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:

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.

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: