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I swear to god if they hired GCI...

^^^ The chance for an RMC is still there, they just said no to a Hybrid solution. They didn't mention Intamin anywhere and hinted to some exciting news. The Interview at 0:58 went somewhere between the lines of "We will build a coaster with a wooden track, that’s all we will say right now. There will be a lot of innovations, look out for some exciting news in the future."

Is there any chance to meet (again) some NL2 community members at the FKF-Convention? It's a convention in Germany organized by the FKF e. V. with interesting talks from fans and people working in the coaster and amusement park industry.

This project has been one hell of a journey – my longest ever project spanning almost a year from conceptualisation to completion. Ten Speed began in mid-February 2017. At the time, I was absolutely obsessed with Coheed and Cambria, especially their album “Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Volume 1: From Fear Through The Eyes of Madness”. I had a few favourite songs from the album, but I always particularly loved “Ten Speed (Of God’s Blood and Burial)”, for it’s great pacing and nonsensical concept. Music in hand, I began working on the initial rough layout.

LAYOUT

When it was time to decide on a coaster type, Vekoma Motorbike was the obvious choice. I wanted the trains to resemble the Ten Speed character, and thought if the ride was built by a real park the motorbike seating would have been an fitting gimmick – also, the ride type had its inception around the time Coheed were writing the album (2004 and 2005). In terms of layout, I wanted to create a highly realistic layout that Vekoma could have built in this era. As aforementioned, I took inspiration from Flamingoland’s Velocity (mainly in how it stays low to the ground and maintains a fast pace), but switched out several elements to provide more airtime and a less repetitive experience. By around March or April 2017 I had a layout I was happy to begin theming and supporting.

The early layout

When the skybox was first created

Supports on now!

Overall on the final layout

MUSIC

Ten Speed was odd in how the music preceded the ride – I actually made the first two soundtracks (Thrilling Wells IV and II) before I had any layout whatsoever, using a POV from Velocity to aid with pacing. The ten soundtracks I created for the ride were an attempt to roughly represent the entire Coheed and Cambria discography – the only album in their entire catalogue not represented is The Afterman: Ascension (as I had another soundtrack from the second Afterman album). Songs were chosen based on what fit best to the ride timings, instead of solely personal preference.

An Easter Egg in the shed room, including the Good Apollo album art

SUPPORTS AND DETAILS

The supports on Ten Speed don’t exactly seem very complex, however they provided some interesting challenges. As NoLimits 2 doesn’t have a Vekoma connector, each support doesn’t connect to the track – this meant a while was spent ensuring they lined up, but I was happy with the overall result. The most interesting (and frustrating) aspect of this coaster however was the launch track. This was created entirely from supports: I’d never really worked on support scenery of this detail before, but I think it certainly was fairly accurate to its real-life counterparts.

The blank scenery environment with Ten Speed inside

SCENERY AND ENVIRONMENT

The environment for Ten Speed was highly inspired by the original Good Apollo Volume 1 comics released by lead singer Claudio Sanchez back in 2005. Whilst physical copies are now very rare, I was lucky enough to find a digital version to take ideas from. The over-riding aesthetic was clear: bleak, drained of colour and highly stylised. My environment aimed to reflect The Writer’s crumbling mental state, hence the use of barren trees and heavy fog on the final release. The skybox did however go through a few iterations – my first concept included a skybox for each major Coheed album (e.g a blue one for “In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3”), but this was scrapped before debut.

The blue skybox

The final look, including fog

The scenery however took more inspiration from the updated Good Apollo Volume 1 comics which began to release in 2017. The building which houses the station and queue line was highly inspired by a building that appeared in both comics as well as the album’s art – The Writer’s home. My station wasn’t exactly an accurate replica; however, I did try to echo some of the scenes which appear in the comics (such as the table with the typewriter). This building is fully laden with Easter eggs and references: the scrawled text on the walls mainly contains lyrics from Good Apollo Volume 1 songs – if you look you’ll find sections from “Once Upon Your Dead Body”, “Mother May I” and of course “Ten Speed (Of God’s Blood and Burial)”. A couple of other Easter eggs include the TV in the queueline playing excerpts from the Good Apollo Animated Vignettes (which were used to promote the album in 2005) and the doormat, which references the opening lyric of “Once Upon Your Dead Body” (“if ‘hello’ could only drop it’s ‘o’”).

Outside of the station there are some other pieces of scenery, however these are not all taken from the comics (e.g. the gate surrounding the area is my own concept, whereas the Erica Court gravestone is taken from the comics).

The house frontage

Some writing on the walls

The entrance gate

The doormatt

Some planning renders...

And their final result.

THE FINAL CUT

Ten Speed is undoubtedly my most complete and detailed project yet, and maybe even one of the most realistic Vekoma motorbike coasters made within NL2. It feels strange to see it finished, and even stranger to know it placed within one of the major Roundups. All that’s left is for me to thank you all for supporting this project! I’ve got more planned, so stay tuned…

“The worlds have now learned of the worst yet to come.
On the brink of an end, a boy learns to run.”

Does this work for base supports? Once complete it'll be linked 3 roughly circular shapes linked.

Talking about train, whatver they do with it I just wish they kept the current Intamin ones. Way better than any other.

I would rather they just kept it as it was... I've not yet joined the RMC hype train.

Thanks CoolioJoe.
While working on that, i also wanted to have the snake badge for each respective car as detail on both the back of the seat/restraint structure, and on the seat itself. But both those locations used a single mirrored texture for each side of the train. So it ended up not working.

^^^^ How can they say "no" to an RMC? You don't know how excited I would have been; an RMC hybrid just one hour away!

No, of course not.

^ Maybe, I'll keep that in mind when doing more design tweaks and mobile optimizations.

I may delete this thread in the next couple of days, any other bugs / suggestions can be messaged to me

YAY! Also the women in the video said they have some surprises and other things to come, but it will be a wood track again... Why did she said that lol RMC

Edit:
Phantasialand started working on theming for FLY

I personally had many posts, random things and discoveries I wish I had saved elsewhere... It's many years of history that's gone in the blink of an eye, so that's a bit heartbreaking, but eh...

So they're not RMCing it.

^Same reason people dream about random things when asleep.

I am so relieved about this. I missed out on Colossos whilst I was in Heide Park, and I felt really bummed. So glad to hear it's safe.

Colossos at Heide Park will return in 2019!

I suggest removing the darkgray bars on mobile if that's possible. Only a minor cosmetic thing which barely impacts the user experience tho.

Copperhead, by myself

^^Why would we dream of that when we have this beautiful site? ;)

^^^ NLC is hosted by me on Digital Ocean, specifically the $80 server option, which provides more than enough resources to run the site. That is roughly what the first monthly cost of NLC was and will continue to be, I think. So it is actually pretty affordable for me to host NLC with all of its services ad free, etc.

It does use some other paid services. Amazon Web Services is used for the hosting of parks and some other things, but even those services are extremely cheap, almost free. The other services NLC uses that cost money have a free plan, and most of those plans suffice, some may need to be upgraded in the future to a paid plan, but I'll look into that when it comes.

Ride op has a way to message me so anything him or the NL development team want to discuss for the site in terms of features / management, etc, are obviously free to discuss with me. I do intend to maintain and develop it for the foreseeable future.