Beta 7 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

Garret added lights to the Transformer:

And we added the Gyro Drop Tower from last weeks Art Stream:

Changelog

- significantly improved guest performance
- significantly improved performance when running game at x2/x3 speed
- significantly improved park loading times
- increased overall guest count (some parks might see less guests; depends on what the park contains)
- added Gyro Drop Tower
- added Calm ride music track
- added sound effects for recently added props and rides
- added scenario goal requiring a certain amount of coasters with a certain rating
- changed coasters to attract significantly more guests to the park than other types of rides
- changed how park rating is calculated
- adjusted money balance to account for higher guest numbers (might need further tweaks)
- improved guest flow to attractions
- improved some more building pieces to be recolorable (walls, pillars)
- improved performance when zooming in/out of crowded areas of the park
- fixed guests being able to see bad decoration below paths
- fixed raised paths not blocking rain on paths below
- fixed some pavillions not blocking rain
- fixed guests sometimes exiting boats immediately instead of riding them
- fixed not being able to build some track pieces after curved slope-to-flat transitions
- fixed exit gates not waiting for all guests to leave the ride
- fixed a case where trains could get stuck when leaving the station and cause lag
- fixed a case where the finance overview could get stuck
- fixed an error when using object pipette on modded objects
- fixed path supports not appearing until game is unpaused
- fixed red build preview when dragging fences even though fence can be built
- fixed duplicate resolution entries in graphics settings

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.

One of my favorite things in simulation games is seeing your creation come alive and just sitting back, watching all the bustling activity.
In Parkitect it’s mostly all the guests running around who are responsible for creating this effect, and it’s not quite yet where we want it to be. “The more the better” has been a sort of unofficial motto throughout development for us, whether it be object counts, park sizes or the amount of rides - the more we can add the better it’ll be for this game.

Guest counts are still lower than we’d like though and right now is the last good time to properly solve this, since increasing the amount of guests also affects the money balance and the entire campaign.
Improving guest performance has been a constant task nearly every month throughout development and it’s at a point now where the only significant further improvements can be gained from multithreading. The main hurdle there is that Unity, the game engine we’re using, is making multithreading really difficult. They are currently making very impressive progress to improve that for the future, but it’s too late for Parkitect to use the solutions they are working on. So I have finally started with finding my own solutions for these difficulties. It’s a very annoying task that requires going through the entire guest AI code and making it compatible, but so far it looks like it’ll be worth it!

As a first smaller improvement, overall performance in Beta 7 will be up to 15% better in busy parks.

The really big improvement will not be in Beta 7 just yet, but I hope I can release an experimental version for anyone interested in testing sometime during June. In the first tests it looks like we should be able to have quite a few more guests while at the same time having better performance overall. Here’s a small teaser:

That’s 8000 guests in a pretty detailed and big park (Northern Highlands), with roughly 1500 guests on screen, running at 65 FPS!

This is just a stress test of course and we won’t increase the guest count anywhere near this dramatically, because 1) it turns out “the more the better” has a limit where it stops being fun and 2) the game needs to run on weaker systems as well. Comforting to know though that guest performance should never be an issue again after all of this! You should also actually start seeing guests complain about long queue lines…