Hello! I have spent countless hours on several projects that I loved doing, lost momentum on, abandoned, then regretted abandoning while never getting the drive to get back into them. It is an incredibly annoying cycle and has resulted in my only finished project in over a year being a larson loop, so I am hoping that keeping track of my progress through this thread might help to break this and get some rides done! My spare time to commit to hobbies is stretched quite thin as I have lots of goals to achieve at the moment, so these will likely still take a while, but at least I can stay motivated with them.

Currently, I have three ongoing projects at various levels of completion with different challenges associated with each:

1 - Falling Dutchman - Vekoma Flying Dutchman

I started this well over a year ago to see whether a skeleton-style seating position would make for a fun ride experience. However, reversing the flying dutchman trans would mean guests ascend the lift upside-down, hence having the lift be a forward-facing drop tower! This thankfully works with bestdani's block logic magic so I didn't have to do any scripting. The layout and supports are done (as far as I know) and as close to the typical flying dutchman supports that I know, the track and supports for the lift hill is based on the Big-Air model as that seemed practically appropriate.

The main hang-up for this has been it's boardwalk/beachfront setting, which I had wanted to do to differentiate it from my last main project's forested setting. However, I completely burnt out when filling out the space to a good enough extent, as the sheer density of both UK and US seaside parks is insane! I also tried to make a beached pirate ship mid-section out of supports for a themed station, which has proved very problematic, but hopefully I can get that finished up as well!

2 - The Archers - Mack Duelling Coasters

This has been in the works for around 6 months and is easily the most ambitious layout that I have attempted. Two unique layouts with differing degrees of intensity (reasonably intense and very intense), several interaction points, and a nearly unbiased victor with no trims on either track to bring them together. For this, the trackwork is done and the majority of the supports are done, all that is left is an enormous archway over the inverting lsm lifts and the custom catwalks.

After that, I will hopefully try my hand at modelling to create a custom station building and queueline, which I am hoping to incorporate all of the functional needs for the ride (double op-booth, access lift, maintenance areas, double-sided lockers, fasttrack?) and provide some actual theming! The theme of the ride is Artemis vs Apollo, and I'm hoping that the style of the ride will be a modernisation on classical greek architecture, as imo the ride tech would need so much dressing-up to avoid clashing with a strictly old-timey style, plus I thought the twist would make for a better challenge!

3 - Vekoma/Maurer Vertical Lift Coaster

This is a much more recent project that I have been putting off for a while, as it is my first attempt at making a ride using FVD! I've tried to make certain elements by hand but failed miserably, so this proved to be a good excuse to learn the ropes with it to try and pull off some wacky elements. Currently I'm on my 4th iteration for the first half of the ride, as I am unsurprisingly terrible at using the software which shows in the nasty transitions between manoeuvres. I have absolutely no clue how long it will take for me to get the hang of FVD, but have no plans for ambitious support work or decorations, so hopefully I'll be one the home stretch as soon as the track is finalised.

[My current task is to reduce the width of the boardwalk area for the Falling Dutchman and "squeeze" more flat rides onto the beach front]

I'll keep updating this with random progress updates, any feedback would be greatly appreciated! If you find this entertaining, then that's fantastic! If not, I'm not surprised, and apologise for clogging your feed up.

Almost immediately, I have gotten distracted and started a new project.... but at least I finished it this time!:

Tornado - Gerstlauer Spinner

After a stressful few weeks, I decided to commit to a quick project that I could complete in a day and realise a layout idea that had been nagging me for a while.... It ended up taking a week, even when rushing the scenery. But I am very happy with the result!

Tornado has a multi pass launch, through a helical spike and reaches a top speed of 70kmh before winding down a compact, stacked layout that stretches over a main pathway and interacts with the queueline. Inspired by Mandrill Mayhem's bizarre forward spike, the launch concept for a spinner in tandem with the station layout was what I had hoped to bring to life (though it would ideally be a double launch instead of a triple launch for the sake of pacing and throughput. I simply don't have the java knowledge to ever attempt manual scripting!). The station and queue layouts are a smorgasbord of bestdani's build shapes and was a very fun challenge to squeeze everything in.

Once I have added a few more trinkets to complete the area, I will upload this to the exchange!
Here is a timelapse of the full construciton period. Unfortunately, when condensed down to 90 seconds, it looks like a mess. However, I thought it would be fun to make anyway just to have the construction recorded (and so that I can delete the 10+gb of video on my laptop), next time I will try to create a separate window for a 3rd-person timelapse and see how that fares:

Further boardwalk work

Before things got more hectic, I had carried on with the Boardwalk theming by reducing the width of the boardwalk itself, and by then cramming more rides into the reduced space! These need more work done to them before they truly fit in, but progress is progress!

I am still getting distracted by other projects. Now I have spent even more time than on the entirety of tornado making just a station building:

Most of the time has been spent finding workarounds to standard modelling as I set a personal challenge to do as much as I could within stock NL2, thereby making the buildings out of supports. This resulted in numerous prototype interiors and modular sections to try and add some flexibility to the process, which ultimately proved ineffective. Nevertheless, I have a complete station, currently made up of 7,588 objects; these being mostly support elements but also include Magu's Hypercoaster shells, bestdani's turnstiles, and "glass" panes made using bestdanis image-to-object tool.

The aim of the station (and therefore the whole ride) is that, in the 70s, a random park with a small plot of land and a fairly decent budget wanted their own space mountain, so contacted Arrow to make one using their Mine-train model. The resultant ride should hopefully use simple tricks to show a fairly believable passage through space, achieve insane rider throughput, and hopefully be a fun ride to operate in full-manual mode.

All 4 projects can now be considered "on the go" with this currently taking most of my interest. Hopefully, now that I'm done faffing around with this, I might make some more progress (The onload and offload stations are within show-scenes that the rest of the ride will be built around) and get the offload station done in less time as far less will need to be considered. Though, I have no doubt that my interests will change soon enough...

My new job and failed contest attempts have gotten in the way of these, but I'm back!

I lost a lot of motivation with the Space Train after trying a few layouts and achieving nothing but inefficient boredom. So I can't say I'm too interested in continuing that for now.

Instead, i've finally gotten around to:

2) The Archers - Further Support work

I have finished the remaining odd stragglers throughout the main layout, leaving only the most daunting task for last... the main archway! I've been sketching ideas for this to try and figure out a neat solution, but it only served to waste time after the 3rd set of identical trusses. So I just bodged a basic shape together and filled the details in until I got this basic shape!

Other than being the wonkiest archway ever seen from above, It offers maybe 1cm of extra clearance for the silver track while having more than enough space to support both lift loops, and have enough space for a service catwalk up to the top of the arch. For clearance (and coolness!)'s sake, this catwalk is in a "collapsed state" and would unfold when E-stopped to a full scale catwalk by lowering down on it's support chains!

This still needs a lot of refinement and connecting up to the tracks, but at least the hardest part is done!

I finally finished another project! It turns out that my real-life work was sapping any creative drive that I had, so every project that I wanted to make barely made it past writing it in my notebook. But now I have been lucky to have a break from it all, I could get back to my projects!... Only it wasn't any of the unfinished projects that I had on the list. Instead, it was revisiting a concept that I have been pondering for years. So, technically it counts for this thread? Either way, let me please introduce:

Bird of Prey - A Gerstlauer concept model

What initially started as a Mack rides concept coaster has evolved into an Infinity coaster! The aim of this was to provide a complete ride experience in as small of a footprint as possible while still containing all of the necessary practical features of the ride. This then expanded to intertwining the track around multiple tree supports to create a more unique looking structure, and each element sequence gradually built up from there over several months until it seemed too compelling to not build. As I think that this would make for a very enticing ride model for parks that don't usually have the space for a major thrill coaster.

This was also a way of practicing using Sketchup, both to use for NoLimits and for more complex buildings that I have ever attempted before, as I have 2 future projects that will be very scenery-heavy and far too ambitious for the build-shape-level scenery that I have attempted in the past. So this also served as a test by figuring out how the station could integrate with the ride!

Here is the ride compared to other compact rollercoasters, namely an SLC, Boomerang, and Reverchon Wild Mouse (Thanks to Alan Casagrande, Peak Amusements & slalom01 for the amazing reverence material!)

As for my next project... I have no idea! I have definitely dropped the Space train idea for now, as I couldn't find a good layout that fit the original mindset (every attempt that I made was shockingly boring). So I will probably bounce between the Falling Dutchman, The Archers, and one of the two new projects, of which I already have a layout and have started planning the scenery for. Now that I have a decent-enough grasp on sketchup, Falling Dutchman shouldn't take long to get out with a typical NL2 environment, so that will probably come next as I still love the concept behind that. Although, I am about to start an amazing new job that will probably take up most of my mental energy, so I will commit to a project whenever I have the time and passion to come back to it.