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.

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.