Wabigbear

Great question! A 'bench' usually refers to a 'workbench', and in this instance it kind of means a section of a project, taken to the 'workbench' for closer, more detailed work to just that section of the project. Some people use 'bench' interchangeably with 'park' as well, but here it means a 'section or part of a project'. The limitations in Planet Coaster when parks exceed a certain size (mostly based on the overall piece count), sometimes make it easier to make a copy of the park file, then remove items except in the area you are going to focus on. That allows the piece count you have available to use to increase. In our case, the original park layout ended up being divided into five parts, because of all the crap we added. Each of those benches when combined make up the whole park which we can't create in one humongous park file. Each bench is released as a stand alone park file - the parts of the park we didn't focus on on that bench are left blank for the most part, and we usually fix peep spawn points and things like railroad tracks to fit with the smaller size. Gawd I hope that made a small bit of sense! LOL!

Yeah, those night shots are really cool! Even more of an inferno than during the day!

While I'm not much of a scenario player, the inventiveness shown here is top notch! I especially liked the "UFO"...that's really cool looking!

Mt Rushmore is actually a piece done by blackmanshadow from the Workshop! It's in multiple parts to get around the TMTK size restrictions, but he also shared a blueprint of the all the parts placed together.

Sincere thanks for the comments everyone! As we leave Bayou Bateaux we'll stop for a beignet and a café au lait at Mardi Gras Cakes... Now we'll access the back entrance to Enterprise... "Train crossing...look out for cars!" A little further on we leave Enterprise and come to our final destination... Rushmore Station, a salute to America's National Parks... Wildlife abounds here...raccoons and other 'critters'... A museum dedicated to National Parks... There's a second floor overlook... Our version of Mt Rushmore... Next door is a stop on the Disney America railroad... Restrooms on the left, and looming in the background is the areas main attraction... Great spot to fill up on Bison Burgers... Grizzly Lodge...home to the Famous Country Bear Jamboree... Here's the main entrance... Portraits of the Cast are displayed... The Grizzly Lodge Restaurant is located on the second floor, check in and the up the stairs or use the elevator... Past Fred, our friendly castmember, is a hall with more portraits of the stars of the show... There's a waiting area with seating... Finally it's SHOWTIME as we enter the Jamboree Theater. Liverlips is in the middle of his number... Always 'synergy' if it's a Disney Park...and that extends to the Ursine Community... There's the doors we came through originally... What a show! Still humming how 'all them guys who turn me on, turn me down"... The Lodge has seating and tables in it's lobby... And - of course - a gift shop and small cafe... You can load up on Country Bear items... The cafe sells do-it-yourself Smores kits, so after you exit the Lodge... Just head upstairs to the firepit and toast you up some tasy treats... Catch of glimpse of of Railroad cars heading past before heading out for the day... Next time we'll take a quick look at some backstage areas, and then that will FINALLY conclude our visit to Disney's America Theme Park...hope you enjoyed your time with us!

Great idea, and here 'mini park' certainly doesn't mean 'mini quality'...Tornado looks fantastic!

Next up, a ride on "Bayou Bateaux", which of course recently received a "Princess and the Frog" overlay becoming "Tianna's Bayou Adventure", 'cause synergy is everything! Looks like 'Princess" Tianna is there to see us off... We float by the Blue bayou Restaurant... Gators??? What do they mean GATORS??? And now there's "River Pirates"??? What sort of ride is this??? Fog seems to be rolling in...that's a funny looking green log there on the right... Looks like a junkyard...for boats... Avast, there be pirates...puny river ones, but pirates none the less! Passing under the train trestle... Look at the size of that firefly! Thankfully it's not a mosquito... The frogs are kinda funny-lookin' here as well... Well, this looks 'interesting'...Mama Odie's a lover of snakes and gators, but not people it seems... There's the old girl now on her front porch...charming... "Fresh" zombies? I suppose they hold together better than the one's past their pull-date...especially if you're just renting them for the weekend. Oh, this is one of those famous New Orleans cemeteries! Looks like a tour group is visiting... Hmmm, must be foreigners, they don't look like locals... Here comes another group of them...can't seem to find the exit. "Hey, tour buses load over there!" Looks like we're headed back towards the city... Local swimming hole...that's how "Slow-foot Joe" became "No-foot Joe" I hear... It's The Real Thing... Hey, Tianna's here to welcome us back! Time to unload and grab a beignet before we continue...

LOVE the station and the tunnel! And I'm also one who likes to build off of Workshop blueprints - they can be a excellent base for tweaking to make them your own - that one looks fantastic!

I wish the water particles worked better at night in this game...well, actually they work but they can't really be lit as they should be. Thankfully they still look great during the daylight hours.

Agreed 100%. Planet Coaster's design team seemed to function without a standardized system of scaling things...one door might be 15 feet tall while another built for Munchkins, same with windows and other building parts as well as foliage as you pointed out, many of the props too. I know they used the reasoning that scaling up items worked visually better in the game, but there was no consistency to that, they scaled some stuff up by varying degrees, other items seem scaled down. There was also no consistency to filling out building themes. One theme might have every wall and roof combination included (missing of course things like quarter-width walls and such...), while another theme would include only some of the items. Made mixing and matching for design work extremely frustrating at times. The same thing happened with things like signage. I recall someone (forgive me for forgetting their name!), actually went through and researched all the missing items from different themes, and shared it on the Planet Coaster website complete with screenshot, to no avail. While much of what Frontier designed was really well done, it's the lack of consistency and attention to details of what was missing that has always bothered me. It's like there were multiple teams working on different things without a standard Planet Coaster design style book being shared between them. Another thing I'd like to see are flat rides - and coaster stations - with a smaller footprint. Some attractions were themselves reasonably small, but surrounded by an unrealistically huge round plazas. I've sometimes skipped using a smaller attraction that would have worked perfectly in a spot but the unrealistic space requirement meant it wouldn't fit. Stations also sometimes were overly large and were forced to allow path connections only on certain sides, which caused them to take up even more space.

I'm not sure, but that looks like a blueprint by Ramses.sam... He made a number of run-down French-themed structures...

Obviously that first screen is of where the fire started...no doubt some gear got stuck and a pulley overheated or something or other. Or maybe it's that shifty looking character leaning against the front while an inferno rages around him? Someone should check him for matches!

It would be my guess...and only a guess...that using something like the Opaque Glass Wall 4m Lit that Frontier designed specifically for use at night would be a better choice than depending on something behind glass panels for a similar look - at least for large scale usage. For a building or two I think you are okay. Of course there are times when glass just is a better choice for what you are trying to do. Wonderful buildings!

It's a mix of scratch-built structures we made along with a lot of blueprints from the Workshop, most of which we tweaked to some degree or just used parts of. It's a lot of placing stuff like a puzzle to see what works, I can remake one street easily a couple dozen times, and that's before adding all the streetscape details. Both of us have pretty good eyes for detail (mine tends to go overboard at times! LOL!) and what seems to 'fit' and are open-minded with suggestions, so we work well together, plus both of us use this game to relax, so there's no big hurry (which is good when I can 'borrow the bench for a bit' turns into "are you going to finish up here anytime THIS year???" LOL!). Thanks for all the nice comments everyone, most appreciated! And don't worry, there's only a couple more things to explore in New Orleans before we wrap up with a visit to a spot honoring my kinfolk!

Citytrader's so old he's visited most of these places repeatedly since they were founded...and while he can't remember why he came into a room or what he had for lunch earlier, he does have an eye for details like these after long, looooooong years of observation. His Seven Wonders Park is built entirely on recollection you know...

Our tour continues! (I saw you looking at your watches...) Leaving Bonnie & Clyde we head back to the streetcar and turn right... At the end of the street you'll note Tiana's Palace, a fancy eatin' place... On the right is the entrance to The Bayou Bateaux...aka "Tiana's Bayou Adventure". The structure is a Workshop find closely based on the Pontalba Building on New Orleans... But before we get there we'll take a sharp left onto Royal Street... Drug store on the corner for those who party the NOLA-way too hard. There's another streetcar making it's way... Many of the signs I created are actual ones from New Orleans... They look fairly good after dark too... Up ahead you can see the Park and the Big Easy restaurant. Turn the corner to the right and there's an ice cream shop... A pedestrian street loops around to the right...some of New Orleans 'seedier' establishments find a home here... "Voodoo Club being one that the tourists seem to flock to. A small plaza features a Venetian Carousel... While across the street is the Royal Theater with live stage performances and Disney feature films... (another Workshop find I tweaked slightly...) We'll pause here...

DeLadysigner has an interesting take on a possible PC2. While admittedly she knows little more than the rest of us, her break down has some good points and you have to take her connections into consideration. She predicts that Frontier will announce another big title in the Spring of next year, with release in the winter before Christmas. That's based on a bunch of things, like that leaked plan, and Frontier's own announcement os a new title during fiscal year. You can listen to her on this video... Is she right? Who knows?

That's what Industrial Strength Duct Tape is for...

IF it's something that you used that might possibly have not been made public, but shared privately with you, you might get that error... Or if you created something, you got it from the TMTK Editor but you haven't in turn uploaded it to the Workshop you can get that error... Use anything recent of mine? I may not have set it to public. Look in game at your Custom items you made...see if they have then little carpenter's square symbol (or maybe it's an arm...I'm not sure... LOL!), if it does it needs to be uploaded to the Workshop first...

I'm amazed that even the in-game textures haven't degraded with as many details this park has! Obviously he has a far FAR better computer than we do!

Well, originally on this ride it was supposed to be a shooter, so I had the idea to start in the 'city' and then move out to a final confrontation in a rural area...and that's about it. So I built a short section of track, laid in most of the structures and themeing around it, and then moved onto the next section. Then later would go back and tweak. Most often I was influenced by things I found in the Workshop that I liked...for instance the gas station or the still and bootleggers, so I added track to where these elements would logically (or maybe not...this is ME we're talking about after all - 'logic' doesn't always come into play...) fit. Some things were also influenced by where the original targets were placed - for instance the bootleggers truck has 'liquid' spilling out of the barrels after they were hit by stray bullets. One scene that didn't show up in the screenshots was inside the barn, where you had cops on one side of the track and bad guys on the other, shooting at each other with a ton of targets for guests to add. The final scene is of the old ramshackle shack with bad guys holed up inside but it was on fire, again with a lot of targets dropping down. But the size of the bench was really lowering the quality of the textures - especially those of the targets, and then I thought about whether this would be a theme Disney would have had and I decided to change directions. Even the unbuilt Dick Tracy attraction for Disneyland Paris wouldn't have had the same sort of shooter ride with guests firing at other 'humans' (even of the cartoonish variety...). There's a lot more I would have liked to have done with this ride, the exit is kind of bare and there needs to be more detailing and work on backgrounds in many areas, perhaps someday I'll plop just it on a smaller bench so I don't have to worry about the textures and I can finish it the way I wanted...

That's Hank's old deaf dog Brutus...he's just waiting for somebody to come too close so he can flop on his back for a belly-rub. He only barks when he see's Hank coming, so he looks like he's earning his keep. The ferocious guard dog that he is...

Thanks everyone! We'll continue our tour where we left off...right in front of "The Search for Bonnie & Clyde"... Sadly this attraction didn't turn out as I had envisioned it. It was meant to be a shooter, where guests rode along chasing the Barrows Gang and joining in on the firefights. Deciding to error on the side of caution, I thought that might be a little too realistic, not being space aliens, or cartoon critters. So I revamped it just as the Luna Autos traveling around following the gang. Besides, at this point on the bench the in-game textures on the targets looked horrible even with settings cranked up... So here we enter the dockside warehouse... Our chariots await (Citytrader relates to that term...) Our purpose on this adventure...keep a sharp lookout! Down a narrow New Orleans alleyway... Gunfire breaks out just ahead at the Last National Bank! The Barrows Gang has struck again... We'll head around to the back and hope to cut off their escape... Oops! Looks like the Bad Guys had the same idea! More gunfire ahead! Looks like part of the Gang escaped through this tunnel... We've followed them to the countryside outside of the city... The desperadoes have held up Hank's Garage! There's ol' Barney standing out in the open watching the Gang and Feds trade shots... Barney never was quite right in the head since that incident with the hay baler... We'll sneak past them... Louie and his Boys have their still running full-time to meet demand from all the speakeasies in the city... Looks like the Gang didn't appreciate Louie's bootlegger's muscling in on their territory The trail ends near this farm, we'll cut through the barn... Looks like one of Clyde's cars...maybe the Feds will be lucky? You'll have to wait and see how it turns out... In the meantime we'll head back into the Big Easy... Back to the Warehouse where we began... We'll grab something to drink on the way out... There's much more NOLA to explore...

VERY atmospheric and the use of billboard is fantastic. Love all the detailing, and especially like the queue on the Pooh ride, that's really done well, the tree roots coming through the dirt walls is spot-on!

Thanks for the nice comments everyone - much appreciated! We'll continue down Royal Street...first these signs caught our attention... The Customs House was a Workshop find, based on the real building I believe...here it serves as a small museum outlining NOLA history... French influences abound, of course... Just in case anyone missed the smaller sign... Another wonderful Workshop blueprint which was transposed into a streetcar...named Desire (Yeah, I know the real one runs nowhere near this part of the city!)... Just past is Wharf Street... Home to some food vendors... At the end of which is the entrance to the "Search for Bonnie & Clyde" ride...and a good place for Cajun Fast Food! To the right there's a ramp down to the boat docks...The Cotton Warehouse holds the exit to Bonnie & Clyde... Not so sure I'd take a ride on the SS Leaky Boat... River traffic is building at this hour... Next up: A spin on the "Search for Bonnie & Clyde"...