So here’s how trash and deliveries will be handled in bigger parks:

A new “Deliveries” building will replace the current crate and trash stacking tiles. It can be connected through pneumatic tubes and conveyor belts to “Depots” that can be placed throughout the park. Shops can be associated with a Depot; if they are, crates will automatically travel to that Depot, from where they then get picked up by Haulers and manually transported the final meters to the shop instead of all the way from the crate stack. Inversely, trash can be dropped off at a depot and then gets automatically pumped to the Deliveries building.
This might sound weird and unrealistic at first, but at least the Disney parks are known to really use a trash disposal system that operates like this (AVAC)!
I’m not aware of a park that uses an automated system for transporting goods, but there are warehouses and airports that operate huge conveyor belt systems like that, so it’s not entirely unrealistic at least - and it should be fun and makes sense for gameplay reasons to have this, so we’re taking that small liberty here.
So far I’ve got the tube/conveyor building working (it works like building paths).

Luuk continued with the scenario editor and made progress with creating tools for defining the owned park area:

Tim added tracking of shop and attraction revenue:

Still lots to do to get all of this operational! Usually we break work down into much smaller tasks that don’t all necessarily have to be completed at once, so even if some tasks aren’t done in time for the monthly alpha update we can ship whatever is ready at that point and it’ll still work… but with these things either the whole system is complete or the entire feature needs to get delayed.
We have a couple weeks left to make it happen but it still makes me a bit nervous…we’ll see!

Alpha 4 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

We added a Spinning Coaster:

And we worked on audio. One of the main problems we had with audio for a long time was that the default way how Unity handles it doesn’t work well with our game due to its near-orthographic perspective. Consider this scene:

There’s a red coaster on the ground and a blue coaster that’s been raised. They are both roughly in the same position on the screen from this view. Now the way Unity figures out what’s audible and what’s not is that you place an “audio listener” somewhere in the scene. You can imagine that it works somewhat like a microphone - everything close to the listener is loud and the further away an audio source is from it the less audible it becomes. The yellow circle in this example shows everything that’s within the audible range of the audio listener:

Looks about right! But if we look at it from another perspective…

…the two coasters are actually not close to each other at all and no matter where we place the audio listener, one of them will always be outside of its range. We could increase the range, but then we’d hear audio sources that are way off-screen.
What we really needed was a way to control the volume of an audio source depending on its position on screen instead of its physical distance to the audio listener, and that has been added now.
This also means that we need to rebalance our audio, so if things sound a bit too loud or too silent currently that’s why :)

Alpha 4 Changelog

- significant performance improvements
- added Spinning Coaster
- added 4D Cinema
- added palm trees
- added customizable colors for some shop products
- added area delete tool
- added controls instructions (beginning of a tutorial system)
- added monitor selection
- added camera scroll/zoom sensitivity settings
- added autosave + save hotkey (Z by default)
- added more rebindable keys
- added detection of performance problems due to mods
- added lateral and longitudinal G visualizations + graphs
- improved audio panning
- improved tracked ride stat visualizations
- improved weather
- improved Janitor behaviour for cleaning dirty toilets
- improved translation support
- increased guest spawn rate by 25%
- fixed stat heatmap visualizations not working on lowest quality settings
- fixed rides saying they have outdated values after loading savegame
- fixed raised objects not being placed at correct height if raising over sloped terrain
- fixed broken employee colors
- fixed errors when trying to load a savegame containing non-existant tracked rides (e.g. missing mods)

Art Stream

It’s Art Stream time again! Join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday at 1pm PST to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

Devlog

We’re mostly busy with making sure everything still works and runs stable after the engine upgrade. After some days of testing it turned out that the “experimental” improved multithreaded rendering in Unity 5.4 is labeled so for a reason :) We’ll not use it for now which costs a couple FPS compared to last weeks test results, but at least we know that it’s something to look forward to in a future update.

The tracked ride visualizations received an update. So far we’ve only been able to show one value for the entire segment, which was precise enough for most cases but a bit lacking on longer segments like the loops or scaled up curves. Here’s an example showing the velocity:

It shows the train loosing speed as it nears the top of the loop and gaining speed afterwards now, as you’d expect. We also added a second color to distinguish between positive and negative vertical Gs:

(And there’s finally a lateral Gs view too)

And here’s a new 4D Cinema :)