Five Hours of Power V - Winner: Blue Thang by CoasterMac305!
File, Extract Package.
-Ride_Op
Go to "File" and click "Extract Package"
so I’m pretty new to Nolimits compared to everyone else and I’m not the greatest but can I still “participate” but not for like comp judging? Like can I use the park to like free design a coaster?
Of course!
-Ride_Op
where can i submit im done with my wingcoaster
i submitet wrongly and now the coaster isnt in
We received 19 unique entries to Five Hours of Power V! Thank you to everyone who submitted. We will work judging the entries and making everything available as soon as possible, though please give us some time as these entries will take a long time to evaluate.
-Ride_Op
Im having problems uploading to the exchange as I've never uploaded anything there before. I have the park saved as a pkg file. Has anyone else had this problem?
Ride_Op posted on August 24th, 2019
We received 19 unique entries to Five Hours of Power V! Thank you to everyone who submitted. We will work judging the entries and making everything available as soon as possible, though please give us some time as these entries will take a long time to evaluate.
-Ride_Op
I have sent you a link in the direct messages to my google drive file. Let me know if you can accept this entry
Responded.
For everyone else, thoughts on this year's challenge?
-Ride_Op
A mile of track was a lot to make, but I think it worked out in the end and brought some cool designs.
Very difficult haha
One of the side purposes of this contest is to demonstrate what is possible within the NoLimits 2 editor. A main complaint about NL2 is that it is hard to use and takes forever to build something good. This contest shows how it is possible to quickly build a quality track in a short period of time. FVD++ produces near perfect results, but it is not as easy to use initially without a deeper understanding of what I'll refer to as math shaping, which doesn't help the "NoLimits 2 is hard to use". No external scripts/tools has been a staple of 5HOP from the beginning and it will continue to be.
To allow FVD++ would involve two classes of builders and new folks wouldn't be able to compete. With requiring the built in tools, new folks learning and people who have switched to FVD++ and are super rusty at hand building are all of a sudden on the same level playing field.
Now a separate contest just around speed FVD++ building could certainly be run where FVD++ is required. Anyone want to organize that?
-Ride_Op
It was much more difficult than I thought, I had practiced on the last 2 years rules but this had me sweating...! Haha. Also I still can't seem to upload to the exchange. I am saving as a package but the drag and drop or select from folder still won't work. Can anybody advise on that and I will upload for all to see 😁
Make sure you add at least one picture. If you have more problems you should probably bring it to another forum to keep this one on topic
For the purposes of this contest, uploading to Google Drive or Dropbox is the fastest since there is nothing to fill out.
-Ride_Op
Ride_op -
what if next year, we had two categories of entry: Handbuilding and FVD? This would allow FVD users to participate using the same challenge as handbuilders, but they would not be judged against the handbuilt rides - this would avoid the advantage of having FVD track shaping.
I totally get the stay within NL2 part - the contest was great this year. Thanks for hosting another great contest!
I thought this was a great challenge and definitely would have participated if I were a better hand-builder. I liked how it pretty much purely focused on creativity, while last year's focused on a more technical aspect (capacity).
I definitely have my own thoughts on why FVD++ should be allowed, but I'd be very interested in organizing some kind of FVD competition - any folks interested, please message me! Maybe we can set something up. I have some ideas already on challenges/criteria.
That would double the work for the judges as we'd have to separate out the two and have different criteria for how well the track is shaped. Plus, a lot of what's going into the judging is the overall realism, so even if your track shape is perfect, if you only put in 1/3 of the needed supports, or your supports weren't realistic enough, no amount of FVD++ can help you with custom supporting quickly.
I still haven't heard a compelling reason for this other than the FVD++ people who like math building over hand building really just want to do it their way. We get similar complaints from people who want to bring in their own custom trains because they had in mind they wanted to build one very specific coaster type in the style of (fill in the blank style NL2 doesn't have native). There are other contests for these approaches where you can build anything you want. And sometimes a contest restricts you to one specific style only. I apologize to anyone not happy about it, however I'm not going to change the rule because some folks didn't like it and refused to enter because they couldn't build using FVD++. The contest is open to all and is a lot of fun, and there are FVD++ people who go with hand building just for this contest because they want the challenge.
As for this year, I'm looking for feedback about this year's challenge specifically. I've more than answered the question about using FVD++, which isn't feedback specific to this year.
We welcome all to join next year to see what diabolical challenge awaits!
-Ride_Op
^^
Thanks! We've tried to vary the main challenge year to year and disguise the way it was making you have to think on the fly. As we've gone along, we've also tried to put in new challenges that prevent people from practicing or coming in with a plan ahead of time.
1: Inaugural year, this was a first run of the contest. Main obstacles were a small build area, water you had to jump over without touching, interesting terrain, and trees to work around.
2: We used paths to restrict where you could place footers, and real rides that you had to work your way around, making you think about how you can place a ride over a lot of fixed existing infrastructure.
3: Wooden and shuttle coasters were previously disallowed because they would be too quick to build in a short time (wooden coasters get over 90% of the structure work done for you and shuttles are only 1/3 the length of a full coaster normally). So we required one of each, plus forced you to cram them through a small gap in the terrain. After that we intentionally left the build area wide open so freedom of choice would be a paralyzing element of the contest.
4: Capacity challenge. We required engineers to factor in lots of trains moving to hit a high capacity, requiring multiple trains, multiple block brakes, and time between blocks to be carefully controlled to ensure the trains kept moving without stacking. Other than restricting where the station went, we left the build area wide open to again paralyze with too much freedom. Narrower build areas tend to help people to build since once they near a border they are forced to turn, which helps them out more than wide open space.
5: Mile of Spaghetti. By forcing a lot of track in a small area, we snuck the main challenge in: lots of supports that can't go straight down because there are lots of tracks stacked up. This was designed to make the players their own obstacle as they forgot to think about the multiple layers of track that all needed to be supported as they kept adding in track.
6: Mwa ha ha ha ha. We have our idea in mind, and it's something that no one has done much of at all.
-Ride_Op
I definitely appreciate the variety! I especially like year 3's challenge, that sounds so stressful.
that support challenge here was indeed super frustrating, I was like uhm okay I'm going to make the supports for the highest tracks first and then build them around the lower tracks making sure they also connect to those, something like the supports from the Xpress platform 13 ride at Walibi Holland, but after the first 3000 ft of track I just couldn't fit in more and after struggling so long to get a mile of track in the blue area I was left with just half an hour to support the whole thing haha, even forgot to add catwalks to ride due to me finishing support work and clearance testing just 2 minutes before the end of the contest. The contest's never been this stressful before haha
I think this year people that went to high and were going too fast also caused themselves problems since they could not turn around or change directions quickly inside the blue area. That required multiple exits and entrances, longer coasters overall, which needed more supports in areas that didn't count toward the track length.
Good news is that next year the challenge will once again be totally different!
-Ride_Op
How, please help, im losing time.