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.

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.

This week has been more of the work we did last week, except in crunch mode - fixing bugs, adding a splash and loading screens, making screen transitions work…not the most exciting stuff to talk about in a devlog I’m afraid!
The pre-pre-alpha builds are done and out now though (Edit: for the $100 “Early Prototypes” tier Kickstarter backers, you should have received a mail if you’re in that group), so we should slowly be returning to our regular work schedule soon.

Gordon got this catchy preview of song #2 for you this week:

It’s stuck in my head since a couple of days.

Garret redesigned the logo once more. It’s now a mix of the last two versions. We gave animating it a try:

He seems to be pretty satisfied with it so this one might stay.

Earlier this week he also spontaneously decided to do a quick impromptu art livestream. It somehow turned into a much longer session than planned and included the following results:

If you want to watch the entire thing there’s a recording of it available on his Twitch channel.