FreeRCT could use a little bit more variety in paths, in particular, it needs queueing paths that you put in front of a ride for quests to wait for a chance to experience the attraction.
The first step was to add different types of paths. The Path build window was extended. As you can see we now have up to 4 different types of path (4 rows). The second step was to denote each path type as being a normal path to walk on, or a queueing path. This is denoted by the two columns. The gui can probably be reduced a bit further by merging some rows.
Adding different types of path, and saying it's a queueing path is one thing. Making it actually work that way is another.
If you build a number of normal path tiles next to each you get a nicely fully covered area as you can see at the left of the picture. It's great for making a grand entrance of the park (although something less dull than grey could be useful :) ). For queueing in front of a ride however, you don't want areas, you want a long path, or in technical terms, each path tile should be connected to at most two other path tiles.
This is what the blue queue path tiles do. They connect to at most two other tiles, preferably other queue tiles. As a result, if you build such a path from the bottom left to the top right (first the bottom lane and then the top lane), you get two separate paths rather than one big area.
Now that you can build queues quite easily, I need to teach the quests about queues. The need to walk behind each other, and stop walking when there is no room in front of them. Finally rides must pickup the first guest from the queue until the ride is full, and deliver the quests at the exit afterwards.
In the original, guests were confused by large areas. Would they be smarter here?
ReplyDeleteAre there plans to further differentiate queue lines with fences like the original game?
The current implementation has the same problem of wandering guests, since they move randomly from tile to tile without any plan where they want to go. We should probably throw in a bit of path finding at some time, which will hopefully solve the wandering guest problem. The challenge is going to be to find a form of path finding such that selling a map to the guest gives you an advantage.
DeleteCurrently there are no plans for further differentiating queue lines, at least not by me. My primary goal is still to have enough functionality in place to make it a playable game. Once that point has been reached, things can be extended with more stuff that improves the game, and add eye-candy things.
One of my biggest pet hates with RCT 1& 2 is that you can only zone workers in squares of 4x4.
ReplyDeleteAs stated above addressing things like this would come after the game is playable but being able to zone down to 1x1 squares would definitely be on my 'would be nice to have' list.
Also, since you have a twitter and FB page it'd be worthwhile adding these gadgets to the blog so that people can follow them easier.