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

This week we got caught up a bit in bug fixes, maintenance and planning.

A bit of visual progress has been made though after all.
The glass building pieces introduced in Alpha 14 and 15 didn’t really look all that much like they are made of glass, so they got a small update.

Before:

Now:

The same overhaul has also been applied to the glass tunnels.

…and then to anything metallic as well.

Garret and Fabrice worked on some new props that are the beginnings of a colorful Fantasy theme :)

Continuing our current trend of adding water rides, we implemented the Splash Battle ride from last weeks Art Stream:

The unique gimmick of this ride is that the boats are equipped with water guns operated by the guests. Apart from battling each other targets can be placed along the track, and passerbys are at risk of getting splashed too!
It is also possible to disable the guns for parts of the ride.

We added buoys. They’re a nice deco for water areas and also block paddleboats from driving through.

Tim added swapping custom object colors using drag & drop:

And we started working with a concept artist, Fabrice, who will help us with designing more props. His first task were Spooky props, and we’re very happy with the results :)
Here’s what he came up with:

And here are the objects in the game that we built from these: