The cruellest RollerCoaster Tycoon park created | Hacker News Reader

The cruellest RollerCoaster Tycoon park created

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Nice. Very reminiscent of Magnasanti in simcity:

https://rumorsontheinternets.org/2010/10/14/magnasanti-the-l...

Taking simulation games to their logical extremes is a wonderful, time-honored tradition.

Looks like the HN vision for San Francisco :-)

Very long read, when they. Could've linked to Mr. Bones' wild ride...

http://m.imgur.com/gallery/Wxzbl

You've got the painting goblin in the same vein.

http://i.imgur.com/NrJku9x.jpg

Rollercoaster Tycoon had many small game elements, like this one, that could be played with and expanded upon to the extreme. A lot like GTA, while playing the game in the intended way is fun, you could also spend hours on doing things the game designers may not even have thought of. I remember my friends and I would set up a target, like a pool of water, and then build roller coasters that would end abruptly and launch the cars flying into the air, the goal being to hit the target upon crash landing.

Apparently I'm not the only one who just enjoyed crashing stuff and torturing the guests in the park:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aie9xFzNT4M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-fOfVsM7jE

I once managed to create a park with a negative amount of guests. I believe it was a concurrency bug: if a guest is drowning (because water appeared below him for example) the game subtracts 1 from the number of guests just before he dies. But if you construct a floor below him when that happens the count stays the same and the visitor lives on...

Yes, I did exactly what you described. Hours of fun!

I put more time into transport tycoon, where there was a neat truck you could pull on competitors - build a level crossing over a road route, and stick a cheap rail engine on it going back and forth, ignoring signals, destroying buses and murdering their passengers.

Ah, to be young again ...

Reminds me of "The Eternal War", the 10 year old Civilization 2 save file from a few years back:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/uxpil/ive_been_play...

I've now been digging for a little and apparently it was finished! By someone else.

https://www.reddit.com/r/theeternalwar/comments/uzm4w/took_5...

Yeah within a day or two of the original post, others who were a little better versed in the game mechanics of Civ 2 were able to beat it.

>It is the brainchild of a particularly mischievous fan who created a park that's home to just one attraction: a massive maze - and let 16 AI guests inside to see if they could find their way to the exit.

I wonder if the author is aware he's created what amounts to a huge Westworld joke? (No spoilers, please.)

> I wonder if the author is aware he's created what amounts to a huge Westworld joke? (No spoilers, please.)

It's not for you to know.

It doesn't look like anything to me.

Good one

I wonder if you're aware that you've created a comment to which it's impossible to reply without a spoiler?

you just did :P

I used to play RollerCoaster Tycoon for hours on end as a child, I loved that game.

As I get older and life has more responsibilities, at times I miss being able to completely immerse myself in a game like this for hours on end.

Well, so much for my idea that super-intelligence would mean lowered levels of sadism... Let's hope AI's don't find these sorts of exercises exciting.

We were just kidding, all-powerful AI! We would have let them out of the park; it was just a big misunderstanding. Please don't hurt us.

Instantly reminded me of "I have no mouth and I must scream". It's a short, but pretty depressing read.

Indeed, "great" story, it sticks with you. Read it a long time ago and that ending...

There's a point-and-click adventure game based on it(https://www.gog.com/game/i_have_no_mouth_and_i_must_scream), which is also very atmospheric.

Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief begins

> As always, before the warmind and I shoot each other, I try to make small talk. 'Prisons are always the same, don't you think?' I don't even know if it can hear me.

By Harlan Ellison, to the curious. I started and finished his "Can and Cantankerous" (included in a Humble Book Bundle) last week. The title is a fittingly succinct self description.

This got me thinking: given the same space, how does one create the hardest to solve maze? Obviously, you’d need to define hardest with some kind of objective metric. For AIs, this would probably be the amount of calculations performed, or time taken to solve. It would also depend on the algorithm used for solving the maze: for perfect mazes (mazes with only one solution) you could use tree search algorithms, whereas if you had loops, you would have to use graph search algorithms.

There’s some thinking about the same problem (although from a human point of view) in this Stack Overflow question:

http://stackoverflow.com/q/14692818/2096560

One limit is that if you've searched every square of a maze, you're guaranteed to have found the exit.

So if you want to have a harder maze than that, you must visit each cell more than once. i.e. lots of backtracking.

If you have N dead ends (i.e. leaf nodes), the node before them must be visited twice (down and back up again). The previous node can be visited at most 4 times (in, down and back for each edge, and back out again). Past that, limitations due to geometry will slow down the growth of possibilities.

Now I am curious to know if the AI is better or not at navigating mazes according to the character ride tastes... if that is the case, then I will think Chris Sawyer is somehow even more impressive than my already very high impression of him.

The AI is actually very primitive for navigating mazes. It is the same AI for every character and does not vary with ride tastes. All the AI does is prefer walking in straight lines and when it reaches a forced decision it takes either direction with equal rating. It does not have any idea where the exit is or do anything fancy. It can easily end up going round the same area on repeat.

Source I read the x86 assembly.

I wonder if maybe each checkpoint is treated as the entrance to a new hedge maze in the code, so what's actually happening is that the lower-intensity AIs have more attainable path-finding goals because they're searching for the next "ride" (checkpoint), whereas the other AIs are only trying to navigate to the exit. From a path-finding perspective, the next checkpoint is always closer than the exit, so the low-intensity AIs end up having a better heuristic for proceeding through the maze.

There is actually no checkpoint in RCT maze. The checkpoint in this case is just scenary items. AI cannot possibly know about that.

One thing I'm curious about: is he actually sure the maze is solvable? I would guess the AI uses A* or something similar to solve and then gradually guides the characters along, but maybe it stumbles if it's unsolvable. Or maybe it gives up after some search depth

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