Devlog Update 158

Garret added some basic geometric shapes as building pieces:

Luuk is back and made sure that certain objects such as trees stick to the terrain when terraforming:

And we continued working on improving some of the controls.
The box selection tool used by the bulldozer and blueprint creator now uses multiple clicks:

The first click starts the selection. The second click locks in the size of the selection box, and the third click determines the height and finishes the selection. This should be easier to understand for new players and is also less fiddly in general than the old way.

Color palettes received a visible “delete” button because “use right click to delete” was not obvious at all.

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Parkitect

Devlog Update 157

As expected, this week went relatively similar to the last one. I also had some time left to playtest and balance and do some performance optimizations for a bit. It was a nice change to work without worrying about whether something visually interesting would be finished by the end of the week for the devlog or not, and is probably something we should be doing a bit more often.

A bit of visual progress has been made after all though: Garret is back from his vacation and made some new basic roof tiles :)

We’re currently testing a modified mouse control scheme. The current one is perfectly fine if you know how it works I think, but it seems to confuse new players sometimes. The changes we’re trying are:

  • have edge panning enabled by default for new players (moving the camera around when the cursor is near the edge of the screen). Some didn’t know you can drag the camera using the middle mouse button, so this should ensure they definitely find some way to move the camera without having to use the keyboard. Can still be disabled in the settings of course.
  • move the camera dragging from the middle mouse button to the right mouse button, which frees up the middle mouse button. Use the middle mouse button for rotating the camera without requiring to use the keyboard. Overall this seems to be the most common button assignment in comparable games.
  • Being able to quickly delete something without requiring to open a separate bulldozer tool is really important though in this game, otherwise building and experimenting becomes annoying. So deleting objects is still done with a simple right mouse click.
  • Don’t delete stuff when clicking with the right mouse button while no building tool is opened to prevent accidental deletions.
  • allow rebinding the middle mouse/right mouse buttons, so you can still put pan back on the middle mouse button

Downsides:

  • the right mouse button has two different tasks now: if you click it deletes, if you drag it doesn’t delete and moves the camera. Having two different actions on one button seems a bit strange to me. Need to keep testing longer and monitor reactions to see if it’s ok.
  • also a bit strange that sometimes deleting objects works with the right mouse button (when in a building tool) and sometimes doesn’t. On the other hand you probably only want to delete stuff while in a building tool anyways, and we’ll change the cursor to have a distinct look while in a building tool which should make it more obvious why sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t
  • previously, when you dragged with the right mouse button held it would keep deleting similar objects, which is really useful when you need to delete many things. Doing this is not as common as panning the mouse or deleting individual objects though, so it’s fine to make this a feature for “advanced” users by making this a bit more complicated than it previously was. You’ll need to holt Alt while dragging now for doing this.
  • haven’t figured out what to do about drag-deleting paths yet :/ Would make sense to use Alt + Drag too?
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Parkitect

Devlog Update 156

Usually I try to keep a balance between fixing bugs, improving old things and adding new things, but occasionally it’s necessary to just focus for a while on fixing and improving. This week was nothing but fixing bugs for me, and since the others are on well-deserved vacation currently that means there are no exciting pictures of cool new things this week I’m afraid.

The week started with a bunch of patches for Alpha 16 before I moved on to some less urgent problems. There was one bug in particular (janitors are occasionally unable to pick up some trash until the savegame is reloaded) that was especially tricky - it has a fairly low and random chance to happen and only appears under certain circumstances. Figuring out what was going on there was a very slow process since I had to leave the game running for hours just to see the issue happening once, so in the end it took roughly two days to understand what the problem was. Once I knew, the fix itself took just a couple minutes, which is how it oftentimes goes with bugs.
That’s why I usually ask people reporting a bug if they know how it can be triggered :) It can really save a ton of time and frustration.

There’s still some more left to work through, so next week looks like it’ll be more of the same.

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Parkitect

Devlog Update 155 + Alpha 16

Alpha 16 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

The janitors and mechanics got improved a bit to recognize trash and vandalized objects on adjacent tiles instead of only on the tile they’re standing on. Additionally all staff wandering behaviour has been improved a bit to make them less likely to step on tiles they’ve recently visited. This makes them cover their area more uniformly and should increase their efficiency a bit (and makes them seem a bit smarter).

Here’s a test with the old completely random movement. The red squares mark where the employee in this test went:

And here’s the improved one:

We added the Boat Transport ride from this weeks Art Stream:

And we wrote a bunch more explanatory tooltips.

Changelog

- added Splash Battle ride
- added Boat Transport ride
- added Spooky and Fantasy props, buoys
- added shuttle mode for Monorail, Suspended Monorail transport rides
- added reordering custom color slots using drag & drop (hold Alt to replace instead)
- added tapping shift when building toggles between setting the object height to the last used one and ground level
- added more tooltips
- improved overall performance, especially with many objects on screen (up to ~40%)
- improved staff patrol behaviour
- improved janitors/mechanics to be more aware of nearby trash/vandalism
- improved behaviour when building entrance/exit between tracked ride stations with one tile distance
- improved camera pan speeds
- improved the look of metallic and glass objects
- improved research costs and duration balance
- fixed visualization views not working anymore
- fixed input field arrows misbehaving on Linux with a non-english locale
- fixed boats driving through coaster tunnels, stone paths, transport system tubes, wooden supports
- fixed errors when deleting a boat ride
- fixed sometimes not being able to open a boat ride even though it is placed in a valid location
- fixed some random error messages popping up occasionally when using any UI with a scroll list
- fixed wrong savegame entry being selected by default when saving game

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Parkitect