This week we’ve obviously been pretty busy with putting the finishing touch on our Kickstarter campaign (which is going great so far thanks to all of you!) and deciding to create an interactive trailer last minute (we’re now glad we did!). But actually, we also managed to get some development done! Yes, it was a crazy week.

First of all, Garret made some shutters for shops (you might have seen them in the interactive trailer already).

They’ll go down when the shop is closed or can’t sell its goods for some reason.

I’ve made a small dev tool for defining the length of coaster cars and their offset to the following car:

On the right is the actual car, on the left an in-editor preview for the offset.

You might be wondering about the weird colors of the car on the right - that’s because some of our models have parts with a user-defined color, and that’s how these are shown in the editor. To make picking nice preselected colors easier for us I also made a small tool that renders the models with customized colors in the editor:

And, the big one - we got some work done on wooden coasters!

The tracks and supports for this coaster are the most difficult to get right, so we wanted to tackle them finally.

Here’s what we have so far:

By the way, this is the very first piece of concept art that Garret did for this game, right on the first day of joining the project:

We’ll have to see if we can get the wooden supports to look more like that, but finally having all the elements from this mockup working in the game is super exciting for us!

This week I continued improving coasters. The code for moving coaster cars along the track is the first thing I wrote for this game - in the meantime I had some ideas for improving it that I wanted to test. I wanted to make sure that these improvements don’t decrease the performance so I used this coaster train with 150 cars for taking performance measurements (it requires approximately the same amount of CPU as many shorter trains, but is easier to measure):

In the end, the new code wasn’t only cleaner and more precise but also significantly faster, so that’s pretty good :)

In a previous update I mentioned that the track crossbeams weren’t absolutely evenly spaced, which as a side effect of these improvements could be fixed and now it’s perfect:

Our hills also had a bit of an odd shape that I fixed - I’m not entirely sure if it’s perfect yet, but it’s certainly much better:

I did some experimentation on scenery visibility this week. Scenery can improve the ratings of rides and your guests will give a scenery rating of the park. Now ideally scenery shouldn’t simply have a “sphere of influence” where everything within a certain radius of the scenery object is affected by it - for example, what if there’s something between the guest and the scenery object that is blocking the view, such as a hill or a building? In that case the scenery should have no effect.

However, doing this visibility check requires some computation time so we can’t do it every single time a guest gets close to any scenery object. A better approach would be to precalculate once from where the scenery object is visible so that we can later do quick lookups using that information to find out which objects are visible from any given place. Here’s a debug view showing the result of that precalculation:

In the center of the image is the scenery object (it’s a burger stall for testing purposes here). The white lines show from where the object is visible. Notice how there are no white lines in the bottom right corner of the image because the terrain is blocking the view, so this scenery object wouldn’t count towards the rating of any rides placed there and wouldn’t be noticed by guests walking past on that side.

The experiment showed that doing this precalculation still takes a bit too long when loading big parks but I think with some optimization it could work. It would certainly be nice to have this kind of visibility check and would allow some interesting gameplay possibilities.

On to more concrete developments!

I’ve added pricetags to things:

They don’t look nice yet but we’ll get to that when we start working on the proper UI.

Our coaster cars were sometimes not properly aligned with the track, especially in tight curves. You can kinda see it here:

And a bit better when looking at it from below:

It was barely noticeable ingame and required some bigger changes but this week it bothered me enough to finally fix it. As the fix also required some changes to the actual coaster car model I made some debug “art” for testing purposes so I could experiment with it instead of having to bother Garret every time I needed a change:

I made the cars too big but as you can see they are now properly aligned with the track and all that’s left to do is to update the real art: