Why no roller coasters?

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1

I’ve been looking for a way to easily create a roller coaster for some time now, but want to do it ALL within one program and would prefer Unity. I’ve seen various tutorials for creating tracks in Blender/3DS/No Limits and importing into Unity but this hinders the creative process: creating a coaster without the terrain. (I would like to build a nice coaster completely within a program like Theme Park Studio or RCT3 or No Limits, but their environmental modeling capabilities are lacking.)

I can’t imagine it would be too difficult to script a basic toolset within Unity, allowing users to extrude rails along an X,Y,Z-adjustable spline and arraying the cross-beams to match, but I have almost zero coding knowledge. (Something that would work similar to Camera Path Animator.)

What would it take for someone to create a package like this? I’d imagine it would sell fairly well, with all the excitement surrounding the Oculus Rift and the several coaster I’ve already seen developed for it. A bonus option would be the ability to construct or extrude different rail styles along with custom cross-beams so that people could create wooden coasters, steel coasters, hanging coasters, mine carts, crazy train tracks, etc. Carts could be part of the package or a separate purchase but the asset would need to include the option to “attach” a cart as an object that might be affected by physics, or include some means of controlling the speed.

Should I also post in Job Offerings? I would personally be able to pay a couple-hundred dollars, but really have no idea what this amount of work would be worth. Hopefully an asset priced at $25-50 would be a better option for a creator though!

2

You might take a look at the systems from Chris West he has systems that can generate roller coasters etc some examples in the videos below.
The train track is basically a roller coaster, would just need to add pylons along the length.

And the same in MegaMoo, basically a rollercoaster with a filled in bottom half, shows how it can be edited at runtime

And at the end of this one it shows a simple script to place pylons along the path of a meshed spline.

3

Thanks so much for this suggestion. I completely looked over the possibilities with this Mega package when I began searching the Asset Store, but it looks as though it could do exactly what I’m wanting!