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perrohunter
hotpotamus
Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 and its spiritual successor, Planet Coaster, are fully 3D and allow you to even "ride" the coasters virtually. Apparently 3 wasn't received so well, but I'm a fan of them all.
elabajaba
Parkitect is the modern spiritual successor to rct1+2, while Planet Coaster is more like 3. The thing I (and some others) don't like about Rct3+planet coaster is that they're park painters where they're more focused on decoration and making a pretty park and the game is trivially easy, vs rct1+2 and parkitect where you generally have to put some work into making a profitable park and there's a bit more focus on the management and simulation.
Parkitect also has multiplayer.
squeaky-clean
I came here to find an excuse to mention Parkitect. Controlling the sight-lines of your park to hide employee pathways and deliveries in order to be more Disney-like is a great feature. Simultaneously fun and infuriating.
bombcar
I watch some planet coaster on YouTube and it blows my mind watching the park painters. I can’t do much more than plop down existing models.
7373737373
RCT3 was buggy, but the fireworks were amazing!
People created genuine art with it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ItBY3H_04I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9WgMeqM3bY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF5n5I6omSA
The devs made the fireworks effect editor accessible from within the game, which allowed the community to create thousands of custom ones:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI1IrLHN2hk
https://www.shyguysworld.com/Archive/index.php?topic=17808.0
JadoJodo
For me, the fact that it was 3-D took away the “magic”.
globular-toast
RCT3 was great but it was so buggy. I think they patched a lot of the bugs with a big update but I was on 56k dialup at the time and couldn't download it. By the time I got ADSL I forgot about it. It's a shame and really sucked for people like me who bought it but couldn't update it.
MichaelCollins
RCT3's first person riding feature was neat, but the bump in performance requirements meant that building large sprawling parks just wasn't as practical. I've never tried it on modern hardware though.
TylerE
It runs great on even a 10 year old machine these days.
RCT2 is way better though… level design especially in 3 was lackluster, and the fact that Chris Sawyer wasn’t really involved in it shows.
Lucasoato
RC3 was so ahead of its time. Although it was released 18 years ago, it featured first-person 3D simulations of user made roller coasters! In 2004!
Can you imagine it?
armada651
I can definitely imagine it because Theme Park World (Sim Theme Park in the US) did this in 1999. It was one of their main selling points.
You weren't just limited to roller coasters either. You could freely walk around the park and walk into any ride all in first person.
codeflo
Yes? What do you imagine games looked like in 2004? That was the year Half-Life 2 came out. Obviously, a game like RCT also has to run a simulation and can’t focus on graphics as much as a shooter. I’m just saying, if anything, RCT3 looked sub-par.
irusensei
At work I say "the ride never ends" everytime some ongoing issue or everyday shenanigan happens. My colleagues kinda interpreted that as something I say but they have no idea its a reference to Mr Bones Wild ride which is RCT2 meme.
planetsprite
I think that meme strikes a chord in people because there's an inherent relatability to being stuck in a hellish process almost deliberately designed to be as long and soul-crushing as possible. Some websites/user interfaces, "ecosystems", feel like they are Mr. Bone's Wild Ride in cloud-compute platform form.
pastacacioepepe
Mr. Bone's Wild Ride is a kafkian metaphor for our struggles.
smcl
There's another thing that was inspired by this. There's a really creative gamer/streamer/creator called "Daniels" who made a sort of troll level in Garry's Mod, a theme park which looked spectacular but had an infuriating and impossible process to enter. Inside the park had various pitfalls and traps to further infuriate participants. This sounds a little bit cruel but it's really fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7ZrKehQ_xc
TylerE
Because you’re butchering the line.
It’s “I want to get off <x>”
Doxin
One of the lines from the original meme is "I want to get off Mr. Bones' wild ride.", but "Mr. Bones says: The ride never ends!" also features which the parent comment is probably referring to.
If you're going to confidently state someone is misquoting something you should probably make sure they are quoting what you think they are quoting.
TylerE
The second formation doesn’t exist in the game
modinfo
> OpenRCT2 requires the original RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 game files
striking
For assets (graphics, sound, etc.), yeah. OpenTTD, an older sibling project, eventually was blessed with artists willing to remake all of the assets so the game could be played without the original TTD installed.
I think a lot of the charm of RCT2 comes from the specific assets in use and the degree of whimsy and joy they contain, more so than TTD's matter-of-fact trains and planes and such.
It's not like these folks are setting out to make a totally free-as-in-beer game that replaces the old one; they just want to be able to fix bugs and add features, and you can't easily do that with the original retail stuff.
account42
RCT2 is now 20 years old - what do we as a society gain by still not letting those assets be freely redistributed and built upon.
striking
Take it up with Disney, not these fine folk.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
Maakuth
Those are commercially available from gog.com: https://www.gog.com/en/game/rollercoaster_tycoon_2
And the data files from the demo version do the trick too.
Gigachad
The way they have been working on this has been interesting. Rather than a from scratch approach, they started with the original game and over time replaced component by component the original game bits with open source replacements.
capableweb
That sounds like that wouldn't hold up in court, it's not a "white room" implementation by any means. I hope it won't be tested though.
Contrast that to OpenTTD or OpenRA where they (AFAIK) re-implemented the engine while still having the same approach of re-using the main games assets.
Edit: taking a look at the source code, I don't think what you're saying is actually true. RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 was written entirely in Assembly but I cannot find any Assembly files in OpenRCT2. So unless they already finished porting everything, it seems incorrect.
thenameipicked
They have finished porting everything. And it was done chunk-by-chunk, but in C++ instead of assembly.
Asooka
I looked at the source a few years back and saw more than a few functions that looked like the result of decompiling machine code to C. I didn't spend much time trying to see if that's true or not, but in the end it doesn't seem to matter. Still, if you like the game, you should keep a local fork of the repository, just in case.
GaryPalmer
I think this is the go-to approach for most of these kind of projects. You decompile it and then start refactoring it into C-functions and such that make sense. That this game was originally written in assembly probably helped a lot making the disassemby readable.
MichaelCollins
I had the discs years ago but lost them at some point. They're available online to pirate, but GOG also has them for a few dollars.
MisterSandman
You can use the demo files for RCT2 to play OpenRCT2 for free. It's not encouraged, but OpenRCT2s website has a download link for it.
throwup
That's very common for projects like this. ScummVM is another example. If you don't require the original files to run, you're essentially redistributing a commercial game for free, which even for older titles is generally not advised.
hogepiyo
It's weird to see genres come and go. Back then it felt like there was a "Tycoon" game for almost everything (well, most of them were fairly terrible, but still...).
TTD was always closer to my heart though really, that and the original Zoo Tycoon. I almost wish there'd be something like this for Zoo Tycoon, while Planet Zoo has some really nice attention to detail with the animals the level of design tuning you can do with scenery / buildings feels a bit overwhelming.
seibelj
Also check out Theme Hospital open source remake
The websites are rather similar!
dopu
This looks pretty great. I’ve been meaning to get back into RCT2. Does OpenRCT2 _feel_ like the original?
TylerE
Yes. It’s basically pixel perfect, except that you can enable various improvements.
For instance: RCT2 used a single byte to store many values.
Some of these were reasonable (like the number of cars on a ride).
Others weren’t… like the number of guests in a queue. When it hit 255 additional guests would refuse to enter the line.
kadoban
Very much so, yeah.
bawolff
I played this recently. Its amazing what a rush of nostalgia i got, and how well the game holds up.
generj
It is even more amazing realizing what a small team made the game, and that it was written in assembly!
The game holds up very well. OpenRCT2 fixes a variety of bugs as well.
I highly recommend https://m.youtube.com/c/MarcelVos Marcel Vos who explores the limits of the game engine, various rides, etc. Amusingly there are scenarios which require nearly zero effort to win.
aasasd
Specifically, the ‘small team’ is Chris Sawyer, with art by Simon Foster and music by Allister Brimble. Even though the art is very recognizable (made by rasterizing 3d objects), both RCT 1-2 and TTD are very much Sawyer's games.
shmde
Little Jimmy thinks the ride was not fun
Little jimmy thinks the bathroom is dirty
Little jimmy has drowned
veselin
I played RCT2 many years ago. But what was most notable was that it had a DST bug that lost all your progress when daylight savings time changed.
But the game was great. Just I had to play some levels twice.
fps_doug
That was RCT1, and they released a patch quite quickly... I mean, at max half a year after the game released, obviously.
Now that you mention that again, I wonder what the underlying issue here was. Nothing in the game depends on the real time clock, and more importantly, how does reloading the saved progress at an arbitrary point in the future break things? I do remember though that poking around the game files I couldn't figure out back then where the progress is stored at all. When I moved to a new machine, I reinstalled the game and then copied over everything from the old machine, basically replacing the entire game, and still all progress was lost. I could still load the individual save games though–which I always saved right after passing the scenario, so nothing happened. Luckily I was only 4 or 5 parks in, so from then on I made sure to save individual scenarios right before passing them, never after, so the win condition would trigger again after loading them.
veselin
I believe it was even more than one game that had this problem. If the data would be stored in a file, then any kid would copy and edit it. So, it was put in shady places in the registry and other windows configs.
voidfunc
I loved rct and rct2 but Parkitect has been a worthy spiritual successor for me
piersj225
I had no idea OpenRTC2 was written in JavaScript https://github.com/Limetric/OpenRCT2.org
grandmczeb
OpenRTC2 is mostly C++[1]. Your link is to the source of their website.
piersj225
Thank you for correcting me!
whalesalad
I believe the original was handwritten in Assembly
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I play OpenRCT2 with my daughter quite often, it works great, I recommend the OpenGL render engine since it allows for additional zoom and the kids love to see the people walking around and puking all over the park.