Specialty Cleaning Methods

Near the end of his work on this utility Joey developed two additional methods of cleaning up park files. We may select these cleanup methods either singly or both at the same time. These methods are:

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[Experimental) Aggressive Compilation and

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[WIP] Intelligent Cleaning Algorithm.

At the time Joey added it the Intelligent Cleaning Algorithm was a work in progress. It will almost always require several cleanup passes. After each pass, when Park Cleanup deems it necessary a message will display asking if we’d like to repeat the algorithm with another pass. We should avail ourselves of each additional pass that the utility suggests until no further repeats are indicated.

The Aggressive Compilation is an experimental process that does what it needs to do in a single pass.

Before using either the Compilation or the Algorithm we need to shut down RCT3. After you’ve selected one or both of these cleanup methods you’ll next need to use the CleanUp The ParkFile toggle. When you're done and are saving your park file Park CleanUp may give the appearance it’s hung and not responding but you can be assured it’s busy saving your park file so do continue to be patient while it’s doing so. In view of that it would seem Park CleanUp does some of its magic when it cleans up the file and also later when it writes our cleaned up park file to parksave.

Pros

This algorithm and compilation will optimize the contents of your park. They are most successfully used during the early stages of your park building, i.e., in a new park that’s early on in its construction. It is confirmed that once these cleanup methods are successfully used that your parksave will always benefit from these speciality cleanups; you will ultimately be able to get more scenery, more guests, and more filesize into your parksave.

Cons

After using either or both of these clean up methods your park is more likely to be successfully loaded by RCT3 if there are no guests in the park. Attempting to use these cleanup methods on huge parks in which there are lots of guests will get you a cleaned up parksave that will likely crash during the Post Activate stage. Because the algorithm and compilation are based on the contents of our park you should occasionally repeat these specialty cleanup methods until you reach the stage where you can no longer open a parksave after having done so. When your park reaches that point you will have benefited your parksave as much as is possible with these Park CleanUp methods and will be unable to further boost your park’s performance, after which you’ll only be able to give your park the standard CleanUp The ParkFile hosedown.

As a matter of interest RCT3’s Post Activate stage seems to be the time the parksave loads all the guests that have been saved with your park. The Post Activate stage tends to take longer the more guests there are in your park.

If your park has reached the stage where you can’t boost its performance any further by using either of these specialty methods in Park CleanUp it doesn’t seem to help if you add another stage of clean up in which you delete the park guests from the parksave. This is irrespective of whether you delete the guests in the Peeps folder or you delete the guests with Park CleanUp.

Deleting the park guests from a parksave is more likely to work on a smaller park earlier on in its development than it will in a huge busy park. In a large park we will enjoy a greater level of success in using the Algorithm and Compilation if we send the guests home prior to saving our park. If we are in RCT3 Land enjoying our loaded park and believe it's time to give it another go with the Algorithm and Compilation it's a good policy to send all the guests home before saving the park file that we intend to clean up.

The number of staff in our park seems to have no effect on the success or failure of the algorithm or compilation methods.

The benefits of using the Algorithm and Compilation methods are accumulative. After our park has grown and reached it's full potential these specialty methods of Park CleanUp are more likely to be successful if we've already used them a few times throughout our park's development. Less success is likely when using the Algorithm and Compilation on a huge park in which they've never before been used.

  About

Park CleanUp Updates

When Joey provided the final version update for Park CleanUp he recommended to the community that we not use the toggle to Check For Updates.

Park CleanUp Tutorial

This is a mini tutorial made up of four tabs:

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Introduction

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Loading a Park File

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Cleaning The Park File

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Saving The Park File

These tutorials were added to Park CleanUp at a time there were no comprehensive tutorials about it within our community.

  Live

A BETA test of a park rate-of-time changer can be found here. This was designed to make the time go by in our parks at a rate that’s more like real life. More specifically it was meant to aid gamers who enjoyed presenting POV videos who experienced the problem of light changes due to sunrises and sunsets that occurred in RCT3 during their video presentation. This was particularly distressing to those presenting a POV of a dark ride who had no choice but to display in their video the shadow and lighting changes that come with sunrise and sunset in RCT3.

Our staff haven’t had any success using the Time Changer BETA.

Additional Toggles

Along the bottom right of this utility are always displayed these two toggles: CleanUp The ParkFile and Deselect All Items. Let's detail what each does.

CleanUp The ParkFile

This is as easy as loading, hitting the toggle, and saving the park file. Considered to be the basic Park CleanUp hosedown it is the most widely used method of cleaning up park files. Most community members new to Park CleanUp rely on this method.

There is a drop-down menu at the right of this tab where we may select further options to more specifically streamline our clean up. Selecting any of these options will auto-tick the corresponding items in the Data List which would save the gamer himself going through the Data List and ticking each one separately.

CleanUp Guests will remove all guests from the park enabling one to load the cleaned up park with no guests in attendance. This is especially handy if we've downloaded a park that has a large number of guests in it but we want to use our own Peep Factory guests in it and we don't want to load the park file, close the park, and then wait for all those guests to go home.

Empty your Themed folder before using the CleanUp GUI2_DatDesc option, a feature which will enable us to strip out every item of custom scenery that's placed in the park by stripping out all references pertaining to that scenery. This feature is helpful if you don't have and can't find for download some of the CSO’s that Park CleanUp says are needed in the park. This method will remove every GUI2_DatDesc entry from the Data List so if you’d like to be more selective you may go through the Data List yourself and select specific GUI2_DatDesc items for removal. Whether you’re separately removing these entries or removing them in bulk please see our heading below Manually Removing GUI2 DatDesc Entries which tells the other steps that need to be taken in order to enable this method to work.

If we've placed fireworks in a park, have removed our firework displays, and we want to remove all references to fireworks from the park file then we'd use the CleanUp Firework related items option.

CleanUp Ducks will remove all the ducks from our park, handy if we've used the Alfred Hitchcock cheat and all those ducks just won't leave, or if we have lots of ducks in our park and want to start afresh with a smaller number of newly arrived ducks. One could also use this option if they’re just about to take screenshots of their sci-fi park and they don’t want ducks flying about in their airless atmosphere.

It is not known what the CleanUp Blender option does.

Again, these specialty options will only tick the corresponding boxes in the Data List and will not actually clean up anything until you use the standard CleanUp The ParkFile option, at which time Park CleanUp will remove all the items checked off by any of the selected drop-down options, any of the items you yourself have individually ticked, and any of the items it would itself have marked out while performing a standard Park CleanUp hosedown.

Deselect All Items

Whether we use Park CleanUp’s Data List tab, the drop-down list, or the RemovalAid tab to mark out items for removal, if we’ve lost our place and need to make a fresh start marking out items for removal, with this toggle we can deselect all the items we’ve checked.

Taking into account that there are RCT3 Vanilla/Soaked!/Wild!, Gold, Platinum, and Deluxe releases and that these may be installed on XP, Vista, Windows 7, and beyond, it seems that not every feature works with every release in every installation on every platform so do remember to back up your park files before trying these options. Joey was still developing these features upon the final release of Park CleanUp and on occasion they do prevent park files from being opened in RCT3.

Alternative Cleaning Methods

Cold Cleaning Our Parks

Our staff usually enjoy success when cold cleaning our parks. Depending on the version of RCT3 that you’ve installed and the operating system on which you’ve installed it you may find it is possible to make mass deletions of scenery from your park file by simply deleting from your Themed directory the folders that contain the custom content in your park that you no longer want, then launching RCT3, and then opening the park.

After your park has been successfully loaded it will need to be saved, given a standard CleanUp The ParkFile hosedown to get rid of the references still remaining in your parksave, and then the park re-loaded. This will give you a fresh start with the park without any unnecessary references and which also does not contain any scenery that you no longer wish to have in it.

Cold cleaning is a Draconian measure that does not offer any selectivity because in deleting any folder from Themed you will strip every item from your park that comes with that set. This method is also handy for downloaded parks:

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that contain certain scenery that you know you yourself would never have put into the park,

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that require scenery sets you don’t have that are no longer available for download, or

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for which you’ve seen a screenshot, you like the landscape or the path layout, but don’t want most or all of the scenery that’s already in the park.

This method may be used for removing vegetation, small scenery and large scenery from your park. However, you will need to take care not to delete any folder containing items that display in any of the other scenery menus. For example, if the set with which you’re attempting a cold clean contains benches, and benches from that set are placed about the park that you want to cold clean, the park will crash when you attempt to launch it because although you’ve removed the set folder from Themed, this method won’t actually remove the benches are still placed in the park. In this example, at some point you’ll need yourself to remove the benches in question from the launched park, save the park, and then delete the folder containing the benches from Themed.

Other examples of items you’d need to manually remove from the park are vending machines or custom stalls if either comes with a vendor. The custom stall or vending machine would need to be manually removed from the park before attempting a cold clean.

A good rule of thumb to consider is if the item is a path extra, includes a vendor, or requires staff or guest interaction then cold cleaning won’t work on it. If you can’t open the park and remove the items yourself then you’d need to manually remove any such items by opening the parksave in Park CleanUp and remove the offending GUI2_DatDesc entries. We’ve shown how to remove GUI2_DatDesc entries here.

To ascertain if cold cleaning will work for you, rather than remove all your Themed folders at one time you could begin by deleting a single folder from Themed that you know for sure it does not contain anything like path extras or stalls. Should you be able to do this without crashing your game it would be safe to remove any other undesired folders from Themed in order to effect a cold clean.

Once you’ve loaded a cold cleaned park in RCT3 you’ll need to save it so that it remains cleaned, after which the parksave should again be opened in Park CleanUp and given a standard CleanUp The ParkFile hosedown.

Cold cleaning works just as well with the folders that come installed with RCT3 in Themed. Most of us know that those folders are:

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Adventure

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Atlantis

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IslandParadise

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Jungle

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Prehistoric

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Space

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Spooky

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WildWest

Some or all of these folders seem to be directly engaged to the core operation of any progressed park beyond what we ourselves can see about the park in its various path extras, ride entrances & exits, coaster car types & flat rides, shops & stalls, and scenery.

While such back-of-house connections to our Themed folders are unknown, an example of an obvious connection to these folders is if you’ve built a coaster with a car type that’s, say, Adventure themed, then you've added the bamboo Adventure ride entrance & exit, and then selected Pirate fencing, and later you've deleted the Adventure folder. When the game engine is attempting to load your parksave this would cause your game to crash because the coaster with the Adventure car type and the Adventure add-ons is linked to the Adventure folder that you deleted from your Themed folder. Although the track type will be listed for potential removal in Park CleanUp, the coaster’s car type, the entrance & exit type, and the fence type is something that is not acknowledged by this utility.

You may load any progressed park into Park CleanUp after you’ve removed RCT3’s eight Themed folders and do a check for missing scenery. Park CleanUp will tell you which of these eight folders are required by your parksave. Except for the possibility of back-of-house conflicts and unknown ride & coaster add-ons you may consider for deletion from Themed any folders that you deem unnecessary for that parksave.

Manually Removing GUI2_Dat Desc Entries

In the Data List, GUI2_DatDesc entries are listed in addition to the references to individual items. Removing GUI2_DatDesc entries will leave the associated references without anything for them to engage with in your parksave so it’s another handy way to remove unwanted scenery from your park file. It gives the same result as a cold clean except you’re using Park CleanUp and are specifically addressing the GUI2’s in order to achieve this. This feature is handy if your RCT3 installation and operating system won’t allow you to successfully perform a cold clean on your parksave.

This Park CleanUp function will selectively remove all the GUI2_DatDesc entries from your parksave so this method isn’t as Draconian as a cold clean. To remove the GUI2’s you’ll need to first remove the unwanted scenery folders from Themed prior to launching the park in Park CleanUp.

After this sort of a clean up, once you’ve saved your changes you’ll notice that if you use Park CleanUp to search through the parksave for missing content Park CleanUp will still flag these sets as missing content. Don’t worry about that. Just like with a cold clean, the only way to permanently get rid of these errant references will be to launch the park that’s been stripped of it’s GUI2’s, save it, and then give the parksave a standard CleanUp The ParkFile hosedown.

It is difficult to predict any success or unsuccess in using either the cold cleaning or Remove GUI2_DatDesc methods of park cleanup. In fact different iterations of the same park saved at different times will give success for one parksave and unsuccess when attempting the same thing with another save.

Analyzing Our Park’s Data

The data contained in each park and the information that Park CleanUp lists is as varied as the assorted content we choose to put into each park. If we want to give more than a casual consideration to the data inside our parksaves, after cleaning up and saving our park file we’d want to re-open our cleaned up park file in Park CleanUp prior to loading that park in RCT3 so that the utility can accurately display what remains.

Following is a General tab screenshot of one of my older parks, Concordia Gardens. As recommended the park file has been cleaned up, saved, and then the cleaned up parksave re-opened in Park CleanUp.

In this park are several enclosures, a huge aquarium, an enormous pool complex, and a moderate amount of custom content. I can see I created this park way back when it was important for me to have coasters in my park rather than flat rides as the Removal Aid tab indicates there are only five flat rides in here alongside the twenty coasters I placed.

I’ve looked through the listing of over a hundred stalls and am reminded that I placed at least one of every type that was available. In the park information up at the top left it says the park was initially saved in Vanilla although some of the stalls listed in this parksave didn’t come along until the Wild! expansion. That tells me that I began this park prior to the release of Soaked! & Wild! and intermittently continued playing around with it until some time after the expansions had been released.

There is no Guest Size bar included in the Park CleanUp bar chart which tells me I saved this park file when the park had very few guests in it or there were no guests in attendance. This can be confirmed when I attempt to load this park in RCT3.

The information I’ve just written was mildly interesting but what if we want a more thorough analysis of our park’s data? For that we’d need to open the Data List tab and review the information there.

This presents an exhaustive listing of every item that’s in the park and I'll tell you there well over 50,000 entries in this list. The information can’t be copied from Park CleanUp and it’s not likely anyone would spend the time required to scroll down this list and individually identify and count out the various items. Further, if we were inclined to look through one part or another of this list we’d find that the entries aren’t in any sort of order. What can we do to process this information so it’s useful to us?