Art Stream

Come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (September 26th) at 1pm PDT to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created

Devlog

We added a new utility building! The Trash Chute is a small and relatively cheap way to quickly transport trash bags to the trash dump. It needs to be connected to the Deliveries Building with the transport pipes.

So far trash bags could also be dropped at the Depot. We’ll probably remove that.

All build windows minimize now to get out of the way while you’re building something, like the deco window already did:

There’s also this new “slide in” animation when the window minimizes. This is not just for aesthetics. I oftentimes noticed people got confused where the deco window went after it instantly minimized and thought they need to re-open it. This quick animation should make it a bit more clear what happens with the window and that it’s still there.

Utility building doors finally received animations.

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.

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