Update 14

This week was mostly experimenting - we tried some techniques for graphical improvements that Garret will be able to use in the future. Right now though he’s busy with redesigning the guests.

Our current guests are a single rigged model and we give them a random haircut and shirt color when they spawn at runtime:

For the new ones Garret wanted a bit more diversity so we tried cutting them into multiple pieces…

…that are then stitched back together on spawn (we tested with the old guests, the image above doesn’t show the new ones). It works! This allows Garret to model different sets of cloths that we can then recombine without having to rig or animate the pieces individually.

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Parkitect

Update 13

I received a bunch of sound effects from Gordon this week, so I started doing some work on implementing them. It’s only sound effects for building paths and shops so far and they don’t even get played at the right volume yet but it already adds a lot. It’s great to finally hear something after so many months of silence.

Next I spontaneously felt like working on block brakes:

As you’d expect they completely stop the train if the next section is occupied and start the train as soon as it’s clear. If the next section is clear they can optionally simply let the train pass (as in the GIF above) or act like trim brakes and slow it down to a predefined speed.

Then I worked on corkscrews. They can be sized up like most other track elements:

Interlocking corkscrews works as well:

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Update 12

One of the biggest things we want to get done soon is UI, so while Garret is working on UI design I took the simple windows I made before and figured out a workflow for filling them with content. I also made them resizable and created a tabbed UI element:

(Placeholder art.)

We’ve upgraded from Unity Free to Pro a while ago giving us access to some more “advanced” features, one of them being “image effects” - shaders that are applied to an entire image instead of individual objects. Using these I rewrote the coaster statistic visualization, as the method I had to use before had a couple of smaller issues. It doesn’t look significantly different, but here’s a comparison anyways:

These kind of visualizations could be used for more than coasters, for example I’ve added one that highlights dirty paths. I had some fun while learning shaders and created a small transition effect when switching into a data visualization view:

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Parkitect

Update 11

Another week another update! This one’s a bit earlier to be in time before our Kickstarter ends (just about one day left!). By the way! For those of you who wanted to support our campaign but couldn’t due to not owning a credit card, we’ve now got PayPal & Amazon options directly on our website thanks to the awesome guys over at Humble.

Anyways, back to this weeks progress - first of all, I added smooth camera rotation using the mouse:

It only rotates around the up axis, so you can’t change the tilt. It can also still snap to four predefined angles as before using the camera rotation buttons, as the end of the GIF tries to demonstrate.

Many of you made me aware that the coasters were moving way too fast, so I took a look and indeed there was a small unit conversion mistake causing it to go about three times as fast as it’s supposed to. It should be correct now:

It’s a bit hard to tell in a choppy GIF, but let me know if this still feels off :)

Next I worked on improvements for steel coaster supports. I made them try to move out of the way a bit if needed:

(Those white connector beams are placeholder art, obviously)

Finally I gave angled supports a try:

They are still highly experimental and require a lot more work (as you can probably tell by the graphical glitches anyways), but I think for a quick try they look promising enough to justify continuing to work on them.

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Parkitect