Hope you all had a nice christmas!

We took it a bit slow this week due to the holidays, so progress has mostly been bug fixes and minor things.

We talked a bit about having different types of terrain this week, like grass, sand, rocks…the tricky part with that is getting the transitions between arbitrary terrain types to look nice, so I experimented with creating a shader that does that.

It didn’t work too well:

We’ll have to find a different approach.

Another experiment was this UI element with a tip for pointing at something:

This one works really well and is now being used in the coaster stats view:

That’s it for this week. See you all next year!

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 :)

Gordon delivered a bunch of new sound effects this week, which is always a joy. He also made some great progress on the first song for the game. Here’s a (non-final) preview:

The remaining builder windows (terraforming, deco, path items) have been implemented, so everything we have in the game so far is controllable from the new UI system now. There’s still a lot of work left until everything is cleaned up and working as you’d expect but I think we’re slowly switching our main focus back on game features now.

There’s been some progress on the banking angle UI:

We can put limits on banking angles (the grayed out part at the top) which will be needed depending on the type of coaster you’re building. There’s also a yellow fill indicating the delta between this segments angle and the angle of the previous segment. It’s purely cosmetic for now but should become more important later on.

…oh, and here’s some wobbly trees as an excuse for the lack of more exciting gifs this week.