We’ve got a fairly big technical decision to make this week: should we switch to deferred shading?

Deferred shading is a technique that allows using lots of high-quality point lights without killing your PC. That means we could do this (and many more lights on screen at once) with good performance:

And we could also fairly cheaply shade water based on depth:

The water could probably be done without deferred shading, but if we ever want to have the lights we definitely need to switch.

Now, please note that the above screenshots are currently nothing but graphics tests: they are taken in-engine, but it doesn’t get dark in the game yet, and you can’t place water yet either. Water is something we just started working on this week (which is why the deferred shading question popped up now). Lights is something we’d like to do potentially: we’d love having them, but placing them on rides and animating them will take lots of time. Since lights are really just eye candy (although we think they look fantastic) that time is currently spent better elsewhere. Basically, for now we’d only like to keep the door open to maybe add lights sometime further down the road.

Now, the downside of switching to deferred shading is that in Unity it doesn’t work together with the orthographic camera we’ve been using so far. The above screenshots have been taken with a perspective camera with a very low field of view to match the previous look of the game as good as possible so you might not even have noticed that it changed. It’s most noticeable on very tall straight structures like the drop towers if they are near the edges of the screen. Here’s an extreme example:

(Left: what the tower would look like with the new perspective camera; right: what the tower looked like with the orthographic camera used so far).

Tall structures look slightly bigger the closer they get to the camera, which they didn’t before.

Here’s a more normal scene for comparison. Old orthographic camera:

New perspective camera:

(Ignore the shadow differences, they are super blurry as a result of the switch right now. We’re looking into fixing that.)

It looks almost identical, but as you can see we’d still move slightly away from that oldschool isometric look, so we wanted to hear your opinion on this before doing the switch (and no, allowing to toggle between both is not an option). We’ll keep working with it for the next few weeks to see if there are any other benefits/downsides, but we can relatively easily switch back if the majority of you hates it.

Other things done this week

In other development news, I’ve started doing some balance work as mentioned last week. I’ve created a small tool that records the duration of flat rides. The problem is that not all of our rides use simple animations - for example the Swinging Ship uses some simple pendulum physics, so the only way to figure out how long it needs for a round is to let it go and measure the time, and this tool does just that. It’ll also be helpful for testing the animations of future rides more quickly, as I don’t have to boot up the entire game and place down a ride manually just for watching what happens.

Using the duration information I created another tool that gives us an overview of all the flat rides in the game and that calculates some important numbers that tell us how “good” the ride is, like the maximum number of guests who can be served per hour and how much money the ride can theoretically make in that time. All rides got some different stats now. They’ll need further tweaks, but it’s pretty cool to finally see guests prefer some rides more than others depending on their personal taste.

Also did some work on a park rating system:

That greenish quarter circle in the menu bar shows your current overall rating. If you hover over it, you get this tooltip that explains where the overall rating is comeing from. As you can see your park rating is broken down into several categories, and we’ve got plans for a couple more. Happiness is the current average of all your guests in the park. Price and cleanliness are running averages over ratings given by each individual guest as soon as he leaves the park (so they depend on what each guest experienced in your park and their personal opinions). We’re doing ratings in percent because we think that makes it intuitively pretty clear that 0% is the worst possible rating, 50% is neither good nor bad and 100% is the best possible rating.

And, finally, now that we have an idea what water might look like in this game, we just had to add a log flume ride:

We might still change the look of the water a bit and maybe add some visuals to show the current, but overall we’re pretty happy with it.

And that’s it. That was a pretty crazy week :)