Pre-Alpha 5 is now available for download! Simply grab it from the download link that you received back when you purchased the game.

This is also our first Linux release! Note that officially we’re only supporting Ubuntu 12.04+, as that is what our engine supports.

The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

We had another fun art stream and Garret worked on some mixed stuff this time, including these nice Mine Carts that are alternate cars for the Wild Mouse coaster:

We had scenery objects that can be build off-grid or alternatively snapped to a grid while holding the Alt key for a while. To make it a bit more clear what’s going on the grid overlay rescales now while snapping is active:

And you can change the grid resolution now, for example hitting Alt + 1 snaps to the center of a tile, Alt + 2 subdivides each tile into 2x2 cells, Alt + 4 subdivides into 4x4 cells and so on:

And finally you can toggle between snapping an object to the center or the corners of the grid cells by hitting the key combination for the currently active grid resolution again, e.g. this is what happens when using Alt + 1 repeatedly:

The problem with key combinations is that they aren’t immediately obvious…you have to learn them somehow, you rarely just accidentally find them by yourself.
I’m still thinking about how the game can teach this to new players without a big “Hey did you know you can do this cool thing?” notice. Resizing the grid is mostly useful for the more “advanced” users who want to build a lot so it might not be too bad if it’s just casually mentioned somewhere deep in the control settings menu, but we’ll see…

Pre-Alpha 5 Changelog:

- added Linux support
- added Mod loading support
- added Bobsled Coaster
- added Castle Walls set
- added alternate cars for: Steel Coaster, Wild Mouse, Wooden Coaster
- added sounds for: Steel Coaster, Wild Mouse, Wing Coaster
- added offset half loops
- added tower ride height limits
- added terrain grid intensity option
- added closing windows with Escape
- added: hold Shift while dragging path to build tunnels through existing terrain
- added Entertainer functionality
- added adjustable terrain grid snapping for deco objects that aren’t locked to the grid (Alt + number key to change grid resolution)
- widened Wing Coaster loops so cars don’t clip into them
- using °F instead of °C when using imperial units
- disabled sounds for preview trains
- reduced memory usage
- improved path dragging behaviour when dragging over terrain that isn’t simple slopes
- improved builder behaviour when building raised objects (stays snapped to position + height after build)
- improved park load times
- improved terraforming performance
- overall performance improvements
- disallowed building tracked ride stations too far below the ground/too high up for paths
- Mac: disabled menu bar and dock in fullscreen mode
- fixed Enterprise being misplaced if rotated
- fixed balloons going crazy during low FPS
- fixed some of the terraforming tools freaking out a bit if dragging outside terrain bounds
- fixed weird stuff happening if starting to edit a tracked ride while its info window is open
- fixed new parks starting at wrong date if another park has been loaded before
- fixed visual glitches if editing a tracked ride while a visualization view was enabled
- fixed clicking attraction platforms not properly opening the attraction info window as intended
- fixed guests being stuck on rides if ride exit leads into an employee path
- fixed bad things happening if double-clicking the “New Park” button on the splash screen
- fixed grasses and terrain overhangs being visible in underground view
- fixed underground paths having handrails in some situations
- fixed a case where path tiles would not properly get removed
- fixed game being unresponsive if loaded with a corrupted settings file
- fixed clicking on terrain slopes not building stairs although the preview showed stairs
- fixes terraforming sounds sometimes not stopping

We released a hotfix (Pre-Alpha 4b) for the lag spikes mentioned in last weeks blog post. Get it from your download link if you’re not using it yet :)

This week we added offset half loops that move one tile to the left or right:

The path builder received more attention this week yet again. Back when I implemented the drag-building for paths we didn’t have tunnels yet, so there were situations where dragging didn’t produce any useful results.
That’s been changed now:

It’s a tool that you use a lot, so it should be as easy to use as possible. I think we achieved that and I’m really happy with it now.

Originally we planned to mainly work on gameplay this month, but you might have seen that people started adding custom objects to the game:

Which is totally awesome! :D

We want building pieces from different sets to somewhat work with each other, and depending on how we implement our building tools these pieces might need to be modeled slightly differently, so Garret started working on a castle walls set to figure out how this’ll work and to sort of set a standard:

So we’re switching plans a bit and work on building tools for a couple weeks longer :)

If you tried Pre-Alpha 4 already you probably noticed some lag spikes whenever guests come on screen. It turned out to be a bug in Unity 5.2 that we didn’t notice before release, so I’ve spent some extra time this week on creating and reporting reproduction cases of performance issues and bugs in all of our third party tools. And I’ve also done some optimizations on our side of course.

I’ve also worked some more with Tim and Luuk of ParkitectNexus, and as a result the game will be able to run mods without requiring the ParkitectNexus Client (although that’s still an excellent tool for easily installing mods and keeping them up to date).
This also means that mods will work on Mac (and Linux, once available)!

The default behaviour when dragging paths above ground is to build stairs across hills. You can simply hold shift now to build a tunnel instead:

The “active” window is slightly highlighted now and can be closed using Escape. Pinned windows are excluded from this.