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.

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

Devlog

We are now using Metal as the default rendering pipeline on macOS, which brings the visual quality of the Mac version up to par with the Windows and Linux versions. Additionally, this should noticeably improve performance on Mac. Since this is a big change it’s possible that this causes some problems on some systems - please let us know if you run into any issues.

You probably know by now that Parkitect has a really unique and intricate scenery rating system that takes into account what guests are able to see. This is mostly working quite well, especially in fairly open spaces. Where it had some problems is enclosed spaces, such as this building for example:

It’s a really nice house that clearly a lot of effort has been put into, so you would expect it to have a great contribution to the scenery rating. But in reality it has almost no effect:

The problem is that these shops inside the building block the view, as do the walls, so guests don’t really “see” much more than 2-3 walls at once, which is too little to have a noticeable positive scenery rating impact. It makes sense in a way, but it feels really unfair.
After some tweaks the rating scores immediately inside and around buildings are more what you’d expect now:

And Garret created some really nice fog, smoke and spark effects during last weeks Art Stream:

Changelog

- added bankruptcy
- added smoke, fog and spark effects
- added Metal support for Mac (improved visual quality and performance)
- added option for hiring a second research team
- added option for running at 30 FPS (useful for increasing battery life on laptops)
- improved calculation of deco scores in enclosed spaces
- updated LSM/hyraulic launch speeds to be more in line with real coasters
- updated German translation
- fixed puke appearing black during night/rain
- fixed a case where Gyro Drop Tower could get stuck

Art Stream

Come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (August 29th) at 1pm PDT to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created

Devlog

Going bankrupt has been a bit informal so far - you’d run out of money and couldn’t buy anything anymore, and that’s it. There’s now some proper UI telling you that you’re in trouble.
Once you are in the red numbers you’ll get a couple months time to make a profit. If you don’t it’s game over.

I have also pretty much finished the tutorial except for some small tweaks and additions maybe. It will teach you all the basics - camera and building controls, how shops and supplies work, how to hide the backstage areas, how to build rides and queues, and finally also how to build a simple coaster. The last one was the most complex and scary part of the tutorial, so I’m very happy that this is out of the way now.