Alpha 17 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

We’ve added the Orbiter from this weeks Art Stream:

It’s a fairly small and simple ride that’s quite interesting to watch :)

Changelog

- added Orbiter
- added roof pieces, generic shapes
- added certain objects (like trees) stick to the terrain while terraforming
- added option to control settings for using the middle mouse button for rotating instead of panning the camera
- disabled workers being allowed to help out in zones they aren’t assigned to if there are no tasks left to do in their assigned zone
- improved mouse controls
- improved guest performance
- improved staff management window performance
- improved balance of guest preferences for rides
- improved handling for box selection tool (used by bulldozer and for creating blueprints)
- improved bulldozer tool
- fixed not being able to place some objects underground anymore
- fixed guests not littering as intended
- fixed a case where the advertising tab wouldn’t work properly
- fixed a case where janitors would not be able to clean trash
- fixed a case where the color picker window could be stuck open
- fixed a case where parts of a crashed train would continue to operate
- fixed a case where boats would drive around without passengers
- fixed mechanics not working properly while off-screen in big parks/on slow PCs
- fixed being able to scroll out of bounds if the game is paused
- fixed guests could walk through cash machines
- fixed speed input field spinner buttons not working properly on Linux with a non-english OS language

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.

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?