next »

[JobLeonard]

I had pretty much the same question: how do transport rides affect pathfinding?

[Sebioff]

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?

Yes, if I can make it work Currently thinking about how to do it!
Right now guests don't do any pathfinding at all, but pathfinding shouldn't be the biggest challenge in my mind (it's already working for staff, just gotta factor transport ride station distances, average waiting times and so in?). I'll have to give guests a sort of long-term memory of what they want to do and how they need to do it though.
Until now they're always in one of many possible behaviours without having an idea of what they'll do next.
For example they might be in their "wander around the park behaviour", then when walking past a ride entrance they might decide to go on the ride and switch to their queue behaviour, then once it's time switch to walking to their seat on the ride and so on. They have no plan of whats happening next and just kinda stumble from one behaviour to the next. A state machine essentially?

For transport rides to work properly they'll need to have a memory - "first you need to go to that ride entrance, then ride it until station X, then walk to your target destination".
At least that's for guests who want to reach a specific location. I think there'll also be some who randomly enter the transport rides and leave at a random station.

[deanr201]

Update 32
Guests are now able to walk to their seats inside the cars of the new transport ride - here’s a view through the cars roof:

Fortunately it was possible to reuse the same waypoints tools I created for flat rides.

We thought about how to display the parks finances this week. We wanted to have something that’s a bit less overwhelming than a big table of numbers and that lets you quickly see how you’re doing. It needs some more polish and isn’t complete yet but here’s what we came up with:

Your parks expenses/income is grouped into these categories. Each category has a colored bar showing the expenses/income of that category. The little black arrow marks the expenses of the previous month - if it’s in the green area it means you’re doing better this month than last, if it’s in the red you’re doing worse.
The categories can be expanded…

…so if you’re interested in the detailed numbers they’re all there.

[StoryOfMyRightHand]

My apologies for asking this.

Can you kill people in this game?

[Ninja Dodo]

This is looking very nice. Will be following.

[deanr201]

Update 33
Art Stream
There’s another art stream coming up! Watch Garret create some Parkitect art on his Twitch channel, on Wednesday from 1pm to 3pm PST.

Devlog
We added guest activity logging! We’re recording certain events for individual guests and there’s a neat visualization overlay showing you what they’ve been up to:


I was a bit concerned what this would do to the filesize of our savegames, but judging by some quick tests it should be alright. And if not there are ways to optimize it.
Guests became cleverer this week - they learned how to properly use transport rides when heading for a specific location. So if for example they want to leave the park they might either walk or hop onto a transport ride and drop off at a suitable station.
Here’s a couple of debug screenshots, with the yellow line showing which path the guests would take if they wanted to get from one endpoint of the line to the other (for rides it marks where they enter the queue and the station they leave at):









It takes into account the average waiting time at a station, the time the ride needs from the entrance to the exit station (on average) and the ride entrance fee in relation to the travelled distance. The weighting of these factors is something we’ll have to balance.

[TheWing]

I don't really think "real" person would consider stuff like average queuing time and time on the transport ride, nor would that person actually know how long it takes to walk where he wants to get.. so I seem to suggest some simulated "guessing", the person might get some idea of how long the ride will take by what's visible of the track, and also he might see a ride more enjoyable, perhaps scenery?

Also, even though I think these are rather obvious, you should take into account the persons' tiredness, nausea, stuff like that. And weather, too, ofc.

Anyhow, this is all just tweaking the values and weighting stuff so that it looks and behaves nicely; you've done a damn good job with the pathfinding, now it's just a matter of which path to choose

Keep up the great work!

[Sebioff]

Well, the whole pathfinding is basically guessing what might be the best option, it's not really guaranteed to be the best option. For example the ride might be broken by the time the guest arrives or the queue might be less/more full.
The reason I'm using the average queueing time even though that's nothing a real guest would really know is because it's easy to calculate and both a good estimate for how long (= distance to walk to the ride entrance) and how full (expected waiting time -> when seeing a super full queue a real person would rather walk) the queue is.

The idea is that guests mostly use this pathfinding only if they really want to go from place A to B for some reason and own a park map, so I think it's valid that they're able to weight the walking distances vs. transport ride distances

Yeah, the persons' stats and weather would be some nice additions. Scenery should play a big role for transport rides for when the guests enter the ride simply for fun, not with a specific goal in mind. Haven't done much work on scenery/ride attractivity yet though

[Martins1]

A new roller coaster/theme park tycoon Game- What I want!


This is what I would like to see in a new rollercoaster tycoon/ theme park simulator sort of game. It is based off how  I felt the best ever game of this sort went and how to improve upon that, and what to keep, get rid of etc... I focus here on gameplay and options and features, rather than its look and technical aspect to it...
Ok so this is a long post so I'm gonna spilt it into four main sections:


Stuff to Keep from RCT3
The variety and countless options. This is the best thing in RCT3... You can do anything.. It's so versatile which is amazing. I would like to keep the ideas of a lot of stuff, but most of it would have to be edited slightly... So I mention that later on... But here we go...


1)Sandbox Mode - Let my imagination be my limits. Allow for completely customisable parks just as there was in RCT3.


2) Custom content - You can see as well as I can... The community has begged for and has pleas for easy to use custom content creators, and the ability to make custom content...


3) NO MICRO-TRANSACTIONS - I'm pretty sure 99% of he community is against them... Just leave them out.. Look at the mobile rct... And now you know not to make Micro-transactions... Rct3 worked without them and so can this game


4) Career mode - just as in rct3, it's fun to use these custom scenarios and to attempt to 'beat' them. However... Make sure to make them more like rct1 and ensure that we really think about running our park... So it's almost like the real life experience.


5) An in game recorder and screenshotter.


6) Customizable peeps and stuff similar.


7) Customizable content- basically add the way in which we can add our own pictures, videos and music to the game, this is really important... And we should be allowed to add our own background to the sky etc.


8 ) the day/night and x2/3 speed buttons. These are really important as they save time, and also should be implemented into custom scenarios.


9) don't make it real time - This isn't a clash of clans game. MY LIFE IS MY LIFE, not the games life. I don't wait for the coaster to be built, I don't wait to make money, just like in rct, money flows into my bank without the need to collect it, and stuff is built instantly, it is not a game that I fit my life into, it fits into my life.

Stuff to change or get rid of from RCT3

This is my biggest list as RCT3 had a tonne of potential, but this is a chance to really capitalise on the best parts of it!


Coasters - The Kings of the parks... We need coasters to be far more versatile now. I suggest two coaster making modes... One similar to that of rct3.. Although perhaps a few more options.. And one similar to that of no limits or TPS. We need them to be better supported and easier supported, they should come with catwalks etc... So therefore it becomes a lot easier to design, with countless number of different coasters, all under their creators.. I.e b&m and gertslauer.


The grid system- A huge problem with rct3 was the grid system, which limited any users imagination, as stuff could not be placed in certain areas etc... You know the drill. However the grid system was in fact useful for making lines of trees, or cool looking entrances. So what I suggest is DIFFERENT MODES for the grid system. I suggest having 2 or 3, depending on what's possible. They are based off the grid system which is implemented in 2D design (the computer software). Here there are 3 settings - grid lock, step lock, and no lock. Grid lock was similar to rct3 and its tiles, in which you have different tiles which things fit onto. The step lock would be represented in rct3 as having 1/8th tiles, and everything can fit into much smaller space, but there is still a limit as to where you can put stuff, and no lock means you can put anything anywhere, so that you can pretty much move stuff down to individual pixels. Obviously the latter would be hard to build symmetrically with, which is why I suggest having modes of building.... Also I suggest having circular or isometric grids, rather than square, that too causes a lot of restriction. Go the full Monty and not only finish the job rct3 started, in allowing for diagonals etc., but allow for 16 different positions. So if I have an arrow it can face North, South, East, west, NE, SW (etc.) (those are the diagonals), but also NEN and SWS (these are the lines between the base four positions and the diagonals). This will allow for players to really make the game more realistic, and heck, if you really want to please me, answer my prayers for a circular or even spherical grid system in which I can face my object at any angle out of the 360 degrees. If it was spherical then... Wow you just made my life complete!


Animals - I want them to stay, but I want more animals, different types, and I want options to make them live in the wild, and to make more exciting viewing galleries, which we can custom make ourself, with a lot more flexibility on the looks of the animal cages etc.   Simply I want ,ore realism and as always,... More options.


Waterparks - Splash! Is the best expansion pack ever! It is so cool and I love it, a lot, however it would be cooler if we could have aquatic animals, and things like animal shows could be implemented into our custom made lakes... And further to this I feel that we need more waterpark stuff. There is a tonne of stuff in real waterparks, have a look at them. What we really need is to make more realistic stuff, so we can make our own decking, and our own Customizable waterparks, with realistic slides and supports... And easier to make staircases etc...


Mixmaster and AFE - If you implement any version of this I will buy it even if it's like 50 quid... But really I want a better, improved one from RCT3... So the main problems are the actual mixmaster area... We should have the whole screen as then it will be so much easier to implement fireworks/lasers/water jets. That's the only mixmaster problem... We need the whole screen so it is easier to add choreography etc...      For the actual AFE- A realistic preview screen which shows us the correct thing.... Rct3 got that one wrong... We also need to be able to save specific ideas. So for example I can save 4 particular particles and label them "glitter" so that in any new firework I make, I can just insert "glitter" and it saves a tonne of time. This would make the AFE simply amazing, and quick and easy to use. Similar to this. The lighting needs to be better, as in most games. We need realistic lighting, which can't make its way through buildings, which is emitted from particles, rather than particles just being the light themselves.. That sort of stuff is really necessary. A much larger range of particle types should be available, along with different texture options etc.


Water - This should have better reflections and should be easier to work with.. And there should be different and more types of water... It doesn't always look the same...


Themes - Most of this has been said elsewhere, but we need a tonne of themes. Like any theme in any theme park, add it in. The most importent, which come up anywhere, are:
Sci fi
Kiddie stuff
Dinosaur
Adventure
Medieval
Dragon
Wild West
Spooky
Eygptian
Roman/greek mythological
Asian
Modern/city

Stuff to add to RCT3

The undo button - It would be so helpful... You wouldn't understand! The community is begging for one... Just implement it...


Texturising- like in nolimits2, adding any of our own textures is really useful and allows for creativity etc.


Hardcore and beginner modes - this would be across all aspects of the game. It is hard for any theme park/ Roller coaster simulator sort of game to cater for both those out there who want to have fun, and will only tap into the basic features of the game and this community... We want all the hardest stuff, with spline based coasters, ridiculously complex grid systems etc, So you introduce the hardcore mode, where we build with small pieces to create large structures, where we design with advanced tools how our land looks, how our coaster works, whilst in beginner mode you can use ploppables, use easy generation of interesting land (so there would be an option to have volcanic park 1-3 and mountain park 1-3 and generic park 1-3 so they don't get to terraform the land, and these different lands are randomly generated to fit with the category, or are pre-made.) and the more simplistic coaster design in rct3 to design their easy coasters. Cater for all audiences, and more audiences will buy the game. It's really just that simple.


Online mode- let's add an element in which we can run a co-op park, or where it is so easy to share our work with someone that we can even visit heir park and rate their park. This online mode has to be turned on though, and it MUST NOT be essential to be online to play. We must be able to play offline, this ability is so vital that you will lose all your customers otherwise.


How the game runs and the technological side to it

High tech engine - This game begs for a high tech engine. Look at rct3 - the limit to your park became file size etc. (The amount of parks which are actually made over two or more sandboxes is unbelievable.) Make sure that the game can handle a tonne of lag, has decent, more realistic graphics and that unlike in RCT3, the lag and computer handling doesn't limit us. Make it so that the problem is the computer and how the computer or laptop runs, not how the game runs. If you get rct3, even on a 2k MacBook Pro, it can lag kinda easily, but this new game should be able to run perfectly in high quality on a 2k MacBook Pro even with the ridiculous amount of meticulous detail some of us go into.


Mods - Allow for mods of it so be made, it can help us use our own unique interface that we want.


Folder storage - In the same way that rct has its folders where everything is saved etc. And how we can share here files with others through downloads, we must be able to share our components, by saving them in our documents and uploading them as downloads, making it a much more custom game, which can be highly enjoyable.



Most of all, respond to the community, talk to the community and let us know what's happening. Hundreds of us across the boards are adding suggestions for RCTWORLD, Parkitect and Frontiers new game. Listen to them. We all want a good coaster/them park tycoon/simulator game - and whichever of those games is the best, we will buy the most of. If you want to make a good game- Listen to us, give us feedback and show us what your doing.

That is all I guess!

Martins1

[deanr201]

Update 34
We quickly noticed a problem with the text boxes from last weeks activity logs - if you had many activities close to each other or zoomed out the boxes would overlap and you couldn’t read a thing.
It seemed like a good idea to automatically space them out to not overlap anymore, so we tried a couple different methods…


…but that didn’t work too well. And even if it did work all these boxes would really block your view.
In the end, the most simple solution worked the best:

As you already know from the previous blog entry and can see here we also worked on adding support for different languages
It’s pointless to actually translate things before they’re final but since there’s slowly more text being added to the game it’s good to have this working. One thing less to worry about!
People received names this week. We’re using these lists from the US Census Bureau that handily also contain data on how frequently the names occur. We’re using the peoples names as seed for their appearance and characteristics, so “John Smith” will always look and behave the same. It’s a bit silly and probably nothing you’d have noticed, but I like the thought that these people are all unique somehow.
Speaking of translations, I guess we’ll have to get similar lists for other countries.
You guys convinced Garret to create a raptor entertainer during this weeks stream, and here he is:

He still needs animations before we can properly implement him though.
Here’s a timelapse of the livestream:



March
Unity 5 is getting close to release. It’s a huge update of the engine we’re using with many exciting new features that should make some things easier for us. We planned to switch to Unity 5 from the very beginning and think the time has finally come to do so next month! It should go fairly smooth but we’ll see.
February was tech-focused, so for March we mostly want to take care of polishing and tying up some loose ends.

[oldblood]

Good news fellas:

http://kotaku.com/new-rollercoaster-tycoon-game-looks-like-shit-1689731858?utm_campaign=Socialflow_Kotaku_Twitter&utm_source=Kotaku_Twitter&utm_medium=Socialflow

"The new Roller Coaster Tycoon game looks like shit" - Kotaku

I knew I backed your KS for a reason...

[oyog]

"The new Roller Coaster Tycoon game looks like shit" - Kotaku

I knew I backed your KS for a reason...

I'm suddenly curious what Chris Sawyer thinks of all this. Is he banking on licensing or does he have nothing to do with Atari at this point?

EDIT: Crap, sorry, not trying to derail the Parkitect thread. <3 Parkitect

[deanr201]

Update 35
As said last week, this month we’re trying to focus on resolving smaller tasks that have slowly piled up over time. It might make the next couple devlog entries a bit less interesting, but it’s gotta be done!
Unity 5 was released earlier this week, so we finally switched over! Despite having one of the longest changelogs I’ve ever seen it went super smooth though. There were only a couple minor issues that were easy enough to resolve, and now we’re using Unity 5
We’ll need some time to learn all the new features that are suddenly available to us, but I’m pretty excited about the switch.
If you’ve seen any of the videos of some of our KS-backers playing the game you’ll have noticed that it was impossible to delete certain things after they’ve been placed. The reason was that in Unity 4 we were experiencing some weird performance drops when making objects selectable…before cooking up my own solution for this I wanted to wait for Unity 5 though and see if it’s fixed there - and indeed everything seems to be fine now, so placed objects can finally be deleted.
We’ve also added some additional guest animations this week that would have been a pain to implement in Unity 4.
There’s now a search bar in the deco builder window:

Not like there’s so much stuff already that it’s needed, but it’s probably best to have this early.
The preview icons fill the available space a bit better now, while still giving a rough idea of scale (at least when you compare similar items to each other, like the logs or trees).
A part of the finance overview from Update 32 is now also available as a tooltip when hovering over the overall money in the main menu (and it got an additional “Overall” bar).

It shows the current and previous months, so you can get a quick overview without having to open and close a window.
Added a height number when building raised stuff:

It currently shows height above ground level, we should change that to height above sea level instead.
I finally decided to give coaster tunnels a try today. Having to implement this was one of the things that’s been giving me headaches for months, but after having a reasonable idea of how to approach this it turned out to be really easy.

The white box look is obviously placeholder and will be replaced with proper art. Garret visited GDC this week though, so all you get for now is my programmer art

[Slader16]

Looks really awesome, I can't wait to see a .gif of the tunnels in action!

[deanr201]

Update 36
We haven’t done a lot of UI work in a while, but now that shops can finally be selected it seemed like a good time to start with the shop info window.

What we have here so far is the product settings tab, listing all the products and their required ingredients (which need to be delivered to the shop). For some ingredients you can tweak how much of it goes into the product, so you have a bit of an influence on how many delivery crates need to be hauled around and the production costs. Guests might not be willing to pay as much/are less satisfied with lower quality products though.
Most ingredients have a status effect on the consumer (for example, coffee reduces tiredness a bit), so you might not want to be too stingy with those.
Adjusting the ingredient amounts should not really be required in the end as that could easily become tedious, but it’s something you can do if you want to.
The costs in the screenshot above are placeholders. We’ll have to do a big balancing pass someday and assign some proper values.
The tunnels from last week received their art and work for other coasters now too:

They’re just simple concrete tubes, but that’s what a lot of real coasters use. We might add other types of tunnels later - for now though I’m pretty satisfied with these.
Working on the coasters wasn’t really planned for this month, but after the work on tunnels I felt like it and the result is that corkscrews can be built diagonally now:

Same for regular hills:

Naturally, diagonal elements are a bit longer and thus have a slightly different shape, but that’s the trade-off for keeping everything properly aligned.
Here’s a comparison showing the shape difference of diagonal hills (orange) and regular ones (blue):

I was told that it would be a good idea to allow building brakes on flat slopes, so that’s possible now:

I think it’s mostly useful for accelerating a train out of a block brake a little bit quicker.
The drive tires and brakes received some simple animations.
We’ve added a follow camera mode for guests:

More things than usual that we did this week were possible to show on a screenshot/gif and interesting enough to show here, so this got a bit longer
Too bad not every week is like this!

[deanr201]

Update 37
We upgraded our shaders to Unity 5′s new PBS system, giving us slightly nicer looking lighting. We also added a bit of rim lighting.
Here’s a comparison showing before (Unity 4) and now (Unity 5):


The difference is small, but it’s noticeable (note the top of the burger or the tree). As a bonus it allowed us to get rid off a couple of shader variants.
You’ll notice that shadows are slightly softer/nicer too, but we simply got that from the switch to Unity 5.
Supports and paths properly react to terrain changes below them now:

You can still raise the terrain to “bury” stuff though, but that’s a different problem.
Tracked rides received s-bends:

They can be scaled and banked and built diagonally like most of the other track segments.
And we finally replaced the weird old loops we’ve been using pretty much since the beginning of development with some properly shaped ones:

They look a bit circular due to the perspective, but they really aren’t. Here’s a before/now comparison:


Thanks to everyone over on our subreddit for helping to make sure we get them right this time

[fa341009]

Hi, I also created an account here because I read a lot about this project and became very interested. I'm starting to fall in love with the idea of building theme parks like I was over 10 years ago.
I also see that a lot of people give their thoughts and input here, so..

What I always like in 'building'-games (as seen in games like' Beach Life'), is the building process. Like if you are placing out a coaster, and clicked finish, work-crew would show up and building materials would become visible on the site and they would start swinging around their hammers. First the station would pop up (or as in other games, appear from the ground and come up in a smooth motion with dust clouds around it), followed by the poles to support the tracks, and finaly the tracks. During the building process, people would stop and watch (like beeing interested in what would be coming).

I don't know how much more work this would be, in my eyes it seems there would just be 3 parts of the attraction beeing shown individually. Making them come up from the ground (like a zombie) should not be that hard either. Again: I'm no programmer, I have no clue..

I'm not sure how long contruction would last, but maybe only a few minutes..

What do you think?

Keep up the wonderful work!


Btw, I love the name Parkitect!

[Whiteclaws]

good god that lighting update, looks stelar doodes,
I just wanted to know if you could try to make grass a different shade of green like a more darkish shade, because right now it feels like the color is a bit too saturated (or whatever it's called) and stuff around look less appealing (Just my opinion, you could try dropping the saturation) As good as ever doe keep at it buys

[deanr201]

Live Steam!
Garret will do another livestream this week! Tune in to his Twitch channel on Saturday from 1pm to 3pm PST to watch him create some new art for Parkitect.

[deanr201]

Update 38
This week has mostly been bug fixes, cleaning up and doing some groundwork for a couple of future features, so it’s a bit of a slow week for the devlog I guess.
Last weeks loops got some more shape adjustments:

Getting their shape right is a bit harder than expected, but I think they’re pretty good now. Thanks for the feedback and suggestions everyone
I’ve done some more work on guest behaviour. They now have a couple of rules for deciding whether they want to leave the park (was entirely random before as a placeholder). Additionally, if they own a park map they’re now able to actively head for an attraction or nearby food stall/cash machine/toilet if necessary. This is what we needed the pathfinding functionality from a couple weeks back for.
We added a launched drop tower ride!

And this is how you build it:

We’re really satisfied with this solution - it’s super simple to use and pretty fun