Chair Lifts 🚠

Hi everyone 👋 and welcome to the realm of ski 🚠

In this dev' update I will talk about the lifts of Skingdom. There will be four different types of lifts :

- Ski lifts (sometimes called “Surface lifts”)
- Chair lifts
- Gondola lifts
- Cable car lifts

Each lift type will have its own appearance of course but also different properties that will make them more or less fitted for some situations.

In this first update we will talk about chair lifts, and I will introduce the other lift types in the future!

Let’s go 🏂

Fixed chair lifts

Chair lifts can be fixed or disengageable, what’s the difference ?

Well, with fixed chair lifts the vehicle is attached to the cable all the time, so the chairs will move at the same speed as the cable through all the track.

It’s a simple and cheaper installation than disengageable chair lifts but it have some drawbacks. Because the vehicles go at the same speed all the time, even at embarking or disembarking the speed of the cable can’t be too high, otherwise it would be dangerous to hop on the chair due to the speed difference between skiers and the vehicles.

This forces the cable to run pretty slowly, leading to a long travel time and reduced rate!

Here is a screenshot of the work in progress version of the fixed chair lifts

Disengageable chair lifts

On disengageable chair lifts the vehicles are removed from the cable when reaching the bottom or top stations.

Here you can see the difference between the claws of fixed (left) and disengageable (right) vehicles

When removed from the cable the vehicles travel on a specific track generally using tires that go way slower than the cable track.

You already know the huge benefits of this system, since the speed can be reduced in the stations, embarking and disembarking is way easier and less dangerous. And because we can have a different speed in stations that on the cable, we can have a cable that is very fast, reducing the travel time and increasing the rate significantly!

Here you can see the vehicles slowing down when reaching the bottom station

That’s all for today! Next time we will talk about the gondola lifts which works the same way as disengageable chair lifts!

Thanks for reading this small update!
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Take care, and see you soon in the realm of ski!

Yannis.