After being worked on for several years, OpenRCT2 introduced the new save format (NSF) to a develop version in November 2021. By April of the next year, the NSF found its way to a release with version v0.4.0.

Up until that point, OpenRCT2 was still using vanilla RCT2's formats for saving games and scenarios: SV6 and SC6 respectively. The old formats had many limits and technical restrictions, as seen below:

Some of the technical restrictions of the vanilla formats are:

• Some of the game structures only allow one or two bytes for indexing.
• The space allocated for these structures cannot be raised as it is fixed in the original game memory.
• Changing structures makes SV6 saved games and SC6 scenarios incompatible with vanilla RCT2.

As such, to greatly expand the capabilities of OpenRCT2, it was essential to create a wholly new save format.

We created one PARK format to replace both the SV6 and SC6 formats. Due to the aforementioned technical restrictions of the vanilla formats, the NSF is not compatible with vanilla RCT2.

Also note that:

• It is still possible to import SV6 saves and SC6 scenarios, and that will never change. The same applies to SV4 saves from RCT1.
• The latest release using vanilla formats for saves is v0.3.5.1.