Surprise! Alpha 9 is here a week earlier than usual! The full change log is at the end of this post.

Holidays

The reason is that after working non-stop since early 2014 we’re taking a two week holiday break to recharge and think about other things than theme parks for a bit :)
We’ll be back in the second week of January 2017. Hope you all have nice holidays! :)

Devlog

Luuk added adjustable coaster lift speeds:

Tim added a bunch of scenario goals:

They can be set up in the scenario editor with customizable settings and rewards:

Experimental performance improvements

We’ve got some pretty big performance improvements coming up for multi-core systems when lots of objects are on screen. It especially helps when zooming all the way out in very detailed parks, but should also improve performance overall to a smaller degree. In our tests we’ve seen CPU load improvements of up to 35%.

Before turning them on for everyone we would like to do some more testing though! We have created a Steam beta branch for this. If you want to give it a try, right-click on Parkitect in your Steam library, then select Properties, go to the Betas tab and select “Experimental”.

Savegames are compatible between the regular and this experimental version, so you can give it a try without any risk. If you do please let us know your results!

Changelog

- added Mine Train Coaster
- added Turbine
- added Market Research
- added scenario goals
- added sorting attraction/shop list by various properties
- added adjustable chain lift speed
- employees only work on tasks outside their assigned zone if there’s nothing left to do in their zone
- less blurry shadows
- fixed Ferris Wheel being a sadness factory
- fixed all kinds of problems with wooden supports
- fixed problems with building tracked ride blueprints near park border
- fixed lag if loading a new savegame while the game is paused

Unity 5.5, the latest version of the engine we’re using, was released last week and so we upgraded. It broke some minor things in the UI that we need to fix but apart from that went painless.

We changed the workers so that they only help out in other zones if there are no tasks left in their assigned zone. That improves worker efficiency a lot when using zones, but might still be a bit too “smart” - maybe if they are assigned to a zone they should not care at all what’s going on elsewhere in the park…? We’ll have to keep an eye on that.

The attraction overview list can be sorted by various ride properties now such as profit and satisfaction rate to get a quick overview of how all rides in the park are doing:

And Luuk worked on Market Research campaigns, which are a pretty useful tool I think :)
When starting a Market Research campaign a certain amount of guests (depending on the duration of the campaign) are asked about various topics, and in the end you receive a handy report with a bunch of graphs as result. Especially useful for deciding which kind of ride to build next should be the graph that shows the preferred ride intensities of the interviewed guests:

And you also get a snapshot of the current needs such as hunger and thirst, and their overall satisfaction with the park.

Alpha 8 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

We’ve added the Power Surge ride that Garret created during this months Art Stream. There’s also a new Pizza Stall:

Tim and Luuk added tracking for a bunch of additional statistics:

And Gordon delivered 3 new ride songs!

And we’re making a distinction between sandbox mode and “normal” mode now when creating a new park, with the only difference so far being that you can’t spend money anymore when you’re in the red in “normal” mode.

Changelog

- added Car Ride
- added Power Surge
- added new notifications UI + ongoing notifications
- added 3 new ride music songs
- added Pizza Stall
- added new props
- added a bunch of new sounds
- added more statistics
- all kinds of balancing improvements across most parts of the game
- fixed people leaving queues after loading savegame (can still happen on first load with Alpha 8)
- fixed not being able to pick up people while game is paused
- fixed tracked rides not restoring customized train colors properly
- fixed loans not getting paid back
- fixed dozens of smaller bugs