Art Stream

It’s time for the first Art Stream of 2018! Come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (January 31st) at 1pm PDT to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

Devlog

Gabby made these new props this week: a birch tree, giraffe statue, turtle topiary, spooky lamps and string lights.

Luuk added a bit of extra UI so shops that are accidentally not connected to a path are easier to spot:

And a new tab in the shop and ride info windows makes it easier to find any running tasks associated with it and see what your staff are doing:

Hey and welcome back in 2018! We hope you all had a good start into the new year.

After recharging for a bit we’re now back at work.
This week we added a First Aid room that’s ideally placed near a ride exit:

It is not cheap to build and operate, but helps a lot with keeping the paths clean around especially nausea-inducing rides and lets guests recover faster so they can more quickly get onto the next ride and spend some money.

And Gabby is working on more structure pieces and props for the Fantasy theme:

Due to the upcoming holidays this release is a bit earlier than usual. We’ll be on our winter break now and will return to the usual weekly devlog schedule on January 15th.

Beta 2 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
Happy Holidays everyone and see you in 2018!

Devlog

Gordon finished another three awesome ride music tracks: Western, Banjo and Polka. Check them out!

I’ve spent this week on performance optimizations.
The worst performance experienced in Parkitect is usually when zooming all the way out so that most of the park is visible on screen at once. To a degree this is simply due to needing to render a lot more stuff, but partially it’s also because we can’t do certain optimizations - for example, we don’t run animations on guests who are not visible. Since one of the biggest performance costs in Parkitect is animations that is a problem with hundreds of visible guests.
To solve this I’ve built a separate animation system with the only purpose of rendering animations as fast as somehow possible when zoomed out. The animations are lower quality but you can barely notice the difference from a distance so it’s fine! I’ve also limited it to the most important animations to further improve performance: standing, walking and sitting.
How much of an improvement this is varies across parks, depending on how many guests there are and what else is going on. Overall though you should see at least an 25% FPS increase when zooming all the way out. Here are some results from my tests:

Changelog

- added Elevator transport ride
- added three new ride music tracks
- added custom ride music (loaded from My Documents/Parkitect/My Music)
- added Western props, window boxes
- added more ride descriptions
- added remaining guest needs to park rating
- added overview list of all current guest activities
- added fences adapt to stairs
- removed color limitations from trees and rocks
- improved performance significantly when zooming out in busy parks
- improved Bumper Boats movement
- improved Splash Battle target building (easier to attach to walls)
- fixed Submarines could unload guests before fully arriving inside the station
- fixed advanced color picker sometimes misbehaving