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This months update contains the following changes: Version 1.11e:
This months update contains the following changes: Version 1.11d:
Hey everyone, we got something really fun for you
Today we're kicking off a contest in collaboration with Busch Gardens Tampa Bay.
People who want to participate get to create something that's inspired by Parkitect and Busch Gardens Tampa Bay in Florida.
The winner will win tickets and accomodations to the park at a date of their choosing.
Read more about how to participate here: https://www.texelraptor.com/contest
This months update contains the following changes: Version 1.11c:
Hi everyone!
To celebrate Parkitects 6th anniversary, weve got a new free update for the game along with some exciting news to share!
This months update contains the following changes: Version 1.10g:
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Hey! A bit of an unscheduled update today - we've fixed a multiplayer desync issue that could happen within 1-2 minutes after starting a multiplayer session and wanted to get the fix out as soon as possible instead of waiting for the usual patch day in ~3 weeks. Have fun :) Version 1.10d:
This months update contains the following changes: Version 1.10c:
[previewyoutube=_QzSgtE68KM;full][/previewyoutube] It's been a long time coming, but it's finally happening: Parkitect is launching on PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series on July 3rd! The regular price is USD 29.99 / 24.99. The port is developed by BlitWorks Games, who are known for porting and publishing console versions of indie games such as Super Meat Boy, They Are Billions, Spelunky 2 and Kingdoms and Castles. Bringing Parkitect to consoles has been a long journey and not an easy feat. It's a big and complicated game, and apart from the technical challenges of getting the game to run at all the way the controls and UI work took a lot of thought since the PC version has clearly not been designed with gamepad controls in mind. Thankfully BlitWorks took on the challenge and endured and we think the final result turned out really nice.
This months update contains the following changes: Version 1.9e:
Hi!
We've just released a free content update that updates a bunch of old deco items to be recolorable.
There's also a good amount of new deco objects, two new entertainer costumes, and some wall and roof shapes to complete existing building sets among other smaller things.
Have fun :)
Version 1.10:
This months update contains the following changes: Version 1.9e:
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Join Jakob and Sandra as they try to help park visitors find the right attraction in a special Valentines Day stream. As usual we take the chance to show off some the amazing assets that the modding community has lovingly put together. Jakob also takes the chance to share some stories from his time working at a real life Theme Park.
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In celebration of Parkitect's 5th anniversary, Sebastian and Garret from Texel Raptor will be streaming the game. We can't believe it's been 5 years already, and we're excited to mark the occasion with some fun activities. Join us to celebrate on Twitch at 11 PM PST / 8:00 CET Later in the day, we'll also be hosting an AMA on [url=https://www.reddit.com/r/ThemeParkitect/comments/185zlf2/were_texel_raptor_the_developers_of_parkitect_ask/ at 8 AM PST / 18:00 CET where you can ask us anything. Make sure you don't miss that too!
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An experimental update for cross-platform multiplayer is now available for testing. This allows all players to play together, no matter if you're using Windows, macOS or Linux. Right now this update is experimental, which means it needs to be installed separately and only players using this update are able to join cross-platform multiplayer sessions. When the update is installed you can't join multiplayer sessions with players who are still using the regular version of the game without the update (but you can always revert back to the regular version at any time). If the tests are going well this will become the new default version of Parkitect in a few weeks, so if you are interested in cross-platform multiplayer please give it a try and let us know if you encounter any issues.
This months update contains the following changes:
- added exclusive full screen mode option - fixed elevator, turntable, switch track, seesaw and hydraulic launch system not working in edit mode when game is paused - fixed broken Italian translation - multiplayer: fixed a desync that could happen when editing an attraction while it is storming - multiplayer: fixed a desync that could happen when editing a tracked ride
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Hey everyone, the Multiplayer Update is now released!
[previewyoutube=xM6bH_Fc0fU;full][/previewyoutube]
Up to 8 people can play together, building the same park.
You can play sandbox parks together and also campaign scenarios.
The majority of mods are compatible with multiplayer mode. A few mods will need to be updated to be compatible.
You can select which DLCs to enable for a multiplayer session, so if you want to play with someone who doesn't have one of the DLCs installed you can do so by simply deselecting it.
When playing in multiplayer mode everyone works on the same park together. You can see what the other people are doing - it's a bit like everyone is playing together on the same PC:
Creating a new game or joining one is done through a lobby.
You can also directly invite your Steam friends to join. It's pretty easy!
Hey everyone, it's the 2nd anniversary of Parkitects 1.0 release this week and we've prepared something for you to celebrate:
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[previewyoutube=3lbvkOJDf5U;full][/previewyoutube] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1353170 The big free update to Version 1.6 and our second paid DLC called Booms & Blooms are available now. Here's a summary of all the changes: Booms & Blooms DLC (paid):
Hey everyone, we're excited to tell you about the Parkitect: Booms & Blooms Pack today!
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Thanks everyone for all the feedback for the 1.5/Taste of Adventure updates! We have released the following patches over the last few days:
Today's Deal: Save 25% on Parkitect!*
Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!
*Offer ends Saturday at 10AM Pacific Time
[previewyoutube=ZAiZLAeF6ao;full][/previewyoutube] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1129050/Parkitect__Taste_of_Adventure The big free update to Version 1.5 and the paid Taste of Adventure expansion are available now. Here's a summary of all the changes: Taste of Adventure expansion (paid):
We're super excited to show you the Parkitect: Taste Of Adventure DLC today!
We've been working on finishing the biggest remaining pieces for our next big update, so there's no patch release this month. It's nearing completion, so more on that hopefully soon :)
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We have finished setting up the new office and are back to proper work now :) For this month we have another patch release that mostly fixes some problems, but there's also a few nice things in there:
We have a small bugfix update for you today that resolves the following issues:
Today's Deal: Save 20% on Parkitect!*
Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!
*Offer ends Monday at 10AM Pacific Time
Half a year ago Parkitect 1.0 has been released, which seems like a milestone worthy of a small update!
Todays free update adds the following:
Knight costume for Entertainer
A fitting costume for the medieval deco theme
Photo Spots
Encourage your guests with these new path objects to marvel at your scenery and take a photo of especially beautiful places
Boat Dark Ride
A pretty high-capacity gentle water ride where guests ride in boats through nicely themed scenery. The boats have no restraints so this ride is only capable of very small drops.
Flat ride modding support
Thanks to contributions by Michael P the Parkitect Asset Editor allows modders to create completely custom flat rides now, such as this Barrel Dance ride by p.marcell
In other news, due to Garret being located in Canada and me in Germany were forced to work remotely which is working fine, but I had grown a bit tired of working from home every day for the past five years of Parkitect development. So over the last few months Ive been busy with setting up a proper small office and weve hired a second full-time programmer.Thanks to your support Parkitect has done really well and is continuing to do so, which allowed us to do this. Were all set up now to continue supporting Parkitect and new projects eventually and cant wait to pick up work at the new place in about three weeks :)
Version 1.3 is available now! It mostly fixes some annoyances, for example the default window spawn positions have been improved to not be in the center of the screen anymore (i.e., the place you want to work on and most likely dont want to have obstructed by windows...)
Since the game remembers where you dragged the windows to you will only really notice this on a fresh install. It has been annoying many new players though, so its good to have that improved.
We also overhauled the Build Challenge voting UI. The old UI always gave an advantage to entries that were submitted early. It showed the highest-rated entries first, so if you submitted a good entry very early it was likely to get to the top of the list and as a result receive even more votes and stay at the top, whereas entries that were submitted after a few days oftentimes got buried and received very few votes. This has gotten more extreme after the 1.0 launch since there are more players now.
The new voting UI looks like this:
Hi! Of course the Build Challenge will continue now that the game is properly released, so here's this months edition! The Build Challenge tasks you with building a certain type of ride within a given footprint and with a limited budget, with a new challenge starting every month. The top 5 entries get included in the game as default ride blueprints.
Parkitect has an official Korean translation now, and the Dutch translation received a complete overhaul.
The game is by far the most popular in Germany, the US and Korea currently, so we hope the addition of a Korean translation and Korean font support will make the game more comfortable to play.
Parkitect also always had a large amount of players from the Netherlands since the beginning. The Dutch translation had become very incomplete over the years, so it was time for an update :)
We know there are still some very common languages missing, and of course we will continue adding support for more languages over the coming weeks and months.
Hey look, its another update in time for the weekend/holidays!
The full changelog is at the end of this post. The highlights are:
Track segments automatically snap to each other if the height difference is reasonably small:
This makes reconnecting track ends easier after editing a ride, and should resolve the troubles new players had with getting track heights to match when being misaligned by 1/8 height unit.
Existing guest/ride/shop info windows automatically get closed when clicking a different guest/ride/shop (unless you pin them):
This should reduce windows cluttering up the view.
Added the park ratings to a tab in the Park Info window:
The park ratings are quite important but could previously only be found by hovering on the ratings bar in the main menu, which is slightly hidden. This will give people a second way to discover them, and there are also some additional tooltips explaining the ratings a bit.
The research menu button received an animation to reflect the current research state:
The fill state of the vial tells you the research progress without having to open the research window, and it looks nice I guess.
And theres a little something for the winter season :)
See you all next year!
Phew, that was an intense ride :) There have been 2-3 slightly bigger issues for some people that had to be hotfixed, but overall Id say the launch went pretty smoothly! It has been great to watch all of the reactions, ratings, feedback and reviews (you can leave one here by the way :D). Thank you! We have an update to Version 1.1 for you today to resolve most of the more pressing small bugs and confusing things you have reported. For the next update we will focus on improvements to the coaster track builder to make finishing tracks more comfortable.
Just three more days until launch! As a quick reminder, the price of the game will change to USD $29.99 / EUR 24.99 around November 28th, so this is the last chance to grab the game at its current Early Access price.
Hey! If you havent seen it yet - the 1.0 version of Parkitect with the campaign mode will release next week on November 29th, and theres a trailer for it here! Weve been working on the campaign mode for about a year now and planned it for much longer, so lets talk a bit about it now that its revealed!
Hey! Take a look at this:
[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqECo1me0Rs]
(Click to see the launch trailer)
Thats right, the 1.0 version of Parkitect will release on November 29th.
Most notably, it will add the Campaign Mode to the game!The campaign spans 26 scenarios with unique and varied settings and is played on a world map with branching paths that gets gradually revealed and comes to live as you progress.
All of the campaign parks have been designed by Silvarret and Joshua Tjarks, so you can be sure they are very nicely decorated.
Garret added some new flags that should fit nicely into most parks, and we updated the old flags with a bit of animation too:
And the terrain generator is getting a small update. Youll be able to select which types of trees exactly it should plant:
It will also give trees some slight color variations.
Beta 12 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
Garret added two nice new path styles:
And we made it so these new paths (and some of the existing old ones) can be recolored, so youll have much more options for path styles now :)
The audio team from A Shell In The Pit has been working on another bigger audio update for a while. Rachel has been adding some new sounds and fine-tuning volumes of existing ones, and Maris has been working on removing the weird pops and cut-off sounds we sometimes had. Theres also stereo sound now, making everything sound a bit less flat, and some more subtle crowd sounds. Theyll keep tweaking, but generally everything sounds a bit nicer now. Heres a quick video to give an impression!
Beta 11 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
Purchasable terrain is now surrounded by a fence. It was previously hard to discover whether a scenario has any purchasable terrain or not because you had to first open the land tools and then switch to the terrain purchasing tab.
This should make it much more clearer and remind you that this option exists.
The loans had a rebalance just recently. They were still not working too well though, so we’re changing them some more. Previously you were actively paying them back and they were running for a certain time, but none of it really mattered. As player the only important thing is how much money you get and how much you need to pay, so we simplified loans to just that.
You have to manually pay back the loan yourself now. This also gives you the option to only pay back a small part of it to reduce the monthly fees, which should be slightly more interesting as well.
When you place an object in Parkitect, we give you a semi-transparent preview of what you’re building. It looks like this:
We had this look since the start of development without much change. In the beginning, when the game only contained some simple flat rides and shops that you could place this worked well enough. As the game grew, we added scenery objects that can be placed freely and that can be recolored, or blueprints that allow you to place thousands of objects at once, and these build previews did not work as well anymore. They looked quite messy and even made it somewhat difficult to see what you’re doing at times.
Last week we changed the build previews to look like this:
Apart from generally looking nicer and giving you a much clearer look at what you’re building, the added shadows help a lot with figuring out how far away from the ground the object is. Removing the transparency makes it a bit easier to see how the object intersects with the terrain or other things.
And we changed the way grid-snapping works. It now snaps to both the grid centers and corners at the same time:
The old way of toggling between these options wasn’t intuitive at all. New players frequently didn’t figure it out, which made building annoying. Removing the toggle behaviour also reduces necessary key presses.
On the downside it might be a bit more fiddly than before since there are more snap positions, but we’ll deal with that if it actually turns out to be a problem.
Beta 10 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
We added an option for hiring a second research team, for a fee of $5000.
$5000 (and the monthly research cost!) is a lot during the beginnings of a scenario, but once the finances have stabilized this will speed up the second half of playing a scenario a bit where money is coming in fairly steadily but new rides are needed for attracting more guests.
And we finished the German translation. This helped with checking whether all text in the game is translatable, and since German text is fairly long it also helped to uncover some spots where the UI needed to be adjusted a bit to better fit the text. Other languages should probably fit as well now without too many further changes. Wunderbar!
We’re waiting a bit longer with getting more translations done because the text for the campaign and tutorial is still changing a bit but as soon as that’s final it’s all ready to be sent off to translators.
Hey, we’re finally working on something again that can be shown without spoiling anything! Nice!We started working on the tutorial, which will also be the first (skippable) scenario of the campaign.It will take you step by step
through the most important features of the game and give some explanations, so we started with getting a system in place for this.
Beta 9 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
Guests gained the ability to puke into trash bins. This can help with keeping cleanliness ratings under control in difficult areas, but since the bins need to be emptied eventually it can still keep the Janitors pretty busy... maybe even busier than before if the next trash dump is far away!
Guests will also have a negative thought now and lose some immersion when seeing an employee resting at a bench. Don’t forget to build staff rooms!
Beta 8 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
Beta 7 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
Garret made the existing concrete and wooden walls recolorable, which makes them a whole lot more useful:
I continued working on moving the AI code to a separate thread this week. It still needs a ton of testing, but overall work is going a bit faster than expected. The guest AI is ~95% done, pathfinding is running on its own thread as well now, and I’ve started working on moving the staff AI (which should not be too problematic overall since I can reuse most of the work done for guests).
There have been some requests for properly documented and more detailed benchmarks last time, so here’s one. These are the systems I tested on:
Low-end system:
Mac Mini 2014, Intel i5 @ 2.6GHz, integrated Intel Iris graphics
A system that’s pretty close to our minimum requirements. The main bottleneck is the lack of a proper graphics card - this system can’t even render an empty screen at 20 FPS at full resolution. Since we’re interested in the games CPU performance instead of the integrated graphics performance (and I got no other system to test with) I’ve lowered the resolution to the point where it can render an empty screen at ~55 FPS.
High-end system:
Windows 10 PC, Intel i7-6700K @ 4GHz, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060
A fairly recent and decent system.
I don’t have a mid-range system available for testing but it should be save to assume that performance would accordingly fall between the results from these.
All tests were run with the exact same scene and camera position in the Eastern Highlands demo park with 3.000 guests. This is a rather detailed park and that guest count is higher than it will be in the end for this park (we haven’t done a proper balancing pass yet to account for the improved performance, but something around 2.000 - 2.500 guests is probably more reasonable).
There have been some requests for “removing the guest cap” last week so I want to point out again that the game has no guest cap. If you build a park with better/more rides then there will be more guests.
The “Old” results are with the currently released Beta 6 version and the “New” results are with the upcoming multithreading version.
A fairly modest improvement of 10-15% for this specific scene. Not amazing, but nice. Worth pointing out though is that in the old version there can be some spikes occasionally where single frames take a bit longer to calculate, whereas in the new version it’s all very stable.
Improving guest performance is not only interesting for being able to have more guests in general, but also because the game allows speeding up time. Running the game at x3 speed means running the guest AI 3 times as often, so running a park with 3.000 guests at x3 speed is roughly comparable to running a park with 9.000 guests at x1 speed. This is where the performance improvements become more apparent.
Here’s the same test as above, but running at x3 speed.
The old version takes a pretty significant hit, whereas in the new version it barely has any performance impact at all.
One of my favorite things in simulation games is seeing your creation come alive and just sitting back, watching all the bustling activity.
In Parkitect it’s mostly all the guests running around who are responsible for creating this effect, and it’s not quite yet where we want it to be.
“The more the better” has been a sort of unofficial motto throughout development for us, whether it be object counts, park sizes or the amount of rides - the more we can add the better it’ll be for this game.
Guest counts are still lower than we’d like though and right now is the last good time to properly solve this, since increasing the amount of guests also affects the money balance and the entire campaign.
Improving guest performance has been a constant task nearly every month throughout development and it’s at a point now where the only significant further improvements can be gained from multithreading. The main hurdle there is that Unity, the game engine we’re using, is making multithreading really difficult. They are currently making very impressive progress to improve that for the future, but it’s too late for Parkitect to use the solutions they are working on. So I have finally started with finding my own solutions for these difficulties. It’s a very annoying task that requires going through the entire guest AI code and making it compatible, but so far it looks like it’ll be worth it!
As a first smaller improvement, overall performance in Beta 7 will be up to 15% better in busy parks.
The really big improvement will not be in Beta 7 just yet, but I hope I can release an experimental version for anyone interested in testing sometime during June. In the first tests it looks like we should be able to have quite a few more guests while at the same time having better performance overall. Here’s a small teaser:
That’s 8000 guests in a pretty detailed and big park (Northern Highlands), with roughly 1500 guests on screen, running at 65 FPS!
This is just a stress test of course and we won’t increase the guest count anywhere near this dramatically, because 1) it turns out “the more the better” has a limit where it stops being fun and 2) the game needs to run on weaker systems as well. Comforting to know though that guest performance should never be an issue again after all of this! You should also actually start seeing guests complain about long queue lines...
We’re back to working on the campaign again, so you know what that means - not too much to show right now :)
We made some good progress on figuring out and implementing how scenarios are going to be unlocked this week.
Since this would be a very short devlog update otherwise, let’s talk some more about the campaign, and first of all who’s working on it.
We’re extremely lucky to have two very talented builders from the community working on scenarios for the campaign: Silvarret and Joshua Tjarks. You have probably seen some of their work already, and so you’ll know that they are great park designers and very passionate about theme park games :)
Our main goal for the campaign is to make every scenario feel different in some way - especially of course by giving scenarios unique settings, but also by varying the starting conditions and goals and having a nice difficulty progression.
These two have been busy for 6-8 months now and they came up with so many ideas that in the end the campaign grew a bit bigger than we originally expected...
As a sneak peak to give you an idea what to expect, here’s a quick look at one of the scenarios - Coaster Canyon by Silvarret:
As a slightly easier scenario this park has lots of flat space for building huge coasters, and there’s also some space at the top of the canyon as an interesting option!
Building on a blank canvas can be difficult, so most maps come with some small pre-built structures to set the mood and hopefully provide you with inspiration for your own additions! We can’t wait to see what you’ll come up with :)
Beta 6 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
As planned, we’re working more on the campaign now and so everything else that’s getting done is mostly polishing.The path builder got some small improvements, the most important one being that it doesn’t move the “cursor” anymore if a path can’t be built for some reason (for example because of the location being blocked).
Previously it would continue moving no matter what, so in this example you’d continue building paths on the other site of the shop. That seemed like a useful behaviour in some situations but really wasn’t. It confused people and when they tried to “undo” their paths it confused them even more, because using the bulldozer button would not move the cursor back through the blocked location.
Transport system pipes automatically snap to the correct height now when hovering existing pipes (just like paths already did). These things can be a bit annoying to build and there are still a few things we should do to improve that, but this is a good first step.
The terraforming tool was notoriously destructive when terraforming near vertical cliffs with the smoothen feature enabled. It was improved to preserve vertical cliffs, which creates far less unpredictable huge terrain changes that are hard to clean up.
Water is one of the things where I can make a dozen tiny changes without ever being entirely satisfied, and so it has been changed once agan.
And finally, the flat ride lights have customizable colors now. An option to disable the lights has been added as well.
Just a quick update this time - this week was all about doing press/community work and collecting feedback (wow, there has been a ton). We also managed to release a couple of minor patches.
[quote]Lonely Hills Park, by DeficientGamer[/quote]
The plan for this month is to spend most of our time on working towards finishing the campaign, so Beta 6 will probably mostly contain polishing, fixes and smaller features.
The reactions to the graphics update have been absolutely amazing, much better than we expected really!
It has brought a lot of new players to the game too, and so both our subreddit and Discord are very active right now - if you haven’t already, maybe you want to join too? :)
Thanks for everyone who is a part of our small community, we really appreciate your support :D
[quote]Brutalism Park, by Urben1680[/quote]
The modders have been very busy as well and some very nice new mods have been released recently. Here's a selection of some favorites!
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1354712119&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1350595529&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1351512761&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1353352580&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1349909768&searchtext=
I’m doing maintenance tasks and preparations for upcoming features currently, so there’s not a whole lot to say about that. I also did some optimizations for very big parks that can improve performance by up to 15% and fixed some stuttering.
Luuk is working on the generic shop counter that sandbox players have been asking for a long time:
It allows selling any products that are available in the other normal shops that have been researched.
Beta 3 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
I worked on some long-requested coaster features this week.
Curves have similar slope options as straight pieces now, meaning curves can transition directly into a slope or to a different slope angle:
This allows building some smooth elements that were not possible before.
And we’re adding LSM launches. This is a magnetic launch system that allows accelerating to high speeds without having to stop the train. It‘s fairly expensive though!
Hey and welcome back in 2018! We hope you all had a good start into the new year.
After recharging for a bit we’re now back at work.
This week we added a First Aid room that’s ideally placed near a ride exit:
It is not cheap to build and operate, but helps a lot with keeping the paths clean around especially nausea-inducing rides and lets guests recover faster so they can more quickly get onto the next ride and spend some money.
And Gabby is working on more structure pieces and props for the Fantasy theme:
Due to the upcoming holidays this release is a bit earlier than usual. We’ll be on our winter break now and will return to the usual weekly devlog schedule on January 15th. Beta 2 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post. Happy Holidays everyone and see you in 2018!
This week there’s a new actions overview, showing what everyone in the park is doing:
Fences adapt to stairs now, making the look of paths very customizable:
The color limitations have been removed from trees and rocks, so you can give them any color and use the brush/pipette tools on them now:
Gabby made some nice new western props and I made some window boxes:
And Garret gave an interview talking about the games development and some things that are still to come. You can find it here.
We added an Elevator transport ride:
Implementing it was interesting, because unlike all other transport rides we had in the game so far this technically is a “flat ride”. Unlike all other flat rides we had in the game so far though this one has two stations!
Naturally guests will use this ride for pathfinding like all other transport rides, so if the only or fastest way to get somewhere they want to go is using the Elevator they’ll use it.
And another fun thing is that it can transition from underground to above ground!
Tim added another much-requested feature: the ability to use custom ride music.
Beta 1 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post. This is probably our biggest update yet and we hope you’ll enjoy it :) As previously announced we’ve slightly increased the price to $19.99 with this release (might take a while to update across all stores).
Parkitect has been complete and stable enough for a while now that calling it an “Alpha” doesn’t seem fitting anymore - so the next update will be “Beta 1″ :) Aside from the name change things will keep going as they have with the weekly devlog updates and monthly game updates until the game is finished. The biggest missing part for that is still the campaign, which is being worked on and progressing well. Along with the Beta 1 update around the end of November we’ll also bump up the price slightly to $19.99.
Parkitect has been fairly moddable for a while now, but it always required some coding skills. To make things easier some great community tools have been created in the past, but since the game keeps changing every month mods tend to break sooner or later which is frustrating for both modders and players.
To improve this situation Luuk has been working on an official modding tool for the past few weeks. Custom objects are the most common type of mod so the quick and easy creation of custom object mods is what the tool is focused on for now. It only takes a couple of clicks to get a 3D model working in the game:
Since this is an official tool we can ensure that mods created with this will continue to work with future updates of the game.
We’re also making it open source in case anyone wants to contribute improvements.
To give modders a headstart the modding tool is fully compatible with the current version of the game and available right now over here: Parkitect Asset Editor
Also, with the next update we’ll add Steam Workshop support for mods allowing to install them with a single click!
Modders will be able to upload and publish updates for mods directly through the game just as easy.
When uploading a blueprint or savegame to the Workshop that contains any modded objects the required mods get automatically linked as dependencies so it’s easy to find and install any mods that are needed for using that blueprint/savegame.
Employees gain experience by doing their work now. The more experienced they are the faster they complete their tasks and the less quickly they get tired.
They can also be sent to the Staff Training Room, a new park utility building where they train to gain experience more quickly.
Alpha 19 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
Last week we revealed the new scenery system and explained how we’re using it to create scenery ratings. Here’s what we’re doing with them.
Guests now have an “Immersion” stat that’s influenced by their surroundings and that affects how fast their happiness decreases. Additionally, their immersion can decrease if they encounter a Hauler carrying crates, so ideally the shop supply routes should be kept somewhere behind the scenes.
Guests also leave a scenery rating when leaving the park, which factors into the overall park rating and thus has some influence on how many guests the park can attract.
Rides receive a scenery rating too (notice how the parts that are just going through rocks are rated lower because they block the view of the nice scenery outside):
It has an influence on how exciting the ride is. Especially for dark rides this can make a noticeable difference.
And as a nice bonus we can use the visibility data to determine whether a ride is covered or not, so covered rides continue to be used during rain as you’d expect.
As an additional fun detail guests close their umbrellas on covered paths :)
Lastly, the question that has come up most since last week: won’t all these visibility calculations slow down the game?
No, they are running in the background on a separate thread and are only done in areas where the scenery changed. Tim optimized them a lot to be very fast too!
So most of the time there’s nothing to calculate, and when there is you won’t notice.
Alpha 18 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
Alpha 17 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
Garret added some basic geometric shapes as building pieces:
Luuk is back and made sure that certain objects such as trees stick to the terrain when terraforming:
And we continued working on improving some of the controls.
The box selection tool used by the bulldozer and blueprint creator now uses multiple clicks:
The first click starts the selection. The second click locks in the size of the selection box, and the third click determines the height and finishes the selection. This should be easier to understand for new players and is also less fiddly in general than the old way.
Color palettes received a visible “delete” button because “use right click to delete” was not obvious at all.
The devlog entries for the last two weeks have been a bit more text-heavy than usual. Here they are.
Alpha 16 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
This week we got caught up a bit in bug fixes, maintenance and planning.
A bit of visual progress has been made though after all.
The glass building pieces introduced in Alpha 14 and 15 didn’t really look all that much like they are made of glass, so they got a small update.
Before:
Now:
The same overhaul has also been applied to the glass tunnels.
...and then to anything metallic as well.
Garret and Fabrice worked on some new props that are the beginnings of a colorful Fantasy theme :)
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:
Alpha 15 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
And the new ride is...
Paddleboats! It’s an entirely new type of ride that works completely different than anything else in the game, so it’s taking a bit longer than usual to make :)
If you look closely you can see that the water received yet another small overhaul too, and I’m finally pretty satisfied with it.
And we also added some nice new animated decoration objects:
Hey, we’re back!
Actually, Garret is still on his plane home right now, but he already made some nice new Western theme objects anyways! They are inspired by some of the theming we saw at Phantasialand:
And Luuk added an option for building blueprints without scenery. This is especially useful for scenarios when money is tight, or if you want to theme the ride yourself.
And we’ve done some work on a new ride - more on that next week :)
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!
Hey! Our development schedule is slightly different than usual this month, which means there’ll be less interesting things to show on the devlog. Garret, Luuk, Tim and I are going to meet each other at the end of the month, and, being a team working on a theme park game, it only makes sense to go and check out some parks on that occasion :) We’ll be traveling around for a while to check out Europa Park (Germany), Phantasialand (Germany) and Efteling (Netherlands) for research (...and fun, alright). Exciting! Since nobody will be around to patch things in case something gets horribly broken we’ll limit this months game update to smaller changes, polishing and fixes, and that pretty much already summarizes the majority of what we’ve done during the past week :) There are also some bigger tasks being worked on in parallel that should go into the June game update, but more on that once the time has come.
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.
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. Give it a listen over here.
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:
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.
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.
Gordon finished a new song! It’s really catchy. Give it a listen here. 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 figuring out a technique that fulfills them all took a while :)
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.
Alpha 11 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
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:
Hey! We forgot to post Devlog Update 133 over here last week, sorry for that. Here it is:
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:
Alpha 10 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
Alpha 8 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
Minimus, by kaylnaris-7
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.
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 :)
Alpha 7 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
Heavens Gardens Halloween Edition, by CoasterB
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.
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.
Alpha 6 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
Pinewood Acres, by PulseDesign
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 :)
Alpha 5 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
Note that this update will likely cause some bugs and other issues, as it's step 1 of adding in scenario and resource mechanics.
Heartland Park, by lord-gonchar
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.
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 :)
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!
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.
Alpha 4 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
Note: this version has some significant changes under the hood and thus might be a bit less stable than the previous one. If you're experiencing major problems you can continue to use Alpha 3 by right-clicking on Parkitect in Steam and selecting Properties -> Betas -> "previous_version".
Heavens Gardens, by CoasterB
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.
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.
Mini Train Recording
So we pull discrete loops and segments out of these recordings. For example, this mini coaster:
Mini Coaster Recording
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.
Wooden Coaster Winch Recording
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.
Scrambler Recording
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.
Merry Go Sound
Alpha 3 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
Riverwood Themepark (no mods), by xRBz
Hope everyone had a good time this week like we did watching all the cool new games being announced at E3 :)
In development news, we added underwater tunnels for paths and tracks:
And track tunnels automatically adjust to terraforming changes now:
By popular demand, blueprints received a search bar:
And the sign naming window received a panel with symbols:
There are more that you can use but these should be the most useful ones.
We got a bit carried away with continuing last weeks work. Paths now don’t connect through walls anymore either:
There are some edge cases with the rounded and diagonal walls, we’ll have to see how well those will work during normal gameplay.
The queue signs finally work:
So we also added signs that can be customized. We needed a font for them with partial unicode support for all the languages with a non-latin alphabet like Russian and Chinese etc., which means there are also some symbols available that could be nice to use. And yes, they can also be set to “no entry” which has been requested quite a lot.
Placing one of these signs at the front of a queue replaces the default queue sign. Flat ride fences can also be replaced by building a fence/wall next to them, which allows for some nice customizability.
(The option in the ride settings for selecting a fence style will be removed as it doesn’t have much of a use anymore now)
And finally, the brick set received some more tiles, a couple of fitting props, and there’s a new path style :)
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.
Alpha 2 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
Thrillville, by muuuh
Alright, we’re somewhat back to our normal schedule!
As a reminder, these devlog entries are a glimpse at what we've been working on during the last week. The things that are shown are usually released in the next Alpha update (at the end of the month). You can read all of our previous devlog entries over here.
This week 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.
Hey everyone! For all the new people who just joined the community this week: this is our weekly devlog where we're posting what we got done during that week. This week is a bit unusual since not much actual development got done due to the Steam launch, so check out any of the previous 95 entries if you're curious what these are usually like :) The big thing this week was the Steam launch of course - it went pretty well! The ratings are at 97% positive right now and there haven’t been too many major technical issues - we’ll have to see how things look in a couple weeks, but so far so good :) In development news we’ve released a patch version (Alpha 1a) since last week that mostly fixed some more small glitches and added a couple minor features (most notably block sections are working as intended now and the Mac/Linux versions are running much more stable now). The last few days we’ve mostly been reading and responding to feedback. The most common complaints so far are: The game is not available in my language This is something I wish we had been a bit more prepared for... we had translation support in the game for a long time but didn’t get any translations done. We could have handled that way better. We got lots of offers from people to help with translations so to rectify this we’ve set up crowdsourced translations over here, which means anyone can help with translating the game into their language. We might still get some professional translations done for the more common languages but for now this is the fastest way to fix this and allows us to add support for rare languages too. There is no campaign This one is a bit tricky - it simply doesn’t make any sense for us to work on a campaign before the game is feature complete. We’d have to redo it all and throw away a lot of work to update campaign levels as more content gets put into the game in the future. While the Steam description says that the game only has a sandbox mode at the moment and that a campaign will be added in the future some people don’t seem to read that and then become disappointed after purchase. Not sure yet how to solve this best so we’ll just observe for a bit longer to see if this complaint keeps coming up. There is no tutorial For now we’ll add more informative tooltips and such, I think that’s generally a good idea. The coaster builder is a good example for that: it should tell you exactly why a certain build option is currently not available instead of just taking it away. Not a big fan of traditional tutorials personally but we really might need a small one that teaches the basics eventually. Noticeable FPS drops if zooming out all the way in big parks To improve this we’re mostly waiting for Unity 5.4, which brings some new features for improving performance if there are many objects on screen at once. The planned release date for Unity 5.4 is June, so I think we’ll have some improvements for this in the game by the end of July if everything goes well. I’ll also check if we can do some other optimizations before that, but the biggest performance hit for zoomed out views specifically is from rendering all the thousands of individual objects in the park so I expect Unity 5.4 to help more with this than anything I can do right now. It’s an Early Access game Yes, it says so on the store page ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ All of our older players are helping a lot with this addressing these issues (thanks so much!) and things seem to calm a bit down now, so we should be able to jump right back into normal development and have some more interesting news again next week :)
Hey! A lot of new players joined the community, so we thought it’d be good to quickly introduce everyone working on this game, as we’re sometimes using these names in blog posts and such.
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).
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.
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!
Oh hey, hello there! If you're reading this over here on Steam chances are you've only recently heard about the game, so welcome!
We've been releasing blog entries of what we've been working on every week (usually around the weekend) for almost 2 years now, and will mirror them over here on Steam for your convenience. This is entry number 92 - if you want to check out any of the previous 91 entries, head over to our "official" devlog.
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It’s been a pretty crazy week :)
We released a new trailer and announced the Steam Early Access launch date. 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:
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