Richard

Nah Clint I missed the MGM show so I've really got nothing to compare it to. All they've demonstrated thus far is just a big of the driving/stunts with few aspects of the storyline so how they translate this series of stunts into a cohesive show is yet to be seen. The full show will feature I believe five cars.

As promised we've got some video footage of the show available for viewing. It shows just a snippet of what will be on offer in the show when it opens. http://www.parkz.com.au/video/1-Hollywood-...ew-footage.html Had to quicky put together the video system today just for this video so it's pretty basic for now -- if anyone runs into any troubles let us know.

Guys we've got some fresh photos up from inside the arena today, showing the theming coming together and some of the stunts being performed: http://www.parkz.com.au/photos/AU/Gold_Coa...tion/page3.html Hopefully we'll also have some video footage up in the next day or two because stills just don't do the driving justice.

I think it's a bit boring that half the rides linked in this topic are among the smallest B&M's out there, and whenever someone posts photos of a larger coaster I keep reading "no that's too expensive for Movie World!". Firstly, most of these small B&Ms have been built small due to land constraints, and secondly the difference in price between one of these small rides and one that is larger (i.e. large enough to be billed as an Australian record breaker) is not the difference between viable and unviable for our parks. These US parks that get 2-3 times the attendance of our parks, are also spending 2-3 times the amount our parks do on new attractions. It's not that they're adding grossly expensive rides every few years that our parks simply can't afford, but rather are adding new major rides more often, and frequently upgrading/adding minor rides. I'd say that anything sub-USD$20 million is not out of the realm of possibilities for our parks long-term. Probably not in the current financial climate but our dollar will be back up within a year and with a bit of luck this psudo-recession/depression will disappear within a similar timeframe, and you simply can't discount anything strategically in the long-run based on short-term conditions. The real question that should be asked when someone posts something that looks like it'd be out of the grasp of our parks financially, is what is something similar that can be achieved for less?, and then does it achieve the same goals?

This issue has nothing to do with 'Doc Brown' -- it is to do with a recent user impersonating someone from WVTP management and releasing (or appearing to release) privileged information. You'll find that whether the info was real or not isn't the issue so much as the impersonation, which is a legal matter for them to pursue. You will find that our parks are quite happy for employees to contribute to this site so long as they stay within the terms of their employment with what they disclose. On this matter, we don't moderate this sort of information -- it's up to the parks to educate their staff and for individual employees to know their responsibilities.

Guys, really. Give it a rest. I will say that there is absolutely nothing at all to suggest these two are the same person, in terms of IP, ISP, email address and how they present themselves. At any rate, we have a new member here who is meaningfully contributing and posting construction updates for us etc. I couldn't care less if previously banned members come back and choose to reinvent themselves as a positive part of this community.

I used the bubbles transition to fit in with the site. I do have a feeling it might get a bit tiresome after a while, in which case a standard fade will probably replace it. Unfortunately there's no way to pause or speed up the transition. I too would like these features. I also decided to reorder galleries so that each individual page goes from oldest to newest as well. I felt this made more sense with the way everything now works. Also makes going through construction updates a lot easier, a lot less back and forth and ties in nicely with the Construction HQ 'Parkz Updates' section which categorises all updates for each project by date.

I was contacted by Network Ten looking for assistance with this story. It was a piece looking at the demise of NSW theme parks.

I've changed the page order back to left to right and also added a new dropdown jump menu at the bottom of the page. Also thought I'd put up Construction HQ to get some feedback. It still has a way to go yet but this is it at its core: http://www.parkz.com.au/constructionHQ/

Interesting you mention that... the design for Construction HQ does indeed feature more colour in the titles. I think in this case the highlighting works better as only the length of the title, but you might be onto something with making them full width on the index page (and the database section to the right). There seems to be a bug where the name dexter appears with blood spatters around it. How perculiar.

How about phase one of rev 1? In regards to the screenshot, not sure of your browser but in IE7 and Firefox 3 the "But wait there's more..." box is properly spaced. With page navigation perhaps a dropdown list is in order. I probably agree with ordering them from left to right rather than right to left. The ordering carries on to the individual photo page navigation but it's easily adapted whichever way the navigation ends up going. Ordered from oldest to newest meaning page 1 is the oldest, page 2 is slightly newer, page 3 is newer again etc.

I guess what you could call phase one is currently up and running -- pages of photos are now ordered from oldest to newest. The biggest difference is that to keep pages static the first page is often only partially complete. Example: http://www.parkz.com.au/photos/AU/Gold_Coa...e/construction/ If anyone runs into any problems/bugs with it let me know. Construction HQ is nearing completion and I'm really liking how it's turned out. Hopefully it'll be running by the end of the month.

If you're going straight to the latest posts section, have you considered simply bookmarking the View New Posts link? Alternatively, you can syndicate with the RSS link down in the bottom left corner of the forums. A mobile version of the site would probably be a good idea. The two issues I see is that technology in this area is rapidly improving, and this site is naturally a very media-intensive so in some respects there'd be little to gain in developing a site dedicated to mobile users because much of the content would either be lost or scaled back to a point where it's no longer effective. In terms of keeping current on a mobile device, RSS feeds would probably be the best way to go about it. We had them on the old site but I'm yet to get some done for this one (aside from the aforementioned Forums feed). That's my thoughts as well. If/when the video section comes back to this site, it'll be if we can work out a way to get relatively regular high-quality "official" videos happening. It'll all come down to having the time needed to both work out the logistics and then actually do them. It's been something I've wanted to do for years now.

That won't happen in the foreseeable future. In all likelihood the link will be removed in an upcoming update until we figure out if/how videos are going to be implemented on the site.

How the current global economic conditions affects our parks remains to be seen. What has caused this has not happened in Australia, where banks haven't pursued sub-prime loans like in the US, partly through responsible government regulation, and also because of our strong resources sector. I'm not convinced average Australians will feel the crunch of this current situation. Banks will, as will companies because of the global nature of finances and the economy, but I don't think the average homeowner in Australia will. Interest rates will have a much greater impact on attendance as this by and large controls disposible income. In short there are still a lot of people out there who can ably afford to visit theme parks. If our parks are negatively impacted anytime soon I'd put the shortcomings down to marketing and failing to live up to the market's expectations rather than a change in consumer sentiment. I'd tend to agree with joz's expectations. Though I don't think Dreamworld's per capita spending will increase quite that much as I believe their management have come to a dead-end with that method of internal growth. As far as the dollar goes, I reckon Village are very happy with their aquisitions. I'd imagine the decision to do that was based on our dollar's performance and we should see a slow down on their international expansion for the time being. Expect the dollar to level off at about $0.75 or possibly higher; the current abysmal value is the market overreacting. It's made me pretty antsy given I rely on US imports so the next few weeks/months will be interesting, especially after having an awesome period there where it was up at $0.98.

That plan was rejected because it was simply inadequate for the area considering current and projected population growth. The fact that it was being built by a company with no expertise in operating a retail centre wasn't a winner, especially considering proper companies will be less likely to come into the area in the future if there's already competition, in which case no one wins.

The only track that remains to be built is the turnaround after the launch. Someone will be wishing they had proper vehicle access to that central section of track when it comes time for maintenance or there's need for emergency access (train valleying etc.). You can see why it'd be easier to just bury the track during construction when you consider the effort needed to get a crane back into that area, jimmy out a section of track locked in with the track beside it. Uncovering it again... if I were Intamin I'd look forward to the call for a replacement section of track because they somehow broke one with a backhoe.

Hmm, a few things... In my view Village Roadshow is a shoddily run company and has been for years. One of their few consistently profitable divisions is their theme parks. Reasons for their share price tanking has little to do with how their theme parks are performing. Share prices are not (necessarily) a reflection of profitability, nor are they are comparitive measure of success between two companies. Looking at any company on an internal level, so long as their investments pay off, they maintain a manageable level of debt and invest capital such that they can continue doing these two things into the future then the company is a success. Decisions are not made to influence share prices, they are made to maximise profits for the shareholders, which in turn causes the market to respond accordingly. Of course this is a generalisation and doesn't hold true for all companies, especially those where there is a majority shareholder such as Village Roadshow, but in the case of Macquarie Leisure it's fairly true. For the record I believe Macquarie Bank owns something like a 12% stake in Macquarie Leisure and aren't in fact even the biggest unitholder, so their influence in the company is fairly limited. Macquarie Leisure's unit price have to me been way over-valued by the market over the past few years, driven by their first real expansions since the company floated, and are now stabilising. My feeling is that once we leave this bear market (whenever that may be), we'll see Macquarie Leisure's unit price increase, but I can't see the $3+ happening soon without significant expansion of the company -- beyond the scope of buying up bowling alleys and fitness centres.

Yeah the "SeaWorld Orlando" pics seen was a mistake I made -- I uploaded a few publicity pics of Manta and decided to add some of my own while I was there and forgot to change the name back to mine. But this is an indication of what the partnership coverage will be like, albeit a bit more prominently advertised.

Forum integration is ultimately the best way to go about comments when you consider that it by default allows for a whole lot of very important features that'd be a huge task in implementing otherwise, including: editing/deleting abilities, including user info (avatar etc.), incrementing post count, moderation functions, censorship / spam protection etc.

The default page for any attraction will still be the most recent photos and the photos will still be ordered from top to bottom newest to oldest. The only difference is when you go to the next most recent page of photos it'll be labelled page 9 instead of page 2 (in the case of Jet Ski Rescue). The navigation will also remain the same in that you go from left to right to get from newest to oldest, so there will be no change to functionality, only the naming, which will add the ability to meaningfully link to a page of photos, knowing that its link will be cemented, just like linking to an individual photo/article/etc. I also want to see photo comments as I totally agree that it'd be of great benefit to the community. It's probably not as difficult as you might think. The framework used for the article comment system could in fact be ported across with zero modifications. The underlying problem is managing what would be literally several thousand different topics, but once I have that worked out it could be relatively easy to accomplish. You've got me thinking about this feature a bit more so I could possibly get it up and running along with the other features listed.

I have had a chance lately to layout the framework for a number of new features that will be coming to Parkz in the coming days/weeks/months. Obviously since Parkz's launch we've had a chance to reflect and modify things to better suit the site. Redesigned / revised index page It's important that the index page has the scope that makes it capable of providing adequate coverage so that when there is a lot of new content it's all reasonably accessible. Everything that is 'good' about the current page will stay but the way news is displayed in particular will change significantly. We've invested in a special piece of software that I think will vastly improve the functionality of the site. I'm really happy with the beta version and I hope to have screenshots and/or the final release before too long. New 'Construction HQ' Construction HQ will be a gateway to all the latest construction content we have available. In recent months it has become clear that to be able to effectively cover a large number of different projects we need an easy-to-use and prominent place where users can keep track of content. In addition, to make this feature work effectively, the way galleries are organised will be slightly altered. Pages will be ordered from oldest to newest, so for instance if you post a URL to 'page 11', its content will not change when new photos are added like it currently does. 'Partnership' coverage More on this later, but think of it for now as a way to vastly expand how much content we can offer. User content profiles Yes this feature will finally be made available. Each user who has submitted content (photos, articles, database entries) will have their own profile that displays all their content. I expect these features (as well as a number of minor improvements and adjustments) will be rolled out over the coming month or so if all goes well. Comments/suggestions are welcome as always.

Assuming that the set will still be Italian themed as Steve Peet said about six months back, it sounds to me like there's not too much chance that any of the cars being reported will even remotely fit the concept.

In our database, if an attraction's date is listed as ???? that means it's still operating. Only attractions where the date is listed as ???? - ???? (or 1992 - 2004, ???? - 2000 etc.) are closed. That means we've got about ten attractions listed for Universal Studios Hollywood. Of course we don't have everything single thing to see or do listed, as not everything in a park warrants its own attraction entry.

Now naturally I can't speak for other sites, but what I can say is that, based on our visitor stats, either there are vastly more enthusiasts out there than you or I would think, or visitors to this site are on the whole not what you'd consider enthusiasts. In fact I'd say based on reading patterns, search engine keywords etc., that enthusiasts are outnumbered upwards of 6 to 1 in our readership. It's not all that hard to appreciate why when you see that Parkz ranks in the top handful of results for many Australian theme park related searches. Looking at it from a marketing perspective, appealing to enthusiasts/fans (in any industry) is about a lot more than just tapping this group's own disposable income. This group is known within their community as being knowledgeable or expert on the subject, and as such their opinion holds more value. Most members here are probably the person family or friends come to for advice if they're planning a theme park trip. I'm sure thinking about it, most will realise they've been able to influence others' decision making pretty heavily. Interesting questions with John Menzies. Nothing there that isn't what you'd expect the answers to be, but I found the Master Blaster comment pretty interesting. The follow-up question that begs asking is, "That said, what then is the strategy behind Jet Ski Rescue, a ride that is fundamentally identical to Motocoaster?". Thinking about it some more, there's two possible answers to this: that it is all about how they frame the attraction and utilise a strategy that highlights its key differences and strengths, or that in terms of return on investment, this style of roller coaster represents the best the industry has to offer. Following up these two questions would be, "Why then can't that same strategy be used to differentiate a superior Master Blaster from that at a competing park?", and "Really??", respectively. I think I'm just thinking aloud now...