The Decline Of Movie World

[Brad2912]

1 hour ago, themagician said:

JL is Currently under maintenance with no dates

That's the best possible news. 

Keep it shuttered until its worthy of being open and not an embarrassment to the park.

[rappa]

12 hours ago, Levithian said:

A lot of the animated characters appear to be moving but the lighting isn't working so you can't even see them. 

Problem is, I don't think the tech is any newer, its still IR based. You can't just add things to a ride like this, the whole sequence has to be rewritten and everything coded to operate each scene has to be changed as even small variations in triggering messes up the queued events to follow. It's designed around some old control systems with everything being dmx triggered. To make significant changes, it really needs to be gutted and replaced. If you had an unlimited budget it would be a trackless ride now. I think the best we could hope for would be a ride in as delivered condition, that is, all the interactive elements that no longer work, all the lighting and effects that provide theming will be repaired or replaced. 

Adding joker doesn't make a whole lot of sense as Starro is the villain. If they were going to add anything animatronic to the ride, they should add a captured Starro animatronic to the unload/exit tunnel area, like he is being lead away after justice league saved earth. Problem is, even a basic humanoid character animatronic can cost over $100,000 USD. 

There is a huge amount of tech that can be upgraded on this thing. 
Everything from the media servers, through the gaming system to the projectors is ancient by computer standards. 
The ride doesn’t run on DMX triggers, its all PLC based with a basic background state and individual scene triggers. 
You can easily change out scene by scene components to upgrade whilst leaving the underlying PLC control system untouched (PLC technology doesn’t really change ‘that’ much over time). 
 

So there is a hell of a lot of new life that could be breathed into the attraction just with system upgrades to the current equivalents of what is already there. 
Some new lights would be nice too. 

[GoGoBoy]

51 minutes ago, Brad2912 said:

That's the best possible news. 

Keep it shuttered until its worthy of being open and not an embarrassment to the park.

I feel powerful 😆. No, but seriously, interesting timing after I just posted that video. Probably a coincidence but you never know 

Edited August 10, 2022 by GoGoBoy

[DaptoFunlandGuy]

13 hours ago, CR4ZE said:

Justice League: Next Generation? *shudders*

I mean at least then the projectors would have to be working for the 'projection mapping'

[GoGoBoy]

According to the website, JL is down until December. Should be plenty of time to get lots of this stuff fixed!

[themagician]

That’s great news, hopefully it’s because they’ve released how bad of shape the ride is in and this will give them plenty of time to get it back to how it originally was 

[Levithian]

On 10/08/2022 at 11:15 PM, rappa said:

There is a huge amount of tech that can be upgraded on this thing. 
Everything from the media servers, through the gaming system to the projectors is ancient by computer standards. 
The ride doesn’t run on DMX triggers, its all PLC based with a basic background state and individual scene triggers. 
You can easily change out scene by scene components to upgrade whilst leaving the underlying PLC control system untouched (PLC technology doesn’t really change ‘that’ much over time). 
 

So there is a hell of a lot of new life that could be breathed into the attraction just with system upgrades to the current equivalents of what is already there. 
Some new lights would be nice too. 

No, it's not PLC based at all. Sally don't do drive systems, they didn't even really do all the interactive stuff back then either. The drive system is completely separate from everything they developed or designed by them. Everything else you see, lighting, video queues, effects queues, it's all dmx controlled/served by solid state motion controllers that tie into the show control program developed by Alterface.  Communication for scoring systems are handled wirelessly and converts back to serial data for the video servers/game servers. It's more akin to a video control center, has nothing to do with ride control at all. Alterface is a control suite (program) running on a windows server that is the bridge between the physical (shooting actual mapped targets) and the interactive elements with things like the projected screens. A great example of how queued events work in the ride is what happens when you get a stoppage during the ride and suddenly you can't shoot any of the targets ahead of you. If the stoppage is long enough, sometimes you'll even see the video replayed on the screen while you are sitting there waiting, or your lasers might completely time out and switch off like the game has ended. 

It's like 3 or 4 different systems working together. So you can't just upgrade or remove one element/system and expect the rest to continue to work. It's not that simple, which is why you wont find changes to the story/gameplay, like with additional/new scenes added. 

[Rabbit2014]

Movie world have posted about upgrades and repairs to the justice league ride

[Naazon]

I'm enjoying this simple but useful communication from MW of recent. 

[Levithian]

On 10/08/2022 at 11:15 PM, GoGoBoy said:

I feel powerful 😆. No, but seriously, interesting timing after I just posted that video. Probably a coincidence but you never know 

Considering I think the original date for closure was something like October? I reckon someone important might have actually seen your post, gone and taken a ride for themselves, realised the shit show they have expected guests to put up with, and decided enough was enough. 😆

Edited August 14, 2022 by Levithian

[jjuttp]

31 minutes ago, Levithian said:

Considering I think the original date for closure was something like October? I reckon someone important might have actually seen your post, gone and taken a ride for themselves, realised the shit show they have expected guests to put up with, and decided enough was enough. 😆

If that was the case Scooby would be down too.

[GoGoBoy]

5 hours ago, Levithian said:

Considering I think the original date for closure was something like October? I reckon someone important might have actually seen your post, gone and taken a ride for themselves, realised the shit show they have expected guests to put up with, and decided enough was enough. 😆

Well if that's the case, credit to them. Maybe it was the fact that the state of the ride made a popular international POV channel, which wasn't a great look. Although it seems strange that the bosses weren't aware of the state of the attraction - surely this stuff gets reported.

Great to hear about the upgrade. Plenty of work to be done 

[Tim Dasco]

Or I wonder if DC found out about it and made them close it cos it wasn't up to contract standards. Can confirm when I went a month or so ago, 6 projectors out, last half the ride no effects or guns working. Even the projector in the load station wasn't working. Should not have been operating under this condition. Was super poor. 

[Rivals]

9 minutes ago, Tim Dasco said:

I wonder if DC found out about it and made them close it cos it wasn't up to contract standards. 

i honestly wouldn’t be surprised. They haven’t done anything to try and fix the ride then it just randomly closes for refurb, which is normally pre-planned and shown on the maintenance page, but this just closed one day unexpectedly.

[GoGoBoy]

Who do you think will need to be involved in this project though? I wonder if Sally will get involved again? I can't imagine that Movie World has the in-house teams that can handle complicated systems like animatronics etc anymore? Assuming they won't get the same contractor as the Scooby 'upgrade' 

Edited August 14, 2022 by GoGoBoy

[Rivals]

9 minutes ago, GoGoBoy said:

Who do you think will need to be involved in this project though? I wonder if Sally will get involved again? I can't imagine that Movie World has the in-house teams that can handle complicated systems like animatronics etc anymore? Assuming they won't get the same contractor as the Scooby 'upgrade' 

i’d assume sally, but if it really is a “last minute” thing due to breach of contract agreements, i suspect it’ll be closed for a while.

[rappa]

I don't think anyone is suggesting that at all.
The shutdown was scheduled for a long time. It's likely the closure is a new thing  but the work would still happen at the planned time in the next few months.

[DaptoFunlandGuy]

15 hours ago, jjuttp said:

If that was the case Scooby would be down too.

If that's the case there'd be a lot more in-park closed than just Scoob.

8 hours ago, rappa said:

I don't think anyone is suggesting that at all.
The shutdown was scheduled for a long time. It's likely the closure is a new thing  but the work would still happen at the planned time in the next few months.

It's an interesting situation then isn't it? The ride is scheduled for a long downtime, presumably to refresh the attraction, and it suddenly goes down early, and they already know it won't come back up again before it's scheduled downtime means either there may be some truth to the theories above, or the ride has had a major failure that is going to take a long time to fix. (To be clear, i'm not suggesting it is unsafe, or that the failure is anything as a result of neglect - just one of those unexpected things that happens with rides occasionally that takes ages to fix due to supplies or whatever. It's the length of the downtime that makes it a 'major' failure rather than the detail of the failure itself).

[Dean Barnett]

The other thing that is interesting is that all the six flags clones don't appear to have the same issues that's plaguing the MW version

[Gazza]

The six flags versions aren't clones of the MW version....

Edited August 15, 2022 by Gazza

[aaronm]

5 hours ago, Dean Barnett said:

The other thing that is interesting is that all the six flags clones don't appear to have the same issues that's plaguing the MW version

Having been on several of these in the last month, they definitely have their own share of issues. Blank screens and quiet/missing audio aren't uncommon. And half the projectors are turned off as they've done away with the 3D effect, so it's impossible to aim at the targets properly.

Doesn't excuse the sorry state of JL3D but the Six Flags counterparts aren't in pristine shape either, despite being relatively newer.

[Dean Barnett]

5 hours ago, Gazza said:

The six flags versions aren't clones of the MW version....

very interesting

[joz]

Do you think that that makes them clones?

[Dean Barnett]

yes 

[themagician]

33 minutes ago, Dean Barnett said:

yes 

The versions of the ride in the US are definitely not clones. They were certainly inspired by and are a newer version of what MW has. If they were clones they would be the exact same. The attractions at Six Flags are clones of each other. When you watch the POV of the SF vs MW rides, you aren’t watching the same thing. Disney parks have different versions of their rides throughout the world, but they aren’t all clones (despite having a similar concept, IP or name)