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

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

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

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

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

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

Or use the terrain to your advantage:

Or simply plant some trees :)

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

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

Seriously - a lot.

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

Art Stream

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

Devlog

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

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

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

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

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

Concept Art Stream

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

Devlog

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

And here are the finished pieces:

If you’ve been playing Parkitect for a while you might remember the ParkitectNexus build challenges, where we challenged you to build a ride within certain restrictions and the best entries got included as blueprints into the game. We’re bringing that back, but this time as a proper feature using the Steam Workshop!

Starting with Alpha 18 we’ll have a section on the starting screen where you can browse and vote on submissions for the currently running challenge.

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

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