Devlog Update 187 - Visuals Update (3/3)

Art Stream

Come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (March 28th) at 1pm PDT. This time Garret will show how we’re updating old rides and will create some new scenery pieces. He will also demo the visuals update.

Devlog

Lights on!

Did you ever feel like your park looks a bit… boring when it rains? After this update that will no longer be the case, because all the lights actually work now.

And if you like it really dark you can turn on the new night mode whenever you want!

The Asset Editor has been updated so mods can use lights as well.

To fully capture the atmosphere of a theme park in the dark we’re updating all flat rides with hundreds of tiny lights.

Moreover, most of these lights also receive unique animation sequences. I have built us a tool for placing and animating the lights, and Garret has been busy working with it. So far we’re at over 6.000 animated lights, but there are still a bunch of rides left to update!

If you want to learn more about how we’re creating light animation sequences you should check out this weeks Art Stream where Garret will show how it works.

Until then here’s a quick video showcasing the new lights in action:

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Parkitect

Devlog Update 186 - Visuals Update (2/3)

The new rendering pipeline allows us to use decals, so we can nicely project graphics on top of 3D geometry now. This is especially useful for the zone visualizations. Previously we drew zone borders that followed the terrain and rendered them on top of anything else. This didn’t work very well with objects that aren’t near the ground:

Now with the decals we can show the borders exactly where they are:

Both screenshots show the exact same zoning, but note how in the old one you can’t really tell which parts of the raised path and the buildings belong to which zone without going into a top-down view.

Decals also allow us to properly project puke onto stairs, which clearly is the killer feature everyone has been waiting for ;)

It really is nice to have though for gameplay reasons too, since the flat old sprite would sometimes get clipped so much on stairs that it was entirely invisible.

We added a new rain protection visualization (and all visualizations have these legends now at the top of the screen):

It might seem a bit pointless since “roofs protect from rain” is intuitively understandable without a visualization view…
We added it because there was nothing in the game that told you that this is actually something the game keeps track of, so it’s mostly there to remind you that you might want to take this into account when designing your park.

Garret finished a new ride, the Monorail Coaster:

This very unusual looking coaster is fairly cheap to build and fits into small footprints, but is still capable of all the elements you’d except from a big steel coaster. On the downside it has a relatively low capacity.
You can also spot a new shop here, the Funnel Cakes stall!

We added a higher-quality tilt shift effect that looks more interesting than the old one:

Of course by default it’s very subtle and not as strong as on this picture, but it’s nice to crank it all the way up every now and then for taking screenshots.

And finally, there’s a new tool for exporting big 4k screenshots of the entire park:

See the next post for bigger versions of these last two images (as big as Tumblr allows anyways).

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Parkitect

Devlog Update 185 - Visuals Update (1/3)

While last month was focused on maintenance work, March will be all about visuals.
We have switched rendering pipelines from a forward renderer to a deferred render over the past few weeks, which completely changes how the game is being rendered and allows us to use some nice modern graphics features with very little performance cost.

To begin, we’ve added Ambient Occlusion which adds some shadows to occluded areas, giving the entire scene more depth. It works very well with Parkitects clean art style and is something we wanted from the beginning, but previous versions we tried were very performance heavy and flickery. This one is nearly free and very stable and high quality.

We also gave the camera a bit more perspective and overhauled the lighting and color balance.

We’ve also enabled a slight bit of tilt shift by default. As usual there are graphics settings for these new effects so you can adjust them to better fit your preferences.

Here's a few more comparison shots!

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Parkitect

Devlog Update 184 + Beta 4

Beta 4 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

We added the Floorless Coaster from this weeks Art Stream:

Apart from the floorless cars it features a new type of brake, the holding brake, which stops and holds trains on slopes for a customizable amount of time:

Changelog

- added Floorless Coaster
- added holding brakes to some coasters
- added Turkey Legs stall
- added Fruit Juices stall
- added generic shop counter
- added Maple Tree, Elephant Statue
- added demolishing objects that have been placed in the scenario editor no longer give a refund
- added graphics setting for adjusting LOD distance
- changed time to start in Year 1 instead of Year 0
- increased guest count by ~10%
- improved guest distribution over the park
- improved overall performance by up to 15%
- improved performance when hiding scenery
- improved performance when using custom camera mods
- improved tunnels on Water Coaster
- fixed some custom ride music mp3s not loading
- fixed a case where shuttle coaster trains could disappear after saving the game
- fixed a case where guests would enter Transformer ride while it’s in the wrong position

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Parkitect