Beta 5 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

Garret made a whole bunch of new decorative lamps during this weeks Art Stream:

And he lit the Swinging Ship to show how our ride lights work:

And we’ve added a new visualization to the track builder that highlights all the invidiual block sections. When using a block system there can never be more than one train inside each “block” of the ride for safety reasons, with a “block” being the section of the track between two positions at which trains can safely be stopped (so they can wait there until the block ahead of them is clear).
This is a bit convoluted to explain in text, so hopefully this new visualization makes it easier to understand.

Changelog

- completely overhauled visuals
- added night mode and lights turn on during rain
- added animated lights to flat rides
- added graphics settings for Ambient Occlusion, Screen Space Reflections
- added higher quality Tilt Shift effect
- added decorative light objects
- added Monorail Coaster
- added Funnel Cakes stall
- added tool for taking screenshots of the entire park (default hotkey: F11)
- added small terraforming costs
- added more guest voices
- added rain protection visualization
- added legends to visualization views
- added block sections visualization to track builder
- added water sections on Water Coaster terminate block sections now
- added list of all shops/rides contained within assigned zone to hauler/mechanic info window
- improved zone visualization
- improved load times and memory use of custom ride music significantly (from many minutes to less than a second in some cases)
- improved overall performance by up to 25%
- reduced time it takes to go from a loaded park back into the main menu or into a different park
- fixed market research results not being displayed correctly anymore since Beta 4
- fixed guests having trouble to find the park entrance if the path from spawn to entrance has many crossings
- fixed guests could accidentally leave the park if there are multiple park entrances next to each other
- fixed rain protection not working for flat rides as intended
- fixed Spinning Coaster cars rotating like crazy after loading savegame
- fixed UI problems with the balloon shop
- fixed tracked ride graphs being empty
- fixed suspended cars not swinging anymore

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).

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!