Luna Park - Designer's Notes I was fortunate in acquiring a measured drawing of the midway at Luna Park. This, combined with the U.S. Geological Survey map for the Shaker Heights Quadrangle, allowed me to layout the park quite accurately. As Luna Park was constantly expanding and upgrading itself, the choice of the year for the Scenario became an important consideration. The mid-teens were my first choice, as that is when Luna was at its zenith. However, in the end I decided on setting the Scenario in 1905. This is mostly because the layout of the park was still in its testing phase, and therefore looked very different than it would from 1906 onwards (in 1906 much of the park was reconfigured, based on lessons learned from that first year). Unfortunately, although now I had good documentation and a fixed date, the limitations of RCT2 imposed upon me some serious compromises. RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 now has more objects/rides available then can be used at the same time. This is unfortunate, as I would have liked to allow the scenario player the option of having a vast selection of scenery object from which to choose in decorating their park. I decided therefore to carefully select unique objects to maximize variety. The new RCT2 scenery stacking feature was of immense help in this regard. For example, I often selected only a half-height wall and eliminated a full-height wall, if two stacked half-height walls would be indistinguishable from the full-height one. I also chose colorable objects over non-colorable ones, if the colorable object could be colored nearly indistinguishably from the non-colorable one. In the end I actually ended up with less objects than allowed. I could have chosen to add 3rd party created objects, and as a result could have made the park better match the contemporary photos of Luna. However, unlike a park built just for display purposes, a scenario is intended not to emphasize the creator’s talent so much as to provide a foundation for the players. If a player has specific 3rd party created objects he wants to use, he still has the option of running the scenario back through the scenario editor as a landscape file (don’t forget to save the rides as track-files first) to add them. These days everyone seems to think that a good looking park can only be made with 3rd party objects. With this particular project, I wanted to show that even with the basic RCT2 objects a reasonably attractive park that gives the feel of a real-life park can still be built. Another problem I encountered is that a square in RCT2 is approximately 14.68 feet. As walls/roofs must use a full square, this quickly threw building proportions out of whack (many of the Luna Park buildings should have been a half square larger/smaller in their dimensions). Placing buildings side-by-side, the cumulative effects were becoming intolerable. I therefore had to look at the big picture, and was forced to intentionally make some buildings slightly smaller or larger. This isn’t that noticeable on the larger buildings, but the tiny buildings (one/two man booths are common to amusement parks, fairgrounds, etceteras) seem absolutely huge. They also seem much too plain, as many objects I might have wanted to use for building gingerbread were nearly the same size as the buildings I wanted to place them on! Sign objects turned out to be the biggest annoyance. There are no three-square wide signs, yet many buildings were three or five squares wide. Adjacent one-square signs would have worked, but the only one-square wide sign is a scrolling sign! Also, the signs are much too large and they hold too few letters. I did the best I could with the tools at my disposal. My goal was to include every sign I could see in the contemporary park photos. Most Luna Park signs are near where they would have been in real life, although in most examples I had to distill the text to its most basic wording. Arched and diagonal signs are of course impossible. The Night and Morning sign should be two diagonals, forming a peak. I just used a small scrolling sign instead. The Scenitorium sign should be arched. I was just going to use a simple single-height sign, but the sign holds only 10 letters, and "Scenitorium" has 11. I was forced therefore to use the double-height sign and split the lettering. The billboards along the park fence are real. I was however only able to read the wording on two of the billboards. The other three billboards I just left blank. Scenario players can decorate these blank billboards to say anything they would like. The coloring of signs is unknown. In fact, color of anything in Luna Park is mostly unknown, as all contemporary photographs are black and white. The few colored postcards that exist are of little help, as it was the artist who chose the colors. I primarily chose colors based on a combination of esthetics and written descriptions. With very few exceptions, RCT2 construction objects can only be placed on a true horizontal/vertical vector with the grid squares. This caused some careful rethinking of Luna Park, as the land is oddly shaped, and the buildings were situated on the land in a skewed manner. I finally decided that the Shoot-the-Chutes ramp would be the key, so I squared it up with the grid and adjusted the landscape in reference to it. The roads of course would look funny, but better jagged roads then jagged buildings. The roads are 60 foot wide, and I had intended on making the roads using the dashed pavement tiles and placing the Victorian homes scenery objects on the opposite side. Unfortunately, these tiles looked awful when placed in a jagged manner, and worse still, became stairways when laid down the ravine slope. I finally decided to forgo the roads altogether. I did however place small signs at the park corners to help orient people as to which road the park fence was abutting. Much of the midway aligns with the Chutes ramp. The biggest exception was the landmark arch, and the stairs and midway on either side of it. This area is turned about 30 degrees in relation to the Chutes ramp. The solution I chose for this problem was to find the center point of the arch and midway buildings, then spin them to the same alignment as the Chutes ramp. I then stretched/shrunk and jaggedly offset each building individually to fill the gaps. Then end result I felt gave the impression of angling away, while still allowing me to use all the scenery objects to actually construct the buildings. Although when looking at Luna Park from a zoomed out position much of the land heights seem correct, it is actually often off by a several feet from reality. This is because in many cases I needed land slopes that were twice again as steep or half again as shallow as what RCT2 offers. A good example is the open field below the trolley loop, where I was forced to put the whole field in a depression rather than to gently lower the height of the field along the distance from the loop to the road. The last major hurtle was the lack of appropriate track pieces for rides. Although the Chutes ramp is extremely close to the correct length and height, the large loop I was forced to build in order to turn the boats around made the structure above the loop way too wide. The Scenic River is also incorrect. The lack of eighth-of-a-circle track pieces on the "river rafts" forced me to make the ride protrude too far towards the ravine (in real life the track gracefully curved towards the park boundary fence). To compensate I had to add an unrealistic bulge of about three squares to the top of the ravine where the ride sits. Anyone who has seen photos of turn of the last century fairs, amusement parks, and exhibitions knows the fondness of the park builders for eclectic architecture, especially architecture with lots of arches. This is not because the builders new nothing about foreign architecture, but rather because they wanted to create an illusion of the exotic, like in a fairyland. Unfortunately RCT2 offers very little in the way of doorways, and virtually nothing in the way of archways. As a result, much of the architecture I created for Luna Park had to be squared-off or had to make use of the Castle Style scenery objects. If someone was willing to make the effort, they can rebuild the Scenario using 3rd party scenery objects to give these structures a facelift. There are many details I tried to incorporate into my recreation of Luna Park, some are known, and some assumed. The four little tombstones scattered around the midway are real life locations of electrical transformers. Luna used lots of electricity, and it was from these transformers that it was distributed. The grey circle at the bottom of the staircases surrounded by poles is the trolley car layover loop. Trolley cars turned into this loop from the middle of Ingersoll Road. Note that the actual park entrance is not the landmark archway. Patrons paid to enter at the bottom of the stairway. The wooden fence on which the billboards are hung actually extended around the entire perimeter of the park. I chose to just use the default park boundary fence instead of extending this wooden fence. Just remember that the RCT2 park boundary fence in the corner between the trolley depot on Ingersoll Road and the edge of the wooden fence on Woodhill Road is not supposed to exist. All the trees in the main portion of the park are as close to reality, as far as position and shape, as I could determine from pictures (although with actual tree species I was limited to what RCT2 had available). The trees on the slope of the ravine however are just randomly placed to give the feeling of thick brush. It may look unnatural to have an open field next to a heavily wooded slope, but this is typical of the landscape in Cleveland. The small outcropping building behind the Café is the kitchen. The shooting gallery used real .22 caliber rifles, and was by necessity iron lined. I used the metal wall objects to simulate this. Most of the "flat" roofs were actually slightly humped to shed water/snow. I suggested this by using roof tiles of a slightly different texture in the middle of the flat roofs as compared to the sides. There is a mural on the wall of the Night and Morning theatre, which I tried to suggest by using different colored wall tiles. I also used two different shades of blue to suggest the mural on the side of the EDISONIA. The plaster mountain next to Chateau Alphonse I simulated using the rock wall, and I then placed wooden support poles behind the wall to give the illusion that the wall was fake. The tower beside the Scenitorium is supposed to be wider than any of the tower scenery objects I had available. As this tower contained the old Taffy Shop, I saw a good opportunity to incorporate an RCT shop. I chose the Candy Apple Stall, as it has a large stick that is sort of tower like. Just imagine that both the tower and stall are one integrated unit. Again the Japanese Exhibition provided another opportunity to include an RCT stall. I chose the Cold Persimmon Punch (sujongkwa) stall to end the Exhibition row, as it had an appropriate roof architecture for the location. The Scenic River building in real life would have touched both the Figure Eight coaster and the Casino. The slight gap between these buildings is an artifact of both straightening the alignment of these buildings and the extra width imposed by the "river rafts" track. Originally the façade was a giant arch. However, arches are one of the objects least supported by RCT2. I therefore decided to create a facade more along the lines of how the ride looked when it was remodeled as the Mystic Caverns. The carpentry shop in the back of the building is realistic, but I don’t have any evidence as to what the back of the building actually looked like. The shop skylight possibly did not exist, but it could have, and it certainly makes the building look more esthetically pleasing. The water wheel did exist, but not where I have placed it (I thought it looked more interesting to us, the game players, to actually be able to see the wheel turning). The out buildings contained dioramas, such as a scene with Buster Brown and his dog Tag. In real life the passages through which the ride tracks entered into the buildings would have been smaller. The large openings I was forced to use make the buildings seem empty, so I filled the visible areas with some random scenery objects to give the illusion that there was something special going on inside. I don’t know how many vehicles the ride originally had, so I chose a number that gave both good spacing and efficient people moving. I am extremely pleased with the Figure Eight side-friction roller coaster. Although the photographic evidence was slim, I was lucky to have an overhead drawing. Unlike other figure eight coasters, such as Lakemont Parks Leap-the-Dips, the two loop stacks were offset from each other. By coincidence, this proved an ideal condition for the RCT2 track pieces. I did not have to make any compromises (other than the normal one of staggered drops, due to their not being any glide slope track in RCT2), and the footprint taken up by the coaster is almost exactly the same as Luna’s Figure Eight had in real life. Note some of the differences between my Figure Eight and Steve Frank’s excellent Leap-the-Dips @ Lakemont Park figure eight. Ignoring the fact that Steve’s coaster is slightly bigger (this is an artifact of RCT2 and the compromises Steve had to make due to the lack of appropriate track parts), the most noticeable difference is that Luna’s Figure Eight brake run passes underneath the loop stack. Luna’s figure eight service building also extends at an angle from the corner of the station into the middle of the loop stack, whereas in Steve’s Leap-the-Dips it extends from the center of the station. Luna’s station was a simple flat roofed affair. There was also a roof over the brake run to keep the brakes dry. I do not know how many cars were on the ride. I made the assumption that no more than one car would be climbing the lift hill at the same time. Therefore, assuming maximum efficiency, four cars seemed to be a good number (as the last car leaves the station, the first one arrives). This was fortunate, as it meant I did not have to make any compromises to accommodate a long station platform. Instead of the usual cupola above the top of the lift hill as there is on the Leap-the-Dips, Luna’s Figure Eight used a single trellis arch of lights (like the light trellises on the roof of the Casino and Café that I am simulating with the white railing scenery object). As there is no suitable RCT scenery object (the white railing object wouldn’t work here), I chose to just leave it off. I don’t know if there was a bunny hop just before the break run. However as this was almost universal on other figure eight roller coasters (and remember this was the worlds largest figure eight roller coaster), I decided to include it on Luna’s coaster. Scenery around the coaster also got special treatment. The tree in the middle of the front loop stack is realistic. A portrait taken behind the coaster reveals a large jagged rock and also a thin tree growing next to the rear loop stack. By coincidence the jagged shape and size of the rock is very similar to that of the broken Egyptian Pillar object, so I used the pillar as a close substitute. Errata: A few of the wall pieces that are touching the park boundary
fence (specifically the lowest wall on the storage shed) can NOT be destroyed,
as the game considers them to be on the outside of the fence. This is
not that big a deal, as you probably will not destroy these structures;
and even if you do the wall panel that cannot be destroyed just functions
as an opaque regular-height boundary fence. |