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!

This is Update 24, so I guess this marks half a year of weekly devlog updates. Yay!

The coaster builder received highlights for the currently selected segment this week, making it much less confusing to understand what’s going on:

And it’s finally possible to adjust the speed limit of brakes, so we’re really using every last bit of space in this window now:

Block brakes can optionally act like normal brakes and slow the train down to a specified speed if the block ahead of them is clear or not brake at all.

Shops and flat rides received grid lines highlighting the ground tiles they’re being built on which both adds to the blueprint look we’ve got for build previews and can be helpful for raised building:

Niveks suggested on our subreddit to allow scaling up the rocks from Update 23. Nice idea!

One goal for this month is to resolve the biggest remaining annoyances of the coaster builder - first and foremost on our list was adding the build previews for the initial station tile and the entrance/exit:

It might not seem very exciting at first since these previews look just like those of any other buildable thing in the game that you have seen on this blog a couple times before, but since coasters work a bit differently from everything else they’d been missing here until now.

It also means we can build rotated and raised stations now!

Another annoyance was not being able to modify coaster tracks at any position. It was only possible to remove or add new segments to the end of the track. Not anymore:

The track builder UI got some new options since Update 21 and is still missing a couple more…it’s getting a bit cramped maybe?

Speaking of UI - trees have color variants now:

Unlike rides for which colors can be freely chosen these have a predefined set of colors (since this is a bit easier to use and it wouldn’t make much sense to give them any color anyways).

There’s also a new set of rocks that I like a lot:

I’m really satisfied with this week, it feels like we got a lot of useful stuff done :)