Hello,

Sorry if this has been asked before, but what exactly does "pumping" mean? I did a search and over 700 items came up and most of them are comments like "there's too much pumping."

I love downloading the sims and running NoLimits. Then when I go to comment I find someone has left one with "too much pumping" and I can't figure it out...it was a nice ride for me but for someone else there was too much pumping. I know my heart would be pumping fast after some of these rides! LOL

Thanks
Jay :-)

Pumping is difficult to explain. Basically, to me, is when the coaster has a sudden rush of G-force and then it suddenly disappears. On No Limits, the "camera" is quickly pushed down and quickly comes back up.

The more technical way of putting it would be that the turn, or transition, is too tight for the speed forcing the coaster to have unnecessarily quick and intense g-force.

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WOW! Quick response! Thanks, and I really appreciate the responses. I couldn't for the life of me figure it out. heheh I now have a better understanding. I too hate when the sim slows down when it should be going at a steady pace. One thing I really hate is going 80mph and the brakes are applied and in less than 2 secs you're at 8mph and back at the start point. Oh well, maybe when I have some extra time I'll get my coaster done. Thanks again!

I think it's like this. One instance of pumping is if you make a banked curve. If you ride in the back of the train in the sim, then you may notice that the train doesn't make a smooth curve but may seem to bank to the right, bank to the left a little, then bank to the right even more, as though the track were unevenly banked. Also, think of it like drawing a circle without a compass. It will obviously have imprefections along it.

As a No Limits designed I've always found Pumping to be the following:

When any element of a coaster (Turn, Drop, Inversion) is not as fluid as intended, it makes very minor jerks and does not flow smoothly. A good example, at least from my experience, would be the barrel rolls on any SLC. You sort of shift and jitter through them, and every part of the SLC for that matter...

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Thornton to Heatley all day, every day.

Another way to explain would be look for a "pumping" motion in the front of the car. It can usually be anticipated if you look for a turn, as you are approaching it, that looks too tight to fit through smoothly.

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Try to ride your own NoLimits coaster in the back seat once and watch at how the rest of the train moves. You will see that sometimes, in transitions, the train makes a sudden move, you can see that by a sort of "wave motion" over the train, because the front cars make the sudden move earlier than the back cars. This wave motion is the pumping.

Another explanation I have seen is that when a helix is not perfectly circle shaped (but more, say, elliptic or another shape), the radius of the curve is not everywhere equal and you see that in the back seat when the train bends sometimes more and sometimes less between the individual cars. That is also called pumping sometimes.

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FYI: reposting some stuff I wrote some times ago on TPR:


Ah well... "pumping"... all these misconceptions and half-truths again... no, pumping is NOT about any radius changes in general, this is a very distinct phenomenon.

"Pumping" == from any *unintentional* radius change, where a certain geometry (like circle, ellipse, parabola, clothoid) is not followed the way it originally was meant to be...

AND / OR

"Pumping" == from failing to use enough vertices for resembling any such geometries, since the beziers used in NL are not able to represent these geometries, when used over larger turn angles and/or with longer segments. the radius will then "wobble", where a gradient change should have been

Now please pay attention: Radius changes on real life coasters that might cause "pump-like" movements are very common in fact. Any plain parabola will show such an effect. Nevertheless, all these real life shapes are made up of combinations of *exact* geometries! Hence these effects are *in no way* similar with the "pumping" that's often occurring in NL-tracks.

To precicely resemble such real life "pump-like" motions within NL, one has to entirely re-create the according geometries, which naturally will require top notch track shaping.

Thus, any of the above causes of "pumping" in NoLimits are *entirely* the designer's failure, and can't even be blamed on any technical shortcomings of editor or sim.

Finally, anyone claiming that his NL-track is "pumping" just because some real life counterparts *seem* to do too, is either clueless, severely misinformed, or just a lazy liar.


P.S. You do always ride last car in NL as well? Do you?

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Limits? NoLimits!