Hey all! This discussion is based on 2025 plans and projects. What are you planning to do on ParkCrafters in 2025?

 

This year is another year of refurbishments for me. Multiple projects that started on SGW are getting refurbished, with some being full park refurbishments. Also this year I am planning to continue Emerald Waters in Planet Coaster 2, somewhat waiting for the flume improvements first and that project will be seeing improvements. The big project for 2025 is my Universal Studios project in RCT3. This is the first time I am sharing 2 parks in one file, something I used to do all the time with Disneyland-based parks in my earlier years. Definitely an exciting year.

We have one last bench to finish on the Wonderful Wizard of Oz PC1 project with Citytrader.  It's already partly done. 

Because the WWoO bench didn't have much room on that side, I took a copy of the Emerald City bench, and then moved part of the Emerald City, and the surrounding areas further down on the bench, recreated the waterways, and then deleted the originals...which took a while.  Then I started the transition from the Emerald City to the last area of the park The Northern Kingdom.  Built a few things and then turned it over to Ctytrader to work his magic.

Since I'm mainly done with WWoO and am waiting for PC2 to be improved, I decided to pick up on another project Citytrader and I had discussed a long time ago, and that was Walt Disney's original idea for a Mickey Mouse Park near the Disney Studios, which wasn't approved and Walt moved on to the far bigger Disneyland.  Citytrader had a good start to a version of that park based on the planned layout that he's worked on on and off which is really nice 

But I stumbled upon an image showing an even earlier version of the MM Park, designed for the same plot of land, but laid out differently.  So I've been working on that.  As usual I tend to build BIG, which I've done this time as well...now comes the process of shrinking down the overall footprint.  Right now it consists mainly of the Main Street area and part of an Old Town area along with a Fairgrounds.  While I'm using a lot of Workshop blueprints, it takes time to find the ones that are scaled correctly to what I use, and then many have wholesale tweaking to fit my purposes - everything from removing multiple stories to adding on wider facades.  Not a bit of TMTK made for this one...so far.

Edited January 29Jan 29 by Wabigbear

My goal this year is to contribute more to this site. I have several projects in the works. Including a "best practices" guide to design and build theme parks in RCT3, and for that I'm building a PKM of the most important concepts of theme park design.

Other idea I have is to build a list of "core" RCT3 CSO.

As for parks, I'd like to revisit Palmcove Museum, this time using CSO. I also have in mind creating in the future a park of a popular videogame franchise. (But the franchise in question wants to build it's own theme park so I'll just have to wait)

In the meantime, I've been toying with the idea of making a park around Supernatural Collaborative Publications i've seen around the internet.

Still working on all my open projects:

Renee Feu Adventure park (PC1)

Enchanted Lake (PC1)

Garden of the Gods (PC2)

Brookfield Zoo (PlaZoo)

Would like to wrap up at least Enchanted lake and start another new park in PC2 once more scenery options may become available. Renee is going to still take some time to build out as well as Brookfield Zoo....but in the end....who knows.

I plan to actually open RCT3 sometime this year and play... maybe.

(I haven't had a chance to even open the game in over 6 months... :^þ  )

Considering the fact I just returned after a few months or something (I was gone due to fighting an unending battle with horrible pay-to-win games...), I think I will actually TRY to make content of my own. I have plans for packs of various additions to RCT3, my problem is that I have a few... problems... and I never have motivation or discipline to work on anything. Maybe I could sketch what i'm thinking of, after all, anything I come up with is free for anyone to adapt into an actual mod. Though here are 2 out of who knows how many of my ideas for mods... (Please don't judge me if they don't happen, my projects are open for anyone.)

Untouched Themes: Collections of Flat Rides and Attractions that directly fall under the Atlantis, Paradise, Safari, and Prehistoric themes. Some ideas for such rides include Trident, Palmswing, Scorpion's Tail, and Dino Eggspin.

Time Travels: A multi-mod collection of Scenery, Attractions, Scenarios, Tracks, and more based off of various time periods.

I was also thinking of making my own custom event calender with the idea of attracting new users via my YT channel (I don't have much yet)... The big issue is I don't know where to start and what to do first... I have a habit of overthinking strategies, which always leads to stress and disorder... I also realized that there could have been a better topic to post this in, but i've been going through a lot. For now, all I do is write documents with my ideas.

On 2/22/2025 at 1:47 PM, Nicole Bertsch said:

[...] my problem is that I have a few... problems... and I never have motivation or discipline to work on anything. [...]

The big issue is I don't know where to start and what to do first... I have a habit of overthinking strategies, which always leads to stress and disorder...

I get you, I'm not that disciplined as well and I'm having some trouble making progress on the projects, maybe I have said it here, maybe not, but my Palmcove Museum entry for the RCT3 20th anniversary contest, at least the last part of it, was somehow rushed. I lost so much time overthinking which art pieces should go in the museum wing and I lost a day or two of time. It did not help that I had college at the same time. But in the end, everything went just fine, not without stress, of course, but I managed to pull things off. In fact, I'm supposed to be doing homework right now, so well procrastination sucks.

The problem with me is that, besides college, I not only have RCT3 but many other projects as well, so I'll advice a 'slow and steady' approach. A tiny bit is better than zero progress.

Regarding strategies, one thing that has helped me in that aspect is not trying to reinvent the wheel trying to create a new strategy, perhaps looking up to 'external' things and adapting them to your needs would help.

For example. And this is perhaps heavily influenced by how RCT2 modders and OpenRCT2 devs work, they create a workflow and then "automate" it. Recently, a video by Marcel Vos explained how they add new track pieces to built-in roller coasters. They add them first to their custom build coaster types (ex: Single rail coaster, not present in vanilla RCT2) and try to streamline and debug it and then "translate" the elements from the single rail coaster to built-in coasters. Under the hood, there is a lot automation in designing tracks to offset work loads and just focusing on designing and debugging the new track pieces. (Or that is what I want to think, I do not know the nitty-gritty, but that's the general picture)

Perhaps we could attempt to create something similar in RCT3, an automated workflow that helps creating RCT3 Custom Objects. Previous attempts to this approach were tried back then in early 2006 and in SGW Forums, but I suspect they never got off the ground due to not having a solid open-sourced, technological infrastructure, we have such infrastructure now and that is exactly what made Open RCT2 achieve massive progress in updating the game.

On 2/22/2025 at 1:47 PM, Nicole Bertsch said:

Untouched Themes: Collections of Flat Rides and Attractions that directly fall under the Atlantis, Paradise, Safari, and Prehistoric themes. Some ideas for such rides include Trident, Palmswing, Scorpion's Tail, and Dino Eggspin.

Time Travels: A multi-mod collection of Scenery, Attractions, Scenarios, Tracks, and more based off of various time periods.

Making updates or expansions to the RCT3 Vanilla Scenery has always been in my bucket list, akin to the Atlantis, Glass and I think, Egypt CSO expansion sets. Honestly, some of the vanilla scenery is just unfit (I'm looking at you Curved Slate Wall from the Color Wall Set) and needs a solid update.

I have a new show in the works and plan to create my first park ever in Planet Coaster 2 once a few more updates for the game get released!

...And of course making more improvements and features to ParkCrafters itself 😁