Alpha 12 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.
There have been some bigger changes under the hood, so please let us know if you encounter any problems.
Note that support for DirectX 9 has been dropped with this update so if you have any trouble running Alpha 12 please make sure your graphics drivers are up to date / check for DirectX updates through Windows Update first.

Devlog

We’ve added the Inverted Double Swing ride from this weeks Art Stream. It’s a pretty interesting looking ride with a fairly small footprint, and it turned out quite nice:

When possible we try to use recordings of real ride sounds, so the audio team went to a nearby Go-karts track this week for a recording (and racing) session.
Look forward to hearing the results of that in the future :)

Changelog

- added Inverted Double Swing
- added Robot entertainer
- added Steam stats
- added zoom to cursor
- changed raising terrain/rides/buildings to 0.5 units from 1 (for new parks/scenarios)
- improved terrain texturing
- improved overall performance in busy parks
- improved performance when hiding scenery
- continued UI overhaul
- terrain generator improvements
- balance adjustments
- fixed performance issues when selecting large amounts of terrain
- fixed error message when switching into underground mode when it’s raining while there’s water on screen
- fixed staff could sometimes take a long time to return to their assigned zone
- fixed setting car rotation for Ghost Mansion Ride/Inverted Dark Ride not working
- fixed a case where trains would not have the correct colors
- fixed goals sometimes already being completed in custom scenarios
- fixed not being able to click through hidden attractions
- fixed a case where track was properly aligned but still didn’t connect
- fixed hydraulic launch section sometimes stopping trains abruptly, resulting in wrong ride stats
- fixed hydraulic launch section launching train while block isn’t clear

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 :)

Luuk added a bunch of statistics across all of your play sessions and some global ones (this uses Steam statistics, so they are only available when playing through Steam):

And we decided to make a somewhat breaking change: we’re changing the terrain to use less steep half-unit high slopes. Naturally this includes placing rides and walls at half unit high increments and less steep stairs.
To keep old savegames compatible they will continue to use the steep terrain and only new parks will use the flat slopes. The old steep stairs will still be available in old and new parks.