This week has mostly been bug fixes, cleaning up and doing some groundwork for a couple of future features, so it’s a bit of a slow week for the devlog I guess.

Last weeks loops got some more shape adjustments:

Getting their shape right is a bit harder than expected, but I think they’re pretty good now. Thanks for the feedback and suggestions everyone :)

I’ve done some more work on guest behaviour. They now have a couple of rules for deciding whether they want to leave the park (was entirely random before as a placeholder). Additionally, if they own a park map they’re now able to actively head for an attraction or nearby food stall/cash machine/toilet if necessary. This is what we needed the pathfinding functionality from a couple weeks back for.

We added a launched drop tower ride!

And this is how you build it:

We’re really satisfied with this solution - it’s super simple to use and pretty fun :)

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 :)

We haven’t done a lot of UI work in a while, but now that shops can finally be selected it seemed like a good time to start with the shop info window.

What we have here so far is the product settings tab, listing all the products and their required ingredients (which need to be delivered to the shop). For some ingredients you can tweak how much of it goes into the product, so you have a bit of an influence on how many delivery crates need to be hauled around and the production costs. Guests might not be willing to pay as much/are less satisfied with lower quality products though.
Most ingredients have a status effect on the consumer (for example, coffee reduces tiredness a bit), so you might not want to be too stingy with those.
Adjusting the ingredient amounts should not really be required in the end as that could easily become tedious, but it’s something you can do if you want to.

The costs in the screenshot above are placeholders. We’ll have to do a big balancing pass someday and assign some proper values.

The tunnels from last week received their art and work for other coasters now too:

They’re just simple concrete tubes, but that’s what a lot of real coasters use. We might add other types of tunnels later - for now though I’m pretty satisfied with these.

Working on the coasters wasn’t really planned for this month, but after the work on tunnels I felt like it and the result is that corkscrews can be built diagonally now:

Same for regular hills:

Naturally, diagonal elements are a bit longer and thus have a slightly different shape, but that’s the trade-off for keeping everything properly aligned.

Here’s a comparison showing the shape difference of diagonal hills (orange) and regular ones (blue):

I was told that it would be a good idea to allow building brakes on flat slopes, so that’s possible now:

I think it’s mostly useful for accelerating a train out of a block brake a little bit quicker.
The drive tires and brakes received some simple animations.

We’ve added a follow camera mode for guests:

More things than usual that we did this week were possible to show on a screenshot/gif and interesting enough to show here, so this got a bit longer :)
Too bad not every week is like this!