I'm getting sick of sid errors. This game has no error trapping whatsoever. It sees something it doesn't like and it shuts down like your wife when she gives you that "I'm not talking to you until you apologize for doing that thing you did and don't know you did and I'm not going to tell you what it was" silent treatment.

I know you're supposed to put in CS a few at a time and try them all out but I have over 800 items and I'm not about to spend the rest of my life (I'm already 62) making sure this game runs efficiently.
Didn't the programmers of this game realize that you can do something like this:

If CS has bad sid,
Then print,"you can't use this piece, it sucks and I don't like it, try something else."
Else, whatever the CS does.
Instead, it says. "You're trying to use a piece I don't like, it offends me. Bye"



And it's not like they didn't know there would be Custom Content. This is the third version of this game and the first two both had custom content.

Of course you can ask why a 62 year old man is playing video games. Well, it's a heck of a lot cheaper than golf! Of course when you have spend upwards of $1500 every couple of years on a new system to stay up to date, that may not be so true either. LOL.

Sorry about the double posting, I don't know how that happened I only clicked "post reply" once.

Well, they didn't intend for there to be CC, but you know, it happens. Plus, Chris Sawyer made RCT1 and 2, Frontier made 3.

I agree, if there's an error, it should just tell you that you can't use it, and just let you live on with your life. But the game was made in 2004, so you can't really complain too much.

Also, if the game crashes when you hover over a CS piece, it's most likely that you installed it wrong. It has nothing to do with the game, so why should you blame it? If you're sure you installed it right, it could also be an error the creator of the set made.

Alex, even in 2004 there were mods for most games. And I studied programming in college in 1980 and they taught us about doing error trapping, so yes, I can complain about a game having lousy error trapping in 2004! It's lazy, ship shod programming and any good game programmer would tell you the same thing. But from the early 2000's on, that's been the norm in the gaming industry. How many games today are shipped with hundreds of bugs, some even game killing? You can blame the programmers or you can blame the executives for pushing it out the door half finished, but that's has been the norm for quite a while now. And as you said, this game wasn't developed by Chris Sawyer otherwise this situation probably wouldn't exist. And most of us know just how good his games were. I still play Transport Tycoon, although it's the free open source version.

Look at Windows. How many times have you received a "Windows has recovered from a serious problem" message" if you have Windows 7? And yet, no BSOD (blue screen of death)? Why? Because Gates finally realized that Windows giving you a BSOD every time two dll's crashed together, or a bad driver tried to install, was sending a lot of people down the Linux path, somewhere MS did NOT want them to go.

That doesn't mean I hate the game, it just means that this particular situation, which comes up a lot according to what I've seen on these forums, increases my frustration level and tends to bring out my Italian temper a bit.

Besides, I've recently re-installed the game and am reloading upwards of 700 pieces of CS just to my Style/themed folder. There's bound to be a lot of sid errors. That doesn't mean I don't get PO'd every time the game crashes after spending an hour or more designing a beautiful entrance. Of course, knowing this, I should save every five minutes. But who does that?

I don't want to sound insulting, but if mods and CC were made for RCT1 and RCT2, doesn't is stand to reason the developers would know that RCT3 would be no exception? Of course they intended for there to be mods, otherwise you couldn't design your own coasters. They knew that would just be step 1.

All that aside, if the game crashes because of CS, it's obvious that there can only be two reasons, bad installation or bad CS. But that wasn't my point. My point was, the game should be able to catch the conflict and keep ticking. Besides, I have to blame the game, or the CS programmer, otherwise I'd have to blame myself for being a moron, which I obviously can't do.

If you couldn't tell, a lot of my post was tongue in cheek, as my last statement was. Half rant, half humor. I appreciate your response, Alex, but seriously, you didn't offer any solutions except to say, politely, that I was an idiot and didn't install the CS properly and had no one to blame but myself. ( which unfortunately, proved to be true). You did, however, suggest that it could be the developer's fault too.

And now be honest and tell me you've never gotten frustrated with this game or any other game and just wanted to scream loudly at anyone about it? If not, you're probably one of the very few considering what I've read in some of these posts in this forum about MR. SID.

I actually did discover the problem with this particular set of items, Belgabor's Invisible Doodads. I assumed it was standard CS and foolishly copied the whole folder over to Style/Themed and didn't RTFM (read the freakin' manual moron. a favorite rant of us old time IT guys.) Apparently, there were three different directories which were involved. I probably knew that the first time I installed it years ago, but was in an hurry this time. Bad move on my part.

Ok, I just checked the re-installation of the Invisible Doodads in the game. Mr. SID is nowhere to be found. Problem solved. But you can be sure I'll find something else to rant about in the future. Heh heh.

What I have never understood about game message boards is the need for someone to attack a person who is clearing ranting in frustration over some aspect of a game they are playing. I'm not aiming this at you, Alex, because you didn't really attack me, but I've seen ranters called all kinds of miserable, mean-spirited names by people who act as if they personally programmed the game and took offense at the criticisms. It almost seems as if they are saying "I have to attack this person's intelligence for criticizing the game, otherwise he'll think I'm dumb for liking it." Something I've seen some ranters claim about others.

^ that is the longest comment I've ever seen.

Sorry, I was a writer in college and I come from a family where you never say in two words what you can say in 20. And I'm a senior living alone with only a standard poodle to talk to having lost my wife to cancer 7 years ago, so I do my conversing on forums and message boards. And somehow my posts seems to get doubled on here for some reason.

Of course, knowing this, I should save every five minutes. But who does that?

Lol I do that. But I think there's something on Shyguy's World about an autosaver.

And now be honest and tell me you've never gotten frustrated with this game or any other game and just wanted to scream loudly at anyone about it?

I usually get frustrated for the following things:

Lag
Slow loading times
Slows down other programs
Bad quality images

All of the things above you can fix with an upgraded computer.

Some of us do things we shouldn't be doing while having RCT3 open. Like having a 1280p movie playing from the hard drive while being on quite a few websites plus running other programs all at the same time. I also keep task manager open most of the time so I can keep an eye on what is using what when things start slowing down or if something locks up on me.

I went up to an i5 3.4GHz quad core when I built my latest computer about two years ago that I overclock 44% up to 4.4GHz. It usually lets me get away with most things most of the time. I am always pushing my luck but I like to multitask.

I have an AMD Phenom II 3.4 quad core with 16 gb of corsair ram, and an ATI Radeon 6950 with an Asus Sabertooth mb. The video card is getting a bit long in the tooth, but not for an old game like this.
I could overclock my cpu; my bios has a very comprehensive overclocking system, but I don't see a need to. I don't play a lot of cpu intensive games especially since I stopped playing MMOs.

No, my game crashed because I installed Belgabor's Invisible Doodads incorrectly. The other problem was folders embedded within other folders they had no business being in. I have no clue how that happened, but I've since gone through all my installed folders and none have the wrong folders embedded as far as I can tell. No crashes lately. Knock on wood.

I checked into that autosaver. Couldn't find a download and apparently, he's not finished with it
I usually keep Task manager open for the same reason. The issue with ram usage isn't the computer or how much ram you have. it's the program itself. Despite the amount of ram you might have in your system, any 32 bit program can only access up to 2 gb. Once it approaches that level of ram usage, it starts to get sluggish and eventually crashes. Some start to fail as early as 1.5 gb usage. 64 bit programs can use an almost infinite amount of ram, but not 32 bit programs, which, of course, RCT3 is.