Paragon - A Nolimits 2 Collaboration Project [Week 4]

[Blase Rhine]

oooooooooo

[Coasterkidmwm]

You had my attention at "unsuitable for public survival". Great job on the theming BTW.

Apologies this is a couple days late - Thomas

OoOo...

[mkingy]

DAF Truck!

If it ain't a DAF, its not worth the faff!

I play Euro Truck Simulator on Steam, and all my trucks are DAFs .

I can add a hand bootleg slc coaster to the park.

Sorry, we are not taking on members for the project (it may or may not already be finished anyway)

Loving the weekly updates!

See you at roundup 200 - Thomas

^ Paragon - what an impressive name! ( ) The only thing that you need to fix here: T has to be "R" - fantastic image though!

Just got back from a celebratory meetup with the team that made this project possible (Element115, iSatnav and me). We want to thank the people who gave us feedback during development of paragon, and some posts talking about the ride's evolution and final design will be put up in the following days. Thanks again for 3rd place on R200 NL2 dev's!

Right, Paragon, what a journey this has been. It started about a year ago with an initial layout design from COASTERGUY246, featuring essentially what you see today (although it was initially supposed to be themed to the Fallout franchise). The concept of the ride was based on a tweaked version of the Energylandia hyper with a launched lift hill. The second portion of the layout was developed after a short break, which was designed with the goal of rivalling the Energylandia hyper mentioned previously with a non manufacture-specific style. The layout has been designed to attempt to give a more unique and varied hyper coaster layout with more unusual forces, such as the almost unheartlined dive loop, which is designed to maximize the feeling of being pulled around at the top of the inversion.









Details
Next came the detailing work, which was primarily Element115's concern with a massive helping hand from Elyani in the way of his incredible (functional) sensors. They have been placed with basic block setups in mind, (block entry, parking, block release etc). The LSM modules are also custom designed alongside all of the details within the brake runs and throughout the launch tunnel. A future post will go in-depth with all of the details of the ride, including the custom transfer table. These little things add up around the ride to provide what we think is one of the most realistic NoLimits environments ever created.

a e s t h e t i c
Key in the 2000s aesthetic that this ride carries is the station building and surrounding support structures. We took heavy inspiration from the Black Mesa research facility from the 1998 game Half Life 1 (keen-eyed people will notice that the newspaper at the top of the thread is dated to the release of the game). The buildings feature imposing, metal texture with pipes so show that this is definitely a working and active site, run by a technology company at the forefront of global development. The basic storyline is that Aether Systems is a technology firm specialising in the design of transportation systems. With the basic design of LSM elevators under their belt (as can be seen in the park and the news article), they went on to use this technology to attempt to design a sleek new transportation system known as Paradigm. After the testing of Paradigm proved ???inconclusive???, they went on to produce Paragon, with the findings of Paradigm still in mind. The area is designed to act like a public test site and has basic amenities that enable the area to be functional for public use around the clock. The ride felt somewhat empty in previous iterations so after some consideration, we elected to add onboard audio to the ride (video coming soon) and tie it into the theme somehow. With assistance from Joseph Pojunis, we decided to add a radio broadcast tower near the site which would ???interfere??? with audio transmission going to the test vehicles during the ride cycle.










The Environment
As for the surrounding area, we wanted to have the ride situated next to a lake surrounded by steep, wooded hills. This lead us to develop the terrain that is around the ride, heavily inspired by the Welsh hills. Next is the functioning train we implemented as part of the story of the ride, as a way of getting test participants and staff to Atlas Lake, a remote facility in [REDACTED], North England. This used the train model from the sketchup warehouse from user MasterChief and the tunnel and associated area from Element115. The surrounding area is also being used by the US Military for high-speed jet testing (much akin to the Mach Loop in Wales), hence the inclusion of an F16 jet periodically flying past. We thought these additions would make the ride area feel a lot more dynamic rather than just sticking a coaster down in a greenfield.








So that's Paragon's development summed up, if we have left anything out that you would like to know about then let us know, we will be ???happy??? to oblige (the file takes a good 10 mins to load at this point). Please be aware that we are doing another post for the details, uploading a future POV featuring the soundtrack and (hopefully) releasing the project once we have optimised it a bit more.

^ Looks epic! Does that British Rail train actually move? If so, is it rideable?

^It does move so arguably it is ridable but it isn't designed as such, I guess you could just sit on the top and get smacked by the tunnels.

iSatnav wrote:

the file takes a good 10 mins to load at this point

See this is a big part of why I don't make NL rides as frequently as I used to; my computer's barely able to load rides with even moderately heavy foliage, let alone play back 60fps videos in Premiere Pro without lagging. I can only imagine just how potentially frustrating it can be to work with a file so huge that it takes ten minutes to load!

In other news, congratulations you guys! It really shows that you guys put a lot of effort in this thing, from the basic layout to the storyline and even the small details like the F-16. It all adds up to one really slick-looking project! Seriously great work!

[Coasterkidmwm]

ripep fps lol. Looks like a neat place though

AmatsuNL wrote:

play back 60fps videos in Premiere Pro without lagging. I can only imagine just how potentially frustrating it can be to work with a file so huge that it takes ten minutes to load!

This is what killed me, recording a video in a park that frequently runs sub-10fps then editing at a similar frame rate, it was painful .

[mkingy]

Nice, interesting to see all your processes and thoughts behind the ride Good to see British Rail instead of Network Rail too given the timeframe