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

As planned, we’re working more on the campaign now and so everything else that’s getting done is mostly polishing.
The path builder got some small improvements, the most important one being that it doesn’t move the “cursor” anymore if a path can’t be built for some reason (for example because of the location being blocked).

Previously it would continue moving no matter what, so in this example you’d continue building paths on the other site of the shop. That seemed like a useful behaviour in some situations but really wasn’t. It confused people and when they tried to “undo” their paths it confused them even more, because using the bulldozer button would not move the cursor back through the blocked location.

Transport system pipes automatically snap to the correct height now when hovering existing pipes (just like paths already did). These things can be a bit annoying to build and there are still a few things we should do to improve that, but this is a good first step.

The terraforming tool was notoriously destructive when terraforming near vertical cliffs with the smoothen feature enabled. It was improved to preserve vertical cliffs, which creates far less unpredictable huge terrain changes that are hard to clean up.

Water is one of the things where I can make a dozen tiny changes without ever being entirely satisfied, and so it has been changed once agan.

And finally, the flat ride lights have customizable colors now. An option to disable the lights has been added as well.

Just a quick update this time - this week was all about doing press/community work and collecting feedback (wow, there has been a ton). We also managed to release a couple of minor patches.

The plan for this month is to spend most of our time on working towards finishing the campaign, so Beta 6 will probably mostly contain polishing, fixes and smaller features.

The reactions to the graphics update have been absolutely amazing, much better than we expected really!
It has brought a lot of new players to the game too, and so both our subreddit and Discord are very active right now - if you haven’t already, maybe you want to join too? :)
Thanks for everyone who is a part of our small community, we really appreciate your support :D