Devlog Update 169
Employees gain experience by doing their work now. The more experienced they are the faster they complete their tasks and the less quickly they get tired.
They can also be sent to the Staff Training Room, a new park utility building where they train to gain experience more quickly.
Devlog Update 168 + Alpha 19
Alpha 19 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
We’ve added the Gentle Monorail Ride from last weeks Art Stream. It’s a very calm scenic ride that fits nicely above paths or between other rides:
There are a bunch of new scenario options:
And we’ve added an overall thoughts overview to the Average Guest Stats window, which helps identify problems with the park more quickly.
You can also click individual entries and get markers for where these thoughts have appeared in the park, which has been added to all other thought lists as well. This helps for example with figuring out where guests visiting a certain ride are coming from:
- added scenery visibility and rating system
- added “Immersion” stat for guests showing how much they like the scenery
- added park and ride scenery ratings
- added scenery protects rides/paths from rain
- added Water Coaster
- added Gentle Monorail Ride
- added Scarecrow entertainer costume
- added skeletons, mausoleum, sculptures
- added scenario settings: can’t change park entrance fee, free ride entrance, free shop products, disallow terraforming, build height restriction
- added all current guest thoughts to guest overview window
- added a bigger 45° curve option
- added right click to turn off all other theme buttons in deco builder window
- improved guest performance
- improved deco window search to search through all categories, not just the currently selected one
- fixed a case where trains could derail for no reason
- fixed haulers not being able to pick up crates from delivery pad if stack is too high
- fixed terrain sometimes not rendering at all on Linux
Devlog Update 167
The month went by way too fast again, but on the upside that means it’s Art Stream time once again.
Come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (October 25th) at 1pm PDT to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.
We put the Water Coaster from last months Art Stream into the game. This unique attraction blends a calm boat ride with thrilling coaster sections capable of steep drops, banked curves and of course big splashes:
There’s a bigger 45° curve option now for all track types:
Fitting for the spooky season Gabby made a mausoleum and some skeleton props. Garret added a scarecrow costume for the Entertainer:
And there are some generic abstract sculptures:
Devlog Update 166
Last week we revealed the new scenery system and explained how we’re using it to create scenery ratings. Here’s what we’re doing with them.
Guests now have an “Immersion” stat that’s influenced by their surroundings and that affects how fast their happiness decreases. Additionally, their immersion can decrease if they encounter a Hauler carrying crates, so ideally the shop supply routes should be kept somewhere behind the scenes.
Guests also leave a scenery rating when leaving the park, which factors into the overall park rating and thus has some influence on how many guests the park can attract.
Rides receive a scenery rating too (notice how the parts that are just going through rocks are rated lower because they block the view of the nice scenery outside):
It has an influence on how exciting the ride is. Especially for dark rides this can make a noticeable difference.
And as a nice bonus we can use the visibility data to determine whether a ride is covered or not, so covered rides continue to be used during rain as you’d expect.
As an additional fun detail guests close their umbrellas on covered paths :)
Lastly, the question that has come up most since last week: won’t all these visibility calculations slow down the game?
No, they are running in the background on a separate thread and are only done in areas where the scenery changed. Tim optimized them a lot to be very fast too!
So most of the time there’s nothing to calculate, and when there is you won’t notice.