Queue paths

The second item I have been busy with is paths.

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.

Long paths

I promise this is my last post about path building for a long time :)

Remember I talked about not liking having to click for every path tile you build? Today I give you an alternative, use the mouse instead!

It works in the following way. After opening the path build window, click at the place where you want to start (the while tile cursor sticks to the position). In the window, click 'Long' (as in 'long build'). Now the system tries to build a path to the mouse cursor position in the vertical plane through the tile cursor. (In the attached picture, the mouse cursor is where I added the red dot.) If you move the mouse, the path changes. When you are happy, click the mouse, and the path is fixated (that is, you can move the mouse without the path following you). Then, like the single tile, click 'Buy' to buy the entire path.

That's much faster, isn't it? :)

The basic idea seems to be working nicely. If you experiment a bit with it, you'll notice there are still some quirks that need to be figured out, but to be honest, I have had quite enough of path building for some time.

Rewrite of the paths, connected path tiles

After the previous blog, I got a message from one Lord who found you could crash the program by building paths off the world (thanks for finding that, Lord).

Unfortunately, fixing proved difficult due to my somewhat naive way of coding it. There were three parties responsible: the world display, the path window, and a helper object that stored some selections. Rather than finding out who to blame exactly, I decided to rewrite it all, making the helper object the central entity. While you cannot see it at the outside, this makes the code much easier to deal with errors, since you know where to look. I fixed the off-world build problem, as well as few other problems.

Also invisible is the introduction of time. The game now keeps track of days, months and years.
Last but not least, the path tile building was changed to extend the edges of adjacent path tiles, which makes a much nicer path as you can see.

Path building, part I

Laying a path in your park is the first step to getting visitors. In the past weeks I have been busy implementing creation of paths. At the right you can see the first result.

When you open the path build window, the cursor changes to a white (rotated) square, and allows you to select a starting tile or path.

Then you can select a build direction with the arrows in the gui which is shown as a flashing arrow in the world display. The arrows at the gui always correspond with what you see at the display, even if you rotate the world.

Next you can press a slope button (at the top of the gui). (I do have sprites for them, but they were not loaded yet.) If you click at another tile or path, the build continues there.

Finally, by pressing 'Buy' you buy the path, and the white square and the arrow move onto the new path (so you can 'buy' again).

I called this entry "part I" as the gui is not finished yet. The other buttons currently do not work, path sprites are not extended to their neighbours, and they need platforms to the ground, and a bar so people don't fall off.