Art Stream

Garret will be doing another art livestream next week - tune in to his Twitch channel on Thursday, from 1pm to 3pm PST!

The last few streams got crazy long, so Garret will try to end it at 3pm this time.

Edit: moved from Wednesday to Thursday.

Devlog

Started this week with fixing a couple more issues, but that’ll be enough for now. It’s really interesting to see that even after staring at the game for hundreds of hours other people will still do things you never tried or thought of. You tend to develop a habit of always testing the same things all over again after a while, so it’s really beneficial to have some other people test even early on.

We’re now planning what to work on during the next weeks/months. The main focus for a while should be to get more gameplay implemented. I did some AI work but there’s nothing to show in GIF-form yet.

There’s a new park overview camera mode:

Pan, rotation and zoom works like in the normal view.

We’re not using a level-of-detail system yet (replacing far away objects with less detailed versions for better performance), but as you have more objects on screen at once in this view we might have to. Maybe we’ll just replace the people with dots? We’ll see once we have more content and bigger parks to test with.

Programming-wise this has been a pretty uneventful week, it’s mostly been fixing bugs and doing some polish work in preparation for the pre-alpha (not that it’ll be bug-free or super polished, but at least it shouldn’t contain some of the nastiest issues. They’ll have to be fixed anyways, so now is as good a time as any).

Gordon delivered a whole bunch of really awesome sound effects this week. Garret has been busy with creating these beautiful new deco items:

It’s possible to build curved slopes and curved slope-to-flat transitions now:

These are the flattest slopes, and as you can see the curved slope is huge…it probably shouldn’t be allowed to build them even steeper. We’ll also need much flatter ones for helixes.

Some common feedback we received for guests was that it looks bad if they simply walk through each other - I agreed but was afraid that fixing that would kill performance. I at least wanted to give making them avoid each other a try though:

It still remains to be seen how much of an performance impact this has in huge parks, but I’m somewhat confident that it might actually work. I’d definitely like to keep it in the game if possible since it really does look a lot nicer.

Hope you all had a good start into 2015! This should be a pretty intense year as there’s a bunch of exciting milestones ahead of us!

My work this year started with a simple thing - a sidebar menu. It only contains one button that opens a placeholder window for hiring staff so far…

…but it’ll grow eventually. It’ll contain some tools that you’ll probably need a bit less often than the ones in the bottom menu bar, so you can hide it to have it out of the way. Of course it should still be hidden the next time you start the game, so then I worked on saving settings like this one. This led to saving the positions of windows so they’re placed in the same position in which you closed them the next time you open them again (both while playing the game and after restarting it).

Next up was yet again more work on coasters. Since the coaster builder is working fairly well it was now time to give them some settings, and the most important one was allowing to change the train length and the number of trains running on the track.

For this it was necessary to figure out the maximum train length and amount that the track could support, and to determine that it’s necessary to know where it’s even possible to spawn trains. Here’s a debug view showing the possible spawn locations…:

(The blue one is a block brake section.)

…and with that the other tasks were easy to solve and we finally have proper support for multiple trains. Having multiple stations like in the screenshot above actually doesn’t fully work yet, but this is somewhat of a first step in that direction.

…aaand it’s possible to change coaster colors now:

(I’m bad at picking nice colors :/)

With that we can check off a good number of things that we wanted to get done before the first pre-alpha build for the “Early Prototypes” tier KS backers later this month. Still lots left to do though!