Help to improve coater design/building?

Need some help with a couple of aspects of coaster design that hopefully will allow me to create better coaster.

Coaster height vs speed

Id rather not have to build a 200ft coaster to get the speed up to 50mph.
you get realife coasters at half that height that can reach those speeds.

1. How do you make coasters build up realistic speeds without launches or insane 300ft first drop heights?

2. How do you keep a fairly constant speed on your rides wothout suddden sharp loss of speed.

Tigh compact steep drops

I struggle to create steep drops for tight coasters like Wild Mouse , Eurofighters and X coasters, without harsh gforces.

1. How to create close together tight drops and camelbacks that are not stretched and keep gforce in the green.
Id rather not have a 2 mile long Wild Mouse coaster.



If I can Iron out these niggles I think I should be able to create some decent compact fast coasters. The ones I make at the minute seem to be twice as big and twice as slow. Any help would be apreciated. Then I can finally upload some creations I think are worthwhile. No one wants to see a 10 mile long Nemesis clone.

[mkingy]

Could you upload a few example files to the scrapyard? It'll help us pinpoint where you are going wrong as its hard to tell from a description what your shaping actually looks like!

http://www.coastercrazy.com/scrapyard/upload.php

[Dirk_Ermen]

TopHatDinosaur wrote:

Need some help with a couple of aspects of coaster design that hopefully will allow me to create better coaster.

Coaster height vs speed

Id rather not have to build a 200ft coaster to get the speed up to 50mph.
you get realife coasters at half that height that can reach those speeds.

1. How do you make coasters build up realistic speeds without launches or insane 300ft first drop heights?

2. How do you keep a fairly constant speed on your rides wothout suddden sharp loss of speed.

1. Well, for drops with speeds like 50mph you'd probably need a height of around 120ft or taller. Look at real existing coasters and try to mimic their drops. That's pretty much how I started to build more realistic feeling drops.
2. It's not about keeping the constant speed, it about keeping the feeling of speed. So if the actual speed decreases, make your turns tighter and your hills a bit smaller. That way it still gives the feeling that you're going just as fast or if done well: Going even faster.

TopHatDinosaur wrote:

Tigh compact steep drops

I struggle to create steep drops for tight coasters like Wild Mouse , Eurofighters and X coasters, without harsh gforces.

1. How to create close together tight drops and camelbacks that are not stretched and keep gforce in the green.
Id rather not have a 2 mile long Wild Mouse coaster.

G-force management can be tricky. But it doesn't matter if your g's go yellow for a bit. As long you stay out of the red zone it's perfectly fine. Personally I'm always looking at the numbers. With forces over 5g, I'm usually trying to tone down by increasing the size of the curve. NL2 has a tool as well to see where the spikes in your curves are. It's called the Radius Comb. It could help out to spot the location of the spike so you know where to smooth it out.

1 - not sure what you mean here I have build coasters 100ft tall that go 50+mph. maybe check the friction in the coaster properties, I always use the NL2 one.

2 - this can be tricky. You can notice though that most coasters the elements get smaller and tighter twords the end of the track as the train decreases in speed. This gives the feeling of consistency. so if you have a 100ft airtime hill after the drop pulling say -.5 G's, you will want the very last airtime hill to be very close to -.5 G's but will for sure not be 100ft tall but maybe 40 ft tall and 1/3 the length.

Drops
one thing I always have trouble with is the crest of the lift. if you start rounding the top too soon(MF) its hard to get the lift/drop compact at all. You want the straight lift section to end at almost the highest point of the coaster then start curving down. I did some practice with this type of thing in my "Funland" release on the Imitador, check out how I shaped the lift/drop on that one.
http://www.coastercrazy.com/20642/Funland-by-Plantoris


Normally what I do when I build is use the G force comb as a guide. instead of building elements into a certain shape, I use the G forces to shape it for me. roughly shape it generally how you want it then go vertices by vertices and adjust them so the forces are where you want them.

also another thing is the "de-pump vertices" tool, be very careful when using this, it can be just as bad as it is good it not used properly. de-pumping in the wrong place can move the track and create bumps, pumps, and un-shape an element. like camel humps, if you de-pump them it can cause them to loose a lot of the airtime and create bumps at the point where the G's go from + to -.
I normally only use the tool to space out the vertices evenly, then I will finish adjusting and smoothing by hand.

hope some of this helped, I am happy to help if you have any other questions.