[PC] Theme Parkitect

[Thermometer]

Platform: PC (Mocht de Kickstarter lukken zijn ze ook naar Mac/Linux aan het kijken)
Ontwikkelaar(s): Texel Raptor
Releasedatum: Ze verwachten rond augustus 2015 klaar te zijn
Genre(s): Simulatie
Speelmodus: Singleplayer

Intro
Theme Parkitect is een "pretpark simulator", dat in hetzelfde straatje als Rollercoaster Tycoon & Theme Park valt. Ze proberen een moderne versie van dit genre neer te zetten in hun game. Ze hebben de game op Kickstarter gezet om geld op te halen voor ontwikkeling kosten. Ze vragen hier om 50.000 Canadese dollars.



Ontwikkeling
Texel Raptor bestaat uit drie mensen:

Sebastian Mayer - programmeur

Garret Randell - grafisch artiest

Gordon McGladdery - componist

Trailer:

Erg leuke 'interactieve trailer' (hun draaiend prototype in-browser waar je kunt rondkijken en inzoomen):



Links:
Officiële website
Kickstarter
Tof topic op TIGForums (voor independent game development) met technische ontwikkelingen
Officiële development blog

Wat vinden jullie ervan? Mij lijkt het erg tof te gaan worden. Wat ze in 5 maanden voor elkaar gebokst hebben (zie de interactive trailer) vind ik impressive en heb dus wel vertrouwen dat als ze hun Kickstarter goal halen, ze de beloftes waar gaan maken. Mijn pledge hebben ze in ieder geval!

[ Voor 5% gewijzigd door Thermometer op 09-09-2014 12:46 . Reden: officiele website toegevoegd ]

[LamSchaap]

Erycius schreef op woensdag 03 september 2014 @ 15:27:
Is kickstarter veranderd? vroeger moest je betalen met Amazon, maar dat zie ik niet meer, je moet nu rechstreeks je CC gegevens invoeren.

Nee, Amazon werkt alleen bij Amerikaanse kickstarter projecten.

Svarog schreef op donderdag 04 september 2014 @ 09:38:
Nog maar 20%, dit gaat makkelijk lukken

Gelukkig maar.

Dat gaat ze zeker wel lukken


Maar ik heb het ook ge'pledged.

Kwam deze ride art timelapse tegen.

[Thermometer]

spokje schreef op vrijdag 19 september 2014 @ 14:16:
Inderdaad, de physics klopt nog weinig van. Ik vond het wel opvallend dat degene die het systeem ontworpen had dacht dat het wel aardig realistisch was zo. Zie een paar posts van mij terug in dit topic. Ze zouden er iig nog wel naar kijken. Je zou ook redelijk doodgaan als je ziet hoe weinig de karretjes afremmen in bochten, er zit duidelijk nog nauwelijks gewicht achter

Maar misschien is het nog wel een tip om dit even in te schieten bij ze. Hoe meer mensen dat doen, hoe meer ze er naar moeten kijken

Toevallig hebben ze dat gefixt in een van de laatste devblogs! Was een simpel data conversie foutje:

Update 11

Another week another update! This one’s a bit earlier to be in time before our Kickstarter ends (just about one day left!). By the way! For those of you who wanted to support our campaign but couldn’t due to not owning a credit card, we’ve now got PayPal & Amazon options directly on our website thanks to the awesome guys over at Humble.

Anyways, back to this weeks progress - first of all, I added smooth camera rotation using the mouse:

It only rotates around the up axis, so you can’t change the tilt. It can also still snap to four predefined angles as before using the camera rotation buttons, as the end of the GIF tries to demonstrate.
Many of you made me aware that the coasters were moving way too fast, so I took a look and indeed there was a small unit conversion mistake causing it to go about three times as fast as it’s supposed to. It should be correct now:

It’s a bit hard to tell in a choppy GIF, but let me know if this still feels off
Next I worked on improvements for steel coaster supports. I made them try to move out of the way a bit if needed:

(Those white connector beams are placeholder art, obviously)
Finally I gave angled supports a

They are still highly experimental and require a lot more work (as you can probably tell by the graphical glitches anyways), but I think for a quick try they look promising enough to justify continuing to work on them.

bron

[TheDeeGee]

Update #12

One of the biggest things we want to get done soon is UI, so while Garret is working on UI design I took the simple windows I made before and figured out a workflow for filling them with content. I also made them resizable and created a tabbed UI element:



(Placeholder art.)

We’ve upgraded from Unity Free to Pro a while ago giving us access to some more “advanced” features, one of them being “image effects” - shaders that are applied to an entire image instead of individual objects. Using these I rewrote the coaster statistic visualization, as the method I had to use before had a couple of smaller issues. It doesn’t look significantly different, but here’s a comparison anyways:



These kind of visualizations could be used for more than coasters, for example I’ve added one that highlights dirty paths. I had some fun while learning shaders and created a small transition effect when switching into a data visualization view:

[ Voor 96% gewijzigd door TheDeeGee op 30-09-2014 20:20 ]

[TheDeeGee]

(Dat was Backers Only, maar mag wel geshared worden)

UI Design

Garret has spent some time at the end of the month working on the design for the UI, and we want to show it to you, our backers, before anyone else. It hasn't been implemented and the work isn't finished, but it should give you an idea of how we want it to look. Please note that some of this is going to change, as we're still iterating on it (Still need to make all the icons for it). It doesn't show every window yet either. We're excited to show you a proper working version in the future!

[TheDeeGee]

Update 13

I received a bunch of sound effects from Gordon this week, so I started doing some work on implementing them. It's only sound effects for building paths and shops so far and they don't even get played at the right volume yet but it already adds a lot. It's great to finally hear something after so many months of silence.

Next I spontaneously felt like working on block brakes:



As you'd expect they completely stop the train if the next section is occupied and start the train as soon as it's clear. If the next section is clear they can optionally simply let the train pass (as in the GIF above) or act like trim brakes and slow it down to a predefined speed.

Then I worked on corkscrews. They can be sized up like most other track elements:



Interlocking corkscrews works as well:

[TheDeeGee]

Update 14

This week was mostly experimenting - we tried some techniques for graphical improvements that Garret will be able to use in the future. Right now though he's busy with redesigning the guests.

Our current guests are a single rigged model and we give them a random haircut and shirt color when they spawn at runtime:



For the new ones Garret wanted a bit more diversity so we tried cutting them into multiple pieces...



...that are then stitched back together on spawn (we tested with the old guests, the image above doesn't show the new ones). It works! This allows Garret to model different sets of cloths that we can then recombine without having to rig or animate the pieces individually.

[catwheel18]

Bron site:

Update 61

Guests learned how to walk across the terrain this week in case they’re suddenly not on a path anymore, either because you dropped them somewhere or deleted the path they were standing on. They’re pretty confused and just randomly walk around until they eventually get back onto a path, but that’s a lot better than getting stuck and not moving at all as they did before.
That means I got to throw guests off paths onto various structures to test what happens - for science! And fun.

(This is what the “parks” I build look like 99% of the time - just test cases for certain conditions.)
Making them able to walk across the terrain was one of these tasks I’ve been procrastinating since forever, and in the end it was neither hard nor a lot of work to do. But I also made use of code originally written for other parts of the game that did not exist a couple months back…sometimes it can be a good idea to let a tricky programming task wait and it might become easier to solve due to other code changes, or you learn something new that helps or suddenly have an idea how to tackle it differently.

Sandbox Pre-Alpha

It looks like we’ll be releasing the pre-alpha later this week! It’ll be available to everyone who backed our Kickstarter or bought the game from our website. We’ll post here, on our subreddit and Twitter once it’s been uploaded.
If you’ve been following this devlog you already know this, but here’s what to expect from this release anyways:
This will be an early WIP release and not quite representative of the final game, so you’ll surely run across some bugs. We’ll be putting out updates fairly frequently, and some will contain major changes (new features, systems, overhauls, etc). That said, the game is playable, though there is no goal or challenge yet. Money has no impact at the moment, but the guests act more or less as we want them to. Right now the game is about building cool stuff and trying to keep people happy and ratings high. Money will become an important factor soon, as we’re working on the resource system and staff system that are major factors of it. These updates will be free, in case some were wondering.

With that out of the way, we’re excited to see what everyone makes with it!

Parkitect Nexus

Parkitect Nexus is a fan-made sharing site made by one of our awesome backers, Luuk Holleman. It’s a great place to share coaster blueprints and park saves, and Luuk’s even pulling data out of the saves to display on the site! Check it out, and be sure to share some creations once you get your hands on the game. There’s already a bunch of really cool stuff on there!

[catwheel18]

Pre-Alpha: out now!

Hey!

The first public Parkitect pre-alpha build is available now! If you backed us on Kickstarter or pre-ordered on our website (which you can still do by the way!) you can now grab this build from Humble!
If you don’t own a Humble account or the game isn’t listed there, all you have to do is enter the mail address that you used when backing us/preordering over here:

https://www.humblebundle.com/resender

And you’ll be sent a link to the download page.
If you changed your email address or something else isn’t working you can reach us at: [e-mail]



Archipelago Park by Lord Gonchar, from Parkitect Nexus
We hope you’re having fun with the bits of the game that are there already and are looking forward to our future updates
Also don’t be afraid to send us a mail with your feedback or participate in the discussions over at our subreddit!

Pre-Alpha 2 Changelog
Keep reading

[LamSchaap]

Op hun Kickstarter pagina:

Mac version coming soon. Within the next few weeks at the latest.

Maar ik ga hem toch vanavond in wine proberen.

Jaja, het werkt zo in WineBottler Openen en spelen!

[ Voor 32% gewijzigd door LamSchaap op 10-09-2015 21:39 ]

[catwheel18]

Bron site

Update 62

It’s been a stressful and exhausting week for us, but a pretty great one too. The pre-alpha is public now, and everyone seems to be having a good time with it We’re really happy with the reactions so far.

The launch also went smoother than expected! We didn’t get swamped with bug reports, and most issues that have been reported are minor, so that’s awesome. Major credits for this go to our $40 Kickstarter backers of course who tested the game during August and diligently sent us reports. Your help has been invaluable!

For this weeks devlog entry, Gordon wrote how he’s approaching coaster sounds!

Devlog

Hey everyone! Gordon aka A Shell in the Pit here doing my first update on the audio of Parkitect.I run A Shell in the Pit Audio in Vancouver and have been working semi-quietly in the semi-background writing music and supervising all the sound design going into Parkitect. Since it’s what I’m working on right now and also serves as a great little intro to dynamic audio for those unfamiliar with it, I thought we could talk about the rollercoaster sounds. I will be doing my first Twitch stream tomorrow (Monday, Sept 14th) at 1pm PST and will be creating the sound for the Wild Mouse so if you find this interesting please stop by twitch.tv/ashellinthepit.

Audio is one of the most mysterious-to-the-public parts of game design, and a lot of cool stuff goes into it that I love explaining to people because it’s rad. A lot of developers I work with start out knowing nothing about audio and audio implementation, or even having an opinion on the matter, to getting right into it and very excited about the possibilities. Sebastian has been a wonderful programmer to work with and Garret and I have a very cohesive view on what the soundtrack should sound like.

OK, coaster sounds. It’s a lot more involved than grabbing a recording of a rollercoaster and triggering it when it starts moving and stopping it when it stops moving. We need it to be representative of and reactive to:

• Crashing and breaking
• Coaster type
• Coaster speed
• Whether there are people onboard
• Starting & stopping

This requires sound source of multiple different speeds of coaster. I have chosen climb, slow, medium, fast and very fast. Unfortunately my arrangements to record at the local amusement park fell through–the person I was dealing with a year ago no longer works there, and to record there through the channels they want me to go through now is prohibitively expensive–thousands of dollars for a couple hours .

Luckily the game audio community is amazing and word got through to another sound designer in Pittsburgh, Marc Straight (@MarcStraight) that I was looking for fresh recordings of coasters. He is doing music for an amusement park in his neck of the woods and had been granted access. I subsidized the purchase of a Sony M10 and he has been able to provide me with some excellent recordings.

After receiving the recordings I brought them into Pro Tools and made perfect loops (perfect meaning there is no ticking or noticeable loop point) of each velocity from a recording of a single ride, and removed the people-sounds from them using the expensive but incredible audio repair software called Izotope Rx and a process known as “mind-numbing tedium”. Since we can have empty coasters, we need the sound of JUST the rollercoaster and will have to add screams in engine depending on who is on the ride.

Before Rx:


A Shell in The Pit Coaster Before RX
After Rx:


A Shell in The Pit Coaster After RX

I was able to create loops of slow, medium, fast and *really* fast of the wooden coaster. Sebastian and I are able to tie data generated by coaster velocity to a parameter in a Timeline Component of our audio middleware tool, Fabric, to fade between loops depending on how fast the rollercoaster is going. Note to budding game audio folks: it is always best/easiest on your programmer to drive parameters with data already being generated for other reasons in the game. We are already tracking coaster speed, so I didn’t need Sebastian to create anything new. I see a lot of Fmod tutorials by inexperienced people that use a million custom parameters, but each one would be extra work for your hypothetical programmer to create.

This is what a Timeline component in Fabric looks like:

Anyway, so far it seems to be working quite nicely! There is a 3d audio issue that Sebastian and I need to sort out (coasters get quieter as they get higher) but we’re on a great course. I had considered doing something more granular, but this seems like a more elegant and simple solution and I think probably sounds better as well. Unfortunately we won’t be able to use authentic recordings for every single ride simply because of lack of access, and I may have to fake a couple couple of coasters using sound design trickery but that’s OK. It will all sound great in the end.

Bookending is a crucial tenet of Sound design. Things generally sound better with a definitive beginning, middle and end and we’re using recordings of the hydraulic brakes to serve as the beginning and end of the coaster rides. These are not looping files but one-shot sounds.

We still have to add sounds for the rubber rollers and the screams of the riders (I am throwing a party for the pre-alpha release and the cost of entry is a scream in my vocal booth ), that said getting dialog is going to be a huge ball of wax in itself and screams are definitely a party of the dialog.

That’s the basics! Hope you found it interesting. There are several other things I’d like to talk about with regards to audio in the future, so expect to hear from me again soon!

[catwheel18]

Update 63

We started working on guest sounds this week by doing a bunch of recordings! Gordon had a party, and everyone who came had to scream into his recording booth
We got 2 hours of laughs, screams, shouts and other sounds now, so this will make the guests have a lot more personality when it’s all edited and put into the game.

There’s Gordon at work in his studio. He’s got an awesome setup that lets us record new voice work, instruments, and whatever else we may need pretty easily.

It was a lot of fun, and we can’t wait to get the sounds into the game.
As for some in-game things, we added helixes to the track builder:

We’ve also added a Double Ferris Wheel ride.

It operates slightly differently from all the other rides we had, so it’s been one of the more difficult rides to implement yet.
Garret got some more ride models done this week, so look forward to that

[catwheel18]

Update 64

Art Stream

It’s the end of the month, which means its time for another art creation livestream! Join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday, starting at 12pm PST.

(Voor precieze tijden klik hier)

Devlog

We added a Vertical Drop Coaster!


It features vertical chain lifts, vertical drops and beyond-vertical drops.

[catwheel18]

Hier de repost mensen van de nieuwe Pre-Alpha

Update 65: Pre-Alpha 3 available

Hey everyone,

Pre-Alpha 3 is available now - this is also the first Mac release!
Simply grab the download from Humble.
Here’s how to get your download link if you don’t have it yet:

• if you own a Humble account and used that for the purchase, please check under Purchases -> Unclaimed Purchases

• if you don’t own a Humble account/it doesn’t show up there, please give the Key Render a try

• if both fails send us a mail: [e-mail]!

Lake Lagertha by Seameus, from ParkitectNexus

Pre-Alpha 3 Changelog:
- added Mac support
- added Double Ferris Wheel ride
- added Vertical Drop Coaster
- added Helix track segments
- added newest available game version check to splash screen
- added edge scrolling (disabled by default)
- added settings menu (+ settings for enabling edge scrolling, changing sound volumes)
- added coaster brake release sounds
- added support for 4:3, 5:4 screen aspect ratios
- added separate tab for transport rides
- added ride last maintained/toilet last cleaned displays
- added new Workman outfit
- adjusted support height limits to more closely match real rides
- balance: made guests less picky/stingy with rides
- balance: lowered how tired people get from walking
- balance: guests become more interested in different rides over time
- new attractions are more popular for a while
- redesigned save/load windows
- set default graphics quality to “Fantastic” instead of “Fastest”, OOPS (you can change graphics quality in the launcher before the game starts)
- increased zoom range
- performance: lowered people memory usage, reduced people load times ~12x
- made Entertainer recolorable
- fixed vomit footprints not being rendered properly anymore
- fixed chain lifts not catching trains properly sometimes
- fixed shop/flat ride/fence/path builders freaking out a bit when hovering cursor over vertical terrain
- fixed sometimes not being able to build a ride/shop next to vertical terrain even though there’s enough space
- fixed a case where trains did not derail when they should
- fixed broken water on lower quality settings
- fixed queue signs being misplaced if spawned on stairs
- fixed 5° banks not behaving properly, throwing the entire track banking off
- fixed missing collision/height limits checks on first tracked ride segment
- fixed building blueprints through trees

[catwheel18]

Bron

Update 66

Garret created a new outfit for the Workmen during last weeks livestream:



(They previously used the same outfit as the Janitors)

We added a new confirmation UI element that should be less annoying than the previous “Are you sure you want to do this?” dialog that popped up in the center of the screen before:



I’ve added some caching for blueprint files, so even with hundreds of blueprints the blueprint picker should open without any lag now, whereas previously it had to touch and evaluate every file. It also allows us to add the number of available blueprints for a ride to the UI:



We put the first guest voice into the game! It’s 138 different sound clips alone and Gordon recorded a bunch of different voices, so there should be enough variation in the end

Gordon also finished another track! It’s another active one (don’t worry, there’ll also be really calm ones):

https://soundcloud.com/as...rkitect-green-green-grass

[catwheel18]

bron

Update 67

We’ve added another 12 voices to the game, which puts us at a total of ~1.700 different voice audio clips. They still need some proper mixing and Gordon intends to record even more but it’s starting to sound pretty good!

Here’s an impression:

[YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok0K8s1zwQw]

The path builder has been long due for a bit of a rework since it hasn’t changed much while the rest of the game grew and evolved. It received previews for the initial tile to make it work like all the other builders in the game:



That also makes building underground and raised paths work as you’d expect:



And other objects snap to underground paths now while in underground view:



I’ve also worked a bit with Luuk Holleman on opening up more systems to modding, so you should be seeing some cool stuff from that area in the future

[ Voor 3% gewijzigd door catwheel18 op 18-10-2015 16:29 ]

[catwheel18]

bron

Update 68

Art Stream

It’s time for another art stream! Come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday starting at 12pm PST to chat and watch some new Parkitect art being created.

(Voor precieze tijden klik hier)

Devlog

We’ve upgraded to Unity 5.2. It’s been out for a while and wasn’t stable enough to ship builds with, but seems to be fine now. This means we can finally use dropdowns:



Pretty crazy stuff.
We’ve been waiting for that to add assigning employees to zones:



An employee assigned to a zone won’t leave that zone unless he has to (e.g. for fetching a crate), so that should help with keeping your workers nicely distributed.

Garret started working on a set of scenery for the current season:



He also added lower detailed models for a bunch of existing objects for zoomed out views.

And we’ve added this new Alpine Coaster:



It’s a fairly gentle ride, but guests operate the toboggans brakes themselves which makes it a bit more thrilling

[ Voor 3% gewijzigd door catwheel18 op 27-10-2015 11:51 ]

[catwheel18]

Goed idee.

Hier 2 foto's van mijn park, niet heel bijzonder maar geeft een idee.





Ik weet het dik in de min Maar dat werkt volgens mij nog niet helemaal goed.

[ Voor 255% gewijzigd door catwheel18 op 30-10-2015 23:46 ]

[aDutchCow]

Hier mijn park haha, zwaar in de min maar is ook nog vrij lastig om eruit te komen haha.



De achtbaan links was de bedoeling dat die ging lijken op de Baron van de Efteling maar dat werkte niet helemaal goed haha.


Verder wil ik die entree uitbreiden alleen de attracties die in de weg staan zijn daar te populair voor om zo maar weg te halen.

[catwheel18]

Update 69 + Pre-Alpha 4

Garret created this fantastic Haunted House during this weeks art stream, and some fitting terrain textures and fences:



(We also fixed that annoying bug where objects placed in front of water would have lots of white pixels around them)

Gordon created a new spooky ambient song

(link naar nummer)

And Pre-Alpha 4 is available now!

Happy Halloween!

Pre-Alpha 4 Changelog

- added Alpine Coaster
- added Haunted House
- added people voices
- added 2 new fences
- added a bunch of spooky scenery items
- added 2 new terrain materials
- added assigning employees to zones
- added Imperial unit system option
- added LOD for a couple of objects
- added terrain height limit
- added transparent tunnels while in underground view
- updated path builder (improved build previews, raising/lowering paths)
- made snapping to paths work while in underground view (improves building underground paths, shops, benches etc.)
- improved underground view on/off toggling
- allowed placing new initial station platform after removing all segments of a ride from within the track builder
- increased max. path height
- performance: loading blueprint lists is pretty much instant now
- opened up more systems for modding
- improved park loading speed a bit
- fixed Double Ferris Wheel not working anymore after loading savegame
- fixed wrong sitting pose on Log Flume cars
- fixed not being able to right-click-delete through build previews
- fixed: removed handrails on stairs into underground tiles
- fixed follow-cam button scrolling view to wrong position if putting a tracked ride into test mode while game is paused
- fixed built object moving around while shift-raising and moving the camera
- fixed various smaller annoyances related to building stuff
- fixed white artifacts around objects placed in front of water
- fixes problems with cursor not matching UI positions in fullscreen mode
- fixed Janitors path sweep animation not playing correctly
- fixed Janitors sometimes getting stuck in toilets if cleaning them while guests are using them

[catwheel18]

Update 70

If you tried Pre-Alpha 4 already you probably noticed some lag spikes whenever guests come on screen. It turned out to be a bug in Unity 5.2 that we didn’t notice before release, so I’ve spent some extra time this week on creating and reporting reproduction cases of performance issues and bugs in all of our third party tools. And I’ve also done some optimizations on our side of course.



Yep, something is definitely wrong here.

I’ve also worked some more with Tim and Luuk of ParkitectNexus, and as a result the game will be able to run mods without requiring the ParkitectNexus Client (although that’s still an excellent tool for easily installing mods and keeping them up to date).
This also means that mods will work on Mac (and Linux, once available)!

The default behaviour when dragging paths above ground is to build stairs across hills. You can simply hold shift now to build a tunnel instead:



The “active” window is slightly highlighted now and can be closed using Escape. Pinned windows are excluded from this.

[catwheel18]

Update 71

We released a hotfix (Pre-Alpha 4b) for the lag spikes mentioned in last weeks blog post. Get it from your download link if you’re not using it yet

This week we added offset half loops that move one tile to the left or right:



The path builder received more attention this week yet again. Back when I implemented the drag-building for paths we didn’t have tunnels yet, so there were situations where dragging didn’t produce any useful results.
That’s been changed now:



It’s a tool that you use a lot, so it should be as easy to use as possible. I think we achieved that and I’m really happy with it now.

Originally we planned to mainly work on gameplay this month, but you might have seen that people started adding custom objects to the game:



Building elements mod by KenneyNL

Which is totally awesome!

We want building pieces from different sets to somewhat work with each other, and depending on how we implement our building tools these pieces might need to be modeled slightly differently, so Garret started working on a castle walls set to figure out how this’ll work and to sort of set a standard:



So we’re switching plans a bit and work on building tools for a couple weeks longer

[catwheel18]

Update 72

Art Stream

It’s time for another Art Stream once again! Join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday 12pm PST to chat and watch some new Parkitect art being created.

(Voor precieze tijden klik hier)

Devlog

We added a Bobsled Coaster!



Unlike the other coasters we have the Bobsled Coaster doesn’t run on rails, which means it can derail if you don’t design it carefully. That also made it a bit challenging to implement… I’m expecting to see some wacky stuff that needs fixing once everyone gets to play with it.

And we also added some alternate cars for existing coasters:

[ Voor 6% gewijzigd door catwheel18 op 24-11-2015 17:47 ]

[catwheel18]

(bron)

Update 73 + Pre-Alpha 5

Pre-Alpha 5 is now available for download! Simply grab it from the download link that you received back when you purchased the game.

This is also our first Linux release! Note that officially we’re only supporting Ubuntu 12.04+, as that is what our engine supports.

The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

We had another fun art stream and Garret worked on some mixed stuff this time, including these nice Mine Carts that are alternate cars for the Wild Mouse coaster:



We had scenery objects that can be build off-grid or alternatively snapped to a grid while holding the Alt key for a while To make it a bit more clear what’s going on the grid overlay rescales now while snapping is active:



And you can change the grid resolution now, for example hitting Alt + 1 snaps to the center of a tile, Alt + 2 subdivides each tile into 2x2 cells, Alt + 4 subdivides into 4x4 cells and so on:



And finally you can toggle between snapping an object to the center or the edges of the grid cells by hitting the key combination for the currently active grid resolution again, e.g. this is what happens when using Alt + 1 repeatedly:



The problem with key combinations is that they aren’t immediately obvious…you have to learn them somehow, you rarely just accidentally find them by yourself.
I’m still thinking about how the game can teach this to new players without a big “Hey did you know you can do this cool thing?” notice. Resizing the grid is mostly useful for the more “advanced” users who want to build a lot so it might not be too bad if it’s just casually mentioned somewhere deep in the control settings menu, but we’ll see…

Pre-Alpha 5 Changelog:

- added Linux support
- added Mod loading support
- added Bobsled Coaster
- added Castle Walls set
- added alternate cars for: Steel Coaster, Wild Mouse, Wooden Coaster
- added sounds for: Steel Coaster, Wild Mouse, Wing Coaster
- added offset half loops
- added tower ride height limits
- added terrain grid intensity option
- added closing windows with Escape
- added: hold Shift while dragging path to build tunnels through existing terrain
- added Entertainer functionality
- added adjustable terrain grid snapping for deco objects that aren’t locked to the grid (Alt + number key to change grid resolution)
- widened Wing Coaster loops so cars don’t clip into them
- using °F instead of °C when using imperial units
- disabled sounds for preview trains
- reduced memory usage
- improved path dragging behaviour when dragging over terrain that isn’t simple slopes
- improved builder behaviour when building raised objects (stays snapped to position + height after build)
- improved park load times
- improved terraforming performance
- overall performance improvements
- disallowed building tracked ride stations too far below the ground/too high up for paths
- Mac: disabled menu bar and dock in fullscreen mode
- fixed Enterprise being misplaced if rotated
- fixed balloons going crazy during low FPS
- fixed some of the terraforming tools freaking out a bit if dragging outside terrain bounds
- fixed weird stuff happening if starting to edit a tracked ride while its info window is open
- fixed new parks starting at wrong date if another park has been loaded before
- fixed visual glitches if editing a tracked ride while a visualization view was enabled
- fixed clicking attraction platforms not properly opening the attraction info window as intended
- fixed guests being stuck on rides if ride exit leads into an employee path
- fixed bad things happening if double-clicking the “New Park” button on the splash screen
- fixed grasses and terrain overhangs being visible in underground view
- fixed underground paths having handrails in some situations
- fixed a case where path tiles would not properly get removed
- fixed game being unresponsive if loaded with a corrupted settings file
- fixed clicking on terrain slopes not building stairs although the preview showed stairs
- fixes terraforming sounds sometimes not stopping

[catwheel18]

Update 74

Improvements for the color picker have been on our list for a long time and it gets requested a lot lately, so we started working on that. We still need to clean it up and make it look nice, so here’s just a screenshot of the current work-in-progress state:



There are new tools for picking colors from existing objects and recoloring them, and palettes can be saved.

Objects can have varying amounts of custom colors (1-4), which made designing the user experience for this window surprisingly difficult. I’m not entirely satisfied with how it currently works, but we got some ideas how to improve it. A couple more days of thinking and work and it should be fine

As a nice side-effect, with a little extra work we could also make these tools work for changing the colors of individual track segments and coaster cars:

[ Voor 5% gewijzigd door catwheel18 op 08-12-2015 09:54 ]

[catwheel18]

Bron

Update 75

It’s been a bit of a slow week, with a mix of smaller stuff and some non-development related tasks getting done.

The color picker has been completed for now:



Recoloring objects received a quick transition effect:



Gordon put sounds for the Bobsled Coaster and Vertical Drop Coaster into the game.

We’re testing some new rain:



(The animation is very fluent in the game, choppiness is due to GIF)

Guests don’t have to wait until their coaster car is at the front of the station anymore before they can leave. This allowed us to give rides a “wait until full” setting, which also means that the Alpine Coaster cars won’t run empty anymore.

And you can let your guests take a bath now:



We don’t show stuff that doesn’t make it into the game here very often, but here’s a little something - we thought it would be fun if a claw from a claw crane machine grabbed the guest when you pick him up, including rope physics:



It didn’t work as well as expected. The swinging made putting the guest down exactly where you wanted pretty annoying, so it got scrapped.

[catwheel18]

bron

Devlog Update 76

You might have seen a couple of bigger Parkitect videos this week, e.g. by Nerd³, Olli43 and MonotoneTim - it’s been a pretty great week (with a lot of time spent on answering emails), but we still got a few things done.

We added an Inverted Coaster!



And here it is in action:



And we added some ride music:



If you’re familiar with Gordons previous work you might recognize some of these titles…

There are only these four short calliope tracks so far that we’ll probably combine into one longer piece. More to come over time!

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 77

Art Stream

Usually we’re doing a live stream at the end of the month, but due to the holidays we’re shifting it to January this time. Same for the next Pre-Alpha update.

Devlog

I made a simple change this week that improves the staff/guest AI quite a bit and helps with performance as well.

Imagine a worker who’s tasked with grabbing a delivery crate from the stack and bringing it to a shop. First of all the worker needs to figure out how to get to the delivery crate stack, if he even can get there at all. This is done using a pathfinding algorithm. Once the worker reached the crate and picked it up he needs to figure out how to get to the shop, again using a pathfinding algorithm.

But what if there is no path from the position of the crate to the shop? The worker unnecessarily went all the way to pick up the crate and wasted time that he could have used to work on something else. It would be better if the game checked whether the crate can be delivered before the worker goes to get it. Pathfinding is relatively fast, but doing a lot of it would quickly get too expensive. So this needs to be done slightly differently!

The solution is that the game simply knows at all times which paths are interconnected. This can be calculated very fast (and only needs to be recalculated if a path gets added/removed) using Flood fill, so now we can essentially check for free whether the crate and shop are reachable before doing the more expensive pathfinding calculation for how to get to these locations.

Here’s a debug view of this connectivity information:



It visualizes which paths are interconnected, so for example any path tiles with a dark green cube can only be reached from other path tiles with a dark green cube. If you’re on a path tile with a dark green cube you can’t reach tiles with a blue cube.

The game keeps separate versions of this for the guests and employees, since guests can additionally use rides to move around the park.

This can be used in a couple of other scenarios too: for example employees who are assigned to a zone will now immediately return to that zone if they’re outside of it (e.g. Janitors who transported a trash bag out of the park). It was previously too expensive to find a reachable path tile within the zone.

[catwheel18]

bron

Devlog Update 78

Hello 2016! Last year was already pretty interesting, but this year should get quite exciting as well

The modding community over at ParkitectNexus keeps growing, which is fantastic! What’s not so great is that many mods need some kind of settings dialog and so far had to implement it themselves and opened it when hitting some hotkey, which started to become chaotic. So on the initiative of the modding community we added a mod settings screen that unifies all of that and also allows to turn off mods without having to uninstall them:



I also made two small mods myself for things that don’t need to be part of the main game - one is a template for a color palette changing effect:



The other is Twitch Integration, which allows viewers of a Twitch livestream to spawn their own guest and follow his activities. That should be fun
That one should be out shortly after Pre-Alpha 6 - which is a bit delayed this time due to the holidays as already said in last weeks post, but it should be done soon. We already started working on getting it stable and ready.

[catwheel18]

Er is nu ook een Tropical Buildings Mod.



Samen met Tropical Trees Pack maakt het natuurlijk af.

[ Voor 70% gewijzigd door catwheel18 op 08-01-2016 18:05 ]

[catwheel18]

Bron

Devlog Update 79 + Pre-Alpha 6

Pre-Alpha 6 is available now! Simply grab it from the download link that you received back when you purchased the game. Use the key resender if you lost your download link.

The full change log is at the end of this post.

We also have a Windows 64bit version available now (we already had a 64bit version for Linux, and Mac is universal).

Note: if you’re using any mods you should update them, as mods from Pre-Alpha 5 aren’t compatible anymore. Most mods should have been updated to make them compatible by now.



Jumbo Estates, by lord-gonchar

Devlog

Gordon has been very busy with Parkitect audio this week!
Here’s what he’s got to say:

Audio stuff! I know you’re as excited about sound as I am and I am VERY. EXCITED. Firstly, we have added over 200 new audio files specifically to deco items, so now we have 30 new decos that whomp and clank into place when built.
But the really exciting news is that after hearing me whine about how hard it is to get authentic carnival instrumentation, reddit user mikeymillsjr reached out and blew our minds. Mikey is a band organ enthusiast, and has got us access to an INCREDIBLE instrument/machine, a legitimate 1924 Wurlitzer 165 owned by fellow enthusiast Glenn Thomas. This thing is the real deal–an absolute work of art–and we couldn’t be happier to have access to such an amazing machine.

Not only do we now have access to a bunch of real-as-it-gets classic tunes from the early 20th century played from physical paper rolls–roughly half an hour of which will be available in this update–but the machine is equipped to accept MIDI data so we can actually get it to play original compositions as well, and it is all thanks to these two awesome guys. We seriously cannot thank you enough.

Community Update

The modding community made some exciting progress this week as well, specifically H-POPS started working on the first custom flat ride:

More progress has been made since that video, so it looks like there’ll be some cool stuff coming up soon

Pre-Alpha 6 Changelog:

- added Inverted Coaster
- added ride music
- added people <-> water interaction
- added saving color palettes, picking colors from existing objects, repainting existing objects
- added mod settings
- added sounds for: Bobsled Coaster, Vertical Drop Coaster
- added new background music
- added a couple hundred new build sound effects
- added attraction options: wait for half full, wait for full (+ Alpine Coaster can’t run without full cars anymore)
- added new rain
- guests can leave trains now before they reached the front of the station
- improved mechanics behaviour for maintaining/repairing rides with multiple stations
- improved blueprint builder preview performance (a lot)
- some AI improvements; most notably made employees return to their assigned zone if they’re outside of it
- improved track heightmarks: always keep them visible at unconnected track ends
- made sure windows don’t accidentally get lost behind menu bars
- Windows: moved savegames, blueprints and mods to “My Documents/Parkitect” folder; fixes issues on Windows 10
- Linux: should fix windows not rendering properly
- fixed terraforming tool being fiddly when raising/lowering large sections of terrain
- fixed delivery crates getting stacked so high that handymen couldn’t pick them up
- fixed objects not following cursor nicely when snapping to grid corners
- fixed guests being stuck on ride exit if exit isn’t connected to a path
- fixed changing attraction waiting time not working
- fixed bobsled trains derailing when loading the game
- fixed bobsled trains derailing when pausing the game
- fixed excessive bobsled car swing on non-tube tracks
- fixed parts of notification bar text entries/windows sometimes showing through tunnel entrances
- fixed scrolling the deco builder window using mouse wheel sometimes not working properly
- fixed path builder remove button sometimes acting unpredictable, especially when removing stairs
- fixed zone borders/park fences not rendering properly in loaded parks
- fixed file name input fields (for savegames, blueprints) allowing invalid characters
- fixed being able to select/delete underground objects while not in underground mode

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 80

Art Stream

Garret will catch up on the December art stream next week. Join us on his Twitch channel on Wednesday, 12pm PST to chat while watching new Parkitect art being created.

(Voor precieze tijden klik hier)

Devlog

It’s been a bit of a boring week for the devlog. Garret has been ill all week, but he’s better now.

I updated the game to use the latest Unity version, which as usual fixed some old issues we had in exchange for adding some new ones. Here are some of the more interesting glitches I encountered:





After a bit of work it’s running fine again now.

I also spent some time on internal tools, like this one that identifies some common problems with our audio setup:



And finally I tried an idea for getting the problem with people walking in circles on wide paths a bit under control:



It works alright on 2 and 3 tile wide paths, which seem to be the most common ones. On wider paths or big plazas it doesn’t work perfectly but reduces the problem. I think it’s a good tradeoff between an ideal solution and being performance friendly, but we’ll have to see what happens once everyone gets to play with it.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 81

Art Stream

We had another fun art stream this week - and to get back on our normal schedule there’ll be another one next week!
As usual, it’ll be on Wednesday, 2pm PST on Garrets Twitch channel.

(Voor precieze tijden klik hier)

Counting Down To

Devlog

The deco builder window received an overhaul this week. We added object categories to organize everything a bit better, and the window also opens faster again because it doesn’t have to load everything at once.



The categories themselves aren’t finalized yet.

Garret set up this style guide for wall pieces to make sure all of our wall sets (and modded ones) will somewhat fit together.



We also released some objects for modders as scale reference. You can get them here.

He also reworked the existing castle walls to fit this style and added a bunch of nice new objects
Raised dirt paths turn into these shaky wooden constructions now.



We also added some SSAO. It’s really subtle and hard to see in a side-by-side comparison, but it does make a difference in the game and works well with our art style. Some closeups, first without SSAO:



And with SSAO:



If you properly want to see the difference, open the images in new tabs and switch between them.

[ Voor 6% gewijzigd door catwheel18 op 24-01-2016 22:49 ]

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 83

It’s been a very busy week for us!
Pre-Alpha 7a was released earlier this week with a couple of good fixes, so you should get that if you haven’t already. Pre-Alpha 7 introduced a few issues on some Mac and Linux systems, but we’ll have to wait for Unity to resolve those.

We added some decorative TV screens to the game that show a slide show of your park:



Delivery crates received stickers showing their contents:



There’s a new animation for the mechanic, so you can actually see him fixing the ride now instead of magically making it work again:



And most flat rides received a setting for adjusting how many rounds they go:

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 84

Garret spent a lot of time this week on money balance. As usual with balance it’s nothing final, but you can actually build some profitable parks now. Feels better and is a good first step towards a working economy

There’s been a suggestion over on our subreddit recently to allow connecting paths to the ride entrance/exit from the sides instead of just from the front that gained a lot of support, and we were able to make it happen:



And we added a toggle for looking through scenery:



Scenery can’t be clicked in this mode, so this allows to access shops, rides, paths or whatever else was hidden behind scenery, and you won’t accidentally delete it.

Community Update

You might remember H-POPS as the guy who added the first custom flat ride to Parkitect a while ago. He’s been very busy since with creating a fantastic looking modding tool that allows bringing custom objects into the game without requiring any code. It also has some other helpful features like setting up collisions on objects, which has been tricky to do for mods so far.

And most of all it has really great tools for animating rides with just a couple of mouse clicks:

It’s making use of the games code for ride animations, so ride animations created with this are able to perfectly match the feeling of our own rides.
We also gave him some of our internal tools for integration into his modding tool.
This is not available yet, but it looks like it’s progressing nicely

Luuk Holleman from ParkitectNexus released a nice Billboards mod recently:



These billboards can show your own images, and it even stores them in the savegame, so you can easily share them with other users of this mod!

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 85

Art Stream

Next week is the last Wednesday of the month once again, and that means it’s time for another Art Stream! Join us on Garrets Twitch channel at 2pm PST to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

(Voor precieze tijden klik hier)

Devlog

We’re all very busy currently, working on many different parts of the game at once and it feels like we’re getting lots of good stuff done. It’s exhausting, but that’s alright

We finally found a look for flowing water that we’re satisfied with:



The object deletion tool was improved to allow deleting stuff much faster, which is mostly useful for scenery. Simply hold and drag the mouse around after right-clicking an object to only delete objects of the same type/from the same category:



And we added the first park utility building, the Staff Room:



For now it’s simply a place for staff to take a break so they don’t have to hang out on benches with the park guests.

And another first: we added the first dark ride, the Ghost Mansion Ride!



It’s a slow ride with self-powered trains.
The cars can rotate into any direction as defined by the track designer:



Similar to brake segments the segment length influences the rotation speed, so you’ve got a bit of control over that. For example here’s a rotation on a short segment:



And the same rotation on a longer segment:



This ride is more limited in its build options compared to big coasters with their loops and whatnot, but having this rotation option makes it still interesting. Pretty happy with it overall

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 86 + Pre-Alpha 8

Pre-Alpha 8 is now available for download!

Grab it from the download link that you received back when you purchased the game.
Use the key resender if you lost your download link.

The full change log is at the end of this post.



WIP Park, by 72206

Devlog

If you’ve used any Parkitect mods (such as the ones seen in the screenshot above) then you’ve probably used the great scenery sets by Kenney, so we’re very happy to say that Kenney is now supporting us with creating official scenery sets for the game

A lot of time this week was spent on figuring out standards to make sure that pieces from different sets and themes work together as good as possible and follow the same style. The first results are this generic set from Kenney that should work with about every theme:



And Garret made a set of spooky walls during the Art Stream this week:



And we finally added the Spiral Slide ride that Garret made during a Stream a while back:



Pre-Alpha 8 Changelog

- added Staff Room
- added Ghost Mansion Ride
- added Spiral Slide
- added generic and spooky walls
- added setting to flat rides for controlling how many rounds they go
- added “see through scenery” toggle
- added connecting to ride entrances/exits from the sides
- added color filters to graphics settings menu
- added TV deco objects
- added ride repair animation
- added log flume water flow animation
- added delivery crate stickers
- added fast object deletion: right-click an object, then drag the mouse around to only delete objects from the same category
- added recoloring multiple objects by click-dragging with the brush tool
- changed castle walls to be recolorable
- a bunch of game balance adjustments
- made path styles moddable
- fixed not being able to right-click-delete queues sometimes
- fixed custom colors of entrance tile not updating when recoloring queue
- fixed a case where guests stepped onto employee paths (possibly ride platforms too?)
- fixed Janitors not cleaning up if you dropped them on a pile of trash
- fixed bad path cursor positioning when right-click-deleting paths
- fixed delivery crates of removed shops staying around forever (get reused now if needed)
- fixed not being able to initiate angle slider drag by clicking anywhere on the circle
- fixed terraforming tools stopping to work when switching between tabs
- fixed guests occasionally leaving train before it’s fully inside station

[catwheel18]

bron

Devlog Update 87

Pre-Alpha 8 was released on Monday, so we took some time this week to watch people play to see what common problems they encountered and to find the areas that we need to improve most. The time right after a release is also great for fixing long-standing issues and improving old code, because if I break something now we’ve got a couple weeks left until the next release to notice it (on the contrary, doing bigger changes a couple days before release is always a bit scary).

We also worked on giving our website a makeover. Almost done! Won’t go online for a couple weeks though

We added a tilt-shift effect (blur near the top and bottom of the screen to make everything look more like a miniature):



It is disabled by default, but if you want to take some nice screenshots or record videos or even play with it there’s an option for it.

And we added the Tourbillon ride:



It looks a bit like something out of a science fiction movie, but it is a real ride currently in development. The movement pattern in the game is randomized.

Vine video.

[ Voor 4% gewijzigd door catwheel18 op 07-03-2016 16:12 ]

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 88

Blueprints got a lot cooler this week - they can contain about anything now!
Scenery…



Paths, Flat Rides, Shops…



And any combination of these really, even multiple coasters:



You might remember from last years Blueprintannouncement postt that unlike savegames they can only store up to a certain amount of data, but don’t worry:



The Pier, by kev-vink

There is a lot of space - you could put entire small parks into it. The above blueprint is only filled to 40%.

You pick the objects that go into the blueprint with a rectangle or individual object selection tool:



We can’t wait to see what you’ll come up with!



Stone Man, by TheDeeGee

We also added new cobblestone and gravel path styles:

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 89

We remade the settings screen:



Apart from looking nicer there’s now a proper way to rebind keys and we’re adding a bunch of new hotkeys. This is also open to modding, so mods can make their controls configurable through this and register their own hotkeys.
The Graphics tab gained options for changing the resolution, which means we can finally disable Unitys default configuration launcher that opened before the game.

Guests now properly head for certain parts of the park even if they don’t own a map, but less frequently than if they have one.

Fences can be raised now (and there’s a new one), rocks received some coloring options, and we added some missing roof pieces:



(Couldn’t think of a proper building to showcase these, heh)

Flat rides can use the “spooky” platform fences that were only used by the Haunted House so far, or you can disable them entirely for easier theming:



We also changed the approach how we’re calculating the excitement rating of tracked rides since the old one didn’t work for dark rides like the Ghost Mansion Ride. We did a balancing pass that should result in some more diversified and fair excitement ratings, but as usual with balancing we’ll see how that works out once everyone gets to play with it.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 90

Art Steam

Time for another Art Stream! Join us on Wednesday at 2pm PST on Garrets Twitch channel to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

(Voor precieze tijden klik hier)

Counting Down To

Devlog

It’s almost exactly 2 years this week since we started working on Parkitect, so we thought we’d do something different for the devlog: let’s take a look back at some pictures from the very beginning of development, from before this blog started
Alright!



It all started out as an experiment on simulating coasters, so naturally the first gif shows some early coaster physics. The tracks are just lots of boxes placed along a curve. This must be from the first couple days of development.



A few days later there are multiple trains, a station, banked segments, and the tracks have been cleaned up to get an idea how properly looking coaster tracks could be done.





Fast-forward a week and there are guests who can ride the coaster, get some food and sit on benches. That hot dog is the only programmer art that’s still in the game! I’m somewhat proud of that.



Another week later we got some very basic terrain and path building tools. Until this point there were no building tools, everything from the previous tests was placed in the game from code. The first terrain experiments were voxel-based, but it was clear very quickly that this wouldn’t work very well from an isometric camera perspective and it would be too ambitious for a single programmer considering with how many other systems (paths, coasters, water) it would have to work.



Coasters learned to derail, although they didn’t always behave like you’d expect.



With some very basic coaster building tools it was now possible to sort of build a park!



Balloons have been in the game for a very long time.



Garret joins the project mid-April and creates this mockup for what the “final” art might look like.



Around the end of April the first proper art is being put into the game.



And the work on flat rides begins - the first one is an exciting square beam to sit on!



By the end of May a lot more art has been done, including some rides and shops that are still in the game.









The long and tiring process of searching for a name for the game begins, and we start working on intuitive building tools that normal players can actually use.



Near the end of August we have enough of the game working in a very basic but presentable state to have an idea what it’ll take us to finish it. It gets Kickstarted and this blog begins

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 91 + Pre-Alpha 9

Pre-Alpha 9 is now available for download!

Grab it from the download link that you received back when you purchased the game.
Use the key resender if you lost your download link.

The full change log is at the end of this post.


Enchanted Gardens, by muuuh

Devlog

We finished the UI for creating and building blueprints:



Building raised objects has been improved to be faster and easier:



And we spent some time on performance improvements. Especially guest performance is much better now, so we increased their spawn rate too

Pre-Alpha 9 Changelog

- added Tourbillon
- added general purpose blueprints (can contain about anything now)
- added cobblestone and gravel path styles
- added changing fence style of flat rides
- added Tilt Shift option to graphics settings menu (disabled by default)
- added options for hiding paths, attractions
- added renaming people
- added new settings screen (+ changing resolution, rebinding keys)
- added a few missing scenery structure pieces
- guests without a map can also head for specific locations like shops and rides etc. now, but less frequently
- did a tracked ride excitement rating balance pass
- made it possible to raise fences
- changed rocks to be recolorable
- improved raised object building
- improved save/load dialog performance
- improved people performance
- overall performance improvements
- increased guest spawn rate
- improved error handling when encountering problems with loading modded objects
- fixed people sometimes getting stuck
- fixed ride entrance/exit sometimes rotating towards a path it couldn’t connect with
- fixed a case where deleting a bobsled coaster station would crash the game
- fixed a case where guests would never leave a coaster
- fixed round settings of some flat rides getting reset
- fixed zoning tools and other mouse tools deleting objects when right-clicking
- fixes issues on Linux with Nvidia GPUs

[Donstil]

Mm ben benieuwd.

[ Voor 15% gewijzigd door Donstil op 06-04-2016 12:04 ]

[catwheel18]

It’s time…



Yes! That big milestone is finally close - we’ll be releasing Parkitect on Steam Early Access on May 5th.

Our Steam store page is live already, so don’t hesitate and put the game on your wishlist!

We prepared a cool new trailer over the past few months for this occasion, made my Marlon Wiebe and Gordon:

And we also revamped our website and updated it with a bunch of recent screenshots!



The beautiful parks in these shots and in the trailer have been created by the awesome Silvarret and TheDeeGee.


So what’s changing now that the game will be on Steam?

Not too much for now for you guys, really! We’ll keep up our regular development schedule, so the weekly devlogs and monthly Art Streams and new game versions continue as usual (although - we hope we’ll be so busy talking to all the new players on Steam during May that we’ll have less time for development, so don’t expect a huge May update).

We’ll finally change the game’s label from Pre-Alpha to Alpha, so the next release will be called Alpha 1. The plan is to release this to everyone who owns the game on Humble a few days before the Steam release, just so we got a bit of time to iron out any last-minute bugs.

And we’ll also finally bump up the price slightly from $15 to$17.999, starting on May 5th (only applies for those of you who haven’t bought the game yet, of course). As was the case with the current price we expect this to stay stable for quite some time, with another small increase once significant amounts of new content and features have been added again.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 92

It’s been a pretty crazy week
We released a new trailer and announced the Steam Early Access launch date (scroll a bit further down if you missed it!). Reactions to that have been really positive, and woah did we get a lot of reactions! We’ve been really busy answering questions about the game all over the internet. Add to that the release of Pre-Alpha 9 and all the feedback for that and you can imagine there’s been a lot going on.

The remaining time this week was spent on getting the Giga Coaster into the game that you might have seen Garret model during one of our previous monthly Art Livestreams:



It can go higher and steeper than any other coaster in the game currently (although we’ll probably enable the steeper slopes for some of the other coasters too).

The coaster support code had to be a bit updated for it to allow these square supports and the angled ones that are slightly offset from the top, and after a certain height it turns off the angled side supports entirely. Some of the older coasters should benefit from these changes too.

While I was already working on supports anyways, ground-level tracks finally spawn supports if you terraform below them as you’d expect:

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 93

Art Steam

Due to the imminent Steam launch this months Art Stream will be a week earlier than usual - come join us on Wednesday at 2pm PST on Garrets Twitch channel to watch him live while he’s creating some new art for the game.

(Voor precieze tijden klik hier)

Devlog

If you’ve played the game you probably noticed that some of the audio volume seemed a bit off - especially coasters were way too silent. The problem is that our game is a bit of a special case with its near-orthographic camera and its huge range of heights at which objects can be placed: you can have certain objects like drop towers or coasters that are 50 units or so above the ground that you want to hear, and at the same time you want to hear everything that’s going on at the ground too…but not stuff that’s going on at the ground and 50 units away from the center of the screen, because if you’re zoomed all the way in, the stuff that’s on ground level and 50 units away is way off-screen.
Instead of Unitys default volume attenuation that determines volume depending on world space distances we needed one that considers whether an object is on screen or not, and we got a first version of that working now.
In short: coasters and other things should start to sound better over the next versions!

Most of this week was spent on Steam stuff though. I’ve integrated Steams content delivery systems into our build tools and can automatically create a new game build and put it onto Steam with a single click now, which is really nice
And we added support for sharing savegames and blueprints on Steam Workshop!



We’re designing the content upload tools in a way that should allow it for other services like ParkitectNexus to plug into it too.

And the track builder got an update so it can adapt better to the requirements of whatever ride you’re currently editing because we were running out of room for slope buttons with the new steeper slopes on the Giga Coaster. And for example for rides that can’t be banked the banking wheel is entirely gone now:



Less uselessly confusing visual clutter!

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 94

We haven’t added a new transport ride in a looong time, but there’s a very iconic one used in many theme parks around the world that we didn’t have yet: the Monorail! Garret modeled it during this weeks Art Stream and here it is in the game:



It’s quite fast and especially great for providing transportation to the more remote areas of your park.



We added a ride synchronization feature. You can synchronize any station (i.e. flat rides or tracked ride stations) with any amount of other stations in the park, no matter where they are located.



(We also changed the previous “Waiting Time” setting to the more intuitive separate inputs for minimum/maximum waiting time)

These settings are also carried over into blueprints, so if you for example build a dueling coaster with two separate tracks and put them both into the same blueprint, the synchronization settings will already be properly set up when someone builds that blueprint.

You can even synchronize tracked ride stations with other stations on the same track. I imagine this might be most useful for dark rides to better control in which parts of the track the trains are, but I’m sure you’ll find some other interesting uses for it



Starting with the next release we’ll change the savegame format to a new compressed one (.park) that reduces savegame size by up to ~85%. The biggest savegame I’ve seen was around 10MB and there’s plenty of disk space nowadays so savegame size was never really an issue, but with content sharing over the internet and cloud storage (and bigger parks in the future) it’s still nice to reduce this.
Don’t worry though: all your old .txt savegames will still be supported, and for those of you who like to manually edit their savegame files this only means that you have to decompress the .park file into a .txt once if you start a new park, which can be done easily with a tool like 7-Zip (or modders could easily create an own tool for it within a few minutes).

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 95 + Alpha 1

Alpha 1 is now available for download! As previously announced, aside from any remaining bug fixes this is the version we’ll release to Steam Early Access next Thursday, so if you find any serious or new problems with it please let us know!
The best place to report issues currently is on our subreddit.

Grab it from the download link that you received back when you purchased the game.
Use the key resender if you lost your download link.

The full change log is at the end of this post.



Cydonia Hills, by Silvarret

Steam Launch Day Stream

We’ll do a Stream on May 5th at 8am PST, right before the Steam launch. If you simply want to hang out and chat a bit we’d be happy if you join us on Garrets Twitch channel

(Voor precieze tijden klik hier)

Devlog

There’s a new visualization for last weeks station synchronization feature that shows connections between all synchronized stations of a ride:



It includes all indirectly synchronized rides, too - for example, the above screenshot shows the synchronization setup for the coaster, which has synchronization configured between its stations and the Drop Tower. The Drop Tower is synchronized with the Carousel though, which means that the coaster can’t start before the Carousel is ready even though it is not directly synchronized with it.
This will probably not be a common situation but it can happen.

There are also a few new decorative objects:



Aside from that there’s not too much to say this week as we’ve obviously been focused on fixing lots of small bugs and annoyances and adding some polish to make a good first impression on Steam
You can find the more notable results of that in the changelog.

Alpha 1 Changelog

- added Giga Coaster
- added Monorail
- added Steam Workshop support
- added synchronizing attraction stations
- added compressed .park savegame format for up to ~85% smaller savegames
- added ride music volume slider
- added spawning supports if terraforming below ground-level tracks
- added option for closing the park only for new guests
- added German translation
- changed attraction “maximum waiting time between new guests” setting to overall minimum/maximum waiting times
- improved people loading speed by ~70%
- improved people animation performance by ~40%
- reduced people RAM usage by ~95%
- improved guest queueing behaviour
- fixed windows could be inaccessible off-screen after changing game resolution
- fixed tracked ride stats resetting to 0 if ride breaks down
- fixed tracked ride stats being wrong on first run after loading a savegame
- fixed tracked rides sometimes allowing to use one car more than the maximum that can fit into the stations
- fixed some graphics options not being applied when loading a new park
- fixed a case where guests would drown if loaded while the car they’re on is above water
- fixed a case where people would not find paths even though their destination was reachable
- fixed a case where guests would walk into a queue without queueing after loading a savegame
- fixed queue lines getting messed up after loading savegame
- fixed guests sometimes playing walking animation when they weren’t moving
- fixed guests sometimes not properly walking through ride entrance gate when entering a ride
- fixed guests moving before “check map” animation finished playing
- fixed firing a hauler deleted the delivery crate he’s carrying
- fixed an issue where trains would drop off passengers at stations that don’t have an exit
- fixed some spinning flat rides doing one additional round at very slow speed (which would also throw off their ratings)
- fixed trash visualization not working for some path tiles

[Donstil]

Maar nog steeds die verschrikkelijk grote interface. Haast niet mee te werken zo.

[ Voor 41% gewijzigd door Donstil op 30-04-2016 18:01 ]

[ravw]

catwheel18 schreef op donderdag 05 mei 2016 @ 21:40:
[...]


Volgens mij zit dat helaas nog niet in de game. Maar het lijkt mij dat dat er wel in komt.

ja het zit er wel in .. je moet naar landschappen, zones en dan eerste zones toe wijzen en dan naar de werker gaan en dan de zone die je gemaakt heb pakken

zie hier

[ Voor 13% gewijzigd door ravw op 05-05-2016 22:28 ]

[catwheel18]

Steam Launch Day!

As a reminder, the game will be available on Steam Early Access in about an hour from now!
If you’ve previously bought the game or backed our Kickstarter you can retrieve your Steam key from your download page that you received after purchase/that we sent you through Kickstarter by using the “click to redeem on Steam” button. It should look somewhat like this:



If you lost the link to your download page, you can retrieve it using the Humble Order Resender.

Alternatively, in case you claimed the game to an Humble Bundle account you can also find the key on your Keys page:



If you followed these instructions but still have problem retrieving your download page or Steam key, you can reach us at [e-mail]

[ravw]

zo hier even een begin van mijn park

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 97

Alright, we’re somewhat back to our normal schedule!

We added a new “Overview” window that is a sort of info hub for everything in your park. It lists all attractions, shops, employees and guests and allows searching through them. For attractions it also gives a quick info about their state and allows changing the entrance fee to make changing prices on multiple rides easier.



People can be marked as “favorite”. It’s simply a little visual marker so you can more easily find them again…



…and it sorts them to the top of the “Guests” overview tab.



The park finance graphs were a bit of a remnant from when we first started working on a proper UI for the game. They never really worked and thus weren’t very useful. That’s changed now!



And we added additional graphs for the amount of guests in the park and all of the park rating categories.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 98

Art Stream

Time for another Art Stream! Join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday at 1pm PDT (=1h earlier than it used to be) to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

(Voor precieze tijden klik hier)

Devlog

We spent this week on addressing some general usability feedback and often requested features.

First of all we added an option for scaling the UI up or down. The UI always automatically scaled depending on your screens DPI which is fine for most situations, but on small laptop screens it’d use up too much space; or if you’re recording at a high resolution the UI would look fine on your screen but too small when watched on YouTubes scaled down resolutions. So that can be manually adjusted now.

One thing we always saw people struggle with in the track builder is that after selecting a special segment from the list on the right they got confused by the curve and slope buttons getting disabled. They didn’t know how to deselect these special pieces. The buttons for the special pieces were simple toggles, so to deselect a piece you’d have to click on it again, but we noticed people would try to click on about any button in the builder UI (including the disabled ones) instead of clicking on the selected piece again to deselect it.

So we’re not disabling the curve and slope buttons anymore, and clicking on any special piece but the selected one will deselect it.



This allowed us to add another thing that got requested a lot: building a piece by clicking on the already selected option a second time. We couldn’t do this so far because that was already reserved for deselecting pieces.



Sometimes it wasn’t clear what certain pieces do or why they can’t be built in some situations, so we added tooltips to help with that.



Input fields for currencies and other numbers got formatted properly and received spinner buttons to speed up doing small adjustments. You can also adjust values using the scroll wheel if you’ve got one on your mouse.



And finally, shops received an option for keeping their prices synchronized across the park.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 99 + Alpha 2

Alpha 2 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.



Thrillville, by muuuh

Devlog

We added the Inverted Dark Ride this week:



It has powered trains and the seat rotation can be controlled by the track.
It’s also a bit of a hybrid between a dark ride and a coaster - the track can control the trains speed, so you can make it run slowly through some thematic scenes and then speed up and get quite fast (for a dark ride at least) to add some more thrilling parts to the ride:



We also added Dutch and Danish translations - thanks so much to everyone helping with translating the game over on our translation website!

Community Update

H-POPS released Mod Spark this week, his Parkitect modding tool. It has support for creating all sorts of custom park objects including flat rides, shops, path types and even coaster trains. This tool makes creating mods as easy as it can get, so if you want to get into creating mods for Parkitect you should definitely give it a look

Alpha 2 Changelog

- added Inverted Dark Ride
- added “Overview” window that gives an overview of rides/shops/staff/guests and allows searching for them
- added marking staff/guests as favorites to more easily find them again
- added graphs for park population, park ratings
- added synchronized product prices across shops
- added brakes for gentle slopes
- added lift ends act like block brakes
- added UI scale option
- added option for snapping camera to isometric angles (45°)
- added guests remember their favorite ride
- added rebinding for more keys
- added volume setting for people voices
- added spinner buttons to number input fields + changing values using scrollwheel
- added Dutch and Danish translations
- adjusted how much guests are willing to pay for park entrance depending on prices of rides in the park
- improved track builder usability
- improved attraction safety stat (didn’t really work as intended previously)
- improved interaction of block segments with stations
- improved handling of shopkeepers
- improved handling of errors during game startup
- improved initial game loading screen to be responsive while loading and added a loading animation so it’s clear that it didn’t crash
- improved savegame and blueprint load/save times by up to ~20%
- overall performance improvements
- fixed finance graphs and improved them
- fixed guests would never throw away their trash except on paths with trash bins
- fixed guests releasing balloons while on rides
- fixed guests staying stuck in queue if queue is deleted below them
- fixed a case where guests could step onto employee paths
- fixed a rare case where people could get stuck
- fixed a rare case where a guest would never leave the park until the savegame is reloaded
- fixed being able to place Star Shape, Spiral Slide in invalid positions
- fixed being able to build tracks below 0
- fixed a case where employees would stop working
- fixed balloons still having color in visualization views
- fixed background music

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 100

Paths don’t connect through fences anymore:



(and recolored flowers look nicer now too)

Putting a fence on a raised path replaces the default handrails entirely with the fence:



There’s a new shark costume for the entertainer:



And we’re adding a set of brick walls



There’s already a very nice modded brickwork set by grautur, but it uses geometry for the individual bricks and grout. Our wall is a simple flat quad with a texture and a normal map to give the bricks some subtle depth, which should be better for performance.

[catwheel18]

Laatste 3 Devlog Updates repost heb ik niet geplaatst vanwege afwezigheid.

Hier kan je ze lezen.

Devlog Update 104 + Alpha 3

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



Riverwood Themepark (no mods), by xRBz

Devlog

Devlog Update 104! I guess that means 2 years of weekly devlogs, wow

Garret modeled a Motion Simulator ride during this weeks Art Stream. At just 2x2 tiles it is the smallest ride in the game and should work nicely to fill some gaps in parks that are running out of space.
Getting the animation working in the game with the hydraulics and all turned out to be a bit more difficult than originally expected, but here it is:



(Animation shortened for GIF)

And we added cloud shadows:



They’re fairly subtle but help visualize the current weather a bit better.

Team

I’ve been the sole programmer working on Parkitect so far and it would’ve been cool to finish it alone… there’s a bunch of work left though and our sale numbers are looking good enough that we can afford to bring on some people to lower the work load and speed things up a bit, so Luuk and Tim from ParkitectNexus are joining us part time to help with programming tasks.
Welcome to the team!

Alpha 3 Changelog

- added Motion Simulator
- added Shark costume for Entertainer
- added brick walls set and some industrial props
- added sounds for Giga Coaster, Mini Coaster, Alpine Coaster, Suspended Coaster, Monorail, Ghost Mansion Ride, Inverted Dark Ride
- added new path style
- added paths don’t connect through walls and fences anymore
- added paths don’t spawn handrails if wall/fence already exists in same location
- added working queue signs
- added text signs that can be put on paths and act as “no entry” signs
- added underwater tunnels
- added track tunnels automatically updating when terraforming
- added search bar for blueprints
- added embedding log flume tracks into water/terrain without spawning tunnels
- added stats graphs for tracked rides
- added cloud shadows
- added Dutch names
- improved the look of flowers
- improved the look of tunnels (look darker on the inside)
- improved savegame load times by up to ~50%
- fixed a case where guests could queue for a closed attraction
- fixed various issues with building fences
- fixed guests rarely thought an empty queue is full and didn’t enter it
- should fix very rare case where mechanics could get stuck in ride exit gates

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 105

This weeks devlog entry is by Em!

Hi, I’m Em and I work with Gord at A Shell in the Pit Audio making sounds for Parkitect.
This week I had an exciting opportunity to visit Vancouver’s one and only Amusement Park; Playland, on a field recording trip. Christopher Tammik joined in the adventure and we each attended armed with a recorder and microphone. We went thinking that we were going to have to be quite stealthy, but ended up only sneaking our gear under clothes and scarves on the more intense rides. We rode the mini train a ridiculous amount of times with no questions asked! (With the exception of some curious kids, which you’ll hear in the following recording.)



The aim for this game in particular was to capture as many mechanical, engine, and rattling sounds as possible while avoiding people and music. Not the easiest thing to do even on an overcast monday, but we did manage to grab some great stuff. The interesting thing to note about what you hear in the game is that these recordings are not going to be used only for their corresponding rides, and they’re not going straight in as recorded. The squeaky clacking of the mini-train could be a single layer amidst multiple for any ride in the game.

soundcloud opname Em Audible Mini Train



So we pull discrete loops and segments out of these recordings. For example, this mini coaster:

soundcloud opname Em Audible Mini Coaster

What you build in your theme park won’t correspond to this 30 second long mini coaster ride. We’ll simply extract similar bumpy and rattly segments of the recording, edit them together, and make it loop seamlessly so it can work for any coaster you build. In Parkitect we create 5 different speed loops per coaster, including the climb loop, which this ride had a great sound for. We were also able to get close enough to the lift mechanism on Playland’s wooden coaster (one of the oldest in the world!) and record a super long segment. That one will most likely be hidden in a couple different rides. In the Wooden Coaster, it was very challenging to keep the microphone steady; it was hard enough holding on and being thrown about the seat.

soundcloud opname Em Audible Wooden Coaster Winch



Other than coasters we were after engines. The louder the engine, the more it would drown out all the background noise of the crowd and music, which all gets recorded and added in separately. It was usually loudest inside the ride, so we spent a lot of time running around riding everything we could. (Yes, this is a real job.) Though it did get to the point where even the kids rides like tea cups were making us feel sick. Note to anyone planning something like this: Do not ride the most spinny thing first.
Here is one of my favourite engine sounds, the scrambler. I cleaned some of the crowd shouts out a little bit but the engine was powerful enough that I didn’t need to alter it too much.

soundcloud opname Em Audible Scrambler

That’s all for now, next up is a trip to a sightseeing train crawling through a vast park. Hope you enjoyed reading about our fun trip. See if you can find these sounds somewhere in the game later! It won’t be easy.



Here’s a merry little video to close off.

[Video: https://twitter.com/emaudible/status/750149643070152704]

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 106

The parks you guys are building are getting crazier all the time, so I’ve spent the last two weeks almost entirely on performance optimizations.
There are three major areas that have been improved.

Rendering

Big Parkitect parks can contain tens or even hundreds of thousands of objects, and Unity was not too great at rendering lots of individual objects so far.
That’s why we’ve been eagerly looking forward to upgrade to Unity 5.4, which we’ve been testing over the last half year or so and which seems stable enough to use now.
Unity 5.4 adds instancing, which is a technique that allows faster rendering of multiple copies of the same object and moves a bunch of work that previously needed to be done on the CPU over to the GPU. Due to the way scenery works in Parkitect the same objects are usually on screen tens or hundreds of times and as a simulation game we need all the CPU time we can get, so that’s perfect
They also added experimental support for improved multithreaded rendering, which helps quite a bit as well.

Guests

We want to have as many guests in the park as possible, so they have already received the most attention for optimizations in the past.
There were still some improvements left to be done though, especially for off-screen people.

Mouse picking

Some of the parks you’ve built got so big that even something as seemingly trivial as figuring out what object is below the mouse could become a performance problem.
We’ve previously used Unitys mesh colliders for this; their intended purpose is more for adding physics interactions to a couple of objects, but it worked well enough in the past.
Since the game received scenery and more content though we’ve seen parks were it could take up to a second to figure out what’s below the mouse in extreme cases…so we’ve replaced that with a custom solution now that’s more suited for our needs and brings that time down to a couple milliseconds.

Results

We’ve tested with a couple of different scenes. Here are some of the results on two of our test systems (graphs showing milliseconds required to calculate each frame, so less is better):





More stuff

Stuff going wrong can cause performance issues as well. Especially right after game updates we’re receiving a bunch of reports about strange issues and performance problems that are usually caused by mods not being compatible with the newest game version yet. Luuk worked on this error window that identifies broken mods and contains the error message so that the problem can be reported to the mod author:



Tim worked on allowing to set specific colors for certain shop products:



And on this area delete tool that lets you select a bunch of objects at once (like the selection tool for creating blueprints) and then delete them:



And we’re displaying some of the controls on screen now depending on context, which should help new players (can be disabled). Eventually this should evolve into a proper tutorial.



And there are some new palm trees:

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 107

Art Stream

It’s Art Stream time again! Join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday at 1pm PST to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

(Voor precieze tijden klik hier)

Devlog

We’re mostly busy with making sure everything still works and runs stable after the engine upgrade. After some days of testing it turned out that the “experimental” improved multithreaded rendering in Unity 5.4 is labeled so for a reason We’ll not use it for now which costs a couple FPS compared to last weeks test results, but at least we know that it’s something to look forward to in a future update.
The tracked ride visualizations received an update. So far we’ve only been able to show one value for the entire segment, which was precise enough for most cases but a bit lacking on longer segments like the loops or scaled up curves. Here’s an example showing the velocity:



It shows the train loosing speed as it nears the top of the loop and gaining speed afterwards now, as you’d expect. We also added a second color to distinguish between positive and negative vertical Gs:



(And there’s finally a lateral Gs view too)
And here’s a new 4D Cinema

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 108 + Alpha 4

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



Heavens Gardens, by CoasterB

Devlog

We added a Spinning Coaster:



And we worked on audio. One of the main problems we had with audio for a long time was that the default way how Unity handles it doesn’t work well with our game due to its near-orthographic perspective. Consider this scene:



There’s a red coaster on the ground and a blue coaster that’s been raised. They are both roughly in the same position on the screen from this view. Now the way Unity figures out what’s audible and what’s not is that you place an “audio listener” somewhere in the scene. You can imagine that it works somewhat like a microphone - everything close to the listener is loud and the further away an audio source is from it the less audible it becomes. The yellow circle in this example shows everything that’s within the audible range of the audio listener:



Looks about right! But if we look at it from another perspective…



…the two coasters are actually not close to each other at all and no matter where we place the audio listener, one of them will always be outside of its range. We could increase the range, but then we’d hear audio sources that are way off-screen.
What we really needed was a way to control the volume of an audio source depending on its position on screen instead of its physical distance to the audio listener, and that has been added now.
This also means that we need to rebalance our audio, so if things sound a bit too loud or too silent currently that’s why

Alpha 4 Changelog

- significant performance improvements
- added Spinning Coaster
- added 4D Cinema
- added palm trees
- added customizable colors for some shop products
- added area delete tool
- added controls instructions (beginning of a tutorial system)
- added monitor selection
- added camera scroll/zoom sensitivity settings
- added autosave + save hotkey (Z by default)
- added more rebindable keys
- added detection of performance problems due to mods
- added lateral and longitudinal G visualizations + graphs
- improved audio panning
- improved tracked ride stat visualizations
- improved weather
- improved Janitor behaviour for cleaning dirty toilets
- improved translation support
- increased guest spawn rate by 25%
- fixed stat heatmap visualizations not working on lowest quality settings
- fixed rides saying they have outdated values after loading savegame
- fixed raised objects not being placed at correct height if raising over sloped terrain
- fixed broken employee colors
- fixed errors when trying to load a savegame containing non-existant tracked rides (e.g. missing mods)

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 109

We added a deco object pipette/cloning tool:



I think this one has been suggested a couple times, and it really speeds up building quite a bit. Simply select any deco object in the park and you can instantly build copies of it (including the same custom colors and custom size of the selected object). Pretty useful and not too complicated to implement, that are my favorite features

Between the Alpha 4 release and a patch for it we’ve started working on some bigger tasks that’ll likely keep us busy for the majority of this month. Luuk started with the scenario designer which will ultimately allow us to offer different starting parks with different settings and challenges instead of just the simple empty flat sandbox you all had to put up with for so long. That’ll come one step at a time though and the first task is just getting some UI working and allowing to create different terrain sizes

Meanwhile I’ve started working on something that’ll improve handling of trash and shop resources - you’ll certainly need that in bigger parks

More on both of these probably next week once there’s a bit more ready to show.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 110

So here’s how trash and deliveries will be handled in bigger parks:



A new “Deliveries” building will replace the current crate and trash stacking tiles. It can be connected through pneumatic tubes and conveyor belts to “Depots” that can be placed throughout the park. Shops can be associated with a Depot; if they are, crates will automatically travel to that Depot, from where they then get picked up by Haulers and manually transported the final meters to the shop instead of all the way from the crate stack. Inversely, trash can be dropped off at a depot and then gets automatically pumped to the Deliveries building.
This might sound weird and unrealistic at first, but at least the Disney parks are known to really use a trash disposal system that operates like this (AVAC)!
I’m not aware of a park that uses an automated system for transporting goods, but there are warehouses and airports that operate huge conveyor belt systems like that, so it’s not entirely unrealistic at least - and it should be fun and makes sense for gameplay reasons to have this, so we’re taking that small liberty here.
So far I’ve got the tube/conveyor building working (it works like building paths).

Luuk continued with the scenario editor and made progress with creating tools for defining the owned park area:



Tim added tracking of shop and attraction revenue:



Still lots to do to get all of this operational! Usually we break work down into much smaller tasks that don’t all necessarily have to be completed at once, so even if some tasks aren’t done in time for the monthly alpha update we can ship whatever is ready at that point and it’ll still work… but with these things either the whole system is complete or the entire feature needs to get delayed.
We have a couple weeks left to make it happen but it still makes me a bit nervous…we’ll see!

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 111

We got the crate transportation to and from the depots working:



As described last week, the Depots have to know for which shops they are responsible. We reused parts of the UI for synchronising attractions for setting this up:



All shops got updated with doors in the back. If possible employees prefer using those instead of entering the shop from the front, even if it means taking a detour.



Garret made some nice new awnings:



Tim made good progress with the scenario editor. Scenario files can be saved now and it’s possible to place park entrances and guest spawn points.



There’s a bunch of polish and UI work left to do but it’s starting to become usable

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 112

Art Stream

It’s the end of the month, so it’s time for another Art Stream once again! Join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday at 1pm PST to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

Devlog

Garret has been busy with making all kinds of decorative objects for the medieval theme:



And there’s also this brick wall and scaffolding set:



I made slopes and supports work for the transport system, and transporting trash out of the park:



And Tim and Luuk continued with the scenario editor. Still a bunch of UI left to do though and we also need to make sure that old savegames still work with all of these changes.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 113 + Alpha 5

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



Devlog

Phew! We managed to get it all stable just in time for this months Alpha update. Somehow this update felt like the trickiest and most exhausting one so far, even though the changelog is shorter than usual.

Garret made some more medieval props. This concludes the work on the medieval set for now.



Changelog

- added resource and trash transport system
- added beginnings of the scenario editor
- added deco object pipette tool (easily clone any deco object)
- added shop and attraction sales stats
- added restocking shops from the back
- added a bunch of deco objects (medieval props, awnings, scaffolding)
- added czech translation (thanks Jan!)
- performance improvements (overall, reduced terrain loading times)
- fixed weather not updating after one year
- fixed guests being confused about where they want to go after using a transportation ride
- fixed path attachments sometimes not being built in the same position that’s shown as preview
- fixed not being able to select objects through path tunnels

[ Voor 5% gewijzigd door catwheel18 op 05-09-2016 22:31 ]

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 115

We added a Hydraulically-launched Coaster! On a special launch track segment the catch-car grabs the train and accelerates it:



Additionally this coaster features vertical sections with rolls.



(We’ll have to improve the supports for something like that, it looks a bit weird right now.)
Luuk added thunderstorms. They turned out really nice:



We’ll leave it to you to discover what they do

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 116

Art Stream

September is almost over, and you know what that means - time for another Art Stream! Join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday at 1pm PST to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

(Voor precieze tijden klik hier)

Devlog

Luuk added guest settings to the scenario editor to allow tweaking the scenario difficulty a bit:



Tim is working on loans. You’ll be offered a couple of loan options with different interest rates and runtimes to choose from that change every now and then.
Once this is complete we can start working on money balance and going bankrupt to finally get away from the purely sandbox-only scenarios

Employee paths reflect the color of the zone they are in:

[ Voor 5% gewijzigd door catwheel18 op 28-09-2016 12:01 ]

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 117 + Alpha 6

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



Pinewood Acres, by PulseDesign

Devlog

This week, we put the bumper cars into the game that Garret made during the last Art Stream:



The finance overview was one of the first pieces of proper UI we put into the game early last year. Back then it seemed like a good idea to keep it very compact, but in the end it made things a bit cluttered and confusing.
Luuk replaced it with a proper table that should be more helpful:



Tim completed the loans for now:



Since you can’t go bankrupt yet they aren’t terribly useful at the moment, but they’re in Alpha 6 anyways for gathering feedback.

Changelog

- added Hydraulically-launched Coaster
- added Bumper Cars
- added loans (you can’t go bankrupt yet, so this is just for gathering feedback on it)
- added attraction maintenance costs
- added thunderstorms
- added rain ambiance
- colorized employee paths by zone color
- audio improvements
- improved finance overview
- improved performance of large terrain area selections/zones rendering
- macOS: using Metal renderer if available
- fixed not being able to synchronize with stations of same tracked ride anymore
- fixed people getting stuck inside utility buildings/ride platforms if dropped onto them
- fixed problems with placing stuff on the terrain border
- fixed being able to change banking angle using scroll wheel if banking angle slider is disabled
- fixed issues when placing objects next to the terrain border

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 118

We started with some bigger tasks this week that’ll probably keep us busy for the majority of this month, so expect more of the same for the next couple blog posts

I started implementing the Go-karts Garret modeled a while ago. What makes them tricky is that they work unlike any other tracked ride we have in the game so far - there are multiple cars racing and overtaking each other at the same time over multiple laps, so figuring that out was the first and most important task. It’s mostly working:



Next up there are lots of smaller details left to do (including making the road look less flat ). More progress on that next week!

Luuk started working on advertisement campaigns. It’ll be possible to run advertisements for the park or for individual shops and attractions. A big part of the UI and some of the functionality is done:



More on how advertisements work next week.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 119

Continued with the Go-karts all week long - had lots of small little tasks left to do that ate a bunch of time. I think they’re done now though



And here they are in motion:



Luuk continued with advertisements. After an ad campaign finishes you’ll get feedback about how effective the campaign was. Running the same ads all the time reduces their effectiveness because everybody you can reach already knows about them, so it makes sense to take breaks inbetween campaigns instead of using them to “buy” a constantly high amount of guests.



Tim is currently working on unlocking rides and other game content through research. You can hire multiple research teams that can work on different things.



This is a big task as well so there’ll probably be more updates on this over the next couple weeks.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 120

Art Stream

Hey, it’s time for the October Art Stream! Come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday at 1pm PST to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

(Voor precieze tijden klik hier)

Devlog

You’ll have to pay a bit more attention to your especially grumpy guests in the future - we added vandalism this week.



This finally gives the Security staff a purpose, and the Mechanics got an additional task as well: they repair vandalized objects when walking past them.

[ Voor 6% gewijzigd door catwheel18 op 26-10-2016 13:50 ]

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 121 + Alpha 7

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



Heavens Gardens Halloween Edition, by CoasterB

Devlog

Tim continued with Research to get it all ready in time for Alpha 7
For scenarios it’s now possible to define which things are available/can be researched:



Note that our current default scenario already has everything available, so for now you’ll have to create your own scenario to actually research anything.

Gordon finished another background music song, and it’s awesome! Check it out:

A Shell in The Pit Dandelion Chins

Changelog

- added Go-karts
- added ad campaigns
- added research (note that in the default scenarios everything is already researched)
- added vandalism
- added a new background song
- added a bunch of new sounds
- added changing transparency of hidden objects
- added steeper slopes for wooden coaster
- improved grid lines/height markers/cost labels when building paths/resource pipes
- improved how tasks get assigned to workers, should prefer nearby workers and respect zones more
- small balancing changes
- fixed being able to delete deliveries building transport system connector
- fixed block section lengths not affecting maximum train length usable on track
- fixed acceleration on hydraulic launch sections not being as intended
- fixed off-screen trees not being selected by bulldozer tool
- fixed Janitors getting confused about where to dump trash if there was an unconnected Depot nearby
- fixed camera jittering when following a coaster train
- fixed not showing anything for some untranslated text instead of using the english text as default

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 122

We plan to spend this month mostly on improving existing content - fixing bugs, polishing, and most importantly doing some balancing, starting with tracked ride stats. This means playing the game for a while, taking note of things that feel wrong, changing some numbers around and then repeating that as many times as possible.
It’s a slow process that takes a lot of time, so to speed it up a bit Luuk built a tool for us that takes a bunch of ride blueprints, automatically builds them in an empty park, and saves some test results into a nicely formatted table that looks like this:



It tells us the current stats of the coasters and how they changed compared to the previous run of the tool, so we can easily see the impact our changes make and work on something else while the tool runs in the background.

We’ve also collaborated with StolleJay to bring his custom props that nicely fit the new Go-karts and some of his other custom scenery objects as official content into the game

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 123

Just a quick update this week since we’ve continued the balancing/polishing/fixing work started this month as expected. The coaster intensity ratings look pretty good to us now so we’re moving on to the nausea ratings next.

We’ve also overhauled the notifications UI. They slide in from the right edge of the screen now:



But most importantly there’s a new “Ongoing” tab to inform you about everything happening right now that might need your attention.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 124

Art Stream

Oh hey, time for the next Art Stream! Come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (November 30th) at 1pm PST to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

(Voor precieze tijden klik hier)

Devlog

And once again we continued with this month of cleanup/balancing improvements. Ride nausea ratings are looking much better now.

We had some time left to add some new content, and because theme parks are not just about having the crazierst coasters we felt it was time to add another calm ride. We added a classic Car Ride:



It comes with alternate cars without a roof:



And race cars are an option as well:



They were originally made for the Go-Karts ride but turned out to be too wide, but for this ride they work nicely

[ Voor 3% gewijzigd door catwheel18 op 21-01-2017 13:33 ]

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 125 + Alpha 8

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



Minimus, by kaylnaris-7

Devlog

We’ve added the Power Surge ride that Garret created during this months Art Stream. There’s also a new Pizza Stall:



Tim and Luuk added tracking for a bunch of additional statistics:



And Gordon delivered 3 new ride songs!

A Shell in The Pit ACCELERATOR

A Shell in The Pit Popped Collars

A Shell in The Pit Black Lights

And we’re making a distinction between sandbox mode and “normal” mode now when creating a new park, with the only difference so far being that you can’t spend money anymore when you’re in the red in “normal” mode.

Changelog

- added Car Ride
- added Power Surge
- added new notifications UI + ongoing notifications
- added 3 new ride music songs
- added Pizza Stall
- added new props
- added a bunch of new sounds
- added more statistics
- all kinds of balancing improvements across most parts of the game
- fixed people leaving queues after loading savegame (can still happen on first load with Alpha
- fixed not being able to pick up people while game is paused
- fixed tracked rides not restoring customized train colors properly
- fixed loans not getting paid back
- fixed dozens of smaller bugs

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 126

Unity 5.5, the latest version of the engine we’re using, was released last week and so we upgraded. It broke some minor things in the UI that we need to fix but apart from that went painless.

We changed the workers so that they only help out in other zones if there are no tasks left in their assigned zone. That improves worker efficiency a lot when using zones, but might still be a bit too “smart” - maybe if they are assigned to a zone they should not care at all what’s going on elsewhere in the park…? We’ll have to keep an eye on that.

The attraction overview list can be sorted by various ride properties now such as profit and satisfaction rate to get a quick overview of how all rides in the park are doing:



And Luuk worked on Market Research campaigns, which are a pretty useful tool I think
When starting a Market Research campaign a certain amount of guests (depending on the duration of the campaign) are asked about various topics, and in the end you receive a handy report with a bunch of graphs as result. Especially useful for deciding which kind of ride to build next should be the graph that shows the preferred ride intensities of the interviewed guests:



And you also get a snapshot of the current needs such as hunger and thirst, and their overall satisfaction with the park.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 127

It’s been a pretty exhausting week, but we got a good amount of stuff done
Here’s a new flat ride, the Turbine:



It might look like a fairly simple ride, but the physics behind the swinging gondolas took a while to get right.

And there’s a new tracked ride, the Mine Train Coaster:



The wooden supports that are also used on the Wooden Coaster were a bit messy and had some problems, so we’re cleaning them up a bit now that another ride uses them.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 128 + Alpha 9

Surprise! Alpha 9 is here a week earlier than usual! The full change log is at the end of this post.



Music Rock Park, by CoasterB

Holidays

The reason is that after working non-stop since early 2014 we’re taking a two week holiday break to recharge and think about other things than theme parks for a bit
We’ll be back in the second week of January 2017. Hope you all have nice holidays!

Devlog

Luuk added adjustable coaster lift speeds:



Tim added a bunch of scenario goals:



They can be set up in the scenario editor with customizable settings and rewards:



Experimental performance improvements

We’ve got some pretty big performance improvements coming up for multi-core systems when lots of objects are on screen. It especially helps when zooming all the way out in very detailed parks, but should also improve performance overall to a smaller degree. In our tests we’ve seen CPU load improvements of up to 35%.

Before turning them on for everyone we would like to do some more testing though! We have created a Steam beta branch for this. If you want to give it a try, right-click on Parkitect in your Steam library, then select Properties, go to the Betas tab and select “Experimental”.

Savegames are compatible between the regular and this experimental version, so you can give it a try without any risk. If you do please let us know your results!

Changelog

- added Mine Train Coaster
- added Turbine
- added Market Research
- added scenario goals
- added sorting attraction/shop list by various properties
- added adjustable chain lift speed
- employees only work on tasks outside their assigned zone if there’s nothing left to do in their zone
- less blurry shadows
- fixed Ferris Wheel being a sadness factory
- fixed all kinds of problems with wooden supports
- fixed problems with building tracked ride blueprints near park border
- fixed lag if loading a new savegame while the game is paused

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 129

Hey, welcome back! Hope you all had great holidays.

I had time to think about some of the remaining technical challenges and how to solve them. One of them were a couple of visual glitches related to tunnels. I’ve reimplemented them this week and that’s all fixed now:



There was also an annoying bug where you’d occasionally get a “location occupied” error message while building coaster tracks even though that wasn’t the case, which should be fixed now too.

Tim added adjusting the weather for scenarios. There are some presets or you can fully customize it:



And we’ve started working with Gabby. She’s a UI designer and 3D artist and is working on cleaning up and improving our UI More on that later.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 130

Art Stream

Once again, it’s time for an Art Stream! Come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (January 25th) at 1pm PST to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

(Voor precieze tijden klik hier)

Devlog

Signs can be set to “no entry” per employee type now, so you can for example keep Entertainers from running around on your shop stock supply paths:



The blueprints browser received a list of categories to make finding what you want easier:



And deco objects can be filtered by theme:



Objects are also grouped by theme in the object list now instead of purely alphabetical so that for example all the castle walls are listed together instead of having to look for them all over the place.
This is also open for modding. Mods can add their objects to an existing theme or add entirely new themes.

Garret added the wall pieces that were missing in the spooky and brick sets:



And there are a bunch of new fun animated mechanical props:



Tim made banking tracks across the 180° mark work as you’d expect (it used to snap all the way around instead of going across 180°):



This also allows building a full 360° roll using just one segment which looks smoother than building it from two segments as before.

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 131

We added the Jumper ride from this weeks Art Stream:



Tim added receiving more park area as a reward for completing scenario goals, which should allow for some interesting scenarios:



And Luuk added a default configuration for the Steam Controller. I don’t own a Steam Controller and was surprised to see how well it works in Luuks demo - almost as fast as using a mouse and keyboard. Pretty cool!

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 132 + Alpha 10

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

Devlog

When we started with this project I knew almost nothing about programming shaders, and while there’s still much left to learn I’ve gained a bit of experience. So I’ve improved the water shorelines and added refractions:



The underwater glass tunnels were faked a bit previously - we simply didn’t draw any water on top of them because I didn’t know how to make it look like they’re not flooded with water on the inside. It looked “good enough” in most cases but always bothered me and especially now with the refractions it looked weird, but I’ve figured out how to make it work properly now:



Garret started working on sciene fiction props:



And Luuk added a maintenance budget setting to rides:



Lowering the budget reduces the monthly maintenance costs but has a negative impact on safety if done for too long.

Changelog

- added Jumper
- added mechanical props
- added science fiction props
- added setting one-way signs per staff type
- added missing pieces for the brick and spooky walls sets
- added adjustable ride maintenance budget
- added receiving land as reward for scenario goals
- added configurable land costs for scenarios
- added adjustable climate for scenarios
- added returning guests
- added theme filters to deco window
- added categories to blueprints window
- added banking across the 180° mark
- added limited banking to 90° per segment size
- added restoring weather and camera position when loading savegame
- added default Steam Controller configuration/scaled up UI in Big Picture mode
- added water edges at terrain end
- improved spawn positions of guest/ride info windows so they don’t all appear in the same spot
- improved deco window performance
- improved rain performance
- improved sorting of deco objects (grouped by theme)
- improved the look of water and underwater tunnels
- improves guest animation performance
- improved stopping position in station for Vertical Drop Coaster and Wing Coaster
- should fix “location occupied” error when building coaster tracks although location isn’t occupied (let us know if it still happens)
- fixed a case where Janitors were unable to transport trash out of the park
- fixed tunnel entrances sometimes showing through terrain
- fixed visual glitches on log flume water
- fixed coaster stat graph getting messed up when switching to coaster stat tab repeatedly
- fixed deco builder entries sometimes not showing enough color buttons
- fixed lag when rotating camera while editing a coaster
- fixed lag when switching to coaster stat tab
- fixed a rare case where it was impossible to click anything after loading a savegame
- fixed Star Shape and Turbine rides sometimes being in wrong position while letting guests in after loading savegame
- fixed camera not being able to focus onto objects while game is paused
- fixed not being able to edit scenarios

[catwheel18]

Devlog Update 133

This week has been mostly maintenance work… fixing small bugs and annoyances, reducing memory allocations, all that good stuff
So here’s just a very quick update - we added two sets of metal walls and supports that were designed by StolleJay:

[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:

[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 ]

[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.

[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:

[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 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: