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.

A somewhat more technical entry this week - I’ve been working on intersection checks against coaster tracks to make sure that the tracks don’t collide with anything else:

This is done by creating a “virtual corridor” along the track that marks the clearance required by the coaster trains. If anything overlaps this corridor, it can’t be build. Here’s a debug view showing this corridor for a section of the track of the steel coaster (in light green lines):

The width and height of this corridor is dependent on the type of coaster you’re building, so for example for a wing coaster it would be much wider than for the steel coaster above and you’d have to make sure that there are no obstacles in the way to the sides of the track.

This method is pretty precise for ensuring that nothing clips through the tracks - for example, while you’re able to build a track over the balloon shop like this…

…you can’t go over it inverted at the same track height:

(Yes, the supports currently clip through inverted tracks, but that’s a different story)

It also allows to build quite compact coasters with near misses:

(Editor screenshot, not in-game graphics quality)

On a related note, building through wooden coaster supports is working now:

Hey all! We just put the footage from the livestream up on YouTube as a timelapse. Check it out!