The Coaster Editor Is Acceptable

[shirty]

One of my favorite Towers coasters!

Yea me too but every time after the 1st time it just cant do itself justice. This might not make any sense to you but... 1st time I went on rita I was hitting a triple drop head on and had the front seats. Few minutes later got off ride and mind was blown. Cant be beaten even under same circumstances it wouldn't be as good.

[Silvarret]

If I remember correctly, Nolimits 1 didn't have an automatic heartline function like Nolimits 2 had. But with its more extensive control over nodes, it was still possible to manually create a believable heartline, especially for banking turns and barrel rolls. Perhaps the possibility of heartlined coasters is there without having to fundamentally change the spline system as it is now, but it would still require a lot of work to be done over the way that the track can be shaped - making smooth curves and transitions with multiple nodes is currently nearly impossible, which I assume is because of the lack of exit/entry control over nodes, among other issues like banking increments.

[magicart87]

If I remember correctly, Nolimits 1 didn't have an automatic heartline function like Nolimits 2 had. But with its more extensive control over nodes, it was still possible to manually create a believable heartline, especially for banking turns and barrel rolls. Perhaps the possibility of heartlined coasters is there without having to fundamentally change the spline system as it is now, but it would still require a lot of work to be done over the way that the track can be shaped - making smooth curves and transitions with multiple nodes is currently nearly impossible, which I assume is because of the lack of exit/entry control over nodes, among other issues like banking increments.

Might sound a bit moronic, but would positioning nodes slightly above the track work? I think this would give pseudo-heartline accuracy. It might even help provide additional "visual information" that makes seeing pitch and roll adjustments more obvious. I wonder how easy it would be for Nvizzio to move the nodes slightly above the track (and if that would actually help)

[shirty]

Its not so much moving the node as the node is part of the line that draws the track.
Whats needed is a null object that's parent to the node, then if we could adjust the height (maybe toggle heartline/trackline or a slider to change manually) of that null we would get the heartline effect.
I'm not much of a coder so I don't know how much work that would take but the principals are quite simple and quite possibly already in place for controlling the nodes angles easier.

[Silvarret]

In response to both posts - and let me say beforehand, I don't have a lot of knowledge of the technical side of things - I think NL2 indeed uses a seperate heartline as a parent to the nodes, and you can in any case even set how the nodes are offset from this line. When banking a track node, it'll automatically move around the heartline depending on the distance you set. Apart from the question whether it's even possible, having the nodes themselves fulfill this heartlining function would probably feel awkward and unnatural to control, and while it may be good for instances in which the heartline is clear to detect (like barrel rolls), I'd imagine it would be very annoying when trying to design a track in general. It would give a more indirect control over the track itself, whereas with the nodes being tied to a heartline, they can also be edited on their own. Eh, if you get what I mean, it's hard to put into words, but I basically suspect it wouldn't be an intuitive approach, whereas the NL2 heartline to me feels very intuitive.

[Deuce]

Might sound a bit moronic, but would positioning nodes slightly above the track work? I think this would give pseudo-heartline accuracy. It might even help provide additional "visual information" that makes seeing pitch and roll adjustments more obvious. I wonder how easy it would be for Nvizzio to move the nodes slightly above the track (and if that would actually help)

Its not so much moving the node as the node is part of the line that draws the track.
Whats needed is a null object that's parent to the node, then if we could adjust the height (maybe toggle heartline/trackline or a slider to change manually) of that null we would get the heartline effect.
I'm not much of a coder so I don't know how much work that would take but the principals are quite simple and quite possibly already in place for controlling the nodes angles easier.

In response to both posts - and let me say beforehand, I don't have a lot of knowledge of the technical side of things - I think NL2 indeed uses a seperate heartline as a parent to the nodes, and you can in any case even set how the nodes are offset from this line. When banking a track node, it'll automatically move around the heartline depending on the distance you set. Apart from the question whether it's even possible, having the nodes themselves fulfill this heartlining function would probably feel awkward and unnatural to control, and while it may be good for instances in which the heartline is clear to detect (like barrel rolls), I'd imagine it would be very annoying when trying to design a track in general. It would give a more indirect control over the track itself, whereas with the nodes being tied to a heartline, they can also be edited on their own. Eh, if you get what I mean, it's hard to put into words, but I basically suspect it wouldn't be an intuitive approach, whereas the NL2 heartline to me feels very intuitive.

Collectively I think you're all right. Ultimatley the node, or the effect of the node, has to be offset from the track. So as Magicart says, if the node was raised, rotating it would cause the track below to sweep round the circumference of the offset of the node, not the node itself. And as Silverret and Shirty point out, the nodes are also used to draw the track, so need to be relative to the track - in NL2 this is solved by having parent 'nodes' which offers the best of both worlds.

But I think if I had been at Atari, sat down with the devs at the planning stage, I would have played the hell out of all available coaster programs and concluded that actually it would be ok for all the nodes to be at track centre initially, and then allow them to be raised individually when needed. The problem is that this wasn't considered at all, and as a result incorporating such a thing now would probably mean starting from scratch with the track editing tools as the calculations involved in generating the track as the node is manipulated would be entirely different. Not exactly rocket science, you could create an algorithm just be manipulating track in CAD and studying the geometric calculations between each step.

But the above is just my initial idea. If I was in Mattlabs position I'd ideally want to try it with a weeks development, just to get a skeletal track to play with. They following another meeting probably realise there was an even neater way of offering all users the best of both ease of use and powerful functions. It would be an evolution, because the game is 'AAA' and I wouldn't take the job if I couldn't get the most talked about element of the game absolutely spot on perfect!!

But this doesn't appear to have happened. In fact, I remember the earlier screens we saw from Nvizzio all had unbanked tracks. Mattlab explained this in one post saying banking was in the next phase of development (or words to that effect). So it looks like rather than contemplate the entire coaster system from the start, they just developed it in a linear way - which isn't ever going to give the best end result.