[PC] Theme Parkitect

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 153

This week we got caught up a bit in bug fixes, maintenance and planning.

A bit of visual progress has been made though after all.
The glass building pieces introduced in Alpha 14 and 15 didn’t really look all that much like they are made of glass, so they got a small update.

Before:



Now:



The same overhaul has also been applied to the glass tunnels

.

…and then to anything metallic as well.



Garret and Fabrice worked on some new props that are the beginnings of a colorful Fantasy theme

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 154

Art Stream

Once again it’s the end of the month and so it’s time for the next Art Stream!
Ccome join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (July 26th) at 1pm PST to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created

(Voor precieze tijden klik hier)

Devlog

We got some more deco objects for the fantasy set done:



The Monorail/Suspended Monorail can operate in shuttle mode now



There’ve been a few questions about the differences between shops recently. I’ve improved our tooltips to be able to show a bit more than just a boring line of text to be able to display some information about the products a shop sells, and then used this new possibility to improve the blueprint tooltips as well.

[ Voor 4% gewijzigd door catwheel18 op 29-07-2017 21:10 ]

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 155 + Alpha 16

Alpha 16 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

The janitors and mechanics got improved a bit to recognize trash and vandalized objects on adjacent tiles instead of only on the tile they’re standing on. Additionally all staff wandering behaviour has been improved a bit to make them less likely to step on tiles they’ve recently visited. This makes them cover their area more uniformly and should increase their efficiency a bit (and makes them seem a bit smarter).

Here’s a test with the old completely random movement. The red squares mark where the employee in this test went:



And here’s the improved one:



We added the Boat Transport ride from this weeks Art Stream:



And we wrote a bunch more explanatory tooltips.



Changelog

- added Splash Battle ride
- added Boat Transport ride
- added Spooky and Fantasy props, buoys
- added shuttle mode for Monorail, Suspended Monorail transport rides
- added reordering custom color slots using drag & drop (hold Alt to replace instead)
- added tapping shift when building toggles between setting the object height to the last used one and ground level
- added more tooltips
- improved overall performance, especially with many objects on screen (up to ~40%)
- improved staff patrol behaviour
- improved janitors/mechanics to be more aware of nearby trash/vandalism
- improved behaviour when building entrance/exit between tracked ride stations with one tile distance
- improved camera pan speeds
- improved the look of metallic and glass objects
- improved research costs and duration balance
- fixed visualization views not working anymore
- fixed input field arrows misbehaving on Linux with a non-english locale
- fixed boats driving through coaster tunnels, stone paths, transport system tubes, wooden supports
- fixed errors when deleting a boat ride
- fixed sometimes not being able to open a boat ride even though it is placed in a valid location
- fixed some random error messages popping up occasionally when using any UI with a scroll list
- fixed wrong savegame entry being selected by default when saving game

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 157

As expected, this week went relatively similar to the last one. I also had some time left to playtest and balance and do some performance optimizations for a bit. It was a nice change to work without worrying about whether something visually interesting would be finished by the end of the week for the devlog or not, and is probably something we should be doing a bit more often.

A bit of visual progress has been made after all though: Garret is back from his vacation and made some new basic roof tiles



We’re currently testing a modified mouse control scheme. The current one is perfectly fine if you know how it works I think, but it seems to confuse new players sometimes. The changes we’re trying are:

• have edge panning enabled by default for new players (moving the camera around when the cursor is near the edge of the screen). Some didn’t know you can drag the camera using the middle mouse button, so this should ensure they definitely find some way to move the camera without having to use the keyboard. Can still be disabled in the settings of course.
• move the camera dragging from the middle mouse button to the right mouse button, which frees up the middle mouse button. Use the middle mouse button for rotating the camera without requiring to use the keyboard. Overall this seems to be the most common button assignment in comparable games.
• Being able to quickly delete something without requiring to open a separate bulldozer tool is really important though in this game, otherwise building and experimenting becomes annoying. So deleting objects is still done with a simple right mouse click.
• Don’t delete stuff when clicking with the right mouse button while no building tool is opened to prevent accidental deletions.
• allow rebinding the middle mouse/right mouse buttons, so you can still put pan back on the middle mouse button

Downsides:

• the right mouse button has two different tasks now: if you click it deletes, if you drag it doesn’t delete and moves the camera. Having two different actions on one button seems a bit strange to me. Need to keep testing longer and monitor reactions to see if it’s ok.
• also a bit strange that sometimes deleting objects works with the right mouse button (when in a building tool) and sometimes doesn’t. On the other hand you probably only want to delete stuff while in a building tool anyways, and we’ll change the cursor to have a distinct look while in a building tool which should make it more obvious why sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t
• previously, when you dragged with the right mouse button held it would keep deleting similar objects, which is really useful when you need to delete many things. Doing this is not as common as panning the mouse or deleting individual objects though, so it’s fine to make this a feature for “advanced” users by making this a bit more complicated than it previously was. You’ll need to holt Alt while dragging now for doing this.
• haven’t figured out what to do about drag-deleting paths yet Would make sense to use Alt + Drag too?

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 158

Garret added some basic geometric shapes as building pieces:



Luuk is back and made sure that certain objects such as trees stick to the terrain when terraforming:



And we continued working on improving some of the controls.
The box selection tool used by the bulldozer and blueprint creator now uses multiple clicks:



The first click starts the selection. The second click locks in the size of the selection box, and the third click determines the height and finishes the selection. This should be easier to understand for new players and is also less fiddly in general than the old way.

Color palettes received a visible “delete” button because “use right click to delete” was not obvious at all.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 160 + Alpha 17

Alpha 17 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

We’ve added the Orbiter from this weeks Art Stream:



It’s a fairly small and simple ride that’s quite interesting to watch

Changelog

- added Orbiter
- added roof pieces, generic shapes
- added certain objects (like trees) stick to the terrain while terraforming
- added option to control settings for using the middle mouse button for rotating instead of panning the camera
- disabled workers being allowed to help out in zones they aren’t assigned to if there are no tasks left to do in their assigned zone
- improved mouse controls
- improved guest performance
- improved staff management window performance
- improved balance of guest preferences for rides
- improved handling for box selection tool (used by bulldozer and for creating blueprints)
- improved bulldozer tool
- fixed not being able to place some objects underground anymore
- fixed guests not littering as intended
- fixed a case where the advertising tab wouldn’t work properly
- fixed a case where janitors would not be able to clean trash
- fixed a case where the color picker window could be stuck open
- fixed a case where parts of a crashed train would continue to operate
- fixed a case where boats would drive around without passengers
- fixed mechanics not working properly while off-screen in big parks/on slow PCs
- fixed being able to scroll out of bounds if the game is paused
- fixed guests could walk through cash machines
- fixed speed input field spinner buttons not working properly on Linux with a non-english OS language

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 161

I’ve been working on transition pieces from one slope angle to another for the majority of last week:



This has been one of the most requested features for a long time, so I’m glad to have made some progress with it. I still need to do a lot more testing since there are so many combinations of pieces, so there’s still some risk of finding some broken cases. So far it seems to be working fine.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 162

Concept Art Stream

That’s right, concept art! Fabrice will be doing a Stream where he’ll draw designs for new props. If you want to help him come up with ideas or just watch and chat, join us Monday 18th at 9am PDT on Twitch.

Devlog

Garret and Fabrice have been working on building pieces for the science fiction theme. This was the concept:



And here are the finished pieces:



If you’ve been playing Parkitect for a while you might remember the ParkitectNexus build challenges, where we challenged you to build a ride within certain restrictions and the best entries got included as blueprints into the game. We’re bringing that back, but this time as a proper feature using the Steam Workshop!
Starting with Alpha 18 we’ll have a section on the starting screen where you can browse and vote on submissions for the currently running challenge.



If you want to submit your own entry that’s really easy too: simply hit the “Participate” button and a special Challenge park opens with a designated building area.



Once you’re done, hit “Submit” and your entry gets included in the voting.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 163

Art Stream

Once again it’s Art Stream time!
Come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (September 27th) at 1pm PST to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

Devlog

A couple people asked if the new slope options could be used for building smooth zero-g-rolls. After some more tweaking that’s possible now:



We added a new UI element that displays the banking angle of disconnected track pieces to make connecting tracks easier. Additionally, the track builder automatically preselects this angle now if possible:



Garret started working on the science fiction props from the concept art stream Fabrice did earlier:



You might remember Gabby from the work she did for the UI overhaul a few months back. She’s currently helping us with additional deco objects and made these:



They’re mainly intended for the spooky theme but could work well in other areas too.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 164 + Alpha 18

Alpha 18 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

Over the past week I’ve tweaked a lot how guests decide on which ride to go, and as a result you should be seeing way more guests queueing for a bigger variety of rides. As a result it‘s probably way too easy now to make a ton of money, so I’ll keep an eye on that during October.



Experimental branch

We’ve got a new experimental version available on Steam. If some of you could help testing it that’d be very appreciated
You can opt into it by right-clicking Parkitect in your library list and selecting Properties -> Betas -> Experimental.

This experimental version is identical to the normal Alpha 18 but uses an updated version of Unity (the game engine we’re using) and we’d like to make sure it’s working properly before releasing it for everyone.

Changelog

- added new slope options for coaster tracks
- added science fiction building pieces and props
- added build challenges
- improvements for connecting track pieces with different banking angles
- tweaked how guests decide which rides to use
- tweaked how guests decide when to leave the park
- adjusted flat ride balance
- fixed track banking transitions not being as smooth as they’re supposed to in some situations
- fixed an error that could break the advertising UI
- fixed water tool not working as expected on vertical cliffs

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 165

I’ve been excited to talk about this for months, so here we go

If you’ve been following the development of Parkitect for a longer time you might remember one of the most unique and technically challenging features of our Kickstarter pitch was “Maintaining the Illusion” - that scenery should not just look nice to the player, or have an “area of influence” effect on its surroundings. We wanted it to have a real management purpose, namely hiding the backstage areas of the park from the guests view.
Three months ago we sat down and discussed how to make this happen.
Tim and Luuk have been working on it since, and now we’ve got a really cool scenery rating system

First of all, let’s take a look at what exactly it is doing.

Here’s an overview shot of a park with a new scenery rating overlay, showing which areas of the park are nicely decorated in shades of green, and which aren’t in red:



Guests don’t like seeing park utility infrastructure such as staff rooms, resource depots and employee paths. They have a negative effect on the scenery rating:



There are many things that are nicer to look at though and block the view.
For example you could hide that staff room behind a facade or completely enclose it inside a custom structure:



Or use the terrain to your advantage:



Or simply plant some trees



These visibility calculations aren’t just being done for the park infrastructure though - we’re doing it for every piece of decoration in the park. And in 3D!
Here’s a debug view where the blue lines show from which path tiles the tree is visible. As the tree moves up it becomes visible over the top of the wall!



Here’s a bonus behind-the-scenes GIF (in realtime!) showing these calculations being done for an entire park. A lot to calculate in a short amount of time!



Seriously - a lot.



Next week we’ll talk about what exactly we’re doing with these scenery ratings and some other uses of the visibility system.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 166

Last week we revealed the new scenery system and explained how we’re using it to create scenery ratings. Here’s what we’re doing with them.

Guests now have an “Immersion” stat that’s influenced by their surroundings and that affects how fast their happiness decreases. Additionally, their immersion can decrease if they encounter a Hauler carrying crates, so ideally the shop supply routes should be kept somewhere behind the scenes.



Guests also leave a scenery rating when leaving the park, which factors into the overall park rating and thus has some influence on how many guests the park can attract.

Rides receive a scenery rating too (notice how the parts that are just going through rocks are rated lower because they block the view of the nice scenery outside):



It has an influence on how exciting the ride is. Especially for dark rides this can make a noticeable difference.

And as a nice bonus we can use the visibility data to determine whether a ride is covered or not, so covered rides continue to be used during rain as you’d expect.
As an additional fun detail guests close their umbrellas on covered paths



Lastly, the question that has come up most since last week: won’t all these visibility calculations slow down the game?
No, they are running in the background on a separate thread and are only done in areas where the scenery changed. Tim optimized them a lot to be very fast too!
So most of the time there’s nothing to calculate, and when there is you won’t notice.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 167

Art Stream

The month went by way too fast again, but on the upside that means it’s Art Stream time once again.
Come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (October 25th) at 1pm PDT to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

Devlog

We put the Water Coaster from last months Art Stream into the game. This unique attraction blends a calm boat ride with thrilling coaster sections capable of steep drops, banked curves and of course big splashes:



There’s a bigger 45° curve option now for all track types:



Fitting for the spooky season Gabby made a mausoleum and some skeleton props. Garret added a scarecrow costume for the Entertainer:



And there are some generic abstract sculptures:

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 168 + Alpha 19

Alpha 19 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

We’ve added the Gentle Monorail Ride from last weeks Art Stream. It’s a very calm scenic ride that fits nicely above paths or between other rides:



There are a bunch of new scenario options:



And we’ve added an overall thoughts overview to the Average Guest Stats window, which helps identify problems with the park more quickly.
You can also click individual entries and get markers for where these thoughts have appeared in the park, which has been added to all other thought lists as well. This helps for example with figuring out where guests visiting a certain ride are coming from:



Changelog

- added scenery visibility and rating system
- added “Immersion” stat for guests showing how much they like the scenery
- added park and ride scenery ratings
- added scenery protects rides/paths from rain
- added Water Coaster
- added Gentle Monorail Ride
- added Scarecrow entertainer costume
- added skeletons, mausoleum, sculptures
- added scenario settings: can’t change park entrance fee, free ride entrance, free shop products, disallow terraforming, build height restriction
- added all current guest thoughts to guest overview window
- added a bigger 45° curve option
- added right click to turn off all other theme buttons in deco builder window
- improved guest performance
- improved deco window search to search through all categories, not just the currently selected one
- fixed a case where trains could derail for no reason
- fixed haulers not being able to pick up crates from delivery pad if stack is too high
- fixed terrain sometimes not rendering at all on Linux

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 169

Employees gain experience by doing their work now. The more experienced they are the faster they complete their tasks and the less quickly they get tired.

They can also be sent to the Staff Training Room, a new park utility building where they train to gain experience more quickly.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 170

Parkitect has been fairly moddable for a while now, but it always required some coding skills. To make things easier some great community tools have been created in the past, but since the game keeps changing every month mods tend to break sooner or later which is frustrating for both modders and players.

To improve this situation Luuk has been working on an official modding tool for the past few weeks. Custom objects are the most common type of mod so the quick and easy creation of custom object mods is what the tool is focused on for now. It only takes a couple of clicks to get a 3D model working in the game:



Since this is an official tool we can ensure that mods created with this will continue to work with future updates of the game.
We’re also making it open source in case anyone wants to contribute improvements.

To give modders a headstart the modding tool is fully compatible with the current version of the game and available right now over here: Parkitect Asset Editor

Also, with the next update we’ll add Steam Workshop support for mods allowing to install them with a single click!
Modders will be able to upload and publish updates for mods directly through the game just as easy.
When uploading a blueprint or savegame to the Workshop that contains any modded objects the required mods get automatically linked as dependencies so it’s easy to find and install any mods that are needed for using that blueprint/savegame.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 171]

Parkitect has been complete and stable enough for a while now that calling it an “Alpha” doesn’t seem fitting anymore - so the next update will be “Beta 1″
Aside from the name change things will keep going as they have with the weekly devlog updates and monthly game updates until the game is finished. The biggest missing part for that is still the campaign, which is being worked on and progressing well.

Along with the Beta 1 update around the end of November we’ll also bump up the price slightly to $19.99.

Devlog

Luuk added marking terrain with “support rights” to the scenario editor, which is land you can’t directly build on but you can build across it:



And the color picker received a palette of nice predefined colors:



Tim has been working on improving savegame loading times and managed to reduce them by roughly 40%:



Most notably the annoying long freeze that happened on the loading screen is also gone now. Making these improvements possible required replacing a bunch of default Unity functionality with custom code. This affects many parts of the game so we’ll keep an extra close look on problem reports once this has been released to make sure no subtle bugs have crept in that we couldn’t find in our tests.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 172

Art Stream

It’s time for another Art Stream! Come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (November 29th) at 1pm PDT to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

Devlog

Garret added an alternate Monorail train based on a design by Fabrice:



And I used some breaks between programming to help with plants:



The older shrubs in the game are more or less just green spheres or cubes, and making a bigger variety of plants with so little detail was problematic. So we tried adding a bit more detail for these and think it still fits the style of the game nicely.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 173 + Beta 1

Beta 1 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post. This is probably our biggest update yet and we hope you’ll enjoy it

As previously announced we’ve slightly increased the price to $19.99 with this release (might take a while to update across all stores).

Devlog

Getting the game to sound like we want has been quite challenging for us so far. There are thousands of sound files to organize and trigger at the right time and volume. So far we’ve been using a third-party tool for this and if you have played the game you surely noticed that things didn’t sound quite right.

To solve this the team over at A Shell in the Pit Audio, who is taking care of all of Parkitects audio needs, has been working on their own custom audio tool since roughly the end of 2016 and with Beta 1 you can hear the results!

Here’s a small sample:

Apart from a much better audio mix and coasters being properly audible all rides have audio now and there are hundreds of other new sounds. There are also five new ride music tracks and a new background music track.
Naturally there are still things to tweak and fix but we hope you’ll agree how much better the game sounds now
A big thanks to Chris, Em, Gordon and Rachel for their hard work on this!

Luuk added more fine-grained options for starting new parks, so when playing a sandbox park you now can decide individually whether it should have money, research or goals enabled:



For tracked rides with wide stations it’s possible to place the entrance and exit in-line with the station platforms now:



There’s a new visualization when having the products tab of a shop open so you can see all of its resource crates that are in transit:



Garret made some new alternate cars during the last Art Stream. The Spinning Coaster now has the option of using these round cars that can be used as trains, unlike the default Spinning Coaster cars that can only run individually:



Meanwhile the Bobsled Coaster received these 6 seat cars that can’t be used as trains:



And then there’s also the new Powered Coaster!



It can slow down or speed up during the ride and can do multiple laps.

There are some new rope fences:



And Gabby added a new tree and bunting:



Changelog

- complete overhaul of the audio implementation
- added hundreds of new sound effects
- added five new ride music songs
- added one new background music song
- added Steam Workshop support for mods
- added tool for easy creation of scenery mods
- added Powered Coaster
- added alternate trains for Monorail, Spinning Coaster, Bobsled
- added employees gain experience from working and get better at their job
- added Staff Training Room for training staff more quickly
- added more fine-grained options for sandbox parks (disable money, disable goals, disable research)
- added a bunch of new plants, crates, fences
- added option to define terrain with “support rights” in the scenario editor
- added option for disabling loans in scenarios
- added predefined palette of nice colors to color picker
- added left control key for putting an object to the same height as the one below the mouse cursor
- added LOD fading
- added disallow terraforming outside park bounds
- added placing entrance/exit in-line with wide tracked ride station platforms
- added visualization of all resource crates in transit to shop products tab
- improved park loading times by ~40%
- some overall performance improvements
- fixed that annoying freeze while loading parks
- fixed guests sometimes complaining about Haulers when they shouldn’t
- fixed boats sometimes getting stuck
- fixed blueprints being able to build objects that haven’t been researched
- fixed being able to build deco blueprints above/below terrain bounds
- fixed being able to build blueprints without having enough money
- fixed goals getting completed while playing in the scenario editor
- fixed park entrance path tiles not saving their style even though their style could be changed using the path style brush tool
- fixed not being able to “buy” land in sandbox mode
- fixed errors with some of the terrain tools
- fixed problems after changing terrain size in the scenario editor
- fixed a case where resources could not be delivered

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 174

We added an Elevator transport ride:



Implementing it was interesting, because unlike all other transport rides we had in the game so far this technically is a “flat ride”. Unlike all other flat rides we had in the game so far though this one has two stations!
Naturally guests will use this ride for pathfinding like all other transport rides, so if the only or fastest way to get somewhere they want to go is using the Elevator they’ll use it.
And another fun thing is that it can transition from underground to above ground!

Tim added another much-requested feature: the ability to use custom ride music.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 175

This week there’s a new actions overview, showing what everyone in the park is doing:



Fences adapt to stairs now, making the look of paths very customizable:



The color limitations have been removed from trees and rocks, so you can give them any color and use the brush/pipette tools on them now:



Gabby made some nice new western props and I made some window boxes:



And Garret gave an interview talking about the games development and some things that are still to come:

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 176 + Beta 2

Due to the upcoming holidays this release is a bit earlier than usual. We’ll be on our winter break now and will return to the usual weekly devlog schedule on January 15th.

Beta 2 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
Happy Holidays everyone and see you in 2018!

Devlog

Gordon finished another three awesome ride music tracks: Western, Banjo and Polka. Check them out!

I’ve spent this week on performance optimizations.
The worst performance experienced in Parkitect is usually when zooming all the way out so that most of the park is visible on screen at once. To a degree this is simply due to needing to render a lot more stuff, but partially it’s also because we can’t do certain optimizations - for example, we don’t run animations on guests who are not visible. Since one of the biggest performance costs in Parkitect is animations that is a problem with hundreds of visible guests.
To solve this I’ve built a separate animation system with the only purpose of rendering animations as fast as somehow possible when zoomed out. The animations are lower quality but you can barely notice the difference from a distance so it’s fine! I’ve also limited it to the most important animations to further improve performance: standing, walking and sitting.
How much of an improvement this is varies across parks, depending on how many guests there are and what else is going on. Overall though you should see at least an 25% FPS increase when zooming all the way out. Here are some results from my tests:



Changelog

- added Elevator transport ride
- added three new ride music tracks
- added custom ride music (loaded from My Documents/Parkitect/My Music)
- added Western props, window boxes
- added more ride descriptions
- added remaining guest needs to park rating
- added overview list of all current guest activities
- added fences adapt to stairs
- removed color limitations from trees and rocks
- improved performance significantly when zooming out in busy parks
- improved Bumper Boats movement
- improved Splash Battle target building (easier to attach to walls)
- fixed Submarines could unload guests before fully arriving inside the station
- fixed advanced color picker sometimes misbehaving

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 177

Hey and welcome back in 2018! We hope you all had a good start into the new year.

After recharging for a bit we’re now back at work.
This week we added a First Aid room that’s ideally placed near a ride exit:



It is not cheap to build and operate, but helps a lot with keeping the paths clean around especially nausea-inducing rides and lets guests recover faster so they can more quickly get onto the next ride and spend some money.

And Gabby is working on more structure pieces and props for the Fantasy theme:

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 178

I worked on some long-requested coaster features this week.
Curves have similar slope options as straight pieces now, meaning curves can transition directly into a slope or to a different slope angle:



This allows building some smooth elements that were not possible before.



And we’re adding LSM launches. This is a magnetic launch system that allows accelerating to high speeds without having to stop the train. It‘s fairly expensive though!

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 179

Art Stream

It’s time for the first Art Stream of 2018! Come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (January 31st) at 1pm PDT to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

Devlog

Gabby made these new props this week: a birch tree, giraffe statue, turtle topiary, spooky lamps and string lights.



Luuk added a bit of extra UI so shops that are accidentally not connected to a path are easier to spot:



And a new tab in the shop and ride info windows makes it easier to find any running tasks associated with it and see what your staff are doing:

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 180 + Beta 3

Beta 3 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

The Magic Carpet ride from this months Art Stream went into the game:



And Gabby finished another nice tree:



Changelog

- added Magic Carpet
- added First Aid Room
- added LSM launches for Steel Coaster, Giga Coaster, Wing Coaster
- added new track pieces for combinations of curves and slopes (e.g. going into a slope on a curve piece)
- added Fantasy props and building pieces, two trees, Spooky lamps, string lights, Giraffe statue, Turtle topiary
- added shopkeepers who aren’t needed anymore get fired automatically
- added ghost trains keep running while the game is paused
- added tracked rides can crash when trains collide
- added ride breakdown types
- added ride crash consequences
- added tab to shop/attraction info windows showing tasks related to it
- added filters for certain thoughts to overall thoughts list
- added search to savegames list
- added more sound effects
- adjusted effects of rain and temperature on how interested guests are in rides/food
- improved shadow quality, especially on coaster tracks
- fixed Ferris Wheel animation
- fixed not being able to replace fences of raised flat rides
- fixed weird pathfinding if station entrance/exit is placed in-line with station platform
- fixed supports not adapting to terrain changes anymore
- fixed a crash in the track builder when going from an inverted section into a vertical segment
- fixed being able to place flat rides outside the park bounds since Beta 1
- fixed a case where boats could get misaligned inside the station/pushed outside the station after loading savegame
- fixed guests did not use transport rides if the park is closing
- fixed guest stat visualizations sometimes not working when zoomed out

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 181

I’m doing maintenance tasks and preparations for upcoming features currently, so there’s not a whole lot to say about that. I also did some optimizations for very big parks that can improve performance by up to 15% and fixed some stuttering.

Luuk is working on the generic shop counter that sandbox players have been asking for a long time:



It allows selling any products that are available in the other normal shops that have been researched.

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Devlog Update 182

Maintenance month continues, so again not a lot to show this week.
We’ve updated to the latest version of Unity and also updated all of our other third-party assets. There were a few small hiccups here and there but overall it went pretty smoothly.

Water coaster channels can be properly embedded into the terrain and lakes now without creating tunnels:



And Gabby got a new Maple Tree:

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Devlog Update 183

Art Stream

Come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (February 28th) at 1pm PDT to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

Devlog

It’s been a long time since we added any new shops, so here are two: a Turkey Legs stall and a Juice Stall selling nice refreshing fruit juices.

[ Voor 52% gewijzigd door catwheel18 op 28-02-2018 21:45 ]

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 184 + Beta 4

Beta 4 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

We added the Floorless Coaster from this weeks Art Stream:



Apart from the floorless cars it features a new type of brake, the holding brake, which stops and holds trains on slopes for a customizable amount of time:



Changelog

- added Floorless Coaster
- added holding brakes to some coasters
- added Turkey Legs stall
- added Fruit Juices stall
- added generic shop counter
- added Maple Tree, Elephant Statue
- added demolishing objects that have been placed in the scenario editor no longer give a refund
- added graphics setting for adjusting LOD distance
- changed time to start in Year 1 instead of Year 0
- increased guest count by ~10%
- improved guest distribution over the park
- improved overall performance by up to 15%
- improved performance when hiding scenery
- improved performance when using custom camera mods
- improved tunnels on Water Coaster
- fixed some custom ride music mp3s not loading
- fixed a case where shuttle coaster trains could disappear after saving the game
- fixed a case where guests would enter Transformer ride while it’s in the wrong position

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 185 - Visuals Update (1)

While last month was focused on maintenance work, March will be all about visuals.
We have switched rendering pipelines from a forward renderer to a deferred render over the past few weeks, which completely changes how the game is being rendered and allows us to use some nice modern graphics features with very little performance cost.

To begin, we’ve added Ambient Occlusion which adds some shadows to occluded areas, giving the entire scene more depth. It works very well with Parkitects clean art style and is something we wanted from the beginning, but previous versions we tried were very performance heavy and flickery. This one is nearly free and very stable and high quality.

We also gave the camera a bit more perspective and overhauled the lighting and color balance.





We’ve also enabled a slight bit of tilt shift by default. As usual there are graphics settings for these new effects so you can adjust them to better fit your preferences.

See the next post for higher resolution comparison shots!

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 186 - Visuals Update (2/3)

The new rendering pipeline allows us to use decals, so we can nicely project graphics on top of 3D geometry now. This is especially useful for the zone visualizations. Previously we drew zone borders that followed the terrain and rendered them on top of anything else. This didn’t work very well with objects that aren’t near the ground:



Now with the decals we can show the borders exactly where they are:



Both screenshots show the exact same zoning, but note how in the old one you can’t really tell which parts of the raised path and the buildings belong to which zone without going into a top-down view.

Decals also allow us to properly project puke onto stairs, which clearly is the killer feature everyone has been waiting for



It really is nice to have though for gameplay reasons too, since the flat old sprite would sometimes get clipped so much on stairs that it was entirely invisible.

We added a new rain protection visualization (and all visualizations have these legends now at the top of the screen):



It might seem a bit pointless since “roofs protect from rain” is intuitively understandable without a visualization view…
We added it because there was nothing in the game that told you that this is actually something the game keeps track of, so it’s mostly there to remind you that you might want to take this into account when designing your park.

Garret finished a new ride, the Monorail Coaster:



This very unusual looking coaster is fairly cheap to build and fits into small footprints, but is still capable of all the elements you’d except from a big steel coaster. On the downside it has a relatively low capacity.
You can also spot a new shop here, the Funnel Cakes stall!

We added a higher-quality tilt shift effect that looks more interesting than the old one:



Of course by default it’s very subtle and not as strong as on this picture, but it’s nice to crank it all the way up every now and then for taking screenshots.

And finally, there’s a new tool for exporting big 4k screenshots of the entire park:



See the next post for bigger versions of these last two images (as big as Tumblr allows anyways).

http://themeparkitect.tum...shots-belonging-to-devlog

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 187 - Visuals Update (3/3)

Art Stream

Come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (March 28th) at 1pm PDT. This time Garret will show how we’re updating old rides and will create some new scenery pieces. He will also demo the visuals update.

Devlog

Lights on!



Did you ever feel like your park looks a bit… boring when it rains? After this update that will no longer be the case, because all the lights actually work now.



And if you like it really dark you can turn on the new night mode whenever you want!



The Asset Editor has been updated so mods can use lights as well.

To fully capture the atmosphere of a theme park in the dark we’re updating all flat rides with hundreds of tiny lights.



Moreover, most of these lights also receive unique animation sequences. I have built us a tool for placing and animating the lights, and Garret has been busy working with it. So far we’re at over 6.000 animated lights, but there are still a bunch of rides left to update!



If you want to learn more about how we’re creating light animation sequences you should check out this weeks Art Stream where Garret will show how it works.

Until then here’s a quick video showcasing the new lights in action:

And some higher quality screenshots will follow shortly in the next post again

http://themeparkitect.tum...shots-belonging-to-devlog

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 188 + Beta 5

Beta 5 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

Garret made a whole bunch of new decorative lamps during this weeks Art Stream:



And he lit the Swinging Ship to show how our ride lights work:



And we’ve added a new visualization to the track builder that highlights all the invidiual block sections. When using a block system there can never be more than one train inside each “block” of the ride for safety reasons, with a “block” being the section of the track between two positions at which trains can safely be stopped (so they can wait there until the block ahead of them is clear).
This is a bit convoluted to explain in text, so hopefully this new visualization makes it easier to understand.



Changelog

- completely overhauled visuals
- added night mode and lights turn on during rain
- added animated lights to flat rides
- added graphics settings for Ambient Occlusion, Screen Space Reflections
- added higher quality Tilt Shift effect
- added decorative light objects
- added Monorail Coaster
- added Funnel Cakes stall
- added tool for taking screenshots of the entire park (default hotkey: F11)
- added small terraforming costs
- added more guest voices
- added rain protection visualization
- added legends to visualization views
- added block sections visualization to track builder
- added water sections on Water Coaster terminate block sections now
- added list of all shops/rides contained within assigned zone to hauler/mechanic info window
- improved zone visualization
- improved load times and memory use of custom ride music significantly (from many minutes to less than a second in some cases)
- improved overall performance by up to 25%
- reduced time it takes to go from a loaded park back into the main menu or into a different park
- fixed market research results not being displayed correctly anymore since Beta 4
- fixed guests having trouble to find the park entrance if the path from spawn to entrance has many crossings
- fixed guests could accidentally leave the park if there are multiple park entrances next to each other
- fixed rain protection not working for flat rides as intended
- fixed Spinning Coaster cars rotating like crazy after loading savegame
- fixed UI problems with the balloon shop
- fixed tracked ride graphs being empty
- fixed suspended cars not swinging anymore

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 189

Just a quick update this time - this week was all about doing press/community work and collecting feedback (wow, there has been a ton). We also managed to release a couple of minor patches.


Lonely Hills Park, by DeficientGamer

The plan for this month is to spend most of our time on working towards finishing the campaign, so Beta 6 will probably mostly contain polishing, fixes and smaller features.

The reactions to the graphics update have been absolutely amazing, much better than we expected really!
It has brought a lot of new players to the game too, and so both our subreddit and Discord are very active right now - if you haven’t already, maybe you want to join too?
Thanks for everyone who is a part of our small community, we really appreciate your support


Brutalism Park, by Urben1680

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 190

As planned, we’re working more on the campaign now and so everything else that’s getting done is mostly polishing.
The path builder got some small improvements, the most important one being that it doesn’t move the “cursor” anymore if a path can’t be built for some reason (for example because of the location being blocked).



Previously it would continue moving no matter what, so in this example you’d continue building paths on the other site of the shop. That seemed like a useful behaviour in some situations but really wasn’t. It confused people and when they tried to “undo” their paths it confused them even more, because using the bulldozer button would not move the cursor back through the blocked location.

Transport system pipes automatically snap to the correct height now when hovering existing pipes (just like paths already did). These things can be a bit annoying to build and there are still a few things we should do to improve that, but this is a good first step.



The terraforming tool was notoriously destructive when terraforming near vertical cliffs with the smoothen feature enabled. It was improved to preserve vertical cliffs, which creates far less unpredictable huge terrain changes that are hard to clean up.



Water is one of the things where I can make a dozen tiny changes without ever being entirely satisfied, and so it has been changed once agan.



And finally, the flat ride lights have customizable colors now. An option to disable the lights has been added as well.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 191

Art Stream

Come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (April 25th) at 1pm PDT to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

Devlog

The control hint box was redesigned. Hopefully more people will actually notice and read it now



Gabby made new pine trees:



The object pipette is being improved to start building at the same height and rotation as the object that’s being copied. It also shows the name of the hovered object and the deco window jumps to the category and position of whatever you’re copying.



Janitors and Mechanics received customization options for controlling which tasks they should work on:



This can be quite useful for example if you want to have a few janitors who should only clean paths without getting distracted by anything else.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 192 + Beta 6

Beta 6 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

We added the Mini Monorail from this months Art Stream:



It’s a low-capacity, but also low-cost transport ride especially suitable for small parks (or short distance transportation in a bigger park). While working on the campaign we noticed that the bigger Monorails we already had make most sense in big parks and the Miniature Railway can be hard to fit into existing parks, so this new Mini Monorail nicely complements the transportation options in the game filling these gaps.

Garret continued adding and animating ride lights:



And Gordon finished a great new background music song! You can listen to a preview here.

Changelog

- added Mini Monorail
- added pine trees
- added new background music
- added lights to more flat rides
- added option for changing flat ride light colors
- added options for Mechanic and Janitor for customizing the tasks they should work on
- added hovered object name as tooltip to object pipette tool
- added deco window remembers last opened category
- added revealing object in deco window when using object pipette tool
- added hotkeys for changing size of resizable objects (+/- by default)
- changed mod objects to be researchable in non-sandbox scenarios
- improved building of paths
- improved building of transport system pieces
- improved object pipette tool to start building at the same height and rotation as copied object
- improved camera rotation behaviour on very uneven terrain (especially with large vertical cliffs)
- improved terraformer behaviour when using smoothen option around vertical cliffs
- improved terraformer levelling tool performance (should fix a crash on systems with low RAM)
- improved performance when hiding scenery during rain/night mode
- improved hunger/thirst/tiredness park ratings
- fixed terraforming tools flickering
- fixed curves on vertical track segments not working properly anymore
- fixed lighting messing with the colors in visualization views, making it sometimes hard to see what values the visualization was showing
- fixed guests not actively heading for Customizable Shops when searching for food
- fixed entertainers could sometimes be displayed with the wrong costume
- fixed being able to train shopkeepers
- fixed closed shops being opened after loading savegame
- fixed error when placing fences on the terrain bounds
- fixed a case where people would walk over terrain when trying to get somewhere
- fixed objects placed in scenario editor giving refunds
- fixed objects from blueprints sometimes not giving refunds when destroyed
- fixed coasters not giving full refund when destroyed using the bulldozer tool
- fixed hue slider in color picker window sometimes not reacting to clicks
- fixed a crash on macOS when using the bulldozer tool

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 193

We’re back to working on the campaign again, so you know what that means - not too much to show right now
We made some good progress on figuring out and implementing how scenarios are going to be unlocked this week.

Since this would be a very short devlog update otherwise, let’s talk some more about the campaign, and first of all who’s working on it.
We’re extremely lucky to have two very talented builders from the community working on scenarios for the campaign: Silvarret and Joshua Tjarks. You have probably seen some of their work already, and so you’ll know that they are great park designers and very passionate about theme park games
Our main goal for the campaign is to make every scenario feel different in some way - especially of course by giving scenarios unique settings, but also by varying the starting conditions and goals and having a nice difficulty progression.
These two have been busy for 6-8 months now and they came up with so many ideas that in the end the campaign grew a bit bigger than we originally expected…

As a sneak peak to give you an idea what to expect, here’s a quick look at one of the scenarios - Coaster Canyon by Silvarret:





As a slightly easier scenario this park has lots of flat space for building huge coasters, and there’s also some space at the top of the canyon as an interesting option!

Building on a blank canvas can be difficult, so most maps come with some small pre-built structures to set the mood and hopefully provide you with inspiration for your own additions! We can’t wait to see what you’ll come up with

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 194

One of my favorite things in simulation games is seeing your creation come alive and just sitting back, watching all the bustling activity.
In Parkitect it’s mostly all the guests running around who are responsible for creating this effect, and it’s not quite yet where we want it to be. “The more the better” has been a sort of unofficial motto throughout development for us, whether it be object counts, park sizes or the amount of rides - the more we can add the better it’ll be for this game.

Guest counts are still lower than we’d like though and right now is the last good time to properly solve this, since increasing the amount of guests also affects the money balance and the entire campaign.
Improving guest performance has been a constant task nearly every month throughout development and it’s at a point now where the only significant further improvements can be gained from multithreading. The main hurdle there is that Unity, the game engine we’re using, is making multithreading really difficult. They are currently making very impressive progress to improve that for the future, but it’s too late for Parkitect to use the solutions they are working on. So I have finally started with finding my own solutions for these difficulties. It’s a very annoying task that requires going through the entire guest AI code and making it compatible, but so far it looks like it’ll be worth it!

As a first smaller improvement, overall performance in Beta 7 will be up to 15% better in busy parks.

The really big improvement will not be in Beta 7 just yet, but I hope I can release an experimental version for anyone interested in testing sometime during June. In the first tests it looks like we should be able to have quite a few more guests while at the same time having better performance overall. Here’s a small teaser:



That’s 8000 guests in a pretty detailed and big park (Northern Highlands), with roughly 1500 guests on screen, running at 65 FPS!

This is just a stress test of course and we won’t increase the guest count anywhere near this dramatically, because 1) it turns out “the more the better” has a limit where it stops being fun and 2) the game needs to run on weaker systems as well. Comforting to know though that guest performance should never be an issue again after all of this! You should also actually start seeing guests complain about long queue lines…

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 195

Garret made the existing concrete and wooden walls recolorable, which makes them a whole lot more useful:



I continued working on moving the AI code to a separate thread this week. It still needs a ton of testing, but overall work is going a bit faster than expected. The guest AI is ~95% done, pathfinding is running on its own thread as well now, and I’ve started working on moving the staff AI (which should not be too problematic overall since I can reuse most of the work done for guests).

There have been some requests for properly documented and more detailed benchmarks last time, so here’s one. These are the systems I tested on:

Low-end system:
Mac Mini 2014, Intel i5 @ 2.6GHz, integrated Intel Iris graphics
A system that’s pretty close to our minimum requirements. The main bottleneck is the lack of a proper graphics card - this system can’t even render an empty screen at 20 FPS at full resolution. Since we’re interested in the games CPU performance instead of the integrated graphics performance (and I got no other system to test with) I’ve lowered the resolution to the point where it can render an empty screen at ~55 FPS.

High-end system:
Windows 10 PC, Intel i7-6700K @ 4GHz, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060
A fairly recent and decent system.

I don’t have a mid-range system available for testing but it should be save to assume that performance would accordingly fall between the results from these.

All tests were run with the exact same scene and camera position in the Eastern Highlands demo park with 3.000 guests. This is a rather detailed park and that guest count is higher than it will be in the end for this park (we haven’t done a proper balancing pass yet to account for the improved performance, but something around 2.000 - 2.500 guests is probably more reasonable).



There have been some requests for “removing the guest cap” last week so I want to point out again that the game has no guest cap. If you build a park with better/more rides then there will be more guests.

The “Old” results are with the currently released Beta 6 version and the “New” results are with the upcoming multithreading version.



A fairly modest improvement of 10-15% for this specific scene. Not amazing, but nice. Worth pointing out though is that in the old version there can be some spikes occasionally where single frames take a bit longer to calculate, whereas in the new version it’s all very stable.

Improving guest performance is not only interesting for being able to have more guests in general, but also because the game allows speeding up time. Running the game at x3 speed means running the guest AI 3 times as often, so running a park with 3.000 guests at x3 speed is roughly comparable to running a park with 9.000 guests at x1 speed. This is where the performance improvements become more apparent.
Here’s the same test as above, but running at x3 speed.



The old version takes a pretty significant hit, whereas in the new version it barely has any performance impact at all.

[catwheel18]

Compilatie van laatste 5 Devlogs

Devlog Update 196

Art Stream

Come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (May 30th) at 1pm PDT to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

Devlog

The multithreading stuff seems to be fairly stable right now! We will still be running a bunch of tests this week, but it looks like it will be possible to release it with Beta 7 already.
Having more guests messes with the financial balance of the game quite a bit, so we started adjusting that. As usual it will take many tiny tweaks over a longer period of time to get that feeling right again, so don’t expect that to be perfect just yet with the next update.



A more reasonable amount of guests for this test park

The audio team delivered a few hundred new sound effects, so all the props and rides that were added in the past half year or so got their sounds now!
Gordon also finished a new calm ride music track which will be very nice for the most low-intensity rides.


Devlog Update 197 + Beta 7

Beta 7 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

Garret added lights to the Transformer:



And we added the Gyro Drop Tower from last weeks Art Stream:



Changelog

- significantly improved guest performance
- significantly improved performance when running game at x2/x3 speed
- significantly improved park loading times
- increased overall guest count (some parks might see less guests; depends on what the park contains)
- added Gyro Drop Tower
- added Calm ride music track
- added sound effects for recently added props and rides
- added scenario goal requiring a certain amount of coasters with a certain rating
- changed coasters to attract significantly more guests to the park than other types of rides
- changed how park rating is calculated
- adjusted money balance to account for higher guest numbers (might need further tweaks)
- improved guest flow to attractions
- improved some more building pieces to be recolorable (walls, pillars)
- improved performance when zooming in/out of crowded areas of the park
- fixed guests being able to see bad decoration below paths
- fixed raised paths not blocking rain on paths below
- fixed some pavillions not blocking rain
- fixed guests sometimes exiting boats immediately instead of riding them
- fixed not being able to build some track pieces after curved slope-to-flat transitions
- fixed exit gates not waiting for all guests to leave the ride
- fixed a case where trains could get stuck when leaving the station and cause lag
- fixed a case where the finance overview could get stuck
- fixed an error when using object pipette on modded objects
- fixed path supports not appearing until game is unpaused
- fixed red build preview when dragging fences even though fence can be built
- fixed duplicate resolution entries in graphics settings


Devlog Update 198

We released a patch for some smaller problems late last week, but overall the update went fairly well and there don’t seem to be any major problems caused by the big underlying changes. The changelog for the patch is at the end of this post.
There are however some rare cases on Mac and Linux where the game is running much slower than it should be for no apparent reason. We’ve contacted Unity about it since it seems to be an engine issue, so hopefully we’ll know what’s going on there soon.

GOG released a new tool that allows us to upload and release new updates by ourselves, which will speed up how fast new game versions appear on their store a lot. We’ve integrated their tool into our release pipeline so releasing updates on GOG is a single click for us now, just like on other big stores.

We’re also getting closer to getting some professional translations done, so I’ve improved our translation tools last week. We had a limitation previously where certain words would be impossible to translate into some languages - for example we have small umbrellas guests can buy from shops and the big ones available as deco that provide shade. Even though these are two very different things in English they are both called “Umbrella” but other languages use different words for each of these, so we needed to add the ability to have multiple different translations for a single English word depending on context.

Changelog (Beta 7a):

- added highlighting trash as source of bad scenery ratings in scenery rating visualization view
- added clicking on a thought marker opens the info window of the person belonging to this thought
- improved behaviour when placing a queue tile next to a ride entrance that is already connected to a path that isn’t a queue
- should fix some severe performance issues on macOS
- fixed prices in deco UI not updating when scaling deco objects using hotkeys
- fixed ride light color button being shown even if ride has no custom light colors
- fixed a case where people would sometimes not know how to get somewhere even though there’s a path
- fixed a problem with color palettes where colors would be invisible
- fixed rare case where staff couldn’t leave staff room
- fixed weirdness with wooden supports when placing rotated blueprints
- fixed edge scrolling being active while game isn’t focused
- fixed weather not getting saved/loaded properly


Devlog Update 199

We’re back to working on the campaign once again, so you know what that means by now - not much that we can show currently and most of the stuff going into the next game update are smaller tweaks.

Many of these were small UI improvements. There are per-category buttons for marking objects as available/researched in the scenario settings now:



The handle for extending boat ride stations should look better and more like something that can be interacted with:



Scenario descriptions are visible from within the park now:



Some event notifications got a progress bar so you got a better idea how much longer the event will go:



And fire deco objects emit some flickering light now:




Devlog Update 200

Art Stream

Come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (June 27th) at 1pm PDT to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

Devlog

We are currently doing our first full playthrough of all campaign levels to see if they are beatable and fun and making the neccesary changes to improve them. It’s going really well and we made good progress, so the first third of the campaign scenarios are pretty much finalized

We’re also improving all the tiny things we’re noticing that feel off during this playtest, so in the past week alone we made ~70 small balance changes and fixes. These will release with Beta 8 next week.

And since this is Devlog 200, here’s a sneak peek at another one of the campaign scenarios - this is Broadmoor Beach by Joshua:



Fitting coasters into this long and narrow strip of land along a beach can be very challenging. Most of the pre-built blueprints are probably not going to fit in there, so you’ll definitely have to come up with some custom coaster designs to beat this one!

[ Voor 86% gewijzigd door catwheel18 op 26-06-2018 12:27 ]

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 201 + Beta 8

Beta 8 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

We got two new rides this month:



The Hyper Coaster is a high-capacity coaster capable of 60m+ drops. It can’t invert, so it’s all about speed and airtime!

The Plane Carousel is a nice calm ride that slowly spins around a central axis like a carousel, but guests have control over the up/down movement of the planes.

Changelog

- added Hyper Coaster
- added Plane Carousel
- added some new fences
- added deco score graph to market research
- added deco score scenario goal
- added inner glass roof corners
- added new sound effects
- added lowest transparency setting when hiding objects hides them completely
- changed research so you can research calm rides/thrill rides etc. instead of flat rides/coasters
- improved queue building to not remove path attachments when dragging in parallel to paths
- improved wooden supports
- improved decision making for when to enable underground view when placing ride blueprints
- made it easier to see which parts of an object are below/above ground when building
- some UI improvements
- lots of small game balance improvements, most notably:
* improved popularity of calm rides
* increased overall guest count again
* changed guest spawn speed
* changed advertisement effectiveness
* reduced park advertisement cost
* increased toilet capacity
* guests get annoyed by trash less quickly
* slightly reduced vandalism
* adjusted research times
* slightly increased guest money
* adjusted how long guests stay at the park
* guests leave earlier if they run out of money
* adjusted flat ride intensity ratings
* increased tracked ride maintenance costs
- fixed guests not using newly bought umbrellas
- fixed parts of concrete walls not being recolorable
- fixed camera not following guests when they are on rides
- fixed a case where Twister wouldn’t stop when it should
- fixed guests disappearing when deleting benches/rides
- fixed path builder switching into underground mode on sloped terrain
- fixed remove button in path builder sometimes not working as intended
- fixed a case where guests could immediately leave the park instead of staying for a while
- fixed a case where trash could get stuck on trash bins and never disappear
- fixed research unlock rewards for completing scenario goals sometimes not getting awarded
- fixed goal rewards being awarded a second time after completing all goals
- fixed an error when subscribing to mods
- fixed objects built below wooden supports being hard to click
- fixed a case where scenario editor UI would stop working
- fixed a case where guests could not despawn
- fixed guests naming the wrong intensity when complaining about no rides of a certain intensity being around
- (hopefully) fixed not being able to build track segments sometimes due to location being occupied

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 202

And we’re back to doing polish + campaign work once again. Campaign testing is at 75% complete now.

Shops and ride entrances received tunnel frames if needed, so building them into vertical terrain works as you’d expect now:




Devlog Update 203

The main menu screen (the one you get immediately after starting the game) was always meant to be temporary, and we’ve been working on its replacement this week. Initial work to figure out what it will be like started a year ago actually, but over the past few weeks a lot more time went into it and it’s really coming together now.

I also started working on the credits, so you can probably tell that we keep inching towards leaving Early Access. Still so much left to do though that there is no date in sight yet, but one step closer!

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 204

Guests gained the ability to puke into trash bins. This can help with keeping cleanliness ratings under control in difficult areas, but since the bins need to be emptied eventually it can still keep the Janitors pretty busy… maybe even busier than before if the next trash dump is far away!



Guests will also have a negative thought now and lose some immersion when seeing an employee resting at a bench. Don’t forget to build staff rooms!

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 205 + Beta 9

Beta 9 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

Doing an Art Stream wasn’t possible this month, but we got a new ride for you anyways! Here’s the Top Scan:



We also added three new basic default terrains to pick from when starting a new park so you got at least something more interesting to choose from than just the flat terrain until the campaign is released without having to generate a terrain using the scenario editor.
The new maps are Lake:



River:



And Hills:



The park entrance for all default maps has been moved towards the center as well.

Changelog

- added Top Scan
- added some more default sandbox scenario terrains
- added guests can puke into trash bins
- added guests are annoyed by employees resting on benches
- added tunnel frames for shops and ride entrances built into vertical terrain
- reduced game load time when having many blueprints installed by ~10-60 seconds
- reduced how much park entrance fee guests are willing to pay if rides have high entrance fees as well
- reduced congestion near the station ends of boat rides
- improved loan balance
- fixed objects having wrong prices when placed on half-unit high terrain
- fixed being able to build path attachments without having enough money
- fixed being able to remove trees that have been marked as indestructible in the scenario editor by building paths through them
- fixed cases where shops would not receive shopkeepers
- fixed being able to build underwater friction wheels on splashdown sections
- fixed terraformer going crazy when used from a top-down view
- fixed tower rides using wrong light colors
- fixed Janitors cleaning paths despite being too tired to work
- fixed guests could get stuck when trying to sit on a removed bench
- fixed guests complaining about long ride times of boat rides
- fixed guests playing walking animation while riding elevator
- fixed shopkeepers spawning in wrong locations when closing and reopening shops

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 206

Hey, we’re finally working on something again that can be shown without spoiling anything! Nice!
We started working on the tutorial, which will also be the first (skippable) scenario of the campaign.
It will take you step by step through the most important features of the game and give some explanations, so we started with getting a system in place for this.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 207

We added an option for hiring a second research team, for a fee of $5000.



$5000 (and the monthly research cost!) is a lot during the beginnings of a scenario, but once the finances have stabilized this will speed up the second half of playing a scenario a bit where money is coming in fairly steadily but new rides are needed for attracting more guests.

And we finished the German translation. This helped with checking whether all text in the game is translatable, and since German text is fairly long it also helped to uncover some spots where the UI needed to be adjusted a bit to better fit the text. Other languages should probably fit as well now without too many further changes. Wunderbar!



We’re waiting a bit longer with getting more translations done because the text for the campaign and tutorial is still changing a bit but as soon as that’s final it’s all ready to be sent off to translators.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 209

Art Stream

Come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (August 29th) at 1pm PDT to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created

Devlog

Going bankrupt has been a bit informal so far - you’d run out of money and couldn’t buy anything anymore, and that’s it. There’s now some proper UI telling you that you’re in trouble.
Once you are in the red numbers you’ll get a couple months time to make a profit. If you don’t it’s game over.



I have also pretty much finished the tutorial except for some small tweaks and additions maybe. It will teach you all the basics - camera and building controls, how shops and supplies work, how to hide the backstage areas, how to build rides and queues, and finally also how to build a simple coaster. The last one was the most complex and scary part of the tutorial, so I’m very happy that this is out of the way now.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 210 + Beta 10

Beta 10 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

We are now using Metal as the default rendering pipeline on macOS, which brings the visual quality of the Mac version up to par with the Windows and Linux versions. Additionally, this should noticeably improve performance on Mac. Since this is a big change it’s possible that this causes some problems on some systems - please let us know if you run into any issues.

You probably know by now that Parkitect has a really unique and intricate scenery rating system that takes into account what guests are able to see. This is mostly working quite well, especially in fairly open spaces. Where it had some problems is enclosed spaces, such as this building for example:



It’s a really nice house that clearly a lot of effort has been put into, so you would expect it to have a great contribution to the scenery rating. But in reality it has almost no effect:



The problem is that these shops inside the building block the view, as do the walls, so guests don’t really “see” much more than 2-3 walls at once, which is too little to have a noticeable positive scenery rating impact. It makes sense in a way, but it feels really unfair.
After some tweaks the rating scores immediately inside and around buildings are more what you’d expect now:



And Garret created some really nice fog, smoke and spark effects during last weeks Art Stream:



Changelog

- added bankruptcy
- added smoke, fog and spark effects
- added Metal support for Mac (improved visual quality and performance)
- added option for hiring a second research team
- added option for running at 30 FPS (useful for increasing battery life on laptops)
- improved calculation of deco scores in enclosed spaces
- updated LSM/hyraulic launch speeds to be more in line with real coasters
- updated German translation
- fixed puke appearing black during night/rain
- fixed a case where Gyro Drop Tower could get stuck

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 211

When you place an object in Parkitect, we give you a semi-transparent preview of what you’re building. It looks like this:



We had this look since the start of development without much change. In the beginning, when the game only contained some simple flat rides and shops that you could place this worked well enough. As the game grew, we added scenery objects that can be placed freely and that can be recolored, or blueprints that allow you to place thousands of objects at once, and these build previews did not work as well anymore. They looked quite messy and even made it somewhat difficult to see what you’re doing at times.
Last week we changed the build previews to look like this:



Apart from generally looking nicer and giving you a much clearer look at what you’re building, the added shadows help a lot with figuring out how far away from the ground the object is. Removing the transparency makes it a bit easier to see how the object intersects with the terrain or other things.

And we changed the way grid-snapping works. It now snaps to both the grid centers and corners at the same time:



The old way of toggling between these options wasn’t intuitive at all. New players frequently didn’t figure it out, which made building annoying. Removing the toggle behaviour also reduces necessary key presses.
On the downside it might be a bit more fiddly than before since there are more snap positions, but we’ll deal with that if it actually turns out to be a problem.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 212

Purchasable terrain is now surrounded by a fence. It was previously hard to discover whether a scenario has any purchasable terrain or not because you had to first open the land tools and then switch to the terrain purchasing tab.
This should make it much more clearer and remind you that this option exists.




The loans had a rebalance just recently. They were still not working too well though, so we’re changing them some more. Previously you were actively paying them back and they were running for a certain time, but none of it really mattered. As player the only important thing is how much money you get and how much you need to pay, so we simplified loans to just that.
You have to manually pay back the loan yourself now. This also gives you the option to only pay back a small part of it to reduce the monthly fees, which should be slightly more interesting as well.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 213

Art Stream

Come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (September 26th) at 1pm PDT to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created

Devlog

We added a new utility building! The Trash Chute is a small and relatively cheap way to quickly transport trash bags to the trash dump. It needs to be connected to the Deliveries Building with the transport pipes.



So far trash bags could also be dropped at the Depot. We’ll probably remove that.

All build windows minimize now to get out of the way while you’re building something, like the deco window already did:



There’s also this new “slide in” animation when the window minimizes. This is not just for aesthetics. I oftentimes noticed people got confused where the deco window went after it instantly minimized and thought they need to re-open it. This quick animation should make it a bit more clear what happens with the window and that it’s still there.

Utility building doors finally received animations.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 214 + Beta 11

Beta 11 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

We added the Stand-up Coaster from this months Art Stream:



And Fabrice made three new animal statues:



Changelog

- added Stand-up Coaster
- added Trash Chute utility building
- added more animal statues
- added operating profit scenario goal
- added fences around purchasable land
- added guests can take photos
- added utility building door animations
- changed how loans work
- improved build previews
- improved all build windows to minimize while building
- improved grid snapping to snap to grid center + corners at once
- fixed a case where deco objects could remain stuck to the mouse after building
- fixed a case where ghost train would be missing when editing a tracked ride
- fixed a case where wrong stats would be reported while editing a tracked ride
- fixed a case where guests could buy something from a closed shop
- fixed a case where guests would face the wrong direction while watching a ride
- fixed not being able to change car rotation/train speed on helix pieces
- fixed not being able to select fog effect in blueprints/bulldozer tool

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 216

Garret added two nice new path styles:



And we made it so these new paths (and some of the existing old ones) can be recolored, so you’ll have much more options for path styles now

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 217

Art Stream

Come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (October 24th) at 1pm PDT to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created

Devlog

The more recent flat rides received their lights and light animations finally:



And we decided to also update the remaining old path styles, so every type of path has custom colors now.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 218 + Beta 12

Beta 12 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

During this months Art Stream, Garret added a set of new generic building pieces and deco items that should fit into most parks. Here’s a preview of some of the new pieces:



Changelog

Beta 12:
- big audio overhaul
* added stereo sound
* added crowd sounds
* added music volume slider to ride settings
* fixed a bunch of audio pops and sounds not playing
- added new path styles
- added custom colors to some normal paths
- added new building pieces (spires, dormers, windows, door, clocks, stepped walls)
- added lights to Power Surge, Top Scan, Plane Carousel, Gyro Drop Tower, Star Shape
- added new ride music song (Coffee Pirates)
- added up helix to Go-Karts
- reduced RAM use
- improved performance in parks with many tracked rides
- improved TV images
- fixed guests disappearing when closing tracked ride
- fixed not being able to replace queue handrails on stairs
- fixed some path attachments missing in blueprints (only for new blueprints)
- fixed some fences not adapting to sloped paths when built from blueprints (only for new blueprints)
- fixed a case where huge parks would not receive as many guests as they should

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 219

Garret added some new flags that should fit nicely into most parks, and we updated the old flags with a bit of animation too:



And the terrain generator is getting a small update. You’ll be able to select which types of trees exactly it should plant:



It will also give trees some slight color variations.

[catwheel18]

Launch date!

Hey! Take a look at this:

That’s right, the 1.0 version of Parkitect will release on November 29th.
Most notably, it will add the Campaign Mode to the game!
The campaign spans 26 scenarios with unique and varied settings and is played on a world map with branching paths that gets gradually revealed and comes to live as you progress.



All of the campaign parks have been designed by Silvarret and Joshua Tjarks, so you can be sure they are very nicely decorated.

Launch price

As announced previously we will increase the price with the release of this update. Our final price will be $29.99 / €24.99 and should come into effect across all stores around November 28th.

Since this has been asked before: of course the 1.0 update will be free for you if you already own the game or buy it at the current price. You won’t have to pay extra for it.

Future

So what will the 1.0 release mean for the future of Parkitect?
During December and early January we expect to be 100% busy with talking to press and players, the inevitable hotfixes and taking a bit of time off over the holidays.

Beyond that we will of course continue to support the game with patches and updates - there’s some more features and content for both creative players and management players that we’re excited to start working on as free updates! However, these updates will happen whenever we have something ready to show instead of on the fixed weekly devlog/monthly game update schedule that we’ve used for the past ~4 years.

Thank you!

Finally, a HUGE thank you to everyone who has helped us to get this far! This game wouldn’t exist without all of the Kickstarter supporters, and it would have been a much smaller game without all of the Early Access supporters.

And of course thanks to everyone who has worked on this game over the years - there have been so many people: obviously Garret, for taking on the risk of working on such a big game with me; Tim and Luuk, who have contributed enormously to the community surrounding this game and did an amazing job with working on the game itself; Gabby, who was always there to help with absolutely anything we needed help for; Gordon for bringing his unique music style to the game that makes building coasters so much more fun; Em, Rachel and Maris for creating thousands of sound effects for all the different things in the game and figuring out how to make them sound good; Fabrice for designing new scenery pieces when we ran out of ideas; Silvarret and Joshua for designing probably the absolutely nicest campaign parks; Marlon, M. Joshua, Michael and Trudy for the trailers and promo art; and of course all of the game testers and community moderators over on reddit and Discord!

Thanks

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 220

Hey! If you haven’t seen it yet - the 1.0 version of Parkitect with the campaign mode will release next week on November 29th, and there’s a trailer for it here!

We’ve been working on the campaign mode for about a year now and planned it for much longer, so let’s talk a bit about it now that it’s revealed!

Design

All the way back in 2014 we knew that we wanted to have some sort of map for the campaign instead of just a list of levels, but it wasn’t clear yet what that would look like. Initially we thought about doing a globe, but then another game did that



Then for the longest time we thought it could work like a rolling pin, sort of like the world in Animal Crossing games. But bending the map like that would have made it much more complicated to build, and it would also not have fit the rest of the game too well. So we decided to roughly match the look of the terrain and decoration that you find inside the game itself.



Now it became a bit like the overworld maps you can find in Mario games.
We didn’t want players to be able to see all of the levels from the start and wanted the map to be obscured in the beginning and only get uncovered as you progress, to make you wonder a bit about what’s still to come.



To pique your curiosity even further we wanted the map have multiple themes and biomes that would roughly match the scenarios you’d find. Fitting all of the different scenario settings into one connected map in a way that somewhat makes sense was pretty tricky, especially since the campaign should also start easy and get more difficult as you progress. So we couldn’t simply move some scenarios to a different place on the map where they would have fit in better geographically because their order was somewhat fixed.



We went with clouds for obscuring the map, simply because it made sense. We also like how there sometimes are holes in the cloud layer that let you get a small glimpse ahead at what’s yet to come



At one point we thought about changing the map to look like a blueprint that gets turned into reality. We liked the look of the effect, but there would have been so much animation and movement going on that it was distracting from the important part, which is the next level getting unlocked.



We slowly started having a nice landscape, but the map was still feeling a bit empty… we wanted a bit more visual feedback showing which levels you have already beaten.
So we added these buildings - each building resembles a scenario you have completed and can be found within that scenario. It is like a trophy that you unlock as reward for winning the scenario, to remind you of the level you played and to make the map feel more alive thanks to you.



The way it slams onto the map with a shockwave that pushes away the clouds is pretty satisfying too!
And we think now it’s also looking a bit like the park maps that you can find at many theme parks, with the main attractions being drawn it at unrealistically big proportions.



Gameplay

Due to the branching paths there are usually 2-3 different scenarios you can choose from to progress, so if you get stuck somewhere you have the option to continue with a different level.

After you have beaten a level you can play it in sandbox mode, so if you want to revisit it and build a more complex park with unlimited money, goals disabled or to build some rides that are usually not available in that level you can do that! We hope this will give creative players a small incentive to give the campaign a try.

You might have seen the little coin pop up in the level unlock animation above. You get one coin for beating the scenario (and you can’t buy them with real money or anything like that, just to be clear about that). Additionally, you can get a second coin by beating all of the optional goals of the scenario. You don’t have to beat the optional goals to move on to the next scenario, but it can still make sense to go for them if you feel like you need an extra challenge or to get the second coin, because at some points you will need a certain amount of coins to progress.



So if you beat some of the optional goals this can also allow you to skip some levels.

Every level has at least an optional time challenge goal where you need to complete the scenario by a certain date (and might have to restart if you miss it!) and sometimes a couple of extra challenges.



This adds a hard mode to every level for players who like this sort of challenge with a reward that’s actually useful, and without blocking people who prefer taking their time or simply aren’t that fast from progressing to the next scenario. It’s hard to please everyone, but we hope this will be a good compromise to let as many players as possible enjoy the game in the way they want to play it.

[S7evin]

Wellicht wel leuk om ff te delen, dit is wat ik nu kan maken met de huidige building blocks, ziet er leuk uit en je kan toch wat behoorlijk diversiteit aanbrengen in je park.

[Snakeye2209]

WEBGAMING schreef op vrijdag 30 november 2018 @ 18:21:
Voor de realistischer aanpak heb je planet coaster.
Deze is specifiek gemaakt om op RTC te lijken.

Ik kan er niet lekker in komen. Ik vind de ui te minimaal. Ik wil graag alles kunnen controleren met de muis, al is dat dan soms omslachtiger. Maar zo te merken is dat niet echt een optie.
Ik kan bijvoorbeeld niet eens vinden hoe ik de camera moet draaien zonder het toetsenbord, volgens mij kan dat helemaal niet.

Beetje doorklikken moet lukken toch? Er is geen toets, maar je kan het zelf aanwijzen. Maar draaien zonder toetsenbord... ja toetsenbord is wel handig zeker omdat de spatie ook het draaien van objecten is...

simile poems by famous poets

En versie 1 is uit!

[Boudewijn]

Leviathius schreef op maandag 3 december 2018 @ 15:45:
[...]


Kijk ook eens naar de 'decoration' waardes van je park. Dit kun je zien als je links in het menu op het vergrootglas klikt en dan 'decoration' kiezen. Overal waar het dan rood is moet je zorgen dat het groen wordt. Als gasten namelijk personeel pad zien of voorraad huisjes, dan wordt de 'onderdompeling' in het pretpark minder. Dus moet je die afschermen met bomen/schuttingen/bosjes. Best interessante gameplay eigenschap vind ik dat in ieder geval. Zet je nog een beetje aan het denken.

Verder ben ik ook erg tevreden over de game en speel het dan ook graag!

Dank voor je reactie @Leviathius .

Nou ja dat is dus het rare, ik heb dat netjes gedaan en alle wachtrijen zijn met heggen afgeschermd. Zie bijvoorbeeld dit:

En de kleurenversie:


Je ziet linksboven dat ik de winkelachterkant netjes heb weggewerkt. Ook rechtsonderin zie je dat mensen niet de immersion hebben maar dat ze wel netjes tussen heggen ed staan. Welk deel heb ik niet begrepen?

[catwheel18]

Version 1.2

Hey look, it’s another update in time for the weekend/holidays!
The full changelog is at the end of this post. The highlights are:

Track segments automatically snap to each other if the height difference is reasonably small:



This makes reconnecting track ends easier after editing a ride, and should resolve the troubles new players had with getting track heights to match when being misaligned by 1/8 height unit.

Existing guest/ride/shop info windows automatically get closed when clicking a different guest/ride/shop (unless you pin them):



This should reduce windows cluttering up the view.

Added the park ratings to a tab in the Park Info window:



The park ratings are quite important but could previously only be found by hovering on the ratings bar in the main menu, which is slightly hidden. This will give people a second way to discover them, and there are also some additional tooltips explaining the ratings a bit.

The research menu button received an animation to reflect the current research state:



The fill state of the vial tells you the research progress without having to open the research window, and it looks nice I guess.

And there’s a little something for the winter season



See you all next year!

Changelog

- added automatically snapping track ends to each other if they are close enough
- added three new ride music options: Street Organ, Winter Funderland, Barollerquoster
- added research and goals to the default sandbox parks (you can still disable them if you want)
- added research menu button reflects the current research progress
- added hats for the winter season
- added park rating tab to Park Info window
- added attractions visited + products bought stats to guest info windows
- added tooltips explaining guest stats/park ratings a bit
- added option for bigger UI scale
- added support for GOG Galaxy Achievements
- opening a guest/ride/shop info window automatically closes all other unpinned guest/ride/shop info windows now
- made sure ESC key can still be used for cancelling actions, even if a different alternate key has been defined in the control settings
- improved loan payment UI to be less confusing
- improved pipette tool for picking an attraction to advertise to also work on queue paths
- updated graphics settings to offer FPS rates depending on refresh rates supported by screen
- updated French/Russian/Simplified Chinese/German translations
- fixed Trash Chute sometimes not connecting to paths
- fixed a case where queue sign could appear in an odd orientation
- fixed a case where scenario descriptions on campaign map could be cut off
- fixed a case where guests could float through the air when using an Elevator
- fixed a case where guest thoughts would not show up in ride/shop/park thought overview lists
- fixed Spiral Slide not working anymore when picking up a sliding guest
- fixed Fruit Juice being less popular than intended

[S7evin]

Voor de liefhebbers, airfield voor de plane carrousel attractie.

[ Voor 22% gewijzigd door S7evin op 26-12-2018 13:44 ]

[catwheel18]

Korean + Dutch, Soundtrack

Parkitect has an official Korean translation now, and the Dutch translation received a complete overhaul.



The game is by far the most popular in Germany, the US and Korea currently, so we hope the addition of a Korean translation and Korean font support will make the game more comfortable to play.
Parkitect also always had a large amount of players from the Netherlands since the beginning. The Dutch translation had become very incomplete over the years, so it was time for an update

We know there are still some very common languages missing, and of course we will continue adding support for more languages over the coming weeks and months.

Soundtrack



We had some requests to make the soundtrack available as separate download, so if you want to listen to the games music outside of the game you can do so now.
It is now available on Steam.

If you have backed our Kickstarter at the Soundtrack tier or bought the Soundtrack Edition directly from our website you can find the soundtrack as a separate download in your Humble library now. If you’re not using a Humble account and lost your download link please use the Resender to retrieve it.

Changelog (Version 1.2a)

- added Korean translation
- updated Dutch translation
- added stripe pattern to sources of bad decoration rating to make them easier to distinguish from undecorated areas
- small campaign adjustments
- made info pips (no resources, no path connection etc) click-through while building something
- improved ghost train visibility when a visualization view is enabled
- fixed a case where water could disappear in unexpected places when terraforming
- fixed very short rides being more exciting than they should be and 1-2 other small exploits
- fixed a memory leak

[ Voor 7% gewijzigd door catwheel18 op 26-12-2018 16:54 ]

[catwheel18]

Version 1.3

Version 1.3 is available now! It mostly fixes some annoyances, for example the default window spawn positions have been improved to not be in the center of the screen anymore (i.e., the place you want to work on and most likely don’t want to have obstructed by windows…)



Since the game remembers where you dragged the windows to you will only really notice this on a fresh install. It has been annoying many new players though, so it’s good to have that improved.

We also overhauled the Build Challenge voting UI. The old UI always gave an advantage to entries that were submitted early. It showed the highest-rated entries first, so if you submitted a good entry very early it was likely to get to the top of the list and as a result receive even more votes and stay at the top, whereas entries that were submitted after a few days oftentimes got buried and received very few votes. This has gotten more extreme after the 1.0 launch since there are more players now.
The new voting UI looks like this:

• it only highlights one entry at a time, giving you a better view of the build
• voting or waiting for a few seconds switches to the next entry
• the order of entries is somewhat randomized but entries with fewer votes have a higher chance of being shown first, so overall everyones submissions should receive roughly the same amount of visibility, even if you submit quite late
• the actual ranking at any point can still be seen on the Workshop

It’s entirely possible that this will need some further tweaks of course, but let’s see how it goes

Changelog

- added new Build Challenge voting system
- added a highlight to the transport system connectors of the Deliveries Building/Depot/Trash Chute when in transport system build mode
- added lower camera sensitivity options
- some campaign balance adjustments
- updated Korean translation
- improved which shop gets researched if scenario starts without a food/drink shop
- improved default window spawn locations to obstruct the view less (for newly installed game)
- improved Korean font support
- fixed guests sometimes ignoring certain food/drink shops when hungry/thirsty
- fixed being able to delete things in the tutorial when you’re not supposed to
- fixed clicking notification for drowned guests moving the camera way off-screen
- fixed rides that were pretty much fully covered still stopping during thunderstorms
- fixed some sounds not playing while game is paused
- fixed a case where background music could play twice
- fixed being able to delete prebuilt scenery on land with support rights (e.g. road in Highway Hijinks scenario)
- fixed market research ride intensity preferences graph being quite inaccurate
- fixed being unable to delete/select particle effects after reloading a park
- fixed rides with a queue length of 1 tile being unpopular
- fixed “hold to win” countdown resetting when reloading savegame
- fixed mods not being loaded when creating a new scenario
- fixed bad starting loans in default sandbox scenarios

[catwheel18]

Announcing the Parkitect: Taste of Adventure update!

We’re super excited to show you the Parkitect: Taste Of Adventure today!

It will launch next week, on November 20th.



This is a huge game update that consists of two parts: the paid Taste of Adventure expansion, adding a ton of tasty new content; and a free patch that adds a whole bunch of improvements and new features to the base game.
Here’s a trailer to show you some of the highlights:

So, what exactly is included?



There’s a whole new campaign map for you to prove your theme park building skills in 10 challenging scenarios. Can you also beat them without pausing the game or using blueprints?



Adventure



Exciting new objects for the most intrepid adventurer!

Candyland



Welcome to the land of cotton candy and gingerbread!



River Rapids



A staple in many theme parks, but certainly the trickiest ride for us to implement!
Features customizable channel width, freely placeable bumpers, rapids and waterfalls

Safari Ride



A calm scenic ride that can be made more exciting with freely placeable bumps on the track.

Vertical Spinning Coaster



A coaster than can only be built vertically with freely spinning rows of seats.

Swinging Coaster



A Wild Mouse-type of coaster with unique cars that can swing sideways

Inverting Spinning Coaster



A spinning coaster capable of launches and inversions

Inverting Wooden Coaster



A hybrid coaster combining wooden and steel sections

Experience



A thrill ride that spins and inverts guests

Clockwork



A flat ride that looks exciting in motion but is fairly tame



Cookies, Shirts, Sub Sandwiches and Corndogs!





Animated doors and gates



Lava



turntables for the Water Coaster



elevators for the Wild Mouse, Spinning Coaster and Swinging Coaster



customizable 3D text signs



Free update

Some of the highlights of the free portion of this update include:

customizable water colors



custom image signs (with modding support!). Your custom images are stored in the savegame/blueprint, so other players can see them too when downloading your shared content from the workshop! Note that custom images take up a lot of the limited storage space in blueprints though



ride photo sections for all tracked rides



modding support for creating custom coaster trains!



improved staff zoning that allows overlapping zones



all path styles can be used as queues now



improved track builder that preselects the settings of removed track segments, making track editing faster




Bron

[Aardappelbakker]

Snakeye2209 schreef op dinsdag 12 mei 2020 @ 23:32:
Die decoratie heeft ook gewoon nut! En dat maakt het leuk om er ook fanatiek mee bezig te zijn.

Ik raak altijd geïnspireerd door de video's van de Silvarrett. Beetje ideeën opdoen en wat de mogelijkheden zijn.
Kan ook demotiverend zijn omdat hij er echt goed in is, maar zeker ook enorm veel tijd in steekt

YouTube: Parkitect Pre-alpha: Cydonia Hills (Part 1) - Alpine Mainstreet

Damn, oke.. nee zo ver ben ik nog niet. Maar is wel inspirerend moet ik zeggen!

Mijn eerste park begint nu wel serieuze vormen aan te nemen, dus dat maakt het geld verdienen ook stukken gemakkelijker. Daarnaast ben ik nu begonnen met het ontdekken van custom gebouwtjes maken en dergelijke. Wel een iets andere look and feel dan in die video











Edit: overdekte eet/drink gelegenheid

[ Voor 6% gewijzigd door Aardappelbakker op 16-05-2020 09:59 . Reden: Foto toegevoegd ]

[Chrosser]

Ik ben ook weer begonnen. Zal morgen eens wat screenshots maken en hier posten. Lijkt me leuk. Silvarret heeft trouwens ook een discord server. Daar zitten ook nog actieve spelers om ideeen uit te wisselen.

Hierbij ook mijn bijdrage in het topic. Ben na lange tijd weer begonnen met een nieuw park vanaf scratch. Ben nu bezig met de entree en het 1ste thema gebied (zelfde stijl). Hierin heb ik met name rustige attracties geplaatst, maar er is ook plaats voor de junior coaster. Die dan weer niet helemaal ''tam'' is. Proberen dit weekend weer wat verder te komen, maar de kids slapen slecht dus ik maak er momenteel geen late avonden van



ps. zou leuk zijn als we nog wat spelers vinden binnen tweakers die hun kunststukjes willen delen!

[ Voor 82% gewijzigd door Chrosser op 18-07-2020 09:25 ]

[Chrosser]

Aardappelbakker schreef op zaterdag 16 mei 2020 @ 08:52:
[...]

Damn, oke.. nee zo ver ben ik nog niet. Maar is wel inspirerend moet ik zeggen!

Mijn eerste park begint nu wel serieuze vormen aan te nemen, dus dat maakt het geld verdienen ook stukken gemakkelijker. Daarnaast ben ik nu begonnen met het ontdekken van custom gebouwtjes maken en dergelijke. Wel een iets andere look and feel dan in die video

[Afbeelding]

[Afbeelding]

[Afbeelding]

[Afbeelding]

[Afbeelding]

Edit: overdekte eet/drink gelegenheid
[Afbeelding]

Je bent aardig op weg! coasters inclusief scenery zelf gebouwd? of zijn het blueprints?

Zelf ook nog aan de klus geweest. Weer een stukje opgeschoten:



ps. Ben er nog niet tevreden mee. Het donkere pad rondom die baloon ride bevalt me nog niet en ook de afdakjes bij de shops daar ga ik waarschijnlijk nog aanpassen.

Ook eens bedenken hoe ik een overgang ga maken naar een nieuw thema. Wil nooit te harde overgangen van het een naar het andere thema, het moet een beetje vloeiend overlopen. Ik ga meer naar een bosrijke omgeving toewerken waarin ik een boomstamattractie of river rapids wil combineren met een achtbaan. verder nog een of twee stoerdere thrill rides in dat gebied. Ook wil ik meer gaan werken met hoogte verschillen. ben eens benieuwd.

[ Voor 28% gewijzigd door Chrosser op 19-07-2020 22:43 ]

[Chrosser]

Nou, heb eindelijk een beetje tijd gevonden, met al dat warme weer. Mijn pc kamer is ongeveer de warmste kamer van het huis. Daar was de afgelopen tijd geen beginnen aan.

Toch nog een paar uurtjes kunnen bouwen en daarmee ben ik tot het volgende gekomen:

Eerst nog het laatste gedeelte nog wat verbeterd. Kleurstelling is wat beter geworden en ik heb nog dat zwevende bootje toegevoegd. Verder nog wat meer scenery toegevoegd.





Toen door naar het volgende gedeelte. Vanuit het eerste themagebied wilde ik via een ''bosgebied'' naar het volgende. Vond het zelf wel mooi als er dan wat boven de bomen uit steekt. Heb daarom een hotel gemaakt met een attractie er in. Ook heb ik het hotel gebruikt voor wat shops en wat leuke zitplekken. Vervolgens heb ik een begin gemaakt met een piraten themagebied. Heb slechts een gedeelte van de boomstamattractie gethematiseerd. De rest is voor een volgende keer. Ook moest ik nog een gat opvullen. Daar ben ik aan begonnen aan het thematiseren van het Schommelschip. Ook dat is in piraten thema waarbij ik probeer een piraten fort te maken. Zoals te zien nog work in progress.







Zo nu ben ik weer benieuwd naar jullie bouwsel

Nog even een klein update'je



Met zonlicht


Zonder zonlicht

[ Voor 23% gewijzigd door Chrosser op 25-08-2020 15:20 ]

[catwheel18]

Announcing the Parkitect: Booms & Blooms update!

Hey everyone, we’re excited to tell you about the Parkitect: Booms & Blooms Pack today!

It will launch next week, on September 2nd.



This update consists of two parts: the paid Booms & Blooms Pack ($7.99/€6.59), adding explosive new content; and a free patch that adds a whole bunch of improvements and new features to the base game.
Here’s a trailer to show you some of the highlights:

So, what exactly is included?

Paid content

In the Booms & Blooms pack you’ll find:



With the new Effect Controller you can create your own firework shows or synchronize effects with your rides! There’s also new speakers that allow you to play your own music, or you can use the Effect Controller to trigger your own sound effects.



Two new thrill rides, one new water ride, and three new coasters! And with the new switch segments your Mine Train Coasters and Junior Coasters can ride backwards!









There’s a new set of trees, and new flags that you can put your own images on!





Free update

Some of the highlights of the free portion of this update include:

• adjustable direction for spinning rides

• new basic shape variations, updated old plants to be recolorable, updated many old trees to be resizable

• we have completely reworked how the game gets rendered, making use of some more modern GPU features to improve performance. How much of a difference you see depends on your system and the park you’re playing (the more heavily decorated your park is the bigger the difference you’ll see).
  Camera mods should benefit from these improvements as well.
  As a result of these improvements we also allow you to zoom out further now.

• similar changes have been made for the light animations of flat rides, moving more work to the GPU. Again, how much of an improvement you’ll see depends on your park - the results you see below is for one of the most extreme cases possible

Bron

[Arjan90]

Nou, ik kon het toch niet helemaal laten om alvast te beginnen aan een park om te bouwen in de sandbox modus.


De entree: er mist nog wat op het grasveld maar ik ben er nog niet helemaal uit wat ik daar wil hebben. Rechtsboven zie je de 4D cinema, in de huisjes zitten de shops.


Boulder Creeks: een junior coaster voor degene onder ons die het allemaal nog wat spannend vinden om in de achtbaan te stappen.


Orbiter: Vlak bij de entree staat de populaire attractie "Orbiter". Aan de andere kant staat een bijzonder dubbel reuzenrad, daar moeten nog planten/bloemen/bosjes/bomen omheen geplant worden.


Pirate Cove: een stukje thema rond het piratenschip, zonder heel uitgebreid met huisjes e.d. te werken. Ik denk er nog over om een gebouw achter het piratenschip te bouwen, dan haal je het zicht op het grasveld ook weg. Daar ga ik straks maar bomen e.d. planten.


Overzichtsfoto: een overzichtsfoto van het work in progress park. Ik ben er tot noch toe wel tevreden over, word langzaam wat vaardiger met het bouwen van achtbanen e.d. dus ook dat gaat steeds beter. De houten achtbaan die je rechtsonder ziet gaat om het water heen en dan weer terug (parallel aan de heenweg). Inmiddels is er linksonder ook een nieuwe achtbaan bijgebouwd die wordt afgeschoten, een steel coaster die wordt voorzien van wat meer industriële thema's in lijn met de kartbaan (die voorzien is van een detail à la Catalunya: een toren met het Rolex logo bovenop ).

[Beakzz]

Chrosser schreef op donderdag 7 januari 2021 @ 11:10:
[...]


Loopt het minder soepel doordat de map zwaarder wordt om te draaien?

Ja misschien het aantal bezoekers Draai nu krap 30fps volledig uitgezoomd.

Je krijgt wel een lekker gemixt park met 4-5 speler. Iedereen zijn eigen stijl en ja er bouwde 1 dame mee

[Marcvz]

Deze game paar dagen terug opgepikt en spijt dat ik dit niet eerder gedaan heb.
Eerste scenario's wat gerushed. Maar nu tijd om t wat serieuzer aan te pakken.

Vanmiddag wat uurtjes besteed aan t bouwen van een lake house. Inmiddels hier en daar alweer getweaked natuurlijk... Maar vergeten screens te maken.
Zodra de entree sectie klaar is zal ik weer nieuwe screens plaatsen.
Hopelijk komt er weer wat leven in dit topic

[Marcvz]

Chrosser schreef op maandag 28 februari 2022 @ 15:50:
Ben sinds kort ook weer bezig met de scenario’s met een vriend via de multiplayer. Heb niet het idee dat er de laatste tijd nog veel gebeurd rondom de game. Wel jammer. Mag van mij wel een deel 2 van komen.

Dat gaat niet gebeuren.
Maar snap t punt VD makers wel. Wat zou er in een deel 2 moeten zitten wat hier niet in zit?

Ik ben inmiddels begonnen aan een victoriaans paleis. Gaat nog wel wat uurtjes inzitten. Maar ben redelijk tevreden over de elementen die ik tot nu toe in elkaar heb geklikt.

[Marcvz]

Even een voortgangs kiekje.
Ik ben nog niet echt snel in de tools die de game biedt. En de objecten zijn ook nieuw.
Via een discord kwam ik achter het grote raam dat onder 'walls' staat IPV onder ramen.
T is leuk om naar de objecten te kijken en ze voor vanalles en nog wat te gebruiken waar ze niet voor bedoeld zijn. Zo bezit het paleis inmiddels een heuse chocolade reep

[Marcvz]

Done!

Was echt veel meer werk dan van tevoren verwacht. Maar blij met het resultaat.
En ivm de transparante ramen ook de binnenkant netjes afgewerkt.

Heeft iemand nog een idee om custom coaster supports te maken zonder mods?

[Marcvz]

Ik heb de officiële discord gejoined en daar is een zogenaamde diorama challenge van start gegaan.

Je krijgt een plot met in dit geval een kart baan erop.
En hier mag je niets aan wijzigen. En dit moet je vervolgens aankleden.

Aangezien ik vanilla speel (mods zijn wel toegestaan, maar wil ik nog niet induiken) moest ik creatief zijn om wat kleur op t circuit te krijgen (ben voor een F1 theme gegaan)

Nog lang niet klaar. Maar denk, ik post vast wat voorgangs kiekjes hier.

Het reuzenrad zal wel verdwijnen. Past niet echt.

[Marcvz]

Update.
Begin meer en meer tevreden te raken.
Dat reuzenrad was een doorn in m'n oog.

[Marcvz]

Even afstand genomen van de diorama challenge en begonnen aan het Coral Caldera scenario.

Got some picks for you.

Dat grote gebouw met de klok is gebaseerd op een bekend gebouw in Hawaii. Daar komt een coaster station op, maar heb nog niet de gewenste coaster.

[ Voor 8% gewijzigd door Marcvz op 08-03-2022 15:52 ]

[Chrosser]

Nou van mijn kant ook een update.

Ben opnieuw beginnen met de scenario's en samen met mijn maat elk park aan het spelen met het doel alle doelstellingen te halen, dus inclusief de optionele.

Hier wat screenshots van 2 rides van eergisteren.



Allemaal zonder mods, met z'n 2e is wel echt meer fun, het is niet dat we perse samen bouwen, maar een beetje ouwehoeren onder het klikken is wel top.