Oooh, good tip. Volcano Bay has need of better cliff faces.
My wife actually watched one of the Let’s Play youtube videos with me and now I fear I may have some competition for my gaming computer.
Years ago she started to play RC3 and we did not see her for three days and she now has that same look in her eyes. : )
I don’t know what happened but the latest patch tanked performance wickedly for me. It’s nigh terrible compared to the way it was a week ago. The opposite of what was supposed to happen.
My aunt is not a gamer. If you ask if she plays games she’d probably say no even though she spends hours playing Facebook games… and once upon a time RCT. She never built a single coaster, always used pre-made models but spent days playing RCT 2 and I believe 3 too. Oh, and because I am an evil niece, I gave her a copy of Animal Crossing which also became a highlight of her days and got her off Farmville for awhile.
Strange—performance has been uniformly worse than I would have expected for me, but I haven’t noticed a significant downturn post-patch.
Performance nothing to write home about so far for me. It’s reasonable (40 - 60 fps), but I’ve downloaded a couple of bigger parks from the workshop that bring things down into the teens. It feels like it’s CPU-limited, as turning down settings doesn’t change anything. Perhaps the visitor AI?
Hopefully things will get tuned to enable parks without sluggishness.
It is pretty as heck, though.
Oh, that made me remember that my wife and daughter weer both into Animal Crossing too!
I thought of showing her Stardew Valley but I like my gaming computer too much!
I thought about Stardew Valley too. I believe she had a Harvest Moon game I gave her too for the Wii, the problem with Stardew is I don’t think she’d enjoy the battle piece of it at all… like zero enjoyment. I am not sure you can do Stardew well without that aspect or I would give that as a gift this year.
Planet Coaster would be great for her, but her computer is old. I might have to see if I can piece together a machine from my old parts for her to play though… I bet I could do it.
2 Gig patch today.l Man I hope performance is back to where it was a while ago for me. Pretty darn ironic I was just ragging on Roller Coaster Tycoon World’s performance a few posts ago.
Take a look at Parkitect as an alternative, it might be suitable for an older computer (it is early access though).
If the UI is good, and it gets out of EA that could very well be great for her and me for that matter… EA though, no way with one of my older family members. That sphere of gaming is just too unreliable, and she’s not going to enjoy constant changes like that.
Evil niece is best niece!
Interesting review from PC Gamer that’s been changed to a review-in-progress.
[quote]
We originally published the following criticism as a complete review, with a score of 70%. We are retracting that score and now consider this our ‘review-in-progress.’ The code we were supplied by Frontier Developments was intended to be used to start the review process, but was not final. We mistakenly overlooked this information in the email that accompanied the code. This is entirely our error. We now have a version of Planet Coaster which includes the additional scenarios, rides, and fixes that are available at launch. Once we have spent more time with this version of the game, we’ll revise the review text and assign a new score. Apologies for the confusion.[/quote]
How is the people-watching aspect of this game? Coming from RCT 1 and 2, one of my favorite past times in my parks involved following specific guests, seeing their feedback, and generally just trying to observe the crowds as they’d come leaping for joy out of a ride, barf all over my freshly maintained sidewalks, or complained about the price of hot dogs.
I spent more time gauging reactions to my park via people and crowd watching than I did flipping through charts and statistical data screens and pipups.
That being said, while I’m eager to build a park, I know I won’t have as much fun with it if the guests don’t do a good job conveying their own thoughts, either through something like thought bubbles, or more preferably through personality and body language. I want my parks to feel alive, not just stuffed with automatons.
I’ve tried watching a few streams and gameplay footage, but they all seem to be focused on things like park/ride construction and monetary goals (admittedly all important things) than any sort of park visitor experience.
I played briefly during the beta but when I followed a patron they actually had a comment about the scenery surrounding the ride. I think the comment/thought was something like the most boring scenery for a ride. I was amazed that the scenery would generate a comment. I can’t wait to see if placing some scenery elements will change that type of comment
A lot of comments about the queue being to long but one younger patron said something like rats, I can’t go on the ride because the queue is too long which struck me as something a kid would say when their parents were not willing to wait that long.
Just picked this up and I’m adding it to my, “games I would like to play over the holiday break but probably won’t get to before someone posts a follow-up thread on it three years from now,” queue.
EDIT: And now remotely installed and ready for me to perhaps fire up later. May as well bump it up the queue for a test run.
From what I can tell, the actual wait time has no bearing on what the patrons think when they assess the ride’s appeal. The main factor is the length of the queue. I’ve built rides with what I would think would be outrageous wait times in real life, but people will happily queue up as long as there’s room in the path. On the other end, I’ve built rides with very speedy lines, but park-goers pass the ride because the queue itself seems too long.
Also, patrons think the scenery around the ride is best when there’s a variety of things to look at, but there’s no algorithm for assessing beauty. A bunch of random garbage scattered around the ride and along the queue paths will be rated higher than a well-executed theme or unified presentation made of a smaller variety of bits.
A fun cheat for that is you can plop down a bunch of stuff for variety with no regard to the plan, then sink it below the surface using the elevation control to max out the beauty stat. Speakers and music seem to work best for this.
Ah, so if I make the queue path longer than the wait may not register as long. I will have to place the rides further back from the path so my queue can be longer. Thanks for the tip!