Hello everyone, this is my latest vision for a Floorless Dive Coaster named Watts 250, this dive coaster has two 90* drops, spaced perfectly between two classic immelman loops, a huge vertical loop, and that mandatory dive splash-down.
Watts 250 drops from 250 feet up, into the Watts Tower. During this ride you will experience great near misses, as well as plenty of fun forceful moments in all directions.
I hope that the length of this rating or the rating itself isn't discouraging. Overall, I liked what you've created here, but there is a lot of room for improvement. I didn't want to leave what can feel like a less-than-steller rating without fully justifying it; and I hope you get something from it that can help improve your rides in the future. Technique: Overall I liked your ideas; the track layout was nice, the track interaction with the environment felt natural, and the terraforming felt suited to the ride and vice versa. Where you fell short here is in implementation. I don't want to rag too hard, but in a few places it felt a bit sloppy. The gates for the station opened directly into the catwalks of the lift. Here I would have custom made the bottom portion out of supports or a custom scenery object so that I could avoid those clearance issues. On the topic of clearance issues, there were numerous occasions where the scenery around the ride was far too close. To help with this, go into the scenery tab in the editor, and find the clearance envelope. It's in the scenery library called 'Demo Objects.' Set this object next to your first train, load it up to ride, switch to the last car on the train, cycle through the cameras until you are in fly-by mode, and move to a bit behind the train so that the entire orange envelope is visible. From there you'll get a good perspective on where you can and cannot have scenery. If the object clips through the envelope, simply move it until it doesn't. As far as the actual track goes, there was a decent amount of "pumping" throughout, which isn't all that comfortable in the over-the-shoulder style bars. And while No Limits lets you put brake sections on curved pieces of track, it's not a good idea to do so. The way the brakes are mounted to the track, and the way they function, means that additional forces outside of directly along the brake pads can cause damage. A good rule of them is to put a 'strict' node just before and just after your section separators for the brakes. Adrenaline: This was a great area for me. 250ft. makes it taller than Griffon, which was terrifying being stopped facing down on! The only complaint I have here is the speed of the loop. It comes to a meager crawl at the top, which can be fun on some ride types, but for the B&M dive coasters I would shoot for a loop that has enough speed to hold about +1g at its minimum vertical g-force, and the same can be said of the immelmann. The rest of the ride had nice pacing. Uniqueness: I really liked the idea of putting the vertical loop as the first element here. The two immelmanns and vertical drops work well together as well. The only thing hurting your score here is the linear nature of the layout, which I'll go into detail about under realism, as most of my comments apply better there. Realism: Unfortunately I have to say this is where your ride suffers the most. The track shaping is off on many parts; I'll try to break it down as concisely as I can. I know this review is wordy as it is. The loop really ought to be more of a teardrop shape. Making your loop a perfect circle is likely the cause of the very slow top. Keeping decent speed at the top means vertical g's at the bottom will be far too high, managing those g's lowers the speed at the top. By gradually decreasing the radius of the loop as the train approaches the top, then increasing gradually as the train approaches the bottom, you can maintain the speed of the train without causing high g-forces. The immelmann is another place where you could use the decreasing radius technique, just do it halfway up. Two issues with the shaping that would inadvertently help with the layout: the roll and the angle. The roll should start a bit before the very top of the element. About 30 degrees from the vertical axis as seen from the side is a good place to start, but play around with it to get an idea for how this affects the shape. The angle between the entrance and the exit of your immelmann is quite a bit too large. What you want to look for, typically, is an angle between 25 and 55 degrees. You can go larger here, and some rides do, but start with the smaller angle and work your way around from there to get an idea of what this does for your shaping and layout. The layout: While I really do like the order of elements here, the way they're arranged is far too linear. Try looking up some aerial photos of B&M roller coasters in general. You'll find that very few of them keep to any sort of grid that keeps the elements at 90 degrees from each other. The overhead views of these rides are organic, if I could put a single word to it, flowing with the terrain, paths, other rides in the park, or all of the above. This is something that No Limits does very well, where games like Roller Coaster Tycoon, and even Planet Coaster, simply cannot do. You've got a powerful tool here, with lots of potential to unlock. Rider Value: I really liked your ideas for this one. Your submission shows to me that there's passion and creativity in there that can one day lead to some well thought and unique roller coasters.
Home
Contact Us
Login
Register
Store
Exchange
Browse The Scrapyard
Forum
Donate
