• ℹ️ Heads up...

    This is a popular topic that is fast moving Guest - before posting, please ensure that you check out the first post in the topic for a quick reminder of guidelines, and importantly a summary of the known facts and information so far. Thanks.

Planet Coaster 2: General Discussion

DistortAMG said:
They do exist and have existed for a long time.

Here is one example of many, the only lighting on this is the white backlit keyboard, essential for alot of proffesional applications. Very powerful and very discreet.

Asking for a very powerful thin and light laptop is not a problem of the laptop industry unfortunately. The microprocessor technology doesn't exist right now, we are moving in that direction but we are not there yet. The processor side is almost there, it's the graphics side that is the problem. Tech is moving forward there though, Steam decks and what not prove that. But the Steam deck is not exactly capable of playing the very latest games and decent quality.

It will be nice being able to play Planco2 on the go on a thin and light, but right now the best option for that is Geforce now.
Click to expand...

Good spot! It's not too tacky and completely agree re the backlit keyboard, my MacBook has that too and wouldn't be without it!

I think you're spot on with the mismatch in what the gaming-capable laptop industry can provide, compared to what the consumer wants. It's interesting that unlike smartphones which are pretty much all optimised design/function wise at this point, the PC industry is still lagging behind.

Strange this is though, is that whilst I own a Mac, and I'm not tethered to Apple over any other manufacturer, they have pulled of something I think the windows PC market is struggling with. That is, apple silicon. This thing is light as a feather (2021 MacBook Air) yet when graphically intense games are ported to Mac using Apple's Metal API, they run flawlessly, even at ultra settings and without fans!

The GPU&CPU is all on one chip, which is seen on PCs too, but Apple have definitely pulled off something incredible here, the issue is that the it's proprietary to Mac, and most of the gaming market is windows, so there's little incentive for developers to optimise games for Metal API. If Apple were to share the technology with the wider-industry, and the industry began working closer with Apple, we might actually get to a very good place where integrated chips are more widespread, and API's like Metal are further developed and rolled out across all manufacturers.

Maybe there's some industry politics at play such as the AMD/NVIDIA competition, long with intel still owning the CPU market? Market competition is great, but it seems to have resulted in stagnation where we might otherwise see immense progress if they worked together, at least from my perspective anyway!
 
Skyscraper said:
Continuous chain of cars and moving station confirmed for the FD Vision!

1727288681809.png


From the latest Frontier Unlocked

Also, could the "sit down powered four seater" be the Mack suspended powered coaster...? 👀
Click to expand...

I am not convinced, right now this seems to be the same as what we did not want. A chain of cars that moves continuously as mentioned in the ride description in the screenshot posted, is very different to a continuous chain of cars which is what you mentioned.
 
DistortAMG said:
I am not convinced, right now this seems to be the same as what we did not want. A chain of cars that moves continuously as mentioned in the ride description in the screenshot posted, is very different to a continuous chain of cars which is what you mentioned.
Click to expand...
Ah yes, reading it again I see what you mean. I will be disappointed if it's chains of three cars as opposed to a continuous chain.
 
I think it is quite clear that this will be a proper Omnimover based on the last part of the description:
"With guests boarding via a conveyor belt". Conveyor belt means a continuous loading station. If the cars were in chains of 3 they would stop in the station. Therfore no need for a conveyor belt.

Also, I notice the Wild mouse now allows for just 1 train operation, meaning the rule of 6 is no longer a thing.
 
Tim said:
I think it is quite clear that this will be a proper Omnimover based on the last part of the description:
"With guests boarding via a conveyor belt". Conveyor belt means a continuous loading station. If the cars were in chains of 3 they would stop in the station. Therfore no need for a conveyor belt.

Also, I notice the Wild mouse now allows for just 1 train operation, meaning the rule of 6 is no longer a thing.
Click to expand...

Still not convinced based on what we have actually seen so far. I do hope you are right. But they could also have the conveyor belt and the station gates open when the small chain of cars is passing through.

Rides do have single cars or small chains and don't stop in stations. Spinball Whizzer being an example. Just because it is not a full set of vehicles doesn't have to mean it will stop.
 
Geeky one here, but I hope guest expectations regarding queue times are more realistic, none of that leaving the queue after 7 minutes cos it's too long.

I would also like to be able to run rides on test mode without it clearing the queue.

And ride op controls would be ace.

Finally, in terms of ride types, a Madhouse, Breakdance, and the ability to create horror mazes would be ace.
 
The big thing for me that they confirmed in the stream was that the game is using ray traced global illumination. I did suspect it, as you could sort of see it in previous videos.

This is the technology that allows darkness inside of buildings along side many other cool and real to life lighting techniques. I'll be interested to see how if at all this is handled on the consoles as both current gen have pretty weak ray tracing capabilitys, if they do include it on current consoles, I would expect a huge down grade to resolution and how smooth the game runs when its turned on. The PS5 Pro will be much better at this though.

On PC, you will need an RTX capable Nvida card for the best experience. AMD do have ray tracing but it is way slower than Nvidia, for the same reason of the consoles, which are also AMD powered. But the same will apply again, turning this on will have a large performance impact, so your going to need a strong RTX card and not an entry level one to make full use of it.

I think though, alot of people will be left out with this, hence why they are not shouting about it and subtly mentioned it in the stream. The current generation of consoles have practically no ray traced, global illuminated games for a reason....because they really struggle to do it. Almost all of the ray traced games on console use it for reflections only, which is much easier to do. If it was included on consoles, which is doubtful, I would expect a large jump in the oswald eugene counter for relatively small indoor spaces as the game attempts to keep the performance decent as is required by Microsoft and Sony to publish on their platforms. If you are running an Xbox Series S, you've got no chance I would say. But I feel this feature won't be on consoles, because of how sharply it would cause the counter to rise, in part because of how rubbish the consoles are at doing ray tracing. The PS5 Pro does feature some seriously beefed up ray tracing hardware, so that probably will support it and quite well, but the others, I doubt it.

Great to see though as this will give great and very, very acurate lighting when turned on, along side completely dark interiors, which is a feature of ray traced global illumination. But you will sacrifice a fair bit of performance for it, like you do in every other game that features the technology.

I do think they may have other technologies improved on from Planet Coaster to improve the lighting for the consoles and lower powered PC's, but I seriously doubt they will be getting the same fully dark buildings as high end PC's, as they simply cannot use the technology well at all, that Frontier have confirmed they are using to make buildings dark. To be fair to Frontier, it is pretty much the only way to do this. So it's not like they could have chosen a different technology.

For anyone who wants more details into what ray tracing actually is, why it is so acurate to real life lighting, looks so great and really makes lighting look real, look at the video below. It covers global illumination type ray tracing to be specific, very well. You can also get an understanding as to why it uses so much computing power to do, power that is for the most part out of reach of current gen consoles unfortunately.


From: https://youtu.be/iOlehM5kNSk?si=izCzVOfzV6WmEwAS
 
Last edited:
I'm excited to confirm that this afternoon, I took the plunge and pre-ordered the Deluxe Edition of Planet Coaster 2!

I know that ordering something before it's out is risky, but based on what we've seen so far, I have little reason to doubt Frontier and I have every faith that the game will be absolutely brilliant... and to be frank, I wanted those additional rides!

6th November can't come soon enough, if you ask me!
 
I am looking forward to the game it is going to be brilliant but they must fix that absolutely crap UI before it releases. A sentiment almost everyone is sharing online.

The UI is totally fine for console players so that should stay, not so much for PC. We use a much more acurate pointing device than a controller. So having this over inflated full screen and very limited UI is crap. I would expect them to change it because the noise online currently is huge regarding the UI.

The UI is so bad you cannot even get a proper workflow going when building large projects, something you could do in the OG Planco. Meaning it is going to take longer to do anything with more clicks, more stuff hidden behind extra menus that don't need to be. You sit closer to a PC monitor, the UI should reflect that in its design, something that isn't fixable with UI scaling.
 
As Mac user, I've finally bitten the bullet and pre-ordered Planet Coaster 2 for the PlayStation 5. The ability to use a keyboard and mouse with it, even on console, was a bit of a draw, although I'll probably end up using the DualSense Controller most of the time.

Thanks to a combination of redeemed PlayStation store credit, earned through PS Stars, and previous "owners" of PlanCo for console getting a discount (even though it was through PlayStation Plus), I've managed to snag the Deluxe Edition for £33.99!
 
I’ve installed VMWare on my Mac to be able to play PlanCo on PC when it is released. I have a 32GB RAM M1 MacBook Pro so should easily be able to partition 16-24GB to Windows for it. Have tested with PlanCo1 and seems to run pretty well, although the middle mouse wheel simply doesn’t work in the game, which is a bit odd. Hopefully this won’t be an issue for PlanCo2!
 
Burbs said:
I’ve installed VMWare on my Mac to be able to play PlanCo on PC when it is released. I have a 32GB RAM M1 MacBook Pro so should easily be able to partition 16-24GB to Windows for it. Have tested with PlanCo1 and seems to run pretty well, although the middle mouse wheel simply doesn’t work in the game, which is a bit odd. Hopefully this won’t be an issue for PlanCo2!
Click to expand...
It's the running under two layers of emulation that you're going to struggle with, in addition to the lack of a dedicated graphics card. I wish you the best of luck!
 
Yeah, I feel for Mac users currently. GeForce now will be a much better way to play. Especially seeing as the game will be using ray tracing for the darkness in buildings etc. No amount of emulation on any Mac will be emulating that, full stop. The option simply will not be available.
 
I thought Planet Coaster had a Mac edition, and that many Macs also had quite high end AMD Radeon graphics cards that could handle a game like Planet Coaster?
 
Matt N said:
I thought Planet Coaster had a Mac edition, and that many Macs also had quite high end AMD Radeon graphics cards that could handle a game like Planet Coaster?
Click to expand...
Planet Coaster has a Mac version, but it's not native. It's running a glorified WINE emulation. Macs also haven't had dedicated graphics cards since the switch to Apple Silicon in 2020. Apple now design their own chips, with integrated graphics, based on ARM architecture.

There are currently no plans for Planet Coaster 2 for Mac.
 
GooseOnTheLoose said:
Planet Coaster has a Mac version, but it's not native. It's running a glorified WINE emulation. Macs also haven't had dedicated graphics cards since the switch to Apple Silicon in 2020. Apple now design their own chips, with integrated graphics, based on ARM architecture.

There are currently no plans for Planet Coaster 2 for Mac.
Click to expand...
Ah, that makes sense. I think I’m thinking of when Macs still had Intel CPUs and assumed that the dedicated AMD graphics cards had been retained, or at least matched in terms of capability, when Apple starting making their own processors…

I was under the impression the Mac version of Planet Coaster was properly supported, like the console version? It’s a shame if not, as lots of people do use Macs.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top