Traveller

Vodhin's Girders N' Glass CS set is one of those truly magnificent essentials, which should be in every RCT3 creator's basic "must have" 101 tool kits!

Personally I would judge this set to be in the Top 5 of The Greatest CSO ever created.

So, "what does make a really great CSO?" - The answer is simply logical: For me personally, a truly great CS set has all of the following qualities:

1) Overall appearance, look and feel.  (in eg. the quality of the textures used, quality of the icons, are the pieces in English etc.)

2) Functionality. How does the set pieces behave, function and work when used in editor, are the pieces recolorable, if they "snap-in", how they snap-in, are any pieces available in diagonal form, etc.

3.) Usefulness. Is the usage of the set limited to "just one thing" - or can the set be used in unlimited ways. Only creator's imagination will pose any kind of limits to this set.

4) Compatibility with other sets, especially in-game textures and other user created CSO. This set is more or less based on the model and look of the original glass girders found in-game, which makes this set even more useful - as they can even be used together almost seamlessly.

5) Extent of the CSO set. How many pieces there are, and how many of them are really useful, and how many of them are unnecessary. Luckily, this set has NO unnecessary pieces. Everything has a well defined usefulness and purpose.  It has 68 various iron girder pieces, 32 glass wall pieces, and a VERY useful building set for creating a custom cast iron spiral staircase - Which screams to be used in spooky theme, and anything fitting for Victorian/Edwardian era scenery!

This set is more than extremely useful! - If you think that this is only good for recreating a version of "The Crystal Palace", you're dead wrong! This set can be used with any other CSO in so many, various and versatile ways that it makes this set a true, genuine masterpiece. I have myself used this set with various sized arches and other pieces which allow non-collision items placed inside or on top of them. If you really want to see how many different ways pieces found in this set can be used, download Belotto33's Structure Packs - it's used in 22 of the 28 sets.

Finally.... If for some unknown and/or weird reason you haven't got this set yet, you truly are missing something great!

I attached screenshot of a conservatory/green house/orangerie built almost entirely exclusively using parts found in this CS set.

This variation of speaker set was obviously meant to function as a ride event, in another words, sound file is played, when the tracked ride reaches the trigger point.  - OK, just what I wanted, so let's test it... Well... copied the files under style\themed, as usual, start the game and test. The speaker does show up in Ride Events menu as intended, when selected there are the same options as with the rest of the ride events, you can rotate it and set the trigger point. OK. Good so far. Now let's place it.... wait... the trigger set button has vanished, now that I have selected the speaker, and I am placing it near the coaster track, where the trigger point shines blue and place the speaker, and I hear the familiar "thump" sound. Oh, I see! This speaker set is no longer a ride event! It has turned itself automatically into a regular speaker set, and trigger function has completely vanished.... and therefore it does NOT function as a ride event, you can only open or close it, select the sound file and set the genre, as with any other normal speaker, but alas, you cannot use it as a ride event. What a huge, big disappointment! Also, the model is very basic, untextured, and parts of it are invisible from one side, so I guess it could (almost) function as an invisible or hidden speaker, but this set unfortunately isn't any good for anything else. Besides there is a better invisible speaker set available, if anyone needs one. Shame really, if this would have worked as intended, this would have been really useful. I think there still aren't any sounds as ride events available for RCT3. Someone really should create one.

ShyGuy's Alpine sets currently run from this set number 1, to set number 6. I don't think I would need to type a review for each of them, for a number of reasons. Firstly, anything that ShyGuy has ever published is a MUST HAVE on every  designer's basic tool kit, and you can trust the impeccable quality and attention to detail found in these sets. They are of not only top quality, but also extremely versatile, beautiful to look at, and practically are problem free. Oh and secondly... This is set number 1 of the 6 Alpine sets published (all can be found here at ParkCrafters), and just this first set alone has a whopping 134 separate components, which should give anyone a clear picture of the insane amount of high quality custom Alpine building blocks for your every need. Whether you're building your very own beer-hall putsch scenario or want to create your own Oktoberfest, these are the definitive sets to go with.

And again here's another link to one of Silvarret's superb tutorial videos, this time to illustrate how a master builder would -and should use these excellent Alpine/Bavarian style building sets:

Silvarret isn't really known as a author for vast amount of CS objects, but he is known for making outstanding building tutorial videos, which are thankfully still on YouTube... even though he claims himself that he felt that "having a tutorial channel is a waste of time"(!) - I very strongly disagree! - He has produced without a doubt the best video tutorials ever for RCT3, (he has also published numerous top quality tutorials and demo videos for other games too, mainly "Planet Coaster" and "Cities: Skyline"). This CS set is one of the few of his own, which are currently available at ParkCrafters. This set contains only 18 components, and it's best use - (which I think it was intended to) is to function as an expansion for ShyGuys super-duper Main Street sets, which unquestionably should be a must have on every little peepsters shopping cart! As is well known, they are so versatile that they can be used for almost any style or period building you could think of! This Silvarret's excellent Neoclassical set adds to them very nicely.  Those columns found in this set are just as at home in Antique Roman Emperor Nero's pyrotechnical observation post, as they would be in a "Lord Farthingbottom's" UK country manor, complete with a ridiculously extravagant garden folly, built sometime around 1824.

Here's a link to Silvarret's über-classic, fantastically useful and very educating "How To Make a Neoclassical Building" tutorial video on YouTube, how to use this set with other sets, mostly ShyGuy's stunning Main Street sets:

Of all the great CS sets, I would personally count The_Cook's Atlantis Vaulting (equally with "The_Cook's Gothic Vaulting") among the top 10 of all the great sets ever released. "Why?" you may ask. I'll tell you. Besides the obvious, they are well designed, look good, bug free, and what only adds to their versatility of use, is the fact that the set uses the same in-game textures, making it easy to combine the set pieces with other authors Atlantis -themed add-ons any way we want, thus exponentially increasing endless creative ways they can be used. Mind you, that using them the way where they would be architecturally, and mathematically realistic and viable structures of how they would function in real world, is most definitely not an easy task. It will take a lot of practice, and without any knowledge of the mechanics and architectural style of ribbed vaulting you will find yourself just placing the parts that seem to fit and form some kind of familiar structure you may have seen somewhere- like for example in your hometown's old church. However, it must be said that you are definitely not required at all to use them this way - thus enabling to use them as parts of anything that we think will look good, and combine them anyway and with everything else, mostly just because gravity and Newton's theories don't apply in most of the scenery objects in RCT3. I personally like realistic and architecturally correct structures, but that's just me, and The_Cook's set enables me to do just that - they are so well and realistic in design. When talking about realistic architecture, The_Cook's set enables us to build a number of realistic forms of vaulting. Firstly, the aforementioned "ribbed vaulting", which is the most complex of the structures using also the sail components in the set. The much simpler "barrel vaulting", among others. The components also enable us to build various types of tunnels, arches and domes, and much, much more. This set is one of those great sets, where the way they are used is only bound our own imagination. Incidentally... I vaguely remember seeing a long, long time ago, an extensive tutorial on some forum site, how to use The_Cook vaulting sets - and I would really like to find it again! If anyone has this tutorial saved somewhere, please be so kind and upload it to ParkCrafters.

DasMatze's Animatronics CS -set is without any doubt one the absolute essentials, when creating custom parks, scenarios and tracks.

It is tricky to install, and you have to read really - and I do mean really carefully - the instruction PDF -file provided with the set.

I'm no fan of automated installation .exe packages, but this set really would benefit from it.

Naturally problems would then arise depending on version of the game and which O/S is used.

However this set really works, and I haven't encountered any issues worth mentioning while using it, if we forget the aforementioned tricky installation.

My game did crash a couple of times during testing, while setting the trigger point, but this can, and will eventually happen for a myriad of reasons to any custom content.

Finally, this set really is highly recommend and extremely valuable as a CS item, because there really aren't too many custom ride events, and more would always be welcome, as long as they are of high quality and well thought out.