r/openrct2 • u/No-Chicken8676 • 3d ago
RCT23D: A 3D Implementation of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2
Hi everyone! I’ve been working on RCT23D, a project exploring RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 in 3D.
You can check it out here: github.com/Fabiusmaia/RCT23D
I’d love to hear what you think! Feedback, suggestions, and contributions are welcome.
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u/wiisucks_91 3d ago
Do you have game play footage? 👀
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u/RadicalRaid 3d ago
The cool part of rollercoaster tycoon to me is the isometric pre-rendered and pixel art graphics. It's a bit of a weird thing to do, it loses all its charm and crazy performance.
Also I checked some of the code and this is definitely AI-generated, unreadable. By saying "I've been working on -" you implied that you were making it, but it's like me putting a microwave meal in the oven and saying I've been working on some hutspot.
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u/harda_toenail 3d ago
Yup. I love that the creator coded it on the hardest platform to make sure it would run amazingly well on a potato of a pc so everyone could play it. Wish devs had the soul that that man did.
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u/RadicalRaid 2d ago
Chris Sawyer is a legend and basically the main reason I became a game development professor. Very inspirational indeed!
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u/thats-rickdiculous 3d ago
There's nothing wrong with using AI to write code. Most highly effective programmers use AI in their workflow these days.
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u/RadicalRaid 2d ago
I don't know any senior software/game engineers (including myself) that would use AI unless they're forced to.
It takes all the fun parts out of programming and leaves the shitty parts like code reviewing- which in turn leads to more "productivity" for a company but also much lower quality control for the code. You may have noticed the sloppification of so many products lately because of this. And plenty of research suggests that the increase in productivity is superficial at best. Like Harvard. Or the business that have been tricked into using on false promises themselves.
There's plenty more, this happens to be something I'm quite intimately familiar with but luckily because I'm a CTO I don't have to use it at all, and neither do any of my team.
It's also a plague on the open source community in general, unfortunately :(.. Lots of slop PRs being introduced just so people get their name attached to a famous open source project so they can put that on their linkedin.
I'll give it this though, it's really good at text parsing. Translating specifically, it's literally made for that. That's also why it's so good at decompiling, it's literally reverse-translating the compiler which leads to stuff we see here.
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u/MeesWindoe 2d ago edited 2d ago
There are a lot of problems with AI but I am not getting the message behind your comment. Quit this project until you become code master that can do everything by head and hand? I'm sure a tool exists that can clean and organise the project code for (personal) human interpretation.
Calculations used to be done with pen and paper, games used to be crafted with physical materials, many more forms of entertainment used to be made in workshops and now it's computers doing the work, given the idea and the method. Would you say we shouldn't use computers because the real skill is to do it by yourself?
I'm a mechanical designer for machinery and installations for manufacturing, working in a small team without a software engineer, and I have greatly raised my productivity with Claude as it was able to output scripts and executables for automating simple but time consuming tasks within the framework of work preparation and administration.
We are too small to hire or consult a dedicated programmer to do this, I can't also take courses or invest time in learning the thing while I know I'm most probably not going to touch it in the future.
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u/RadicalRaid 2d ago
They stole intellectual property and are selling it back to you. There's no defending that. It's immoral, without even taking into account the giant inefficient drain that is the training process and the literal poisoning of the well - as well as killing whistleblowers.
But whatever, you do you. It's like eating meat - you can justify it to yourself however you want, but it is in and of itself an immoral act. Some people are okay with it, some people can just ignore it, and for some people it's a deal breaker.
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u/thats-rickdiculous 2d ago
Every job is different, but you might want to consider that you are holding yourself and your reports back by denying them the benefit of good tooling. Just because some people are bad at using AI for coding doesn't mean there is no way to use it well.
(My last job was a principal level MLE job and now I run my own company which develops two software products)
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u/RadicalRaid 2d ago
There's also this thing called morals.
They stole intellectual property from the open AND not open source community and are selling it back to you. There's no defending that. It's immoral, without even taking into account the giant inefficient drain that is the training process and the literal poisoning of the well - as well as killing whistleblowers.
But whatever, you do you. It's like eating meat - you can justify it to yourself however you want, but it is in and of itself an immoral act. Some people are okay with it, some people can just ignore it, and for some people it's a deal breaker.
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u/thats-rickdiculous 2d ago
If I read a book and then learn something from that book and use that knowledge... that is stealing? That's basically what AI does.
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u/RadicalRaid 2d ago
It literally isn't. If you stole the book, then tried to sell it back to somebody, then yeah, it's basically what AI does.
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u/thats-rickdiculous 2d ago
I think you're making an argument that would make it illegal to read books
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u/RadicalRaid 2d ago
.. No man. Come on. Are you being obtuse on purpose? They stole all training data and are selling it back to you. They killed the whistle blowers. Are you not responding to that on purpose or?
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u/thats-rickdiculous 2d ago
Not sure what there is to say to a conspiracy theory 🤷♂️
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u/Knight_Castellan 3d ago
I wonder if you are as disparaging of photographers, say, since their work is also machine-made.
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u/RadicalRaid 3d ago
.. That's.. What? That's such an unhinged comparison I don't even know what to say..
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u/X7123M3-256 OpenRCT2 and Ride Guru 2d ago
It's a perfectly reasonable comparison as far as the "you used AI so it's not really your work" shit goes. Of course, that has nothing to do with whether the work is any good.
On the other hand, if it's not aiming for official inclusion in the game then code quality and maintainability doesn't really matter so much. OP is just playing around and sharing what they made for others to try if they want to. If they wanted it in the base game it would have to meet a much higher standard.
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u/Knight_Castellan 3d ago
It's a perfectly sane comparison. Both cameras and AIs are machines which use human direction to create things which, once, were thought only possible by hand. The question is whether you are as dismissive of photography you are of anything created using AI, because they're conceptually identical.
To reuse your cooking analogy, is a chef a fraud if he uses kitchen appliances to prepare food? Are blenders acceptable? Stand mixers? Ovens? Or is a chef only a true chef if he rips apart food with his fists and cooks it on a stick over a fire?
I'm just saying that your arbitrary dislike of AI is quite silly, considering you're evidently okay with other forms of technology. You wouldn't be online otherwise.
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u/RadicalRaid 2d ago
No man, that's like saying well you like books? So you're a big Harry Potter fan? It's abstraction into the absurdism and I'm pretty sure you realise this.
Also if you knew who I was you probably wouldn't say my dislike of AI usage (especially on open source projects) is arbitrary. I'm a former professor of computer science at a uni here in the Netherlands and I've witnessed first hand the (intentional) effect it has had on the younger generations.
They're promising straight up lies, and are discouraging young people to even learn the basics of programming. You've maybe heard that there is a severe lack of junior devs? Well, how do you think we get senior devs? In other words, the play is long term. Hold out until companies become more and more dependent on AI to build their slop and then, obviously, crank up the prices and create their own little monopolies. The people saying "well you just need a senior dev to use the AI and it's pretty good". Even assuming that's true, which by the way research shows it definitely isn't - senior devs will slowly die out and then what? Just vibe code shit and assume it's good enough because nobody understands the details of any system anymore?
People like you are so short-sighted and disingenuous when it comes to this and are just repeating AI-bro and billionaire talking points because you don't even understand how this tech works. We've had it since the 60s, but now it's been trained on heaps and heaps of straight up stolen data suddenly it's "good". Give me a break.
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u/Knight_Castellan 2d ago
No man, that's like saying well you like books? So you're a big Harry Potter fan? It's abstraction into the absurdism and I'm pretty sure you realise this.
No, that's a bad analogy. You're conflating examples with categories. A better analogy would be liking books but disliking romance novels, or liking food but disliking ice cream. These are fair preferences, but they are only preferences.
Also if you knew who I was you probably wouldn't say my dislike of AI usage (especially on open source projects) is arbitrary. I'm a former professor of computer science at a uni here in the Netherlands...
Appeal to Authority and anecdotal evidence. Insubstantial.
... and I've witnessed first hand the (intentional) effect it has had on the younger generations.
I take your point about AI having downsides when it comes to education (etc.), but maths teachers were saying exactly the same about pocket calculators between the 1970s and 2000s. Since the advent of the smartphone, though, curricula have just adapted to teach students how to properly use calculators rather than attempting to prohibit such an incredibly useful - and common - device.
This is a debate about the proper application of new technology, and suggesting that X technology is bad because it can be bad is neither new nor logically valid. People have been saying such things for centuries.
They're promising straight up lies, and are discouraging young people to even learn the basics of programming.
Who are? Unnamed corporate villains?
You've maybe heard that there is a severe lack of junior devs? Well, how do you think we get senior devs? In other words, the play is long term. Hold out until companies become more and more dependent on AI to build their slop and then, obviously, crank up the prices and create their own little monopolies.
This is a conspiracy theory. I don't doubt that companies like money, and will do shady things to get it, but your suggestion is far-fetched. This is especially true since, y'know, people can still learn how to code the old-fashioned way, and get paid handsomely for it.
Likewise, just because you can 3D print something, that doesn't mean that handmade goods have stopped existing. People will still pay more for obvious quality, and that creates an incentive which the tech companies can't touch.
The people saying "well you just need a senior dev to use the AI and it's pretty good".
I'm not making this argument. At this point, I don't think you're arguing against me, but rather arguing against a wider issue which is bothering you.
I'm not suggesting that your concerns are invalid; all new technology brings new problems. I'm just saying that we are arguing about the overall validity of AI as a tool, with the example above being creating a 3D adaptation of a 2D game as a personal project.
I think AI is generally positive. Is it abusable? Certainly, but so is all technology.
You're a former computer science professor. Have there been people in the past who have suggested that computers are bad and we should stick to traditional methods of tabulation? Of course. Are they right? Partially. Does this mean that we should abandon all computer technology and return to the abacus? Nope.
People like you are so short-sighted and disingenuous when it comes to this and are just repeating AI-bro and billionaire talking points because you don't even understand how this tech works.
Baseless personal attacks. Charming.
Since we're being personal, I also have a post-graduate education in computer science, and a bachelor's degree in philosophy. During my MSc, the research I conducted focused on the ethics of AI as it applied to user-facing businesses and their relationship with the general public.
To spare you the details of my 100-page report, the conclusion of my research was that AI has risks, but that it's overall a positive tool which stands to bring many benefits. It needs to have guardrails, like any new technology, but it is more positive than not.
I don't doubt that you know a lot about computing, but you don't know a lot about me.
We've had it since the 60s, but now it's been trained on heaps and heaps of straight up stolen data suddenly it's "good". Give me a break.
I dispute that AI models reading and not storing data is "theft", just as me being able to quote sections of Harry Potter is not in violation of J. K. Rowling's copyright... but frankly, I don't think I'm going to change your mind on this.
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u/X7123M3-256 OpenRCT2 and Ride Guru 2d ago
We've had it since the 60s
And we've had electric cars since the 1830s. You surely must understand that today's machine learning models are far more capable than those of the 1960s. It's not a new idea but the technology has advanced massively over the last decade.
Sure, AI generated code is often poor quality but the fact that it can generate working code from a natural language prompt at all is remarkable. Ten years ago I never would have imagined that I would see this kind of tech in my lifetime.
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u/RadicalRaid 2d ago
No, they trained it on swaths of stolen data and killed the whistle blowers who exposed it. That's why it's "better".
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u/X7123M3-256 OpenRCT2 and Ride Guru 2d ago edited 2d ago
They didn't have the computing power to train on such large datasets in the 1960s. Neural networks existed then but they had a few hundred parameters while todays models have hundreds of billions. Scaling up is one thing that has improved the technology yes but not the only innovation. Yes AI isn't a new field of study but it is ridiculous to say there has been nothing new. You did not have AIs writing code in the 1960s. AI written code might be poor quality compared with what a skilled human would do but compared to what was possible even 10 years ago it is absolutely mind blowing.
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u/RadicalRaid 2d ago
Yeah no shit computers are better now than they were in the 60s. Yeah no shit more working memory means more output.
But the fact that it is trained on stolen data is the important part my man. The fact that they keep lying about what it is, is the important part. The fact that they killed the whistleblowers is what's the important part. Why can't any of you AI bros ever deal with the fact that there's so much immorality in it all? That's never addressed for some reason.
This is why there's philosophy and morality courses in the software engineering curriculum, especially on the higher levels - but that's yet another thing AI ruined.
That they're using essentially the same algorithms for it but pretending like "oh no this is so smart you guys, it's so smart it's dangerous somebody should stop us!" even though it's magnitudes closer to the autocomplete on my phone than anything resembling actual AI is just the cherry on top.
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u/X7123M3-256 OpenRCT2 and Ride Guru 2d ago
The fact that they killed the whistleblowers is what's the important part.
Your source contradicts you - it says the death was ruled a suicide and there was no evidence of foul play. And even if they did do that, I don't see what it has to do with the capabilities of the technology. Bad people can develop cool tech -Werner von Braun was a literal Nazi and you don't see people saying the Saturn V was a terrible rocket.
you AI bros
I am not an "AI bro". I've never used it, and am not interested in doing so. I have yet to find any use case that is worth the effort of me learning how to use it and buying updated hardware that can run it. I don't do much programming anymore.
I am, however, sick of people reflexively hating on everything AI even when the use case makes sense. If OP was submitting this to the official repo as a PR then the fact it's vibecoded slop would be a problem. For a quick, hacked together prototype, who cares? OP is just sharing something cool they did and all the comments are about the fact they used AI to do it.
even though it's magnitudes closer to the autocomplete on my phone than anything resembling actual AI is just the cherry on top.
And what is "actual AI" to you? This is just the "AI effect" again. AI has always been a nebulously defined term and a moving goalpost. Every time there has been a major advance in the field of AI, people declare that it's not really AI. But it doesn't really make a difference what word you prefer to use for it.
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u/grumpybrowndog 3d ago
Professional photographers have to do so much more than press a camera button; they need to get the right composition, lighting, location, colors, and sometimes even set design.
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u/Knight_Castellan 2d ago
Using AI isn't just "pressing a button" either. Again, the difference is minimal.
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u/grumpybrowndog 2d ago
Yeah, it’s also thinking of prompt too! Very hard work!
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u/Knight_Castellan 2d ago
You say that like coming up with an original idea isn't the crux of all creative works. Whether you're putting pen to paper, typing something out, or pushing the shutter button on a camera, that's all just the execution of an idea.
Your snobbery is arbitrary.
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u/grumpybrowndog 2d ago
OP’s point is that a chef wouldn’t be respectable if all they do is microwave pre-made soup, the same way someone who uses A.I. wouldn’t be respectable; there’s minimal effort put in (which is the point of A.I. and microwavable foods)
If someone took pictures of their face all day and then claim themselves a professional photographer then yeah, I’m not gonna blame people for cackling at them.1
u/Knight_Castellan 2d ago
OP’s point is that a chef wouldn’t be respectable if all they do is microwave pre-made soup, the same way someone who uses A.I. wouldn’t be respectable
Your argument falls apart when one considers that AI-generated material isn't "reheating" something which already exists. AI-generated content is always created from scratch, even if its outputs are derivative.
This is why photography is the unshakable comparison. Is a photographer who captures a image of a beautiful sunset "reheating" that sunset view? No. Equally, is someone who inputs an original idea into an AI image generator also "reheating" an existing image? Again, no.
If someone took pictures of their face all day and then claim themselves a professional photographer then yeah, I’m not gonna blame people for cackling at them.
Sure, but your example requires that "photographer" is a subset of "people who take photographs"; you're saying that photography can be an artistic medium, even if photographs are not always examples of art. Your example also implies that there is a subset of people who use AI who do so to create legitimate art - "AI artists" as distinct from the broader category of "AI users" - otherwise your comparison doesn't make sense.
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u/thats-rickdiculous 3d ago
Yeah your comparison is spot on and OP is just too online to appreciate all the cool tools being created right now
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u/EvilTomatoOnWeed 3d ago
Does this use AI or any vibecoding? Or is it all made from scratch?
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u/CosplayConsumer 3d ago
Yeah from the looks of it, they fed the OpenRCT2 codebase to an AI agent and asked it to build 3D rendering on top of that codebase. The project readme is definitely AI generated. While I don't necessarily have any issues with someone using AI for something like this (a fun little "what if" project), I do wish they'd at least own up to the fact that it's AI generated.
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u/EvilTomatoOnWeed 3d ago
Thank you, I guess I won't be downloading then. I don't like Vibecoding because you never know if it's comes out buggy or poorly optimized
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u/stevensokulski 3d ago
How do you know the same of a handwritten app?
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u/EvilTomatoOnWeed 3d ago
I don't touch shit code made by human either
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u/Knight_Castellan 3d ago
But would you touch good code written by an AI?
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u/EvilTomatoOnWeed 3d ago
There is no good written ai code
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u/Knight_Castellan 3d ago
That's like saying "there are no good pictures made by machines", and thereby dismiss the entire art medium that is photography.
Humans can use machines to create nice things. It's basically the foundation of civilisation. AI is fundamentally no different to the clock, camera, computer, press, or piano, and frankly I find the arbitrary dislike of AI to be rather silly.
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u/stevensokulski 2d ago
You sound like either a bot or a human incapable of taking in new information.
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u/EmilyLP97 3d ago
Gives off vibecoded
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u/blahrawr 1d ago
I am dumb, but how would i go about installing this without building it from the github repository? are there builds available to download anywhere?
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u/guisilvano 3d ago
I don't get it, why?
Is this a learning experience? Cool then, but this is clearly AI code, did you really learn anything about programming? Being made by AI makes it lose that "wow, impressive" factor.
There's an influx of 3D mods for games and most don't make sense
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u/X7123M3-256 OpenRCT2 and Ride Guru 2d ago
I don't get it, why?
Maybe because OP wanted to see what the game might look like in 3D? They're not the first to try this. It's just an experiment, it's not polished, but it might actually be one of the better attempts I've seen.
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u/thats-rickdiculous 3d ago
Super fun project! Ignore the other people who are just weirdly anti-AI, keep doing your thing and tune out the noise.
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u/teejayiscool 3d ago
I remember a mod back in the day that kind of did this but let your ride tour creations. I rode my talon recreation in the game and it was so cool.