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

We added an Elevator transport ride:

Implementing it was interesting, because unlike all other transport rides we had in the game so far this technically is a “flat ride”. Unlike all other flat rides we had in the game so far though this one has two stations!
Naturally guests will use this ride for pathfinding like all other transport rides, so if the only or fastest way to get somewhere they want to go is using the Elevator they’ll use it.
And another fun thing is that it can transition from underground to above ground!

Tim added another much-requested feature: the ability to use custom ride music.

Beta 1 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post. This is probably our biggest update yet and we hope you’ll enjoy it :)

As previously announced we’ve slightly increased the price to $19.99 with this release (might take a while to update across all stores).

Devlog

Getting the game to sound like we want has been quite challenging for us so far. There are thousands of sound files to organize and trigger at the right time and volume. So far we’ve been using a third-party tool for this and if you have played the game you surely noticed that things didn’t sound quite right.

To solve this the team over at A Shell in the Pit Audio, who is taking care of all of Parkitects audio needs, has been working on their own custom audio tool since roughly the end of 2016 and with Beta 1 you can hear the results!

Here’s a small sample:

Apart from a much better audio mix and coasters being properly audible all rides have audio now and there are hundreds of other new sounds. There are also five new ride music tracks and a new background music track.
Naturally there are still things to tweak and fix but we hope you’ll agree how much better the game sounds now :)
A big thanks to Chris, Em, Gordon and Rachel for their hard work on this!

Luuk added more fine-grained options for starting new parks, so when playing a sandbox park you now can decide individually whether it should have money, research or goals enabled:

For tracked rides with wide stations it’s possible to place the entrance and exit in-line with the station platforms now:

There’s a new visualization when having the products tab of a shop open so you can see all of its resource crates that are in transit:

Garret made some new alternate cars during the last Art Stream. The Spinning Coaster now has the option of using these round cars that can be used as trains, unlike the default Spinning Coaster cars that can only run individually:

Meanwhile the Bobsled Coaster received these 6 seat cars that can’t be used as trains:

And then there’s also the new Powered Coaster!

It can slow down or speed up during the ride and can do multiple laps.

There are some new rope fences:

And Gabby added a new tree and bunting:

Changelog

- complete overhaul of the audio implementation
- added hundreds of new sound effects
- added five new ride music songs
- added one new background music song
- added Steam Workshop support for mods
- added tool for easy creation of scenery mods
- added Powered Coaster
- added alternate trains for Monorail, Spinning Coaster, Bobsled
- added employees gain experience from working and get better at their job
- added Staff Training Room for training staff more quickly
- added more fine-grained options for sandbox parks (disable money, disable goals, disable research)
- added a bunch of new plants, crates, fences
- added option to define terrain with “support rights” in the scenario editor
- added option for disabling loans in scenarios
- added predefined palette of nice colors to color picker
- added left control key for putting an object to the same height as the one below the mouse cursor
- added LOD fading
- added disallow terraforming outside park bounds
- added placing entrance/exit in-line with wide tracked ride station platforms
- added visualization of all resource crates in transit to shop products tab
- improved park loading times by ~40%
- some overall performance improvements
- fixed that annoying freeze while loading parks
- fixed guests sometimes complaining about Haulers when they shouldn’t
- fixed boats sometimes getting stuck
- fixed blueprints being able to build objects that haven’t been researched
- fixed being able to build deco blueprints above/below terrain bounds
- fixed being able to build blueprints without having enough money
- fixed goals getting completed while playing in the scenario editor
- fixed park entrance path tiles not saving their style even though their style could be changed using the path style brush tool
- fixed not being able to “buy” land in sandbox mode
- fixed errors with some of the terrain tools
- fixed problems after changing terrain size in the scenario editor
- fixed a case where resources could not be delivered