OpenRCT2 force visualiser plugin

Back in march I got a little bit addicted to OpenRCT2. Actually, it was more of a relapse - Rollercoaster Tycoon has been one of my favourite games since my parents gifted me the original as a child back in 1999, and I've been playing it (and the sequels) on and off ever since. There's definitely a timeless aspect to the gameplay and I wouldn't be alone in arguing the franchise peaked with RCT2. RCT is a masterful blend of an easy to play and hard to master sim/management game, and a creative tool for creating weird and wonderful fantasy parks. The sequel released in 2002 is all this and more. More rides, more scenery, more tools, more scenarios. My young teen self dedicated about half of his brain to RCT2.

Suffice it to say I really love this game, but as with all 20+ year old games, it suffers from a lack of quality of life features and feels a bit clunky to our modern palettes. Enter OpenRCT2, an open source reimplementation of the game which drags it kicking and screaming into the world of today, with improved rendering, online multiplayer, hundreds of UI improvements, and most crucially, excellent modding support. Now, instead of wishing a feature existed, anyone can go ahead and build it.

The idea

So obviously I built a mod for OpenRCT2. The force visualiser plugin attempts to fix a problem I've always had when building rollercoasters in RCT, which is that the game rates your ride after you've built it, and doesn't do a good job of explaining poor ratings. As a result you can spend an hour building your masterpiece, only to be thwarted by the game telling you it's rubbish and all park guests (or "peeps" as they're called) refusing to ride it. You then enter a cycle of aimless tweaking and retesting to appease the algorithm. There are force/time graphs which help a little, but they don't tell you exactly which part of the track you should be looking at, or even which forces are too much for the poor peeps to handle. Wouldn't it be great to get constant feedback as you went?

The plugin allows you to select a ride and visualise the forces as you build. While testing, the train paints the track based on whether certain force thresholds have been exceeded. E.g. Green for normal forces, yellow for moderate forces, and red for excessive forces. This way, you can see at a glance if part of your ride might cause problems. Neat! (In the case of an incomplete track, OpenRCT2 has added a feature where a "ghost" of the rollercoaster train traverses the existing track and vanishes at the end.)

There are a bunch of customisations which can be made to the visualiser as well, such as custom colours and thresholds, hiding supports, and visualising only vertical or horizontal forces.

Future plans

Going forward I'm planning to add a lot more control and QOL improvements to the visualiser, including:

• Saving configuration under named profiles
• Speed visualisation
• Force/time and speed/time graphs (better than the in-game ones!)
• Many more small tweaks to make things easier to use