I am curious because tle last dev activity was three years ago.

Yes, the project is still alive, but FreeRCT suffers from a chronic shortage of developers so it's going on veeery slowly, and with long gaps between contributions.

I split my time between contributing to several FOSS projects of which FreeRCT is one, and I'm actually working on some stuff (currently, related to the UIs for coaster and other ride selection, construction, and management), but don't expect the changes to become visible anytime soon ☹️

what about the path building and terrain shaping

Hope this proyect gets enywhere sometime, I revisited this page from my last visit some months ago and this proyect keeps the same.

defeo wrote:

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Hope this proyect gets enywhere sometime, I revisited this page from my last visit some months ago and this proyect keeps the same.

Also my account is new besides my knowledge of this page.

Sadly, I don’t think there will be much development in the future

Sorry for taking so long, I couldn't reply because I was away, and yes, it's a shame how neglected this is.

Hi all, and I'm glad that this project still attracts some interest despite the lack of much ongoing development 🙂️

Sorry that I have been absent for so long, I'm very busy with work currently and after 8+ hours daily of focused coding I don't have the energy to code yet more for my open-source projects. However I expect that in the medium term things will go back to normal and then it's absolutely my intention to continue contributing to FreeRCT.

What would you say FreeRCT needs most urgently at this point?
My opinion is that the core gameplay is fairly stable now and that a large quantity of new rides ought to be added to make the game more fun to actually play for a prolonged time. For this I intend to first refactor the way multi-tile rides are rendered because the current tiled system is a horrid pain to graphics designers and discourages creativity. That once solved, I want to create a variety of new gentle and thrill rides, and later have a go at making an entire coaster.

Something that would be fantastic is the improvement of the roller coaster construction you actually can build just 8 track pieces in total. Bank turns, brakes, steep drops, and inversions would be impresive.
Also after several minutes of gameplay some sprites corrupt, for example the fountain suddenly appears to be a janitor or an entretainer but that is understandable because the game is in its early versions, games in these versions are very prone to having bugs.

Good news: I figured out how to deal with multi-tile sprites properly. Our engine sort of supports implicit horizontal splitting, which will still be a headache to write when creating the FML files but requires no code changes and allows easy rendering.

So I have started working on a new type of coaster that uses several features that are already implemented: Two widths of curves, gentle and steep slopes, banked curves. Not yet implemented in the code are loopings and other advanced-type track pieces, but several of those are also firmly planned.
Please be patient as it will take some time to write up the

Concept art straight out of modelling:

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<th:block th:insert="~{fragments/forums :: forumHeader(${headerLeft}, ${headerMiddle}, '')}"></th:block>

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Don't know what happened, also good Arrow loopers are being added.

Looks like a bug in the website migration has messed up the post edit form 😁️ Will fix that ASAP

–> edit: fixed 🙂️

thanks

Hey how is it going, I wanted to ask about the new coaster progress if everything was good.

Hi, yes I am slowly but steadily progressing. Making an all-new coaster really is a lot of work, although thankfully most of it is a one-time effort:

• Every coaster track piece has to be defined with some basic parameters (buildcost etc, where it appears in the build UI, …) as well as which voxels it covers (how wide and high) and its connection types to other tracks. This is the easy part.
• For each track piece, the images for all 4 rotations have to be defined. For single-tile pieces this is easy; but for larger pieces, each rotation is a considerable effort to split'n'splice the image coordinates so it appears just right in the final view. This involves a lot of trial and error and is very time-consuming and rather dull.
• Finally, each track piece needs to define the 3D curve along which the coaster car actually moves while traversing the piece. This is super hard because we basically decompose a Bezier curve into three constituent third-degree polynomials (one for each coordinate) in a coordinate system that is not aligned with the coordinate system used for everything else. This, too, involves a lot of tedious calculations and trial and error.

So, I am progressing, but it will take a lot more time until even the first buildable version is ready for testing. This is not even considering new pieces like loopings and helixes yet which will need new UI buttons as well.

The good news is at least that most of this is a one-time effort. For pieces that already exist in the Basic Steel Coaster I can simply copy-paste the existing definitions, and creating more new coasters in the future will also be 90% just copy-pasting what I am crafting now with only different graphics. Only entirely new kinds of track pieces need so much work… making something new is always much more work and slower in the making than adding to something that's nearly complete already 😉️