
The cruellest RollerCoaster Tycoon park created - danso
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-03-10-inside-the-most-evil-rollercoaster-tycoon-park-ever-created
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po
Nice. Very reminiscent of Magnasanti in simcity:

[https://rumorsontheinternets.org/2010/10/14/magnasanti-
the-l...](https://rumorsontheinternets.org/2010/10/14/magnasanti-the-largest-
and-most-terrifying-simcity/)

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

~~~
ghaff
Looks like the HN vision for San Francisco :-)

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

[http://m.imgur.com/gallery/Wxzbl](http://m.imgur.com/gallery/Wxzbl)

~~~
H4CK3RM4N
You've got the painting goblin in the same vein.

[http://i.imgur.com/NrJku9x.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/NrJku9x.jpg)

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3131s
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=aie9xFzNT4M)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-fOfVsM7jE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-fOfVsM7jE)

~~~
edem
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...

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Flammy
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...](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/uxpil/ive_been_playing_the_same_game_of_civilization_ii/)

~~~
rhaps0dy
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...](https://www.reddit.com/r/theeternalwar/comments/uzm4w/took_58_years_ingame_but_i_pulled_it_off/)

~~~
Flammy
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.

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rl3
> _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.)

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rocqua
It doesn't look like anything to me.

~~~
muninn_
Good one

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bkjelden
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.

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nefitty
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.

~~~
paulddraper
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.

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

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

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

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mdf
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](http://stackoverflow.com/q/14692818/2096560)

~~~
adekok
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.

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speeder
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.

~~~
peeters
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.

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

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brian-armstrong
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

