Alpha 19 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post. 

Devlog

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:

Changelog

- 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

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.

I’ve been excited to talk about this for months, so here we go :D

If you’ve been following the development of Parkitect for a longer time you might remember one of the most unique and technically challenging features of our Kickstarter pitch was “Maintaining the Illusion” - that scenery should not just look nice to the player, or have an “area of influence” effect on its surroundings. We wanted it to have a real management purpose, namely hiding the backstage areas of the park from the guests view.
Three months ago we sat down and discussed how to make this happen.
Tim and Luuk have been working on it since, and now we’ve got a really cool scenery rating system :)

First of all, let’s take a look at what exactly it is doing.

Here’s an overview shot of a park with a new scenery rating overlay, showing which areas of the park are nicely decorated in shades of green, and which aren’t in red:

Guests don’t like seeing park utility infrastructure such as staff rooms, resource depots and employee paths. They have a negative effect on the scenery rating:

There are many things that are nicer to look at though and block the view.
For example you could hide that staff room behind a facade or completely enclose it inside a custom structure:

Or use the terrain to your advantage:

Or simply plant some trees :)

These visibility calculations aren’t just being done for the park infrastructure though - we’re doing it for every piece of decoration in the park. And in 3D!
Here’s a debug view where the blue lines show from which path tiles the tree is visible. As the tree moves up it becomes visible over the top of the wall!

Here’s a bonus behind-the-scenes GIF (in realtime!) showing these calculations being done for an entire park. A lot to calculate in a short amount of time!

Seriously - a lot.

Next week we’ll talk about what exactly we’re doing with these scenery ratings and some other uses of the visibility system.