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

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

Devlog

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

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

Here’s a small sample:

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then there’s also the new Powered Coaster!

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

There are some new rope fences:

And Gabby added a new tree and bunting:

Changelog

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

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

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

Devlog

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

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

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

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

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.