While watching Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 videos you may have seen some wonderfully smooth, swinging camera movements. These are often created with the ‘Flying Camera Route Editor’ built into RCT3. You may also hear this referred to as the ‘Attract Sequence Editor’ since that name appeared in the Prima guide. But since the routes you’ll be creating are saved as ‘.fcr’ files, I’m going to stick with the FCR Editor name for this guide.
The Flying Camera Route Editor is an unfinished bonus hidden within RCT3. Since it’s not an official feature, information about it only started to appear as players experimented with it. I’d like to thank all of the regulars in the Atari RCT3 Forums who have taken the time to share their knowledge. Thanks in particular to Bitter Jeweler, Vodhin, and Simbolism, all of whom, besides being talented video makers, have provided valuable feedback for this guide. Vodhin has also produced an excellent video tutorial explaining how to use the Editor. Be sure to look for it at his site, along with lots of other great info.
The information in this guide has been tested on the North American retail release of RCT3 complete with second patch. Other versions should work the same way - famous last words. I welcome any additions, corrections, or suggestions for improving this guide.
First, a brief aside just to make sure everybody knows about the ‘official’ way of making video clips in RCT3. Anytime you are playing the game you can press the CTRL+SHIFT+F11 key combination to start recording a clip. Press the same keys again to stop. This works when you’re just looking around your park, or when you’re using the CoasterCam to ride your rollercoaster. Yes, the frame-by-frame recording process is slow, but of very good quality. By default, the movies end up in the ‘My Documents\My Videos\RCT3\’ folder.
Remember that CTRL+SHIFT+F11 key combo, you’ll need it later.
There are two ways to bring up the Editor’s window:
- rename a peep as ‘D Lean’ (a famous British movie director)
- even simpler, press the CTRL+SHIFT+0 key combination.
That’s a ‘zero’, not the letter ‘O’, and it has to be the zero over the ‘P’ key, not
the one over on the numeric keypad. This will bring up a mostly blank FCR Editor window.
To see the rest of the Editor’s controls, let’s start a new route. You have probably already discovered that clicking the buttons doesn’t seem to do anything. The trick is to click on the drop shadow under the button. Remember this trick, it be needed for some other buttons later.
After clicking the drop shadow under the New Route button you’ll be able to see all of the FCR Editor’s other controls. In the screenshot below I’ve added some labels so we can refer to them in the tutorial.
One other bit of terminology to get out of the way. When you start creating camera routes a number of markers will appear in the main game screen.
