next »

[deanr201]

Update 26
Hope you all had a good start into 2015! This should be a pretty intense year as there’s a bunch of exciting milestones ahead of us!
My work this year started with a simple thing - a sidebar menu. It only contains one button that opens a placeholder window for hiring staff so far…

…but it’ll grow eventually. It’ll contain some tools that you’ll probably need a bit less often than the ones in the bottom menu bar, so you can hide it to have it out of the way. Of course it should still be hidden the next time you start the game, so then I worked on saving settings like this one. This led to saving the positions of windows so they’re placed in the same position in which you closed them the next time you open them again (both while playing the game and after restarting it).
Next up was yet again more work on coasters. Since the coaster builder is working fairly well it was now time to give them some settings, and the most important one was allowing to change the train length and the number of trains running on the track.
For this it was necessary to figure out the maximum train length and amount that the track could support, and to determine that it’s necessary to know where it’s even possible to spawn trains. Here’s a debug view showing the possible spawn locations…:

(The blue one is a block brake section.)
…and with that the other tasks were easy to solve and we finally have proper support for multiple trains. Having multiple stations like in the screenshot above actually doesn’t fully work yet, but this is somewhat of a first step in that direction.
…aaand it’s possible to change coaster colors now:

(I’m bad at picking nice colors :/)
With that we can check off a good number of things that we wanted to get done before the first pre-alpha build for the “Early Prototypes” tier KS backers later this month. Still lots left to do though!   

[deanr201]

Update 27
Programming-wise this has been a pretty uneventful week, it’s mostly been fixing bugs and doing some polish work in preparation for the pre-alpha (not that it’ll be bug-free or super polished, but at least it shouldn’t contain some of the nastiest issues. They’ll have to be fixed anyways, so now is as good a time as any).
Gordon delivered a whole bunch of really awesome sound effects this week. Garret has been busy with creating these beautiful new deco items:

It’s possible to build curved slopes and curved slope-to-flat transitions now:

These are the flattest slopes, and as you can see the curved slope is huge…it probably shouldn’t be allowed to build them even steeper. We’ll also need much flatter ones for helixes.
Some common feedback we received for guests was that it looks bad if they simply walk through each other - I agreed but was afraid that fixing that would kill performance. I at least wanted to give making them avoid each other a try though:

It still remains to be seen how much of an performance impact this has in huge parks, but I’m somewhat confident that it might actually work. I’d definitely like to keep it in the game if possible since it really does look a lot nicer.

[danieru]

How did you do the quest avoidance?

Edit: Also that new UI is incredible 

[JobLeonard]

Nice. Are you using continuum crowds?

[Sebioff]

How did you do the quest avoidance?

Edit: Also that new UI is incredible 

Thanks :D

The guest movement is agent-based using steering behaviours - one force towards their next target (a coordinate on the path tile they're heading for) and a small separating force. I don't want any congestion, they should just not visually glitch through each other if possible.
Bin-lattice spatial subdivision for efficiently getting potential collisions.
Avoidance is only done for guests who are on-screen.
Not entirely sure about the performance as the Unity profiler constantly freezes my laptop, but from the little I saw it looked pretty cheap.
They could theoretically push each other off the paths, not entirely sure yet what to do about that (clamp the separating force somehow I guess).

[danieru]

Ah, only performing the avoidance for on screen quests is good idea. Worst case the screen is crowded and you need to disable the avoidance at large populations. In which case the paths are already going to be congested and nothing of value is lost. 

[JobLeonard]

I dunno about "nothing of value" being lost - part of what makes people walking through each other unrealistic is that natural bottlenecks don't work as such bottlenecks.

[deanr201]

Update 28
This week has been more of the work we did last week, except in crunch mode - fixing bugs, adding a splash and loading screens, making screen transitions work…not the most exciting stuff to talk about in a devlog I’m afraid!
The pre-pre-alpha builds are done and out now though (Edit: for the $100 “Early Prototypes” tier Kickstarter backers, you should have received a mail if you’re in that group), so we should slowly be returning to our regular work schedule soon.
Gordon got this catchy preview of song #2 for you this week:
https://soundcloud.com/ashellinthepit/parkitect-song-2-1st-pass-mastered

It’s stuck in my head since a couple of days.
Garret redesigned the logo once more. It’s now a mix of the last two versions. We gave animating it a try:

He seems to be pretty satisfied with it so this one might stay.
Earlier this week he also spontaneously decided to do a quick impromptu art livestream. It somehow turned into a much longer session than planned and included the following result:

If you want to watch the entire thing there’s a recording of it available on his Twitch channel.

[handro]

Keep up the great work! Maybe I missed it, but was the name changed from Theme Parkitect to just Parkitect and if so why? Also good song however it sounds very very familiar especially at 30 sec to 40 sec.

[Lo-Fi]

I love that animated logo! The one thing I would suggest is making all of the objects in the logo be animated, not just the ferris wheel and the few others. Balloons drifting up, coasters moving on the tracks, etc.

[Sebioff]

I dunno about "nothing of value" being lost - part of what makes people walking through each other unrealistic is that natural bottlenecks don't work as such bottlenecks.

Are bottlenecks desirable though? I think it might be cool and could be interesting to see but I'm not so sure if it makes sense gameplay-wise? For example in SimCity you can pick from a number of roads with higher speed limits to deal with congestion (with the negative side-effects of noise and pollution), but for pedestrians you can really only build wider paths.
I'm not 100% sure about this but I also don't think congestion is a huge issue in theme parks as everyone moves at about the same speed and just kinda spreads out over the park? It can get crowded but the only true bottlenecks seem to be during special occasions like parades or park closing where everyone is heading for the same goal.
And there's of course the performance issue if you want to do avoidance on all guests in the park all the time

Keep up the great work! Maybe I missed it, but was the name changed from Theme Parkitect to just Parkitect and if so why? Also good song however it sounds very very familiar especially at 30 sec to 40 sec.

Yes - it was really only called "Theme Parkitect" for a couple days or so (unfortunately we were confident enough in the name to register domains and Youtube-accounts and so on, whoops). We decided to drop the "Theme" as the name was uncomfortably close to "Theme Park" (owned by EA).
Not sure if there was any particular inspiration for that part of the song, you'd have to ask Gordon on his soundcloud (we gave him SimCity, Sims, and various Nintendo games as general music direction though).

I love that animated logo! The one thing I would suggest is making all of the objects in the logo be animated, not just the ferris wheel and the few others. Balloons drifting up, coasters moving on the tracks, etc.

Thanks! Ran out of time to do that for the pre-pre-alpha builds but yes, gotta do that eventually

(Thanks to deanr201 for continuing to copy these over! )

[JobLeonard]

I dunno about "nothing of value" being lost - part of what makes people walking through each other unrealistic is that natural bottlenecks don't work as such bottlenecks.

Are bottlenecks desirable though? I think it might be cool and could be interesting to see but I'm not so sure if it makes sense gameplay-wise? For example in SimCity you can pick from a number of roads with higher speed limits to deal with congestion (with the negative side-effects of noise and pollution), but for pedestrians you can really only build wider paths.
I'm not 100% sure about this but I also don't think congestion is a huge issue in theme parks as everyone moves at about the same speed and just kinda spreads out over the park? It can get crowded but the only true bottlenecks seem to be during special occasions like parades or park closing where everyone is heading for the same goal.
And there's of course the performance issue if you want to do avoidance on all guests in the park all the time

If you look at theme park layouts they definitely have different sized paths for main connections between sections and actual attractions.

But like you said, it's all up to you to decide if this is a desirable gameplay element.

[deanr201]

Update 29
Art Stream

Garret will be doing another art livestream next week - tune in to his Twitch channel on Thursday, from 1pm to 3pm PST!

The last few streams got crazy long, so Garret will try to end it at 3pm this time.

Edit: moved from Wednesday to Thursday.

Devlog
Started this week with fixing a couple more issues, but that’ll be enough for now. It’s really interesting to see that even after staring at the game for hundreds of hours other people will still do things you never tried or thought of. You tend to develop a habit of always testing the same things all over again after a while, so it’s really beneficial to have some other people test even early on.

We’re now planning what to work on during the next weeks/months. The main focus for a while should be to get more gameplay implemented. I did some AI work but there’s nothing to show in GIF-form yet.
There’s a new park overview camera mode:


Pan, rotation and zoom works like in the normal view.
We’re not using a level-of-detail system yet (replacing far away objects with less detailed versions for better performance), but as you have more objects on screen at once in this view we might have to. Maybe we’ll just replace the people with dots? We’ll see once we have more content and bigger parks to test with.

[Quarry]

Another thing worth signing is the fences that disappear when in top down view

[JobLeonard]

I the transition - it's much easier to make sense of the "space" in games that do this (instead of jumping from one view to the other)

[deanr201]

Update 30
Got the detection of which grid tiles are crossed by a coaster track segment working. It’s being used to detect whether the segment is within the park boundaries or not and for drawing the footprint grid lines like in the other builders:


The flowerboxes received custom color pickers:

Unlike the trees with their predefined palette their color can be chosen freely.
Garret made a new ride during this weeks livestream and here it is working in game:

(It’s sped up in the GIF for some reason)
If you missed the stream we got the entire thing for you in the Twitch archive or a timelapse here

[deanr201]

And for those that missed it.

Published on 2 Feb 2015
Parkitect now features some much improved coaster design tools!

[deanr201]

Update 31
A very busy week with lots of big code changes!
There’s a terrain gridlines toggle…

…but the real work was spent on coasters - or tracked rides as I should say.
As mentioned earlier building tracked rides with multiple stations didn’t work yet. Now it does:

(Sped up for demonstration)
Having multiple stations doesn’t make that much sense on coasters though, sooo…the inevitable next step was to start working on a transport ride!

Implementing it took some time since it works fairly different from the coasters we had so far - it’s powered, suspended, and then there’s also the shape of these supports.
Speaking of suspended, it does swing a bit in curves, although it’s hard to notice since it’s rather subtle and the framerate of this GIF is a bit low:

Now that it works adding other suspended or powered rides should go much faster though. It should also be fairly easy to add other kinds of tracked rides now that the code doesn’t expect everything with a track to be a coaster.
Just because we got it nicely driving on it’s track doesn’t mean there isn’t lots of work left to do on it though! More on that in the coming weeks I guess.

[Cranktrain]

This is looking rather brilliant. Keep going!

[hell2o]

will the guests pathfinding utilize transport rides? for example if a guest wants to get from one side of the park to the other and there is both a long path to the other side and a short ride will they try to use the ride? if so will they take the cost of ride vs the distance of the path into account?