We upgraded our shaders to Unity 5′s new PBS system, giving us slightly nicer looking lighting. We also added a bit of rim lighting.
Here’s a comparison showing before (Unity 4) and now (Unity 5):

The difference is small, but it’s noticeable (note the top of the burger or the tree). As a bonus it allowed us to get rid off a couple of shader variants.
You’ll notice that shadows are slightly softer/nicer too, but we simply got that from the switch to Unity 5.

Supports and paths properly react to terrain changes below them now:

You can still raise the terrain to “bury” stuff though, but that’s a different problem.

Tracked rides received s-bends:

They can be scaled and banked and built diagonally like most of the other track segments.

And we finally replaced the weird old loops we’ve been using pretty much since the beginning of development with some properly shaped ones:

They look a bit circular due to the perspective, but they really aren’t. Here’s a before/now comparison:

Thanks to everyone over on our subreddit for helping to make sure we get them right this time :)

As said last week, this month we’re trying to focus on resolving smaller tasks that have slowly piled up over time. It might make the next couple devlog entries a bit less interesting, but it’s gotta be done!

Unity 5 was released earlier this week, so we finally switched over! Despite having one of the longest changelogs I’ve ever seen it went super smooth though. There were only a couple minor issues that were easy enough to resolve, and now we’re using Unity 5 :)
We’ll need some time to learn all the new features that are suddenly available to us, but I’m pretty excited about the switch.

If you’ve seen any of the videos of some of our KS-backers playing the game you’ll have noticed that it was impossible to delete certain things after they’ve been placed. The reason was that in Unity 4 we were experiencing some weird performance drops when making objects selectable…before cooking up my own solution for this I wanted to wait for Unity 5 though and see if it’s fixed there - and indeed everything seems to be fine now, so placed objects can finally be deleted. :)

We’ve also added some additional guest animations this week that would have been a pain to implement in Unity 4.

There’s now a search bar in the deco builder window:

Not like there’s so much stuff already that it’s needed, but it’s probably best to have this early.
The preview icons fill the available space a bit better now, while still giving a rough idea of scale (at least when you compare similar items to each other, like the logs or trees).

A part of the finance overview from Update 32 is now also available as a tooltip when hovering over the overall money in the main menu (and it got an additional “Overall” bar).

It shows the current and previous months, so you can get a quick overview without having to open and close a window.

Added a height number when building raised stuff:

It currently shows height above ground level, we should change that to height above sea level instead.

I finally decided to give coaster tunnels a try today. Having to implement this was one of the things that’s been giving me headaches for months, but after having a reasonable idea of how to approach this it turned out to be really easy.

The white box look is obviously placeholder and will be replaced with proper art. Garret visited GDC this week though, so all you get for now is my programmer art :)

We quickly noticed a problem with the text boxes from last weeks activity logs - if you had many activities close to each other or zoomed out the boxes would overlap and you couldn’t read a thing.

It seemed like a good idea to automatically space them out to not overlap anymore, so we tried a couple different methods…

…but that didn’t work too well. And even if it did work all these boxes would really block your view.

In the end, the most simple solution worked the best:

As you already know from the previous blog entry and can see here we also worked on adding support for different languages :)
It’s pointless to actually translate things before they’re final but since there’s slowly more text being added to the game it’s good to have this working. One thing less to worry about!

People received names this week. We’re using these lists from the US Census Bureau that handily also contain data on how frequently the names occur. We’re using the peoples names as seed for their appearance and characteristics, so “John Smith” will always look and behave the same. It’s a bit silly and probably nothing you’d have noticed, but I like the thought that these people are all unique somehow.
Speaking of translations, I guess we’ll have to get similar lists for other countries.

You guys convinced Garret to create a raptor entertainer during this weeks stream, and here he is:

He still needs animations before we can properly implement him though.

Here’s a timelapse of the livestream:

March

Unity 5 is getting close to release. It’s a huge update of the engine we’re using with many exciting new features that should make some things easier for us. We planned to switch to Unity 5 from the very beginning and think the time has finally come to do so next month! It should go fairly smooth but we’ll see.

February was tech-focused, so for March we mostly want to take care of polishing and tying up some loose ends.