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:

Time for another weekly update! By the way, I tagged the previous entries and added a “Weekly Updates” link to the menu at the top, in case you want to filter out the other posts here.

I started this week with implementing the Enterprise ride Garret made during last weeks livestream. Here’s a glimpse of it in action:

I then went back to working on coasters and implemented brakes. You set a target speed for them, and by the end of the segment the train will be slowed down to that speed.

The force of deceleration depends on how much faster the train is than the speed limit and how long the brake segment is - so, while a short segment will properly slow a fast train down…

…that’s obviously not very comfortable for your guests. You might want to build a longer brake run instead, which automatically results in a smoother deceleration:

Lastly, we got quite a few requests for wing coasters, so we’ve done some work on them! They aren’t quite done yet - for example, due to their width they’ll need a special station. Here’s what we have so far though:

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: