Update 16

Did a bit more UI work this week - here’s the start of what’s supposed to become a menu:

And we’ve added a height indicator for raised building previews:


Getting the new guests into the game took more planning and work than expected but we finally got them into a somewhat usable state today.

This weeks update was a bit late because I hoped I could show them ingame, but we’re not quite there yet - here’s a screenshot though of a couple of randomly generated ones from the body parts that Garret made so far:

Obviously the hair is still missing and the skin and cloth colors aren’t right yet (but hey, at least they HAVE skin color now) :)

Also, they don’t only look much nicer and can be more varied but are more efficient than the old ones as well, so we should be able to have more on screen at once than before.

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Update 15

Some weeks you mostly fix bugs, some weeks you mostly work on under the hood improvements…not this week though! This week we worked on many different things that are easy to show :)

I got resizing slope transitions working:

These are all 45° hills with the same height, but differently sized transition segments.

There are some new steeper and flatter hill options:

And friction wheels for flat or curved lifts:

When mousing over paths the shop builder preview now tries to move to the nearest free tile:

This is especially useful with raised paths, as it lets you easily and intuitively build a raised shop:

We added a small flavor animation when trying to build in an invalid location that I like a lot:

You might have seen these “blueprint” graphics used at the bottom of ride previews before:

So far Garret drew those from hand. We also want to use them when building benches and other things - drawing them all from hand would have been a ton of work and so I worked on generating them automatically. They also animate along with the ride now simply because that seemed fun:

Garret also made great progress with the new guests this week so I’ll hand this post over to him and let him talk about them :)

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So I worked on the new park guests this week, updating their design and giving them a new animation rig and skeleton. What this means is they’re a little more interesting to look at and easier for me to animate and work with. This model is really just a test dummy we used to figure out proportions and new features, so I gave it a look to fit the part! Real guests will look a bit different. (Not robots, for instance :P)

The previous park guests were one of the first things I made and were basically a quick proof of concept. These new ones can have different looking clothing with different colours, different skins, and even some facial expression! Sebastian gave them the ability to curiously look around and blink. I think it gives them a lot of character.

It’s gonna be fun to make all the clothing and face options for these and have more than just stick figures wearing different coloured shirts walking around.

Beep boop. ;)

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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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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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