The Universe Coaster
March 11, 2023 10:53 AM Subscribe
Someone Created A Ride In Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 That Will Outlast Our Actual Universe [YouTube] “Released in 2002, Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 is a popular PC theme park builder that is still actively played and modded by players in 2023. But there are also purists who don’t play the game using fancy mods or open-source ports. And Marcel Vos, a popular RCT2 YouTuber, is one of these players who enjoys experimenting with the original 20-year-old version of the game. A few years back he made a coaster that takes 12 years to complete. But now his newest creation—impressively created without mods—is a working roller coaster that will take over 3 quinvigintillion years in real life to complete. Bring some snacks. [...] If you want to see this bonkers Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 ride yourself, Marcel Vos has graciously released a file you can download and play on your own PC.” [via: Kotaku]
"We are currently awaiting the loading of our complement of small lemon-soaked paper napkins for your comfort, refreshment and hygiene during the journey."
posted by tclark at 11:38 AM on March 11, 2023 [18 favorites]
posted by tclark at 11:38 AM on March 11, 2023 [18 favorites]
I've been in that line at Disneyworld.
posted by blue_beetle at 11:44 AM on March 11, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by blue_beetle at 11:44 AM on March 11, 2023 [3 favorites]
I think in advance of watching this video I would never have guessed from the description that the project here is tricking rollercoaster tycoon into running the roller coaster as slow as (in)humanly possible. Which is kind of fascinating as a hobby (or possibly profession in this case??), reminds me of this John Cage composition.
posted by advil at 12:03 PM on March 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by advil at 12:03 PM on March 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
So, let's start deconstructing other planets.
posted by hippybear at 12:22 PM on March 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by hippybear at 12:22 PM on March 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
See also Arthur Ganson’s “Machine With Concrete”, a sculpture composed of a series of 12 gears, each of them in a 50:1 reduction ratio. It would take about 13 billion years for the final gear to make a single turn.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 3:05 PM on March 11, 2023 [9 favorites]
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 3:05 PM on March 11, 2023 [9 favorites]
I pray the ride is rode forever. I pray the safety bar is never rolled away. I pray that which was riding remains riding, intensely, in perpetual woo...
posted by cortex at 6:05 PM on March 11, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by cortex at 6:05 PM on March 11, 2023 [7 favorites]
So if I understand correctly, the deal with this coaster is NOT that it has an extreme gear reduction that makes it travel at an infinitesimally low speed constantly throughout the "ride," but that when everyone is seated and the ride is ready to begin, it doesn't ACTUALLY start moving until well after the heat death of the universe because, somewhere at the end of the chain of synchronized coasters, one of the coasters essentially has to complete ten bazillion laps before the ride can move, and then again for every single lap of the universe coaster?
If I understand it right, then I guess that's like saying I can create the world's longest rollercoaster ride by building a jail on the roller coaster and just leaving you in it for billions of years, and then getting the coaster moving again to start its actual thousand-year journey or whatever. Not to say it's not impressive but it feels somehow different from what I expected.
posted by chrominance at 7:44 PM on March 11, 2023 [3 favorites]
If I understand it right, then I guess that's like saying I can create the world's longest rollercoaster ride by building a jail on the roller coaster and just leaving you in it for billions of years, and then getting the coaster moving again to start its actual thousand-year journey or whatever. Not to say it's not impressive but it feels somehow different from what I expected.
posted by chrominance at 7:44 PM on March 11, 2023 [3 favorites]
What's impressive about it is that this has been engineered in a sandbox with specific limitations, without mods, through a lot of thought and experimentation.
This isn't about the quality of the rollercoaster ride.
This is about the quality of the thought experiment and its living proof in the form of this level that can be downloaded and run. (Downloaded and ran? Grammar gods have forsaken me tonight!)
posted by hippybear at 8:05 PM on March 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
This isn't about the quality of the rollercoaster ride.
This is about the quality of the thought experiment and its living proof in the form of this level that can be downloaded and run. (Downloaded and ran? Grammar gods have forsaken me tonight!)
posted by hippybear at 8:05 PM on March 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
This feels somehow related to the Franzen post.
posted by Stonestock Relentless at 8:13 PM on March 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Stonestock Relentless at 8:13 PM on March 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
Downlud and ron.
posted by cortex at 9:20 PM on March 11, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by cortex at 9:20 PM on March 11, 2023 [4 favorites]
This feels somehow related to the Franzen post.
And for me, for some reason, the Al Hertzfeldt Simpsons couch gag.
posted by Naberius at 5:05 AM on March 12, 2023
And for me, for some reason, the Al Hertzfeldt Simpsons couch gag.
posted by Naberius at 5:05 AM on March 12, 2023
Still play this game on the regular. Fantastic.
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:40 AM on March 12, 2023
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:40 AM on March 12, 2023
"Longer than you think, Dad! Longer than you think!!!"
posted by tclark at 8:40 AM on March 12, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by tclark at 8:40 AM on March 12, 2023 [4 favorites]
Dammit! I was putting together a Marcel Vos megapost, too! Curse my forgetting to do that thing!
My initial reaction to Marcel was similar to chrominance's above—"a little too letter-and-not-the-spirit-of-the-law for my liking, hmph"—but I wound up going down a rabbithole of his and, the more I saw of him, the more I realized that he's very aware of that letter-of-the-law-ness and puts a lot of time into finding really interesting ways of putting it into action. For instance, he figured out how to win one of Roller Coaster Tycoon's scenarios using only four tiles, then brought his work down to two, and eventually devised a solution that only required a single batshit tile. He solved one level with a solution that required 400 real-time hours and 1,500 in-game years to complete, and—in my favorite one-two punch of his—he then toiled to get it out of the €17,000,000 debt he'd put it in. Another time, he solved one of the most difficult scenarios in the game with a single, extremely stupid ride.
His approach is kind of like performance art mixed with bad science: he exploits the game's mechanics to ridiculous lengths in order to devise provably-effective solutions to otherwise-difficult challenges. The fun is seeing him work out new ways of achieving goals that push the simulation into absolutely ridiculous places, breaking all pretenses of verisimilitude, and then—as he builds towards his solutions—narrating the things that are happening as if the simulation is still accurate. It's extremely dorky in a D&D-player-fucking-with-Player's-Handbook kind of way, but he's really damn good at it, and along the way he makes sacrilege of a childhood* classic.
His "most insane park of all time" is absolutely gorgeous, too. And horrifying.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 9:13 AM on March 12, 2023 [7 favorites]
My initial reaction to Marcel was similar to chrominance's above—"a little too letter-and-not-the-spirit-of-the-law for my liking, hmph"—but I wound up going down a rabbithole of his and, the more I saw of him, the more I realized that he's very aware of that letter-of-the-law-ness and puts a lot of time into finding really interesting ways of putting it into action. For instance, he figured out how to win one of Roller Coaster Tycoon's scenarios using only four tiles, then brought his work down to two, and eventually devised a solution that only required a single batshit tile. He solved one level with a solution that required 400 real-time hours and 1,500 in-game years to complete, and—in my favorite one-two punch of his—he then toiled to get it out of the €17,000,000 debt he'd put it in. Another time, he solved one of the most difficult scenarios in the game with a single, extremely stupid ride.
His approach is kind of like performance art mixed with bad science: he exploits the game's mechanics to ridiculous lengths in order to devise provably-effective solutions to otherwise-difficult challenges. The fun is seeing him work out new ways of achieving goals that push the simulation into absolutely ridiculous places, breaking all pretenses of verisimilitude, and then—as he builds towards his solutions—narrating the things that are happening as if the simulation is still accurate. It's extremely dorky in a D&D-player-fucking-with-Player's-Handbook kind of way, but he's really damn good at it, and along the way he makes sacrilege of a childhood* classic.
His "most insane park of all time" is absolutely gorgeous, too. And horrifying.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 9:13 AM on March 12, 2023 [7 favorites]
This reminds me of "Magnasanti," the dystopian hellscape city that won/broke SimCity.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 3:23 PM on March 12, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 3:23 PM on March 12, 2023 [3 favorites]
Opus Magnum - the worst machine I could fit on one screen (bigmacdontcare)
"Specifically to fit on one screen, all of the arms and glyphs have to be placed on the 8x15 play area visible at 1600x900 resolution without moving the screen or minimizing any of the trays. The programming has to fit on the screen as well, so you can only use 6 arms, and each one has to have instructions only defined for cycles 1-29.
"But once it gets going, things can move off screen.
"Worst here is defined only in terms of cycle count on completion. It has to complete, in theory. Since the game is Turing complete, you can certainly implement some awful computable functions, but given the constraints I went for just barely worse than exponential.
"I failed, because this is substantially worse than exponential! Upon further analysis, the machine is performing tetration. The Nth output takes at least 1.85 ^^ (7N+1) cycles to drop."
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 7:24 AM on March 13, 2023
"Specifically to fit on one screen, all of the arms and glyphs have to be placed on the 8x15 play area visible at 1600x900 resolution without moving the screen or minimizing any of the trays. The programming has to fit on the screen as well, so you can only use 6 arms, and each one has to have instructions only defined for cycles 1-29.
"But once it gets going, things can move off screen.
"Worst here is defined only in terms of cycle count on completion. It has to complete, in theory. Since the game is Turing complete, you can certainly implement some awful computable functions, but given the constraints I went for just barely worse than exponential.
"I failed, because this is substantially worse than exponential! Upon further analysis, the machine is performing tetration. The Nth output takes at least 1.85 ^^ (7N+1) cycles to drop."
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 7:24 AM on March 13, 2023
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posted by Fizz at 10:55 AM on March 11, 2023 [1 favorite]