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:
