one like the third one on the left and couldn’t get it to work. I’ll try the far right option instead to see if it solves the issue. I like the idea of the trains leaving from opposite directions.
hi Marcel, I realy like your rct2 posts. About the dualing coasters, is there a way to safe them in the game as one coaster? Even after sychronising 2 stations, it still counts as two coasters. Can you safe them as one coaster and use it in other parks or scenarios?
No- you can save them as two (or however many) coasters if they're not too complex and just build them next to each other. The exception is if you built them as a mobius track (multiple stations on one ride - see my 7 tips comment) which will be a single ride thus can be saved as one ride. This question reminds me of another tip related to a problem with saving interacting / grouped rides- backup often and don't design anything other than simpler synced rides in the designer (design them in park)- the reason being the only problem with more complex synced rides (it also applies to rides with complex interactions with/interweaving other rides or/and complex height variables) is that saving them sometimes messes up due to complexities over supports, interactions and height- I lost a rather epic four ride combo designed in the designer as it couldn't handle saving each ride properly. So sometimes they'll only save correctly within a park not individually or in the ride designer. Think it's to do with things like the game changing the supports etc as you build the rides up to accommodate the other rides, and also the game matching the supports to the land heights/terrain. For this reason it's wise to rename your park saves every so often as well just in case.
Oh, man. I’m a programmer, and would hate to attempt to fully implement or even debug a fully featured synchronization script. It looks like a nightmare. Keeping 16 coasters synced? Nightmare. Totally doable, just bloody hard. I would want to add a ton more UI features to make it more obvious to the typical non-nerd user exactly which conditions are and aren’t being satisfied.
Awesome tutorial! Just one question. Can a ride synch with itself? (have the track go from the first station to the adjacent one and back to the first one) Or is it only possible with 2 rides? Merry christmas from me too!
Definitely possible! Everything he described in the video can be done with only one ride, with the only limitation being that one ride can only have a maximum of 4 stations.
@@LeggyBoiTim In the last park you see in this video, Diamond Heights from RCT1, the wild mine ride you see at the top right is in fact a single continuous track synchronized with itself. The name for that layout is the Mobius layout, and there are three real-world coasters that make use of it; the two I can recall are The Racer at Kennywood (not to be confused with the coaster of the same name at Kings Island, which is two separate tracks) and Grand National at Blackpool Pleasure Beach (also featured in RCT1).
@@reillywalker195 The Grand National is dope. One of those where you can feel the carriages and track flexing as you ride it, definitely adds to the sense of jeopardy.
Can you use that to make a ride that takes a very long time, or more precisely to make a "chain" of multiple coasters where the ride time doubles from one ride to the next? The first coaster A a long time to complete and has a station A1 synchronized with 2 stations of a other coaster B, B1 and B2. So that the train in B1 and B2 will only leave when a train in A1 leavs but not the other way around. The train in coaster B goes from B1, leaves there when the train in A1 also leaves, goes to B2 and leaves there when the next train in A1 leaves. From there the train in coaster B goes to yet a other station B3 and from there back to station B1. B3 is similar build as A1, there are 2 stations of coaster C, C1 and C2, synchronized with station B3, so that the train in in C1 and C2 only leaves when a train in B3 leaves. Every coaster has only 1 train. If this works, it would mean the ride time for coaster B is double that of coaster A and coaster C has a ride time 4 times that. You can add more coasters, each doubling the time. If you build 32 coasters in a chain, it would mean the last coaster has a ride time of 2147483648 times the ride time of coaster A. I read something about a limit of 255 coasters, if this is true it would mean the last would have a ride time 28948022309329048855892746252171976963317496166410141009864396001978282409984 times longer than coaster A. I do not have RCT2, so i do not know if this works.
Seven good tips for syncing: 1. some good tutorial and entry/exit pathing tips as well as an awesome synced coaster group (possibly my favorite) here: ua-cam.com/video/3-xNWfBk2yQ/v-deo.html 2. you sometimes need to re-sync them- it can go awry if a ride breaks down or something else puts things out of sync- from memory I think I close them all, pause and reopen then unpause- but experiment as it's been a while. You may also be able to open them in pause mode in the first place (again from memory) 3. mirroring can be great for synced rides, lots of creative options, really clever designers can also time ride interactions such as interlocked loops, flypasts, head on approaches etc (fighting or racing coasters being two of the options, the variance due to guest weight can sometimes make the latter an actual race) 4. similar to mirroring but trickier and won't always work due to speed per ride lap varying is time-matching so that trains mostly return to the stations at the same time even though the tracks aren't mirrored, a lot harder than mirroring due to getting different circuits to take the same time 5. mobius loops (research Blackpool Pleasure Beach- Grand National, each ride can have up to four stations of its own so you can double up on this idea) 6. be creative- I synced up four different rides with a four elements theme 7. Try to still keep your path grid as neat/complete as you can- to minimize the risk of adding to the chances of lost guests, and use anything you know on safety to make the ride as safe as you can as it's a showpiece ride 7b. have fun, syncing has always been my fave aspect of RCT2 (it may even be easier than in newer games but I've not tried yet for comparison)- the in-game and player-created parks have sometimes made great use of it and you can create some truly wonderful combination rides with it from junior versions of major coasters that sync with their bigger counterparts to all kinds of unique blends of rides- you may invent a brand new combo. I also hope to do some Wood vs Steel concepts in future as well as some mini me versions of big coasters for the less brave/younger guests.
Question: Synchronisation gives you that bonus to Excitement. But not being the only coaster of a type gives a -25% penalty to Price. And if you want two coasters mutually linked, for obvious reasons you want them to be indentical in runtime - wich works best if they are a copy of type + track. Of course you do get double the through put and higher guestcap (particular on hard guest generation), but still: Does one offset the other?
What version of RCT2 vanilla are you using? I have the Triple Thrill Pack, and I can only have coasters synced when the exit stations are directly next to each other
I missed it if it was mentioned: Does this work in synchronizing stations of different ride types? Wherein each ride will get its respective stat bonus regardless of the other station(s) it's synchronized with?
another instance where only one station (For a 2 Unique Stations setup) won't wait if the other one has broken down (Say the Wild mouse @ 1:17 has broken down the Mini Coaster will ignore the Wild Mouse until it's gets fixed)
See FoxMaster's 'making of x5' vid I linked in my 7 tips comment. You can make stations different lengths as long as the first tiles align which allows for some clever pathing solutions- you just need the trains and shortest stations to be compatible. If needs be, as with FoxMaster's five track design, you can use different exit stations so you have the space needed for exits and exit paths as well as the entrance ones. It's worth solving this aspect of the design before you start the build. 16 could get quite messy though! Now there's a challenge: the best 16 track synced design :)
Does having the stations right by each other but facing different directions only work in open RCT2? I tried that in the normal game a couple weeks ago and it wasn't working for me. The stations were the same lengths right up against each other but facing different directions.
What if you a ride with 2 stations, with like 1 straight track piece in between them? So, station a with entrance, whole ride with lots of excitement, station b with exit, 1 track piece, station a. And you sync station b to some other ride. Does the bonus still count?
Heb je gezien dat je op looopings staat? Buiten dat, maak je echt zeer interesante video's. Heb je plannen om iets met modded rides te gaan doen? Zoals bijvoorbeeld de B&M wing coaster, Intamin Flying coaster etc. En natuurlijk de flat rides
Really interesting video, but I feel like your aside in the middle revealed that this entire video is just documenting bugs introduced by OpenRCT's changes in synchronization behaviour...
Not sure if those are bugs though. I discovered openrct2 when it was already 2 years old, so there have been a lot of changes that I wasn't there for to witness them happen. It might very well be intentional.
Holy shit, is there a way to get a better look at that pair of coasters at 1:28 ?? Those things are beauty’s, I’d love to see if I could build something half as good on my own game
How should you place enterance/exit buildings in rides that have several syncronized stations? Or do one just sacrifise optimal troughput by placing them at the very end? I see this as a problem for 3 or more stations that go in the same direction or 5 or more that goes in different directions.
could you use the multiple stations synced with each other around 6:00 to make an even longer coaster than your previous record? could you exponentiate 31 somehow? i'm not sure of the exact mechanics or if this is possible.
The best way i found was to extend the middle station more on the entrance part, but that means the other tracks need a drop or lift just at the end to go over the buildings.
The point of transport rides, at least in RCT2 and Classic, is this: guests will ride transport rides regardless of their preferred ride intensity if they can do so for free. You thus can use transport rides to move guests in large numbers from one section of your park to another and, perhaps more importantly, get large numbers of guests off of your paths. They're more useful in pay for entry parks since you're not charging for rides in such parks anyway, but you can use them in pay for ride parks to that same effect if you wish.
Hey I think u missed that If 1 coaster has multiple stations (monorail is most common for this) And its on synchronize it waits for a train in each station to be ready But Maybe that is only in RCT3 wich i play and not in RCT2
Hi Marcel, I noticed something strange with synchronization. I have a bunch of (very space efficient) copies of synchronized twister coasters in a grid in my Extreme Heights scenario. Every pair should synchronize as their stations are adjacent, but I find that the whole grid synchronizes, even though there are 4 tiles in between every pair of stations. have you ever encountered something like this?
If you build for example a river rapid and an inverted coaster, do they get the bonus as you mentioned, so a different bonus or do they get the same bonus?
So, in OpenRCT2, would it work to have a dedicated station piece set to synchronisation and just copy and paste it next to all of your coasters using the tile inspector (and maybe insert a corrupt element to make it invisible) to get the bonus on all your coasters while only using a single extra ride?
Someone did some experiments with copy pasting synched stations a while and I think it indeed worked like that. That's a lot of work though, and if you're using the tile inspector you are most likely making a sandbox park, in which that stat boost wouldn't really be relevant.
Hey Marcel, talking about interesting applications (3:50) wouldn't this be a good trick to beat the longest coaster record? i.ibb.co/ryTJBV5/Screenshot-20181229-035005.png Idea: a coaster has to do 2 laps before its neighbour (to the right) can do 1 lap (resulting in the leftmost coaster having to do 4 laps before the rightmost can do 1, and this is obviously extendable): When trains depart at the same time from the first of the 2 stations in line, one train (train A) takes a bit longer than the other (train B) due to the corner. As train B doesn't wait, train A has to wait there until train B comes round for another lap, before train A can do its other 2 stations without waiting and get back to the first station, to wait for train B. Now train B has done 2 laps while train A only has 1. Now coaster B is also adjacent to coaster C, which has to do 2 laps before coaster B can do 1. With N coasters, you can make the leftmost coaster do 2^(N-1) laps before the rightmost coaster has done 1.
I haven't been able to test this though (the above is purely designed based on what you explained here), as this doesn't work in RCT Classic as you explained. (Yeah I really should install OpenRCT2)
I had a similar idea a few days after I released that longest coaster video and designed this: i.imgur.com/wgU5Ghq.png. It workes on the same principle as your design except mine is more complicated. The most important thing is that it works in OpenRCT2. You should join our discord (link in the description) if you want to talk about it more.
It turns out that not all of things I discussed in the video are true for RCT vanilla and RCT classic. The 'synchronization range' is only a thing in OpenRCT2. In vanilla and classic it only works if both first tiles are right next to each other. They can still be in opposite directions, but they have to be next to each other, otherwise it will not work. Everything discussed in this video is true to OpenRCT2, so if you play that you don't have to worry about anything.
From my personal experience a couple of decades ago with the original retail release of RCT2 (and its expansions), station heads do not have to be at exactly the same height to synch up. They will also synch if the stations are exactly 1 height unit apart (i.e., they share at least one edge of the cubes that they occupy in 3D space). I don't know if this can be extended, say, to have a coaster with two synchronized stations at significantly different heights, perhaps even one directly above the other (as I never thought to try it), but it definitely works to have horizontally separated stations at the same height +/- 1.
I know this from a four-track synchronized wooden coaster I built that had its stations in two pairs, separated by 4 tiles using 4 station heads of a wooden wild mouse coaster in between them, one level lower so I could hide them underground. This made it a lot easier to get the entrances/exits and paths into and out of the coaster with optimal placement for maximum throughput.
I do not know whether or not OpenRCT2 emulates this.
can you synchronize stations for the same coaster so you get the excitement bonus without the extra closed station piece or another ride?
Ethereal Swordsman i had this exact same thought and question as well
When you talk about the "first tile" of each station, do you mean the back tile where the station begins which is the first tile that returning vehicles come back to, or the tile that leads to the start of the ride itself that departing vehicles leave the station from?
@@tifforo1 based on watching the video, the first tile is the start of the station that trains will leave (I.e. the tile that leads to the start of the ride itself). Trains will need to be in that first tile so that they can start in sync.
it's cool that the steeplechase gets so much extra excitement from this - in real life, most steeplechase coasters were "racing" coasters themselves, so reflecting that in the game's mechanics is a nice touch.
I've been trying to build ones that will have at least 3 steeplechases synched but having a hard time
I've just seen a 11 minutes video explaining the logic of a function that I will never use in a game that I've played 15 years ago.
Thanks.
Hello everyone, and welcome... to another video!
Those duelling coasters are absolute works of art!
I’ve always had an odd love of this feature. I’m not sure why seeing two coasters launch at once is so appealing.
I swear in one of the original versions, there was a park that came with three steel coasters. One yellow, one orange, and one red. Those things were the shit!
After playing OpenRCT2, with RCT1 and it's expansions, I can confirm. It's called The Three Monkeys park. It's in the second expansion for RCT1.
“See No Evil,” “Hear No Evil,” and “Speak No Evil”
Haven’t played that in 15 years, but I remember!
I remember that park. Was one of my favorites, as it was one of the only scenarios where you had 3 coasters synchronized. I also remember that park always annoyed me since you had no food stalls until you researched them.
Yeah man was awesome
That coaster @ 1:28 is a beauty. I love that coaster type!
Yea, I was kinda sad when it cut away before the ride finished.
Those dueling snow-themed coasters are beautiful.
Thank you for the excellent channel. RCT2 is very old now but it's great still seeing new videos about the game appear. I've learnt so much new stuff about the game from you, keep it coming and Merry Christmas!!!
I can't wait for more videos in this series! You're getting me back into RCT2!
Merry Christmas Marcel. Thank you for making these videos.
Wait, aren't 5:46 and 6:42 basically just AND and OR gates with the blue track as the output?
Holyshit you're right. Me and some other people have been working on logic gates a while back but I think these are a lot easier to work with. The main problem we encountered was making a NOT gate though. If you have no signal coming through somewhere it has to turn into a signal. There were some designs but no reliable ones as of yet.
@@aphenioxPDWtechnology I think you need a NOT gate to make NAND and NOR gates. NOT gates are tricky because it requires a good and reliable way to create something out of nothing.
Now I'm wondering if RCT is Turing Complete
thats what I was thinking too
Ashdeer time to recreate Pokémon green in RCT
This is a series I can get behind. Would it be possible for you to talk about more niche building tips and tricks?
Yo dude ik ben zo blij met deze video. Er zitten zo veel mooie dingen en mechanics in RCT waar ik veel te weinig van weet.
Very useful info. I struggled to get a steeplechase coaster over 7 excitement but now I know I could have just made it synchronized and saved myself the stress.
Awesome video, as usual! Good job, Marcel!
I suspect what’s going on at 5:46 is that communication is somewhat bidirectional. A station not only looks for adjacent stations and whether a train is ready to leave there, but it also tells them to release their train when everything it can see looks ready.
The yellow station doesn’t see anything so the train never waits.
The blue station can see the yellow station. When its train is ready and it can see yellow’s train is also ready, blue releases its own train and (redundantly) sends a signal to yellow to release its train at the same time.
Red can see blue, but only looks further to the side from the tile near the rear of the blue station that it sees, so it won’t notice yellow as seen from the tile blue itself uses. As soon as the red and blue trains are ready, red releases its train and sends a signal to blue to do the same, which blue obeys even when yellow isn’t ready.
After extending the red station so it can see the yellow station (directly and through blue, but either by itself should suffice), the whole shebang works as you initially expected.
I’m just hypothesizing based on this video and my sense for how a programmer might have implemented it. It would be interesting if I’m right. It would also be interesting to be proven wrong and learn the true mechanic.
Marcel, thank you for taking the time to put this together and explain this better. I appreciate your efforts.
Brilliant work sir! I didn't know this mechanic was so flexible!
i like your videos and gave me info i never knew about RCT. Greats from Belgium :)
Now I really want to make some dual coasters with this, though they'll probably be terrible lol.
I never actually knew about this or like half the stuff you talk about on this channel. Thanks for the informative videos, and Happy Holidays!
WOW, I actually learned someting from this video. Thank you for the new information!
I love your channel for thoroughness!
i am addicted to building coasters with 4 stations next to one another such that they race and/or duel and end up in the next station over so that they keep looping through them and still always start 4 abreast
Using one ride waiting and one ride not in a sync would probably help if the non waiting ride was shorter, because the shorter ride could complete multiple circuits on it's own before the longer ride returned to launch with it. The end result wouldn't bring any profit benefit other than making sure the rides are balanced and aren't wasting time idling, but you could potentially make some awesome designs with that though! Thanks for sharing that; I might use that trick in my next game! :D
now i know what i did wrong, thx really helpfull vid
Wow, must have taken a while to get all that stat bonus info, gg!
merry christmas to! :-D
greetings from germany
sorry for my bad english
Merry Christmas Marcel.
The blue coaster only needs one coaster to synchronize with. Thus, if either the red or yellow line up with it, it meets all conditions needed for launch.
when i was a kid, there was a lot of time wasted with making three station synchronized coasters, and they had to be perfect where they all return to the station at the same time, give or take half a second. i'm glad i didn't know back then that you could synchronize up to 16 stations, cuz 11 year old me would never see the light of day ever again lmfao
I think this proves that much longer ride lengths are more than possible. Nice work.
I'm looking forward to the "explained" series :)
This may show my naivety when it comes to game programming: but I think it should be quite possible, if you have two trains that leave synchronized, to keep track of the distance between the two trains throughout the whole ride, and then calculate the excitement boost based on when the trains are in proximity to one another.
Before the rides are tested you do some quick trigonometry between each piece of ride relative to each piece of the other ride and store these values to look up later when the trains are moving. This would have the added "side effect" of not being able to cheat the system by placing an unused station piece, because it has no train, no bonus.
You can also do a single coaster that syncs to itself if the two sets of stations on a single coaster are adjacent. You have to have double the amount of trains then test and close one coaster until it makes a complete loop. Then the single coaster will be synced with its other station. This gives the neat effect that the train will always come u p on the opposite side.
When you wished us a Merry Christmas, i immediately
checked the date of the video.
Merry Christmas!
Also can you do you a video on the little door things that people use on wild mice coaster?
I think Deurklink made a video recently on that. Check his channel. Look for Git Gud #17
In case unaware you can use them on other things too- like the car ride, junior coaster!
Merry Christmas!
6:14 I think, based on what we see here, we could assume this: If a coaster is set to synchronize it will check its related coasters.
If some are not synchronized, it will go when ANY of the coasters are ready.
If they all are, it will wait until ALL of them are ready.
A decent explanation of the synchronization with adjacent station operation. My configuration awaits its integration, without confutation.
I wonder how the devs determined all these numbers? Did they go to a theme park with a bobsleigh coaster and another one with a synchronised bobsleigh coaster and think "hmm, I'd say that was .2 more exciting, because of the the syncing"
Jeez I love the snow maps in this game... such a nostalgic feeling.
What do you think about using sychronised stations on your pre build coaster design? (aside from your mobius designs)
For a lot of your pre build designs it's possible to build a mirrored version and place them side by side. For example the coaster in your Extreme Heights Tutorial. Furthermore in this example you would save space becaus two coaster would share the path.
Perhaps in your next ride overview videos you can mention which designs are good for sincronised station. (e.g. spiral coaster medium, with sincronised station the excitement would raise above 6.)
Ah, the synchronised coasters from one of the early stages of the original RCT...
I tried to import those into RCT3 once, since I thought they'd be interesting to experience from first person...
Turns out they're built in a way that violates the rules for RCT3...
So much for being able to import old rides. XD
merry coastermas
Could you explain how the Park Value (PV) mechanic works? I'm having trouble completing Dinky Park on the original RCT because I don't know exactly what helps or hurts the value, or how it can decay or increase over time.
Edit: Diamond Heights!
The biggest factor affecting park value is your rides. For maximum park value, your rides need to be totally new and have high stats. Note that those stats don't necessarily need to be excitement: a coaster with less than 2 excitement but over 20 intensity and 15 nausea would have great park value, for example. You also get more value from a particular ride if it's the only one of its type in your park. There are many other factors to park value, but ride stats and age are the main factors.
The way to get rid of the "crashed" status of a ride is to reset the ride. Once the mechanic has fixed the brakes (assuming a brakes failure was responsible for the crash), click the construction tab or, in RCT1 and 2, click the Close Ride button twice. Reopening a crashed ride isn't a good idea, though: its popularity will probably never recover, and you'll be ineligible for the Safest Park Award so long as it remains in your park. You should aim to prevent crashes by doing two things: running shorter trains or adding length to your track to reduce the station entry speed to below 30 MPH (48 km/h) or, if playing RCT2 or Classic, using block brakes.
Diamond Heights Doppelganger taught me the art of building the Mobius Track... next to Crumbly Woods and their beast of a Woodchip Woodchip...
You're track designs are really cool.
Awesome tips
on 6:44 it's simple, the blue coaster falls under both rules now so it will wait for red but it will also move when yellow tells blue it arrived, in that way when all 3 collide you get 2 rules at the same time, though when the first rule goes of just before the other (wich will happen in 99% of the cases it will follow the rule of the one to ocure first.
I’ll never forget one time I try and synchronizing with adjacent stations and there was one across the map that it seemed to be waiting for because despite having one right next to it, it wasn’t going even though they were both ready, and the one across the map wasn’t going either 🤷🏿♀️
Next video: Park Rating explained!
Deurklink has already made a video on park rating explaining exactly how to calculate it, but perhaps Marcel will do one as well.
I bet the logic is "if station A is ready and all stations it's synchronized to are ready, send A and all stations it's synchronized to". This would explain 6:30, where it checks red (synced to blue) and will say red is ready, blue is ready, so send them. Disregarding yellow.
In a general purpose park challenge (the whole 'park rating/guests' or 'park value' challenges) are these worth doing or is it worth just having a new coaster?
and when you have multiple next to each other, is there a point where it isn't worth adding another one? (ex: Steel Roller Coaster's Shuttle Rocket prebuild. if you have two going in tandem I get it, but if you add a third, a fourth, etc when does it become more trouble then it's worth)
The Merry-Go-Round gets 10 excitement if you synchronize it with another Merry-Go-Round.
It looks like on the three synchronized setup at 5:47, the yellow coaster will go whenever there is a train to synchronize with, no matter which train it is.
RCT Classic synchronization doesn't work at all unless the main stations on both coasters are adjacent. Meaning that from these examples 2:16 only the left two and the one on the far right will work, the other 3 will just have both coasters not moving at all
Thanks, I just built one like the third one on the left and couldn’t get it to work. I’ll try the far right option instead to see if it solves the issue. I like the idea of the trains leaving from opposite directions.
Shoutout to openRCT2 for releasing on linux!
hi Marcel, I realy like your rct2 posts. About the dualing coasters, is there a way to safe them in the game as one coaster? Even after sychronising 2 stations, it still counts as two coasters. Can you safe them as one coaster and use it in other parks or scenarios?
No- you can save them as two (or however many) coasters if they're not too complex and just build them next to each other. The exception is if you built them as a mobius track (multiple stations on one ride - see my 7 tips comment) which will be a single ride thus can be saved as one ride. This question reminds me of another tip related to a problem with saving interacting / grouped rides- backup often and don't design anything other than simpler synced rides in the designer (design them in park)- the reason being the only problem with more complex synced rides (it also applies to rides with complex interactions with/interweaving other rides or/and complex height variables) is that saving them sometimes messes up due to complexities over supports, interactions and height- I lost a rather epic four ride combo designed in the designer as it couldn't handle saving each ride properly. So sometimes they'll only save correctly within a park not individually or in the ride designer. Think it's to do with things like the game changing the supports etc as you build the rides up to accommodate the other rides, and also the game matching the supports to the land heights/terrain. For this reason it's wise to rename your park saves every so often as well just in case.
Could you do a video about effectiveness of scenery and mowing the lawn?
yes, he did eventually do those. have a look!
Oh, man. I’m a programmer, and would hate to attempt to fully implement or even debug a fully featured synchronization script. It looks like a nightmare. Keeping 16 coasters synced? Nightmare. Totally doable, just bloody hard. I would want to add a ton more UI features to make it more obvious to the typical non-nerd user exactly which conditions are and aren’t being satisfied.
Awesome tutorial! Just one question. Can a ride synch with itself? (have the track go from the first station to the adjacent one and back to the first one) Or is it only possible with 2 rides? Merry christmas from me too!
Definitely possible! Everything he described in the video can be done with only one ride, with the only limitation being that one ride can only have a maximum of 4 stations.
@@tubapride7847 Thank you so much!
@@LeggyBoiTim In the last park you see in this video, Diamond Heights from RCT1, the wild mine ride you see at the top right is in fact a single continuous track synchronized with itself. The name for that layout is the Mobius layout, and there are three real-world coasters that make use of it; the two I can recall are The Racer at Kennywood (not to be confused with the coaster of the same name at Kings Island, which is two separate tracks) and Grand National at Blackpool Pleasure Beach (also featured in RCT1).
@@reillywalker195 The Grand National is dope. One of those where you can feel the carriages and track flexing as you ride it, definitely adds to the sense of jeopardy.
@@LeaderOfTheRedNinjas Yeah you really feel like you need to keep your head down on it. Great coaster.
“But I am sure there are some interesting applications of this.”
Later uses it to design scenario’s were a ride won’t move for millions of years.
Can you use that to make a ride that takes a very long time, or more precisely to make a "chain" of multiple coasters where the ride time doubles from one ride to the next?
The first coaster A a long time to complete and has a station A1 synchronized with 2 stations of a other coaster B, B1 and B2. So that the train in B1 and B2 will only leave when a train in A1 leavs but not the other way around. The train in coaster B goes from B1, leaves there when the train in A1 also leaves, goes to B2 and leaves there when the next train in A1 leaves. From there the train in coaster B goes to yet a other station B3 and from there back to station B1. B3 is similar build as A1, there are 2 stations of coaster C, C1 and C2, synchronized with station B3, so that the train in in C1 and C2 only leaves when a train in B3 leaves. Every coaster has only 1 train.
If this works, it would mean the ride time for coaster B is double that of coaster A and coaster C has a ride time 4 times that. You can add more coasters, each doubling the time. If you build 32 coasters in a chain, it would mean the last coaster has a ride time of 2147483648 times the ride time of coaster A. I read something about a limit of 255 coasters, if this is true it would mean the last would have a ride time 28948022309329048855892746252171976963317496166410141009864396001978282409984 times longer than coaster A.
I do not have RCT2, so i do not know if this works.
Seven good tips for syncing: 1. some good tutorial and entry/exit pathing tips as well as an awesome synced coaster group (possibly my favorite) here: ua-cam.com/video/3-xNWfBk2yQ/v-deo.html 2. you sometimes need to re-sync them- it can go awry if a ride breaks down or something else puts things out of sync- from memory I think I close them all, pause and reopen then unpause- but experiment as it's been a while. You may also be able to open them in pause mode in the first place (again from memory) 3. mirroring can be great for synced rides, lots of creative options, really clever designers can also time ride interactions such as interlocked loops, flypasts, head on approaches etc (fighting or racing coasters being two of the options, the variance due to guest weight can sometimes make the latter an actual race) 4. similar to mirroring but trickier and won't always work due to speed per ride lap varying is time-matching so that trains mostly return to the stations at the same time even though the tracks aren't mirrored, a lot harder than mirroring due to getting different circuits to take the same time 5. mobius loops (research Blackpool Pleasure Beach- Grand National, each ride can have up to four stations of its own so you can double up on this idea) 6. be creative- I synced up four different rides with a four elements theme 7. Try to still keep your path grid as neat/complete as you can- to minimize the risk of adding to the chances of lost guests, and use anything you know on safety to make the ride as safe as you can as it's a showpiece ride 7b. have fun, syncing has always been my fave aspect of RCT2 (it may even be easier than in newer games but I've not tried yet for comparison)- the in-game and player-created parks have sometimes made great use of it and you can create some truly wonderful combination rides with it from junior versions of major coasters that sync with their bigger counterparts to all kinds of unique blends of rides- you may invent a brand new combo. I also hope to do some Wood vs Steel concepts in future as well as some mini me versions of big coasters for the less brave/younger guests.
Do you have or could you just do a showcase of some of those gorgeous coasters you've made?
Mooi
Vooden mouse coaster
I would love a video going over how concessions work in RCT2. You could title the video "Concessions Explained."
Question:
Synchronisation gives you that bonus to Excitement.
But not being the only coaster of a type gives a -25% penalty to Price. And if you want two coasters mutually linked, for obvious reasons you want them to be indentical in runtime - wich works best if they are a copy of type + track.
Of course you do get double the through put and higher guestcap (particular on hard guest generation), but still: Does one offset the other?
What version of RCT2 vanilla are you using? I have the Triple Thrill Pack, and I can only have coasters synced when the exit stations are directly next to each other
As he said in the video, he uses openRCT2.
*intensity*
I think i can make a clock using multiple stations and synchronizations. That would be cool
I missed it if it was mentioned:
Does this work in synchronizing stations of different ride types? Wherein each ride will get its respective stat bonus regardless of the other station(s) it's synchronized with?
When you thought "Nah this video is not for me, I know how it works!"
another instance where only one station (For a 2 Unique Stations setup) won't wait if the other one has broken down (Say the Wild mouse @ 1:17 has broken down the Mini Coaster will ignore the Wild Mouse until it's gets fixed)
Make a video on the water coasterrrrr plz
This is how you understand sychronisation conductance
nice to see you can sync 16 stations, but how do the people get on the ride? (or off for that matter) ;-)
See FoxMaster's 'making of x5' vid I linked in my 7 tips comment. You can make stations different lengths as long as the first tiles align which allows for some clever pathing solutions- you just need the trains and shortest stations to be compatible. If needs be, as with FoxMaster's five track design, you can use different exit stations so you have the space needed for exits and exit paths as well as the entrance ones. It's worth solving this aspect of the design before you start the build. 16 could get quite messy though! Now there's a challenge: the best 16 track synced design :)
8:56 [Intensity intensifies]
Does having the stations right by each other but facing different directions only work in open RCT2? I tried that in the normal game a couple weeks ago and it wasn't working for me. The stations were the same lengths right up against each other but facing different directions.
Must the statiosn be parallel to each other or can they also be perpendicular?
What if you a ride with 2 stations, with like 1 straight track piece in between them?
So, station a with entrance, whole ride with lots of excitement, station b with exit, 1 track piece, station a.
And you sync station b to some other ride. Does the bonus still count?
Heb je gezien dat je op looopings staat? Buiten dat, maak je echt zeer interesante video's. Heb je plannen om iets met modded rides te gaan doen? Zoals bijvoorbeeld de B&M wing coaster, Intamin Flying coaster etc. En natuurlijk de flat rides
Really interesting video, but I feel like your aside in the middle revealed that this entire video is just documenting bugs introduced by OpenRCT's changes in synchronization behaviour...
Not sure if those are bugs though. I discovered openrct2 when it was already 2 years old, so there have been a lot of changes that I wasn't there for to witness them happen. It might very well be intentional.
Holy shit, is there a way to get a better look at that pair of coasters at 1:28 ?? Those things are beauty’s, I’d love to see if I could build something half as good on my own game
How should you place enterance/exit buildings in rides that have several syncronized stations? Or do one just sacrifise optimal troughput by placing them at the very end? I see this as a problem for 3 or more stations that go in the same direction or 5 or more that goes in different directions.
could you use the multiple stations synced with each other around 6:00 to make an even longer coaster than your previous record? could you exponentiate 31 somehow? i'm not sure of the exact mechanics or if this is possible.
This explained why when I tried to sync a coaster with itself four times in a plus shape it did not work very well
Does this work as intended if you have a single ride with two stations (e.g. a mobius track)?
Yup!
Yep. I use it for my Entry and Exit stations for the excitement boost on big-capacity coasters.
I love these types of coaster designs rather than just mirroring a design to the other side as a separate roller coaster.
if I have 3 or more stations next to each other , how do I get visitors onto the middle ones? Doesn't every coaster need an entrance and an exit?
The best way i found was to extend the middle station more on the entrance part, but that means the other tracks need a drop or lift just at the end to go over the buildings.
So what's the deal with monorails/transport rides, anyway? Do they serve any purpose beyond roleplaying?
Nope.
The point of transport rides, at least in RCT2 and Classic, is this: guests will ride transport rides regardless of their preferred ride intensity if they can do so for free. You thus can use transport rides to move guests in large numbers from one section of your park to another and, perhaps more importantly, get large numbers of guests off of your paths. They're more useful in pay for entry parks since you're not charging for rides in such parks anyway, but you can use them in pay for ride parks to that same effect if you wish.
Hey
I think u missed that
If 1 coaster has multiple stations (monorail is most common for this)
And its on synchronize it waits for a train in each station to be ready
But
Maybe that is only in RCT3 wich i play and not in RCT2
I think that's RCT3 only, as in RCT2 transport rides cannot synchronize at all.
@@MarcelVos oh okay
Works in pretty much the same way in RCT3
Hi Marcel, I noticed something strange with synchronization.
I have a bunch of (very space efficient) copies of synchronized twister coasters in a grid in my Extreme Heights scenario. Every pair should synchronize as their stations are adjacent, but I find that the whole grid synchronizes, even though there are 4 tiles in between every pair of stations. have you ever encountered something like this?
If you build for example a river rapid and an inverted coaster, do they get the bonus as you mentioned, so a different bonus or do they get the same bonus?
They both get their own bonuses, which in this case are not the same.
Thank you@@MarcelVos
Can you do a video of how to maximize excitement and minimize intensity? I struggle with this. Please and ty.
do perpendicular coasters work on coasters that don't need a complete circuit as long as the first tile is touching the other station?
So, in OpenRCT2, would it work to have a dedicated station piece set to synchronisation and just copy and paste it next to all of your coasters using the tile inspector (and maybe insert a corrupt element to make it invisible) to get the bonus on all your coasters while only using a single extra ride?
Someone did some experiments with copy pasting synched stations a while and I think it indeed worked like that. That's a lot of work though, and if you're using the tile inspector you are most likely making a sandbox park, in which that stat boost wouldn't really be relevant.
Hey Marcel, talking about interesting applications (3:50) wouldn't this be a good trick to beat the longest coaster record?
i.ibb.co/ryTJBV5/Screenshot-20181229-035005.png
Idea: a coaster has to do 2 laps before its neighbour (to the right) can do 1 lap (resulting in the leftmost coaster having to do 4 laps before the rightmost can do 1, and this is obviously extendable):
When trains depart at the same time from the first of the 2 stations in line, one train (train A) takes a bit longer than the other (train B) due to the corner. As train B doesn't wait, train A has to wait there until train B comes round for another lap, before train A can do its other 2 stations without waiting and get back to the first station, to wait for train B. Now train B has done 2 laps while train A only has 1. Now coaster B is also adjacent to coaster C, which has to do 2 laps before coaster B can do 1. With N coasters, you can make the leftmost coaster do 2^(N-1) laps before the rightmost coaster has done 1.
I haven't been able to test this though (the above is purely designed based on what you explained here), as this doesn't work in RCT Classic as you explained. (Yeah I really should install OpenRCT2)
I had a similar idea a few days after I released that longest coaster video and designed this: i.imgur.com/wgU5Ghq.png. It workes on the same principle as your design except mine is more complicated. The most important thing is that it works in OpenRCT2. You should join our discord (link in the description) if you want to talk about it more.
I guess now I can make actually decent rides. Sadly my dualing / racing coasters suck so yea
Great video, but what's Jason Statham got to do with it?
5:17 How can anyone get to those trains there no space to put entrance and exit for blue and green trains
cowscrazy They don't, and there are no trains.
cowscrazy build the back of the middle two stations out longer and put the entrances and exits there.