Beta 10 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

Devlog

We are now using Metal as the default rendering pipeline on macOS, which brings the visual quality of the Mac version up to par with the Windows and Linux versions. Additionally, this should noticeably improve performance on Mac. Since this is a big change it’s possible that this causes some problems on some systems - please let us know if you run into any issues.

You probably know by now that Parkitect has a really unique and intricate scenery rating system that takes into account what guests are able to see. This is mostly working quite well, especially in fairly open spaces. Where it had some problems is enclosed spaces, such as this building for example:

It’s a really nice house that clearly a lot of effort has been put into, so you would expect it to have a great contribution to the scenery rating. But in reality it has almost no effect:

The problem is that these shops inside the building block the view, as do the walls, so guests don’t really “see” much more than 2-3 walls at once, which is too little to have a noticeable positive scenery rating impact. It makes sense in a way, but it feels really unfair.
After some tweaks the rating scores immediately inside and around buildings are more what you’d expect now:

And Garret created some really nice fog, smoke and spark effects during last weeks Art Stream:

Changelog

- added bankruptcy
- added smoke, fog and spark effects
- added Metal support for Mac (improved visual quality and performance)
- added option for hiring a second research team
- added option for running at 30 FPS (useful for increasing battery life on laptops)
- improved calculation of deco scores in enclosed spaces
- updated LSM/hyraulic launch speeds to be more in line with real coasters
- updated German translation
- fixed puke appearing black during night/rain
- fixed a case where Gyro Drop Tower could get stuck

We reached an important milestone - the campaign mode is finished enough that it can be played through from start to end, and has been sent to our group of testers!
They have a few weeks time to try it now, while we work on further polishing things and incorporating tester feedback in the meantime.

Having people test the campaign is very important. We have worked on this for so long and know the game inside out that we have no reliable feeling for its difficulty anymore… the early feedback so far is that even the first few easy scenarios are quite hard, so some more tweaking will be necessary!

We added an option for hiring a second research team, for a fee of $5000.

$5000 (and the monthly research cost!) is a lot during the beginnings of a scenario, but once the finances have stabilized this will speed up the second half of playing a scenario a bit where money is coming in fairly steadily but new rides are needed for attracting more guests.

And we finished the German translation. This helped with checking whether all text in the game is translatable, and since German text is fairly long it also helped to uncover some spots where the UI needed to be adjusted a bit to better fit the text. Other languages should probably fit as well now without too many further changes. Wunderbar!

We’re waiting a bit longer with getting more translations done because the text for the campaign and tutorial is still changing a bit but as soon as that’s final it’s all ready to be sent off to translators.