Update 32

Guests are now able to walk to their seats inside the cars of the new transport ride - here’s a view through the cars roof:

Fortunately it was possible to reuse the same waypoints tools I created for flat rides.

We thought about how to display the parks finances this week. We wanted to have something that’s a bit less overwhelming than a big table of numbers and that lets you quickly see how you’re doing. It needs some more polish and isn’t complete yet but here’s what we came up with:

Your parks expenses/income is grouped into these categories. Each category has a colored bar showing the expenses/income of that category. The little black arrow marks the expenses of the previous month - if it’s in the green area it means you’re doing better this month than last, if it’s in the red you’re doing worse.

The categories can be expanded…

…so if you’re interested in the detailed numbers they’re all there.

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Parkitect

Update 31

A very busy week with lots of big code changes!

There’s a terrain gridlines toggle…

…but the real work was spent on coasters - or tracked rides as I should say.

As mentioned earlier building tracked rides with multiple stations didn’t work yet. Now it does:

(Sped up for demonstration)

Having multiple stations doesn’t make that much sense on coasters though, sooo…the inevitable next step was to start working on a transport ride!

Implementing it took some time since it works fairly different from the coasters we had so far - it’s powered, suspended, and then there’s also the shape of these supports.

Speaking of suspended, it does swing a bit in curves, although it’s hard to notice since it’s rather subtle and the framerate of this GIF is a bit low:

Now that it works adding other suspended or powered rides should go much faster though. It should also be fairly easy to add other kinds of tracked rides now that the code doesn’t expect everything with a track to be a coaster.

Just because we got it nicely driving on it’s track doesn’t mean there isn’t lots of work left to do on it though! More on that in the coming weeks I guess.

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Parkitect

Update 30

Got the detection of which grid tiles are crossed by a coaster track segment working. It’s being used to detect whether the segment is within the park boundaries or not and for drawing the footprint grid lines like in the other builders:

The flowerboxes received custom color pickers:

Unlike the trees with their predefined palette their color can be chosen freely.

Garret made a new ride during this weeks livestream and here it is working in game:

(It’s sped up in the GIF for some reason)

If you missed the stream we got the entire thing for you in the Twitch archive or a timelapse here:

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Parkitect

Update 29

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.

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Parkitect