[PC] Theme Parkitect

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 134

Unitys text rendering isn’t the greatest currently - text looks blurry, styling and layouting is fairly limited, and when it had some trouble with handling a custom font as part of our current UI overhaul it was clear that it was time to switch to a 3rd party text rendering solution. Here’s a direct comparison:



The deco window is quite big and can get in the way, so we’re experimenting with automatically minimizing it as soon as the cursor leaves the window. Not sure yet if this might be confusing new players, we’ll have to see



Tim has spent the last couple weeks on adding a random terrain generator to the scenario editor, and it’s producing pretty nice results now There’s lots of options so you’ll never have to play on empty flat terrains anymore (although that’s still possible if you want to):



Garret added a smaller park entrance that can be themed more easily:



And some wooden paths, queues and more deco objects, including additional nice building pieces based on designs by StolleJay:

[catwheel18]

(Laatste weken beetje druk gehad hier plaats ik als nog de 3 laatste updates.)

Devlog Update 135

Art Stream

Hey! As usual near the end of the month, come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (March 1st) at 1pm PST to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

(Voor precieze tijden klik hier)

Devlog

I’ve returned to working on the terrain to hopefully resolve all of the remaining tasks. The first one: preventing terrain from clipping through flat rides/shops/utility buildings.



The biggest challenge with this was not actually making the terraforming stop in occupied places but figuring out whether the place is occupied or not with acceptable performance. We’re obviously using space-partitioning data structures (Octrees in this case) to speed up our collision checks, but if you need to do many lookups that gets slow too at some point…
Just like we’ve already done it with guests activities we’re also putting markers for thoughts in the park now when their thoughts tab is opened, so it’s a bit easier to see what the thoughts are referring to:

[Remcom00]

Yes, eindelijk weer een random terrain generator .
Dat was mijn grootste ergernis, was een mod voor maar die werkt al lang niet meer.

[Soccer98]

Zijn deze veranderingen direct doorgevoerd of is het wachten op de volgende alpha?

[Postius]

Releasedatum: Ze verwachten rond augustus 2015 klaar te zijn


Blijft grappig

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 136 + Alpha 11

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

Devlog

We added Skyfall, a drop tower ride where guests are turned into a horizontal position during the drop:



And there’s the Junior Coaster from this weeks Art Stream:



And Gabby made progress with the visual overhaul of the UI. Updating it all is a ton of work that’ll be ongoing for a while. Releasing it all at once when it’s finished would be difficult, so we’ll ship what we currently have and continue improving it over the next few Alphas until it’s done (like we’ve always done it with all parts of the game ).
Here’s the current state:



Changelog

- started UI overhaul (not complete yet)
- added Junior Coaster
- added Skyfall
- added terrain generator to scenario editor
- added fountains
- added modern building sets
- added wooden paths and queues
- added smaller park entrance that is easier to theme
- added shadow fadeout distance setting
- added tilt shift intensity setting
- added running costs for shops and utility buildings
- added female staff outfits
- added auto-minimizing deco builder window
- added world markers for person thoughts
- minor balance adjustments
- small performance improvements
- preventing terrain from clipping through rides/shops/utility buildings when terraforming
- tweaked shadows
- improved camera behaviour near terrain bounds
- improved text crispness
- improved sign text readability
- improved height indicator when building deco objects
- improved some windows remember some of their state when closing/reopening
- improved quality of path textures when zooming out
- removed SSAO (for now)
- fixed newly added rides being unlocked in old scenarios
- fixed guests vandalizing objects that don’t belong to the park
- fixed Go Karts could get stuck
- fixed Ferris Wheel was in wrong position after loading savegame
- fixed a case where ride entrance/exit could be placed at the wrong height
- fixed color filters not being applied anymore after rain
- fixed scenario autosave files being saved to the wrong folder
- fixed a case where some tracked rides could have unrealistically high intensity/nausea ratings

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 137

Luuk added a bunch of statistics across all of your play sessions and some global ones (this uses Steam statistics, so they are only available when playing through Steam):



And we decided to make a somewhat breaking change: we’re changing the terrain to use less steep half-unit high slopes. Naturally this includes placing rides and walls at half unit high increments and less steep stairs.
To keep old savegames compatible they will continue to use the steep terrain and only new parks will use the flat slopes. The old steep stairs will still be available in old and new parks.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 138

Gordon finished a new song! It’s really catchy, give it a listen:

A Shell in The Pit - Clouds

Improving terrain textures has been an open task for a very long time. The reason is that we have a list of requirements/wishes for them, and figuing out a technique that fulfills them all took a while

• we wanted to not be severly limited in the amount of different terrain textures we can use (~8 at least)
• hard straight edges between textures don’t look nice, there should be some sort of transition. This can clash with the first requirement; for example Texture Splatting is usually only done with up to 4 different textures, or requires lots of big splat textures, which leads us to the next requirement…
• it shouldn’t increase savegame sizes too much
• it should play nicely with our terrain. The old textures looked particularly bad around hills

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since the Christmas Holidays break last year and did a bunch of research and prototyping, and we’ve finally arrived at a method that we like

First of all, here’s what it looks like:



You can change the texture for quarter tiles now instead of for the whole tile, so it’s more fine-grained than before. Actually, it’s even more fine-grained than that, because each quater tile is further divided up into 4 triangles so you can paint around hills nicely:



As you can see, transitions between tiles aren’t exactly smooth but it’s better than straight edges, and I think our art style allows us to get away with the hard cuts.
We can theoretically use up to 256 different terrain textures, and savegame size shouldn’t be increased by more than a couple hundred kilobytes in most cases.

So, we’re pretty happy with that!

On the downside, we’ll have to drop DirectX 9 support for it. DirectX 10 is available since ~10 years by now, but we still wanted to know how many people would be affected by this change.
So we ran some analytics over the last couple months and found that less than 2% of our players use DirectX 9. Doesn’t sound too bad, but that’s still uncomfortably many!
Digging into this further though it turns out that ~90% of these people use DirectX 10-capable graphics cards, so we assume they just don’t have the proper drivers or DirectX version installed. In addition, a good amount of the remaining people is still running Windows XP, which we never officially supported.
So I think we can justify changing our minimum requirements to a DirectX 10-capable graphics card. If you’re still affected by this and can do absolutely nothing about it, please let us know.

Just for fun, here’s a dump of screenshots of the (sometimes weird) things we tried for terrain textures

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 139

Art Stream

March went past way too fast, but on the positive side that means it’s time for another Art Stream!
Come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (March 29th) at 1pm PST to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

(Voor precieze tijden klik hier)

Devlog

This week has mostly been maintenance, fixing bugs and making sure all the terrain changes don’t break the existing terraforming tools/terrain generator/old parks.
One change worth mentioning is a performance improvement for off-screen guests. In some especially crowded parks we’ve seen CPU usage reductions of up to 50% with that

Garret added something cool though: a new Robot entertainer

[ Voor 6% gewijzigd door catwheel18 op 27-03-2017 21:57 ]

[HollowGamer]

Wil dit spel gaan kopen, kan iemand mij vertellen hoe het op dit moment speelt?
Ik vind het niet erg om af-en-toe opnieuw te beginnen en kan ook door foutjes heen kijken, maar het verbaasd mij nog altijd dat er alpha bij staat, terwijl ik mij kan herinneren dat deze voor het eerst uitkwam in 2015.
Hoe actief wordt dit spel ontwikkeld in de zin van attracties, etc.? Zie op de blog veel nieuwe dingen staan, maar hoe gevuld is deze game?

[aDutchCow]

De game heeft best wel wat content, veel coasters en flatrides. Tegenwoordig kunnen spelers ook hun eigen scenario maken zodat er ook een doel is om te spelen.
En volgens mij wordt het spel wel elke week of elke 2 weken geupdate

[catwheel18]

bron

Devlog Update 140 + Alpha 12

Alpha 12 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
There have been some bigger changes under the hood, so please let us know if you encounter any problems.
Note that support for DirectX 9 has been dropped with this update so if you have any trouble running Alpha 12 please make sure your graphics drivers are up to date / check for DirectX updates through Windows Update first.

Devlog

We’ve added the Inverted Double Swing ride from this weeks Art Stream. It’s a pretty interesting looking ride with a fairly small footprint, and it turned out quite nice:



When possible we try to use recordings of real ride sounds, so the audio team went to a nearby Go-karts track this week for a recording (and racing) session.
Look forward to hearing the results of that in the future



Changelog

- added Inverted Double Swing
- added Robot entertainer
- added Steam stats
- added zoom to cursor
- changed raising terrain/rides/buildings to 0.5 units from 1 (for new parks/scenarios)
- improved terrain texturing
- improved overall performance in busy parks
- improved performance when hiding scenery
- continued UI overhaul
- terrain generator improvements
- balance adjustments
- fixed performance issues when selecting large amounts of terrain
- fixed error message when switching into underground mode when it’s raining while there’s water on screen
- fixed staff could sometimes take a long time to return to their assigned zone
- fixed setting car rotation for Ghost Mansion Ride/Inverted Dark Ride not working
- fixed a case where trains would not have the correct colors
- fixed goals sometimes already being completed in custom scenarios
- fixed not being able to click through hidden attractions
- fixed a case where track was properly aligned but still didn’t connect
- fixed hydraulic launch section sometimes stopping trains abruptly, resulting in wrong ride stats
- fixed hydraulic launch section launching train while block isn’t clear

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 141

This week, Garret added some new terrain textures so you can get more use out of the new terrain features introduced in Alpha 12:



Water adjusts to terrain changes by itself now so you don’t have to constantly update it manually after terraforming for a bit:



When connecting an existing pool of water to a hole it’ll remove the water though, otherwise you could accidentally flood stuff easily that you didn’t intend to:



And with that all the remaining big tasks regarding terrain we still had on our task list are done NICE.
We also added the first ride that makes proper use of lakes, the Submarines:



And Luuk added support for Steam Cloud, so if you’re playing on multiple systems through Steam all your savegames and blueprints automatically synchronize across them.

[aDutchCow]

Die submarines zien er wel echt heel gaaf uit!
Ik ga het binnenkort maar weer eens oppakken denk ik zo

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 142

Gordon bought a morin khuur a few months ago and has been practising it since, and now he’s finished his first song with it:

A Shell in The Pit Forever Fields (with drums)

It’s a bit unusual, but we’ll find a good use for it

Tim keeps working on scenario features and has added a time constraint for goal completion:



With this setting, all goals need to be kept complete for the given amount of time before the scenario is won. If any of the goal conditions isn’t met anymore the timer resets.

And we’ve added another water ride, the Calm River Ride. It’s a low-intensity ride where boats float along a water channel and you can see on the right hand side here:

[npolm]

Dit spel wordt met de week mooier en uitgebreider.
Dat is voor mij alleen best een nadeel. Het is best overwhelming. Dat vind ik zelfs bij Planet Coaster al het geval. De mogelijkheden zijn zo eindeloos dat ik nooit weet waar ik moet beginnen en niets af kan maken. Hoe doen jullie dat??

[aDutchCow]

polm85 schreef op dinsdag 18 april 2017 @ 12:07:
Dit spel wordt met de week mooier en uitgebreider.
Dat is voor mij alleen best een nadeel. Het is best overwhelming. Dat vind ik zelfs bij Planet Coaster al het geval. De mogelijkheden zijn zo eindeloos dat ik nooit weet waar ik moet beginnen en niets af kan maken. Hoe doen jullie dat??

Gewoon beginnen, en dan de basis leren kennen. Wanneer je ergens tegenaan loopt, zoeken op Reddit of series op Youtube kijken. En dan moet je al een eind komen. En af en toe dit topic natuurlijk bekijken zodat je up to date blijft met de nieuwste updates

[lukjah]

Yes, eindelijk weer een random terrain generator .
Dat was mijn grootste ergernis, was een mod voor maar die werkt al lang niet meer.

Grappig feitje, de Tim waar de devlog over spreekt is dezelfde "ikkentim" die de originele mod heeft geschreven

Zijn deze veranderingen direct doorgevoerd of is het wachten op de volgende alpha?

Elke eind van de maand komt er een update.

Releasedatum: Ze verwachten rond augustus 2015 klaar te zijn

De eerste publieke speelbare versie is toen uitgekomen

Ik vind het niet erg om af-en-toe opnieuw te beginnen en kan ook door foutjes heen kijken, maar het verbaasd mij nog altijd dat er alpha bij staat, terwijl ik mij kan herinneren dat deze voor het eerst uitkwam in 2015.

Beta betekend officieel: "zo goed als compleet maar niet bugvrij". Dat zijn we nog niet, vandaar ook nog geen beta tag.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 143

Art Stream

It’s time for the April Art Stream, and this month it’ll be on Tuesday instead of the usual Wednesday.
Come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Tuesday (April 25th) at 1pm PST to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

(Voor precieze tijden klik hier)

Devlog

When adding the Calm River Ride last week we weren’t sure yet whether we’d be able to get the boats move around inside the channel as you’d expect or not. Since the channel is only a small bit wider than the boats it would have been alright if they just stayed inside in the center of the “track” at all times like any other ride, but we got the movement working now and it looks quite nice!
Here’s a top-down view:



The path builder oftentimes decided to build tunnels when dragging across uneven terrain, which has been improved now:



You can still get tunnels by holding Shift while dragging.
There’s a new brush tool for changing the style of existing paths:



Garret added some new bamboo path objects:



Luuk added a bunch of small random events that should shake things up a bit every now and then.



There are positive and negative events. Some are entirely random, some can be prevented and some can be resolved by taking action.

And Luuk also added some nice animations for trash:

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 144 + Alpha 13

Alpha 13 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
Steam Cloud support is currently only available on the Experimental branch to make sure it’s all working as expected before we release it to everyone. If you want to give it a try, right-click Parkitect in the Steam library and select Properties -> Betas -> Experimental.

Devlog

There’s a new tool available in the scenario editor for marking objects as indestructible:



This can be useful for custom-built structures such as park entrance buildings, but can also be used for creating scenarios with some unique restrictions.

Changelog

- added Submarines ride
- added Calm River Ride
- added random events
- added Steam Cloud support (on Experimental branch)
- added brush tool for changing existing path types
- added guests stop and watch rides
- added bamboo path objects
- added terrain textures
- added closing shops
- added hold Alt to change terrain painting mode
- added hotkey for pipette tool (“P”)
- added countdown timer for fulfilling scenario goals
- added objects can be marked as indestructible in scenario editor
- improved behaviour of water when terraforming near it
- improved performance when hiding scenery some more
- improved path dragging to better work on uneven terrain
- improved behaviour when quicksaving a new park
- improved how scenario goal rewards work
- improved balance of flat ride costs and capacities
- fixed issue with Inverted Double Swing seats
- fixed a case where Transformer was in wrong animation position after loading savegame
- fixed grasses showing across tunnels through vertical terrain cliffs
- fixed vandalism visualization not being applied properly to some objects
- fixed walls sometimes getting misplaced when building next to sloped terrain
- fixed a rare case where the camera would freak out when switching into top-down view (“M”)
- fixed high wage costs when starting a new scenario
- fixed an error message when adjusting UI scale

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 145

Hey!

Our development schedule is slightly different than usual this month, which means there’ll be less interesting things to show on the devlog.

Garret, Luuk, Tim and I are going to meet each other at the end of the month, and, being a team working on a theme park game, it only makes sense to go and check out some parks on that occasion
We’ll be traveling around for a while to check out Europa Park (Germany), Phantasialand (Germany) and Efteling (Netherlands) for research (…and fun, alright). Exciting!

Since nobody will be around to patch things in case something gets horribly broken we’ll limit this months game update to smaller changes, polishing and fixes, and that pretty much already summarizes the majority of what we’ve done during the past week
There are also some bigger tasks being worked on in parallel that should go into the June game update, but more on that once the time has come.

[Deruxian]

Wanneer moet de release nu komen dan?

[spokje]

"when it's done". Je kunt het al prima spelen hoor. Ze lijken wel in de afrondingsfase te zitten.

[HollowGamer]

De Efteling is zo'n mooi park, hopelijk kunnen ze er wat dingen van toevoegen.

Is er een manier om bugs te rapporteren? Ben een visuele bug tegengekomen.

[lukjah]

Wanneer moet de release nu komen dan?

Een weekje eerder dan normaal.

Is er een manier om bugs te rapporteren? Ben een visuele bug tegengekomen.

Je kan [e-mail] mailen of posten op de subreddit

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 146

We added the Flying Coaster from last months Art Stream. It‘s capable of some rather unique inversions:



Zones received a staff tab that highlights all assigned employees:

And Luuk restructured the finance overview a bit. All irregularly occuring transactions such as construction costs and land purchases went into the “Other” group and there’s a new “Operational” subtotal that excludes this group. That should make it easier to figure out how well the park is actually doing. All groups can also be collapsed since that window is getting a bit tall.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 147 + Alpha 14

Alpha 14 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

As previously mentioned we’ll be on our theme park tour now. The devlog will return to its usual schedule around the June 10th weekend. See you then!

Devlog

Garret added some nice new objects that I’m sure some of you will be very happy about:

Tim added notifications for some global park problems. They are supposed to help new players.



Luuk extracted some more information from blueprint files to show them in the UI:


Changelog

- added Flying Coaster
- added glass walls, cacti, stone walls, fountain jet
- added wooden supports adapt to terrain changes
- added employee list to zone info window
- added sorting employees by zone
- added shops can get dirty
- added buttons for calling mechanics/janitors for unscheduled maintenance/cleaning
- added notifications for global problems of the park (tired guests, shops out of stock etc)
- added displaying some more information about a blueprints content
- added subtle texture to most things
- added recolorable ride entrance booths
- improved camera when building tracks
- improved balance of tracked ride costs
- improved performance when moving blueprint build preview over occupied locations
- improved finance overview
- enabled Steam Cloud support for all Steam users
- fixed Ghost Mansion Ride having wrong intensity ratings
- fixed wrong orientation of Calm River Ride boats on slopes
- fixed cases where rides derailed when building them from a blueprint
- fixed object pipette hotkey not working properly while deco window is minimized
- fixed garbage not being cleaned up after loading savegame
- fixed a very rare case where guests could randomly drown

[catwheel18]

i.v.m. vakantie heb ik de laatste 3 updates niet kunnen plaatsen.

Mocht je het nog willen lezen klik hier.

Devlog Update 151 + Alpha 15

Alpha 15 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

Oh hey look, in addition to the Paddleboats we also added a second type of boat ride for this update - the Bumper Boats!



As a player, when you think about a games performance the UI is probably not one of the first things that comes to mind… but the UI needs to be optimized for performance too!
In Parkitect, one of the biggest UI performance difficulties has always been in windows with long lists - and we got a bunch of those, like the savegame list, the guest overview, and of course the build windows.
The Deco window has always been particularly problematic since there are hundreds of objects to scroll trough already and it only got worse with additional modded content. We have improved list performance a couple of times already but it was clear that some more work needed to be done.

Previously we used Unitys out-of-the-box scroll views, which behind the scenes works like this:



As soon as the window got opened all the list entries were loaded. When scrolling they simply got moved around accordingly. For relatively short or simple lists this is good enough, but if you need to load a bunch of stuff this can take a while and cause a noticeable lag spike.
And if the user doesn’t scroll all of that loading was for nothing!

We changed the lists to work like this instead:



Now, only enough list entries to cover the visible area of the scroll view are loaded. When scrolling, entries that leave the visible area get shifted to the other end of the list and their content gets replaced with whatever is supposed to be there.

For the user there’s no visible difference, but this is so much faster. And most importantly, it always takes the same amount of time to load no matter how many list entries there are, so we can add more stuff now without having to worry about this again

Here are some performance comparisons (bar length = loading time):



Changelog

- added Paddleboats
- added Bumper Boats
- added Western props, brazier, fire jet, jumping fountains, umbrellas, glass roofs
- added option for building ride blueprints without scenery
- added Eastern Highlands demo park
- added option for rides to wait for “any load, but not empty”
- added ride stats when sharing blueprint to Workshop and allowed editing description
- updated Steel Coaster cars
- improved lighting slightly
- improved water
- improved performance during rain
- significantly improved performance of Deco window (and others) opening/closing/minimizing/maximizing
- fixed vandalism state being saved into blueprints
- fixed not being able to lower Inverted Dark Ride velocity below 10km/h
- fixed missing supports on Miniature Railway
- fixed ride income graphs
- fixed not being able to build inside the scenario editor if money is set to 0
- fixed research cost not matching the allocated budget
- fixed tunnel rendering issues on Mac and Linux
- fixed edge scrolling not working properly on Linux
- fixes a case where terrain would be invisible on some systems
- fixed water not looking right in blueprint renders
- fixed fountain water flickering during rain
- fixed shop entries in overview window sometimes showing wrong information when changing sort order

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 152

Continuing our current trend of adding water rides, we implemented the Splash Battle ride from last weeks Art Stream:



The unique gimmick of this ride is that the boats are equipped with water guns operated by the guests. Apart from battling each other targets can be placed along the track, and passerbys are at risk of getting splashed too!
It is also possible to disable the guns for parts of the ride.

We added buoys. They’re a nice deco for water areas and also block paddleboats from driving through.



Tim added swapping custom object colors using drag & drop:



And we started working with a concept artist, Fabrice, who will help us with designing more props. His first task were Spooky props, and we’re very happy with the results
Here’s what he came up with:



And here are the objects in the game that we built from these:

[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

[Mar.tin]

[verwijderd]

[ Voor 93% gewijzigd door Mar.tin op 28-07-2022 12:24 ]

[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 156

Usually I try to keep a balance between fixing bugs, improving old things and adding new things, but occasionally it’s necessary to just focus for a while on fixing and improving. This week was nothing but fixing bugs for me, and since the others are on well-deserved vacation currently that means there are no exciting pictures of cool new things this week I’m afraid.

The week started with a bunch of patches for Alpha 16 before I moved on to some less urgent problems. There was one bug in particular (janitors are occasionally unable to pick up some trash until the savegame is reloaded) that was especially tricky - it has a fairly low and random chance to happen and only appears under certain circumstances. Figuring out what was going on there was a very slow process since I had to leave the game running for hours just to see the issue happening once, so in the end it took roughly two days to understand what the problem was. Once I knew, the fix itself took just a couple minutes, which is how it oftentimes goes with bugs.
That’s why I usually ask people reporting a bug if they know how it can be triggered It can really save a ton of time and frustration.

There’s still some more left to work through, so next week looks like it’ll be more of the same.

[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 159

Art Stream

Once again it’s Art Stream time!
Come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (August 30th) at 1pm PST to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

Devlog

I’ve been working on the UI for the campaign mode this week. It’s just the basic outline of it so far to get something working with placeholder art, so no screenshots of it yet.

After testing the control changes from Devlog Update 157 over the past couple of weeks we’re reverting the change of being able to move the camera with the right mouse button because it interferred with some places where dragging with the right mouse button was already being used for something, such as for removing zones. We discussed a couple of different ways of changing these places to make it work somehow, but couldn’t find any solutions that weren’t significantly worse than the old behaviour.
In turn we added an option for exchanging the camera panning on the middle mouse button for camera rotation, so that button becomes more useful if you’re using edge or keyboard panning. All the other control changes remain intact, so it’s not too much of a loss really.

[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

[spokje]

Is er iets over de lange(re) termijn planning? Wanneer ze final willen gaan bijvoorbeeld? Leuk die sandbox, maar ze zijn nu al zo lang aan het ontwikkelen (wel zeer actief gelukkig ) dat ik me wel afvraag of die game ooit uitgebracht gaat worden

[GWBoes]

idd, In de startpost hier staat voor release augustus 2014, daar zijn we inmiddels al 2 jaar overheen. Het is dat ze zo'n tijdloze artstyle gebruiken anders had bijna niemand hier nog op zitten wachten.

Ben wel benieuwd hoe hij nu speelt, voor het laatst echt gespeeld tijdens de pre-alpha daarna niet echt meer naar om gekeken.

[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.

[aDutchCow]

Ik had het inderdaad gezien maar dit moet toch een flinke impact hebben op de performance?

[torx]

aDutchCow schreef op dinsdag 10 oktober 2017 @ 14:06:
Ik had het inderdaad gezien maar dit moet toch een flinke impact hebben op de performance?

Volgens de ontwikkelaar niet:

There should be no noticeable performance difference

[Oekol]

Leuk initiatief. Ga het in de gaten houden. Totaal geen tijd om meer tijd te besteden aan het spelen van nieuwe games, maar dit soort dingen kan ik alleen maar toejuichen. Vind het fantastisch om de progressie te volgen!

[Luuknoord]

TorX schreef op dinsdag 10 oktober 2017 @ 14:37:
[...]

Volgens de ontwikkelaar niet:


[...]

Zoals ik het zie is het een proces wat je iedere keer moet starten als je iets af hebt. Lijkt me niet realtime eerlijk gezegd.

[Snakeye2209]

Leoon. schreef op dinsdag 10 oktober 2017 @ 14:50:
Leuk initiatief. Ga het in de gaten houden. Totaal geen tijd om meer tijd te besteden aan het spelen van nieuwe games, maar dit soort dingen kan ik alleen maar toejuichen. Vind het fantastisch om de progressie te volgen!

Hier hetzelfde. Nog geen tijd. Ooit Planet Coaster gekocht, niet meer aangeraakt door drukte, maar straks in de wintermaanden veel meer tijd om dit soort spellen te spelen. Heerlijk

[torx]

Luuknoord schreef op dinsdag 10 oktober 2017 @ 19:19:
Zoals ik het zie is het een proces wat je iedere keer moet starten als je iets af hebt. Lijkt me niet realtime eerlijk gezegd.

Bedoel je handmatig starten? Dat is niet het geval. Het is namelijk van invloed op het gedrag van je gasten. Het zal telkens berekend worden als je het decor of landschap wijzigt. Als dat beperkt wordt tot een klein gebied rond je wijziging, dan moet het met de performance wel meevallen.

[Luuknoord]

TorX schreef op woensdag 11 oktober 2017 @ 09:55:
[...]

Bedoel je handmatig starten? Dat is niet het geval. Het is namelijk van invloed op het gedrag van je gasten. Het zal telkens berekend worden als je het decor of landschap wijzigt. Als dat beperkt wordt tot een klein gebied rond je wijziging, dan moet het met de performance wel meevallen.

Dat zou ook kunnen, maar als ik de gif zo zie qua visualisatie zou ik het tegenovergestelde zeggen.
Maar we zullen zien. Ik heb zelf Parkitect niet, maar ik vindt het ontwikkelproces van deze game zoveel interessanter dan Planet Coaster, vandaar dat ik het een beetje volg.

[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:

[mschol]

ik lees wel intressante updates, moet hem maar weer eens aanslingeren, ze hebben een hoop verbeterd en toegevoegd

[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!

[Beakzz]

Wordt dit ook nog echt gespeeld, want het lijkt meer een dev blog momenteel. Dit spel blijft een beetje op mijn radar hangen (vooral omdat ik hoop dat het management gedeelte nog wordt aangepakt), maar ik zie weinig enthousiaste verhalen of pics van eigen parken hier

[mschol]

Beakzz schreef op dinsdag 30 januari 2018 @ 17:43:
Wordt dit ook nog echt gespeeld, want het lijkt meer een dev blog momenteel. Dit spel blijft een beetje op mijn radar hangen (vooral omdat ik hoop dat het management gedeelte nog wordt aangepakt), maar ik zie weinig enthousiaste verhalen of pics van eigen parken hier

ik probeer keer op keer dit spel op te pakken, maar om de een of andere reden kan hey mij niet lang genoeg blijven boeien (iets wat rct wel kon)

anders had ik wel plaatjes e.d. gepost

[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.

---

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:

---

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]

Had er even een paar gemist.

[ Voor 96% gewijzigd door catwheel18 op 28-02-2018 21:40 ]

[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!

[Boudewijn]

Het is best een tof spel maar ik mis een beetje de kick die ik bij rct destijds wel had. Met dezelfde levels.

Ergens voelt het niet af nee, is er al duidelijk wanneer de makers denken de boel wat strakker geregeld te hebben?

[Tomski1986]

Boudewijn schreef op maandag 12 maart 2018 @ 21:35:
Het is best een tof spel maar ik mis een beetje de kick die ik bij rct destijds wel had. Met dezelfde levels.

Ergens voelt het niet af nee, is er al duidelijk wanneer de makers denken de boel wat strakker geregeld te hebben?

Ik denk dat dit gewoon komt door ouder te worden. Het nieuwe en leuke aan een spel is er vlug af.

[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

[spokje]

Nice. Wat ik nog een beetje mis is supports voor alle achtbanen. Track lijkt nu vaak nog te zweven zonder stalen supports eronder. Ik snap dat het geen realisme nastreeft, maar weet iemand toevallig of dit op de roadmap staat? Zoals in die gele coaster van de vorige post, waar het wagentje rijdt, daar is 0 support voor die track. Dat zou IRL nooit gaan werken zeg maar

[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

[Orian]

Boudewijn schreef op maandag 12 maart 2018 @ 21:35:
Het is best een tof spel maar ik mis een beetje de kick die ik bij rct destijds wel had. Met dezelfde levels.

Ergens voelt het niet af nee, is er al duidelijk wanneer de makers denken de boel wat strakker geregeld te hebben?

Volgens mij komt het door een gebrek aan campaign. Elke keer weer in een vlak grasland gegooid worden, of half steam afzoeken naar een leuk mod-level is niet wat ik onder 'fun' versta. Ik wacht dan ook nog even op de campaign. Ik hoop wel dat die snel komt. Er zijn al veel features, maar gewoon spelen is nog wat lastig.

[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

[Chrosser]

Wow, het begint er nu echt op te lijken.

Heb het spel al sinds de aller eerste alpha fase, maar heb de game al een hele tijd niet meer aangeraakt. Ga het vanavond maar eens even opstarten denk ik. Zit inderdaad zoals hierboven ook al gezegd te wachten op een campaign modus, want die ultra mooie parken zoals hierboven ben ik niet in staat te maken.

Ben benieuwd of alle redelijkerwijs te verwachten flatrides er in zitten. Coasters zijn er meestal wel in overvloed.

[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.

[Chrosser]

Heb het Parkitect virus wel weer te pakken. Afgelopen dagen flink aan mijn park verbouwd en uitgebreid.
Dingen die me wel nog opvallen en niet helemaal perfect lijken te werken:

• Als je zones hebt aangemaakt dan lijkt het alsof personeel dat moe is niet naar de staffbuilding gaat indien die in een andere zone ligt. Klopt dit? Ik heb bijvoorbeeld nu 6 zones aangemaakt maar niet in alle zes de zones ligt een staffbuilding. De staffbuilding deselecteer ik voor de zekerheid altijd even in die betreffende zone. Dan lijkt het beter te werken.

• In het begin van een sandbox heb je erg weinig geld (standaard 20k?). Zelfs één achtbaan neerzetten lukt dan vaak niet echt. Iets dat je eigenlijk wel nodig hebt om wat bezoekers te trekken. Dat gezegd hebbende: Geld management is voor mij nog erg ondoorzichtig. Entreeprijzen en attractietickets lijken onder alle omstandigheden gekocht te worden. Je krijgt hier geen waarschuwingsberichten over toch? of ben ik te netjes geweest met mijn pricing?


Verder erg toffe game! Heb nu langzaam wat mods geinstalleerd omdat ik merk dat er standaard wat weinig objecten zijn om verschillende typen gebouwen te kunnen bouwen.

[Schuim]

Wisten jullie al dat de mensen achter Parkitect heel graag ondersteuning willen?
Ze zijn voor allerlei talen vertalers aan het zoeken, en hier aan bijdragen is helemaal niet moeilijk.

Ik heb me zelf de afgelopen weken, net als een paar anderen de afgelopen maanden, door het Nederlands heen geslagen (ja het is een beste bult) en is het Nederlands zo goed als klaar.

Echter moeten er voor het Nederlands vooral nog bevestigingen/goedkeuringen gegeven worden.
Dit werkt via een stem methode.

Je krijgt die zin in het Engels te zien, en daar kun je of zelf een woord/zin aan toevoegen door het tekst vak te gebruiken, of een stem geven voor een van de suggesties die al gedaan zijn.
Die vind je iets lager.

Een suggestie word als juist gezien, als deze minimaal 3 stemmen heeft, of de meeste stemmen als er meerdere suggesties 3 of meer stemmen hebben.

Het is mij niet bekend of je voor het stemmen aangemeld moet zijn.
Even kijken dus

Dus help Parkitect aan een Nederlandse vertaling door een steentje bij te dragen.
Zodat iedereen het straks kan spelen!


http://translate.themepar...cts/parkitect/strings/nl/

[ Voor 8% gewijzigd door Schuim op 04-06-2018 13:59 ]

[mschol]

ik heb al eens gekeken bij de vertalingen, maar veel waar ik echt enorm twijfel wat de beste passende vertaling is..

[Snakeye2209]

Ook al speel ik het spel zelf (nog) niet. Vond ik het wel leuk om uit verveling eens te helpen. Maar bij sommige zaken zegt hij "Your suggestion already exists!" Terwijl er gewoon geen andere vertaling is.
Ben benieuwd hoe ze daarmee om gaan.

[Schuim]

Snakeye2209 schreef op dinsdag 5 juni 2018 @ 08:37:
Ook al speel ik het spel zelf (nog) niet. Vond ik het wel leuk om uit verveling eens te helpen. Maar bij sommige zaken zegt hij "Your suggestion already exists!" Terwijl er gewoon geen andere vertaling is.
Ben benieuwd hoe ze daarmee om gaan.

Ik weet dat er in die vertaal site nog al een bug zit, ik kan je garanderen dat als die de melding geeft, dat die vertaling ook al bestaat, maar hij hem om een of andere magische reden op dat moment niet laat zien.
Vaak komt die wel naar voren als je het tabblad suggestions opent, maar dat doet die dus niet altijd automatisch.

[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!

[Mauz1978]

Ik zie alleen maar devlogs hier, maar zijn er ook mensen hier die het spelen en aanraden? Wat biedt dit meer of heeft andere charmes dan planet coaster kan bieden?

[mschol]

Mauz1978 schreef op zaterdag 21 juli 2018 @ 15:31:
Ik zie alleen maar devlogs hier, maar zijn er ook mensen hier die het spelen en aanraden? Wat biedt dit meer of heeft andere charmes dan planet coaster kan bieden?

ik speel het heel af en toe
het blijft qua graphics en speelstijl meer bij RCT, het toevoegen van een bevoorradingssysteem maakt het uitdagender om zomaar ergens een winkeltje neer te zetten.

[Beakzz]

Mauz1978 schreef op zaterdag 21 juli 2018 @ 15:31:
Ik zie alleen maar devlogs hier, maar zijn er ook mensen hier die het spelen en aanraden? Wat biedt dit meer of heeft andere charmes dan planet coaster kan bieden?

Alleen maar dev vlogs en af en toe mensen die vragen of er nog ervaringen zijn. Volgens mij vroeg ik het de laatste keer

Snap ook echt niet dat er helemaal niemand zijn creaties deelt hier, maar ik denk dat het spel gewoon niet leeft onder de Tweakers. Enige andere wat ik kan verzinnen is dat het er grappig uit ziet, maar gewoon niet leuk is om te spelen.