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!

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

Devlog Update 183

Art Stream

Come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (February 28th) at 1pm PDT to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

Devlog

It’s been a long time since we added any new shops, so here are two: a Turkey Legs stall and a Juice Stall selling nice refreshing fruit juices.

Devlog Update 182

Maintenance month continues, so again not a lot to show this week.
We’ve updated to the latest version of Unity and also updated all of our other third-party assets. There were a few small hiccups here and there but overall it went pretty smoothly.

Water coaster channels can be properly embedded into the terrain and lakes now without creating tunnels:

And Gabby got a new Maple Tree: