Garret made the existing concrete and wooden walls recolorable, which makes them a whole lot more useful:

I continued working on moving the AI code to a separate thread this week. It still needs a ton of testing, but overall work is going a bit faster than expected. The guest AI is ~95% done, pathfinding is running on its own thread as well now, and I’ve started working on moving the staff AI (which should not be too problematic overall since I can reuse most of the work done for guests).

There have been some requests for properly documented and more detailed benchmarks last time, so here’s one. These are the systems I tested on:

Low-end system:
Mac Mini 2014, Intel i5 @ 2.6GHz, integrated Intel Iris graphics
A system that’s pretty close to our minimum requirements. The main bottleneck is the lack of a proper graphics card - this system can’t even render an empty screen at 20 FPS at full resolution. Since we’re interested in the games CPU performance instead of the integrated graphics performance (and I got no other system to test with) I’ve lowered the resolution to the point where it can render an empty screen at ~55 FPS.

High-end system:
Windows 10 PC, Intel i7-6700K @ 4GHz, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060
A fairly recent and decent system.

I don’t have a mid-range system available for testing but it should be save to assume that performance would accordingly fall between the results from these.

All tests were run with the exact same scene and camera position in the Eastern Highlands demo park with 3.000 guests. This is a rather detailed park and that guest count is higher than it will be in the end for this park (we haven’t done a proper balancing pass yet to account for the improved performance, but something around 2.000 - 2.500 guests is probably more reasonable).

There have been some requests for “removing the guest cap” last week so I want to point out again that the game has no guest cap. If you build a park with better/more rides then there will be more guests.

The “Old” results are with the currently released Beta 6 version and the “New” results are with the upcoming multithreading version.

A fairly modest improvement of 10-15% for this specific scene. Not amazing, but nice. Worth pointing out though is that in the old version there can be some spikes occasionally where single frames take a bit longer to calculate, whereas in the new version it’s all very stable.

Improving guest performance is not only interesting for being able to have more guests in general, but also because the game allows speeding up time. Running the game at x3 speed means running the guest AI 3 times as often, so running a park with 3.000 guests at x3 speed is roughly comparable to running a park with 9.000 guests at x1 speed. This is where the performance improvements become more apparent.
Here’s the same test as above, but running at x3 speed.

The old version takes a pretty significant hit, whereas in the new version it barely has any performance impact at all.

We’re back to working on the campaign again, so you know what that means - not too much to show right now :)
We made some good progress on figuring out and implementing how scenarios are going to be unlocked this week.

Since this would be a very short devlog update otherwise, let’s talk some more about the campaign, and first of all who’s working on it.
We’re extremely lucky to have two very talented builders from the community working on scenarios for the campaign: Silvarret and Joshua Tjarks. You have probably seen some of their work already, and so you’ll know that they are great park designers and very passionate about theme park games :)
Our main goal for the campaign is to make every scenario feel different in some way - especially of course by giving scenarios unique settings, but also by varying the starting conditions and goals and having a nice difficulty progression.
These two have been busy for 6-8 months now and they came up with so many ideas that in the end the campaign grew a bit bigger than we originally expected…

As a sneak peak to give you an idea what to expect, here’s a quick look at one of the scenarios - Coaster Canyon by Silvarret:

As a slightly easier scenario this park has lots of flat space for building huge coasters, and there’s also some space at the top of the canyon as an interesting option!

Building on a blank canvas can be difficult, so most maps come with some small pre-built structures to set the mood and hopefully provide you with inspiration for your own additions! We can’t wait to see what you’ll come up with :)

Beta 6 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

We added the Mini Monorail from this months Art Stream:

It’s a low-capacity, but also low-cost transport ride especially suitable for small parks (or short distance transportation in a bigger park). While working on the campaign we noticed that the bigger Monorails we already had make most sense in big parks and the Miniature Railway can be hard to fit into existing parks, so this new Mini Monorail nicely complements the transportation options in the game filling these gaps.

Garret continued adding and animating ride lights:

And Gordon finished a great new background music song! You can listen to a preview here.

Changelog

- added Mini Monorail
- added pine trees
- added new background music
- added lights to more flat rides
- added option for changing flat ride light colors
- added options for Mechanic and Janitor for customizing the tasks they should work on
- added hovered object name as tooltip to object pipette tool
- added deco window remembers last opened category
- added revealing object in deco window when using object pipette tool
- added hotkeys for changing size of resizable objects (+/- by default)
- changed mod objects to be researchable in non-sandbox scenarios
- improved building of paths
- improved building of transport system pieces
- improved object pipette tool to start building at the same height and rotation as copied object
- improved camera rotation behaviour on very uneven terrain (especially with large vertical cliffs)
- improved terraformer behaviour when using smoothen option around vertical cliffs
- improved terraformer levelling tool performance (should fix a crash on systems with low RAM)
- improved performance when hiding scenery during rain/night mode
- improved hunger/thirst/tiredness park ratings
- fixed terraforming tools flickering
- fixed curves on vertical track segments not working properly anymore
- fixed lighting messing with the colors in visualization views, making it sometimes hard to see what values the visualization was showing
- fixed guests not actively heading for Customizable Shops when searching for food
- fixed entertainers could sometimes be displayed with the wrong costume
- fixed being able to train shopkeepers
- fixed closed shops being opened after loading savegame
- fixed error when placing fences on the terrain bounds
- fixed a case where people would walk over terrain when trying to get somewhere
- fixed objects placed in scenario editor giving refunds
- fixed objects from blueprints sometimes not giving refunds when destroyed
- fixed coasters not giving full refund when destroyed using the bulldozer tool
- fixed hue slider in color picker window sometimes not reacting to clicks
- fixed a crash on macOS when using the bulldozer tool