The initial appearance of this utility on this website was in our very first Showcase! There we introduced Park CleanUp's attributes and highlighted how it benefited the community. That article showed how to download and install Park CleanUp and presented reasons why we’d use it. Here we give a thorough appraisal of the different ways to use this utility.

The reason parks become laggy is due to the accumulation of references in our park file. Once a reference is included in our parksave it always remains. In the beginning Joey created Park CleanUp to remove these references, and then as he progressed with his utility’s development Joey began to add to it other features including the ability to optimize our park files. Unfortunately the development of Park CleanUp stopped at around this time.

Notwithstanding this we can still benefit from Park CleanUp because every gamer needs to deal with references and we all agree we’re better off if the unnecessary ones are removed from our park files.

RCT3 creates references while it launches, while it loads our park, and whenever we scroll over the items in the game menus. When we save our parks it will save every one of these references in our park file.

Other sorts of references are used by the game engine to draw every single item that's in our park, and to render the polys of the items in our park in such a way that the animals look like animals, the terrain looks like terrain, the bodies of water in our parks look like water, to render particle effects, display weather, display animations, and so on.

Other references will further tell our graphics card to draw those polys differently based on the distance the items are from us in the park, whether it’s a glossy item or a matte item, whether it's night or day in our park, to display on our screen the polys we can currently see in our park based on our antialiasing settings, to display the perspective in our park based on whether our camera settings are freelook or advanced, or whether to ignore drawing an item at all because we’ve either turned our LOD settings down to zero or have altogether switched off the visibility of that item type.

Many of these references are used by the game engine while compiling the content, state, condition and value of our park. These references also serve the inhabitants of our park. Such references might:

►

tell our animals where food, water, & the enclosure fences are, let our animals know if there’s another animal nearby to play with, advise the animal keeper that it's feeding time, and warn us which animals are sick, with this data being added to or subtracted from our park rating accordingly;

►

advise the janitor which path tile he should go to next to clear up, remind him if there is a litter bin along the way, summon the gulls if the paths have been untended for too long, and then add further references to our park rating about the overall state of our paths;

►

inform our mechanic it is time to inspect pool complex & advise him of the strength of the cleaner he is to use when he gets there, information from which the game engine can rate the state of the water in our pool, can warn us that no mechanic can access our pool for maintenance, and further modify guest attitudes towards our pool complex based on the condition of our pool water.

So as you see some of the references generated by RCT3 are used by the game engine when compiling our park rating and can further indicate to our park guests they are safe because there’s a security guard nearby, can tell guests where the loungers or diving boards are in our pool complex, can map out if there are enough stalls about for a drink & what path guests should take in order to quench their thirst, or inform guests that there’s lots of scenery about in our parks & that we as park managers have spared no expense.

Exploring Park CleanUp

In order to begin using Park CleanUp you'll need to show it where to find your RCT3 installation. Launch Park CleanUp and follow the steps here to do that.

After you’ve opened this utility the first thing you’ll notice are the three toggle switches along the top left. They are:

1

Load Park

2

Save Park As

3

Create ParkZIP

To make use of Park CleanUp we'll need to decide which parksave we want to work on, to copy that parksave, and then do any work on the copy. Use switch 1 to load your copied parksave. We’d toggle 2 after we’ve completed using this utility on our park file and wish to save our work. Kindly refer to our sub-heading later in this article Create ParkZIP to gain information about 3.

It is after we’ve used this utility a few times that most of us then wonder what purpose is served by the seven tabs below the toggle switches.

  General

With a colourful bar chart this tab simply presents a visual overview of what’s in our park file. This is the tab that comes up by default.

  Data List

It’s possible to navigate throughout this complete listing of every item there is in our park in order to pick and choose specific items for cleanup. Manually checking off items in this list requires a clear understanding of what each item is and is for advanced users of Park CleanUp.

  Content

This tab is indispensible for gamers who need to know if any scenery is missing for a park file they’d like to load, or who want to know what scenery is required for a park they might want to share.

  Removal Aid

Inside this tab are three sub-tabs. The first tab lists all the flat rides in your park file, the second lists all the tracks, while the third lists the stalls and facilities.

Whether they came installed with the game or were added later as custom content all your park’s attractions may be found sorted into these tabs. The attractions displayed in these lists show up in the order that you placed them in your park, with the first attraction you placed being at the top of the list and the last one that you placed at the bottom.

The Removal Aid Tab And Particle Effects

While Park CleanUp is handy for removing rides, tracks, and stalls from the park file without the need to actually launch the park in RCT3, one needs to take care when making such removals for attractions that come with particle effects. Such attractions are illustrated below with Top Spin, Dinosaur-Go-Round, and Rocket Boost Java.

After using Park CleanUp to remove such attractions from your parksave you’ll observe later upon loading the cleaned up park that the scenery item or attraction has been removed but the particle effects are still in place and still operating.

Should you find your park in this situation you’ll need to perform a few further steps with your cleaned up parksave. Ideally you’d do this to the parksave prior to its being launched in RCT3. However, before you progress with these additional steps, if you have cleaned up your park, have deleted rides and attractions, and have opened the parksave so you can observe the particle effects operating with the rides deleted then you will need to use Park CleanUp to again clean up the park file, again save the park file, and then re-open the saved park file in Park Cleanup. Saving your cleaned up park file and then re-opening it in Park CleanUp without again launching it in RCT3 will ensure any unnecessary references stay deleted and will make the following steps easier for you. With your cleaned up park file now re-opened in Park CleanUp:

A

Go to the Data List tab in Park CleanUp.

B

Scroll to the very bottom of the list of items on display. It’s an extremely long list that, depending on the content in your park, can be many thousands of items in length.

C

From the bottom, slowly scroll up until you start to see entries that are called Particle. You will observe there are four different types of particle entries:

ParticleSource

ParticleBaseDesc

ParticleEmitterDesc

ParticleDesc

D

Select (put a check mark) in the box next to each Particle Source entry.

E

When you reach the end of all the Particle entries scroll up in the Data List a bit more where you’ll find another group of Particle entries.

F

Repeat D above.

G

You may want to scroll up further to see if there is a third group of Particle entries but there are usually only two groups of these. In a cleaned up park file that hasn’t been loaded in the game they’re always grouped like this near the end of the Data List.

H

Clean up the park file.

I

Save the park file.

J

Launch RCT3 and open the saved, cleaned up park file. You will observe that all your particle effects have now been removed from the parksave.

There is no way to tell which ParticleSource reference emits what effect or the attraction it comes with so we’ll need to delete every ParticleSource entry to be sure we delete the particle effects that remain in our park that have no attraction to go with them. This method is selective in that it will delete only the particle effects in your park that are unaccompanied by scenery and attractions so deleting all the particle source references does no harm to any particle effects remaining in our park that are still accompanied by scenery and attractions.

If you’ve used Park CleanUp’s Removal Aid tab to delete, say, a large River Rapids track you’d probably have a huge number of errant particle effects you'd later need to delete so it might be worth your while to attempt to delete your River Rapids track in a loaded park. If this is not possible, our heading later on in this article Park CleanUp & Third-Party Applications will show you how to put all the Data List entries in alphabetical order. After you’ve done that you can count the number of ParticleSource entries that need to be deleted and then return to Park CleanUp knowing exactly how many you need to find there so you may know for sure that you’ve deleted every one.

  Settings

It is in this tab that we’d browse to our RCT3 installation folder so that Park CleanUp will know where the Themed folder is that it needs to review each time we use it. This will only need to be done once right after we launch Park CleanUp for the first time. To do this we'd use the Browse toggle at the top right. Navigate all the way down to your RCT3plus.exe file and click on the EXE file so that Park CleanUp can store the path.

Here we could also set up Park CleanUp so it runs in Developer Mode. After selecting this option and restarting Park CleanUp it displays another Tab called Create A Debug Dump. At one time it was possible to use the dump toggle to make a file that we’d then have sent off to Joey. Joey analysed such files and some of his findings helped improve future versions of Park CleanUp. Because Joey has moved on from RCT3 the dump toggle does not work in this final version of Park CleanUp.

The Analyse Park toggle provides a bar chart with guest information that would have been submitted to Joey along with our park dump.

This version of Park CleanUp also comes with a toggle enabling us to restore everything in this utility to the settings that were in place when we opened Park CleanUp for the first time.