For boring technical reasons, consoles don’t allow as much space to fit stuff in or as much processing power to run the game as on a PC, where most theme park games are played. As a result, there is a concept of a power limit in the park, and (unfortunately!) you can’t just keep putting more and more and more stuff into your park.
So how did we get around this? Just like a real theme park, there’s a limit on the amount of electrical power that you can take for each themed area of a park. Each item you have in there makes a certain drain on your available power, until you can fit no more in there. Each thing (stall, ride, coaster, game, whatever) takes a different amount of power, so there are a lot of different permutations! This adds another dimension to the gameplay and is something you need to keep in mind (as well as the financial cost of your attractions) – there are even one or two missions based around it!
Speaking of Boring Technical Stuff...
From the outset, we knew it would be a squeeze to fit a game as big, varied and deep as Thrillville, and so it proved. To give you an idea of what were up against, the 32 MB of memory in a PS2 is the same total amount of memory as the lowest-spec PC graphics card that RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 supported. Fortunately, we have some very smart programmers and have developed lots of both console and PC games, so we had several approaches. For instance, in addition to the “power limit” example mentioned above, we changed the way animations work to use “bones” rather than morph animations, so lots of memory is saved (at the expense of yet more CPU calculations).
All of these challenges were certainly daunting, but we really do feel as though we’ve conquered them all. We invite you see for yourself on November 21 when Thrillville lands on store shelves everywhere.
Previous Thrillville Developer Diaries:
