This week, Garret added some new terrain textures so you can get more use out of the new terrain features introduced in Alpha 12:

Water adjusts to terrain changes by itself now so you don’t have to constantly update it manually after terraforming for a bit:

When connecting an existing pool of water to a hole it’ll remove the water though, otherwise you could accidentally flood stuff easily that you didn’t intend to:

And with that all the remaining big tasks regarding terrain we still had on our task list are done :) NICE.

We also added the first ride that makes proper use of lakes, the Submarines:

And Luuk added support for Steam Cloud, so if you’re playing on multiple systems through Steam all your savegames and blueprints automatically synchronize across them.

Art Stream

March went past way too fast, but on the positive side that means it’s time for another Art Stream!
Come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (March 29th) at 1pm PST to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

Devlog

This week has mostly been maintenance, fixing bugs and making sure all the terrain changes don’t break the existing terraforming tools/terrain generator/old parks.
One change worth mentioning is a performance improvement for off-screen guests. In some especially crowded parks we’ve seen CPU usage reductions of up to 50% with that :)

Garret added something cool though: a new Robot entertainer :)

Gordon finished a new song! It’s really catchy, give it a listen:

Improving terrain textures has been an open task for a very long time. The reason is that we have a list of requirements/wishes for them, and figuing out a technique that fulfills them all took a while :)

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since the Christmas Holidays break last year and did a bunch of research and prototyping, and we’ve finally arrived at a method that we like :D

First of all, here’s what it looks like:

You can change the texture for quarter tiles now instead of for the whole tile, so it’s more fine-grained than before. Actually, it’s even more fine-grained than that, because each quater tile is further divided up into 4 triangles so you can paint around hills nicely:

As you can see, transitions between tiles aren’t exactly smooth but it’s better than straight edges, and I think our art style allows us to get away with the hard cuts.
We can theoretically use up to 256 different terrain textures, and savegame size shouldn’t be increased by more than a couple hundred kilobytes in most cases.

So, we’re pretty happy with that!

On the downside, we’ll have to drop DirectX 9 support for it. DirectX 10 is available since ~10 years by now, but we still wanted to know how many people would be affected by this change.
So we ran some analytics over the last couple months and found that less than 2% of our players use DirectX 9. Doesn’t sound too bad, but that’s still uncomfortably many!
Digging into this further though it turns out that ~90% of these people use DirectX 10-capable graphics cards, so we assume they just don’t have the proper drivers or DirectX version installed. In addition, a good amount of the remaining people is still running Windows XP, which we never officially supported.
So I think we can justify changing our minimum requirements to a DirectX 10-capable graphics card. If you’re still affected by this and can do absolutely nothing about it, please let us know.

Just for fun, here’s a dump of screenshots of the (sometimes weird) things we tried for terrain textures :)