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.

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

Devlog Update 154

Art Stream

Once again it’s the end of the month and so it’s time for the next Art Stream!
Ccome join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (July 26th) at 1pm PST to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created :)

Devlog

We got some more deco objects for the fantasy set done:

The Monorail/Suspended Monorail can operate in shuttle mode now :)

There’ve been a few questions about the differences between shops recently. I’ve improved our tooltips to be able to show a bit more than just a boring line of text to be able to display some information about the products a shop sells, and then used this new possibility to improve the blueprint tooltips as well.

Devlog Update 153

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 :)