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Comment by perrohunter | Hacker News Reader

I play OpenRCT2 with my daughter quite often, it works great, I recommend the OpenGL render engine since it allows for additional zoom and the kids love to see the people walking around and puking all over the park.

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Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 and its spiritual successor, Planet Coaster, are fully 3D and allow you to even "ride" the coasters virtually. Apparently 3 wasn't received so well, but I'm a fan of them all.

RCT3's first person riding feature was neat, but the bump in performance requirements meant that building large sprawling parks just wasn't as practical. I've never tried it on modern hardware though.

It runs great on even a 10 year old machine these days.

RCT2 is way better though… level design especially in 3 was lackluster, and the fact that Chris Sawyer wasn’t really involved in it shows.

Parkitect is the modern spiritual successor to rct1+2, while Planet Coaster is more like 3. The thing I (and some others) don't like about Rct3+planet coaster is that they're park painters where they're more focused on decoration and making a pretty park and the game is trivially easy, vs rct1+2 and parkitect where you generally have to put some work into making a profitable park and there's a bit more focus on the management and simulation.

Parkitect also has multiplayer.

I came here to find an excuse to mention Parkitect. Controlling the sight-lines of your park to hide employee pathways and deliveries in order to be more Disney-like is a great feature. Simultaneously fun and infuriating.

Eh, just slap blank beige walls everywhere and the peeps are happy. Obviously the game can't be expected to rate aesthetics, but the excitement of making a nice park is a bit lessened when you know that a beige solid wall would have done the same job.

Another thing I really don't like about Parkitect is that the physics feel too slow. The coasters don't have the same sense of speed as in Planet Coaster or RCT1 and I think a big part of the reason is the oversized peeps. Which is a shame, because regardless of what I said above, I actually like Parkitect's scenery and ride building the best.

I watch some planet coaster on YouTube and it blows my mind watching the park painters. I can’t do much more than plop down existing models.

Same with some of the City Skylines Youtubers ... I barely can get a functioning traffic network running (without despawning of vehicles) and then there are those who spend ages placing little bushes along the highways because it looks nicer.

For me, the fact that it was 3-D took away the “magic”.

RC3 was so ahead of its time. Although it was released 18 years ago, it featured first-person 3D simulations of user made roller coasters! In 2004!

Can you imagine it?

I can definitely imagine it because Theme Park World (Sim Theme Park in the US) did this in 1999. It was one of their main selling points.

You weren't just limited to roller coasters either. You could freely walk around the park and walk into any ride all in first person.

Yeah, Theme Park 1 (1994) had pre-rendered videos to emulate riding the rides (and so for things like waterslides and rollercoasters didn't match your layout), but Theme Park World had 3D real-time rides of your layouts.

Yes? What do you imagine games looked like in 2004? That was the year Half-Life 2 came out. Obviously, a game like RCT also has to run a simulation and can’t focus on graphics as much as a shooter. I’m just saying, if anything, RCT3 looked sub-par.

RCT3 was great but it was so buggy. I think they patched a lot of the bugs with a big update but I was on 56k dialup at the time and couldn't download it. By the time I got ADSL I forgot about it. It's a shame and really sucked for people like me who bought it but couldn't update it.

RCT3 was buggy, but the fireworks were amazing!

People created genuine art with it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ItBY3H_04I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9WgMeqM3bY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF5n5I6omSA

The devs made the fireworks effect editor accessible from within the game, which allowed the community to create thousands of custom ones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI1IrLHN2hk

https://www.shyguysworld.com/Archive/index.php?topic=17808.0

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