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[Osteel]

This looks like everything that made RCT so awesome. :D

I don't know if this is answered, but are you going to have a way to share parks either as a large image or downloading?

[deanr201]

They've just released the second Pre-Pre Alpha, so let's take another look at Parkitect!

Flabaliki Plays: Parkitect Pre-Pre Alpha 2 on Youtube!

[Sebioff]

I don't know if this is answered, but are you going to have a way to share parks either as a large image or downloading?

Yeah, you can simply send around the savegame files (1 park = 1 file). I assume we can integrate that with Steam Workshop somehow, but I'm not entirely sure yet how that'll work.

[deanr201]

Bit of a smaller update this week.
So far we only had randomly generated guests. This week I worked on a tool that lets us predefine guests with a certain name/look/traits. We’ll need this to fulfill our $50/$150/$200 Kickstarter tier rewards.
We added a notification bar that’ll keep you informed of important activities inside the park that need your attention. It works pretty much as you would expect - if you receive a notification the notification bar slides down a bit to reveal the notification, then after a couple of seconds it slides back up again to take up as little space as possible.

You can manually expand it to see the last couple messages.

Garret defined some UI style guidelines, so we started cleaning up some of the existing windows a bit.
And we finally got the graphics for wider paths working:

[deanr201]

Update 46
I’ve spent this week almost entirely on taking a closer look at the biggest performance bottlenecks. Results:
up to 15 FPS increase in some places of our test park on my machine
~80% faster load times for the test park
got rid off some noticeable lag when building/removing track segments, was especially crazy when demolishing an entire coaster
identified 2-3 other things that could result in an improvement
These were the low-hanging fruit at the moment.
We started working on scenery structures. Nothing there to show yet really, we’re just experimenting at this point to figure out how they’re supposed to work.
And we’ve added Umbrellas:

(Yes, the shops colors don’t match yet.)

[deanr201]

Update 47
This week was all about coasters/tracked rides. Building track segments costs money now. Demolishing a segment refunds a part of the building costs depending on the age of the segment: within the first couple minutes of building it restores the entire costs, so you can experiment with the track layout without having to worry about wasting money. Afterwards it very slowly refunds less and less.
Some janky seams between track segments got smoothened:

We added half loops!

And vertical tracks!

Both were kind of tricky, so I’m glad they’re finally done and seem to work.
I’ve been thinking about how to display height marks on tracks in the least confusing way. The problem is that you can easily get multiple markers occupying roughly the same space on screen, making them hard to read:

I tried scaling them by mouse distance:

Helps!

[TheWing]

I tried scaling them by mouse distance:

Helps!

I think they should be scaled along the track by mouse distance.. at least it seems they're just physical distance from mouse now, and that kinda messes it up (in my mind). Oh, and also, when building they should be just simply fading away the further they get from the point the player is constructing?

Damn awesome work, as usual, keep it up o/

[Sebioff]

Yep, I think you're right

[deanr201]

Garret is going to stream some art again! Come join us Wednesday from 1pm-3pm PST on his Twitch channel to chat while watching some new art being created.

Devlog
A good amount of time this week has been spent on calculating a bunch of statistical numbers for tracked rides. They’ll be used for determining how much guests enjoyed your ride. The balancing is still entirely off and it’ll most likely take lots of tweaking over a long amount of time to get it right, but it’s a start.
Gordon delivered the first set of sound effects for flat rides this week! Each ride got at least 3 unique sounds, so Gordon won’t run out of work soon and getting them into the game takes some time as well, but there are finally some motors, pneumatics and metallic clicks and creaks to hear. Here’s an example:
VINE LINK
(Volume cranked up all the way for demonstration purposes)
And we’ve added a Topple Tower ride:

It’s pretty big and slightly weird, but also quite interesting

[deanr201]

Update 49
The plan for this month is to focus on putting more content into the game, ideally making use of the features that we already have.
Here’s the Teacups ride from this weeks livestream (timelapse coming soon):

And we started working on different terrain types!

(We finally fixed that gap in the path between the ride platform and entrance/exit :D)
No transitions between different types of terrain yet, but we’ve got a rough idea how it might work.
Also started working on a zoning tool:

You can utilize it as a sort of planning tool, apart from that it doesn’t have much use yet.
Garret also made a set of new scenery objects that are not in the game yet. Hopefully they will be soon!

[JobLeonard]

Love the teacups - the visual design even evokes the motion in which they will rotate

[deanr201]

Update 50
Art Stream
Hey, there’s a second art stream happening this month! As usual: on Wednesday, Garret creates some nice new Parkitect art live on his Twitch channel. We’re starting one hour earlier this time though - 12pm to 2pm.


This week, we worked on hedges and fences.
You build them similarly to paths using click & drag:

They automatically snap to the closest tile edge.
At first we tried implementing them tile-based, like we did with the park fences, so there’d be one model for a flat fence, and one model for a sloped fence, and it’d place the correct one and rotate it depending on the terrain elevation. However, with hedges it quickly became clear that this wasn’t the best approach, since they need to follow the terrain shape pretty closely to look good, and we would have needed to create and manage quite a bunch of different tiles.

So in the end what we did instead is to have just one single flat hedge/fence model and warp that to match the terrain shape.
We got a nice selection of hedges/fences now, and adding more is pretty simple.

(The hedges are custom-colored by the way, just like the trees)
We also added these topiaries. They can be build off-grid, but sometimes you want to build them on-grid, for example when placing one precisely next to a hedge. We made it so you can hold a button to snap them to a grid:

You can build some nice gardens now

And we improved last weeks zone visualization to more clearly show the boundaries:

[deanr201]

Update 51
We added a mode that visualizes guests happiness:

It helps with spotting unhappy guests so you can check what complaints they might have. Or maybe you want to pick just the happy guests to get some praise for the amazing park you built
It also helps us with debugging and balancing, actually, since we can more easily see ourselves now how guests react.
And it looks pretty cool.
And of course we added the Suspended Coaster that Garret modeled during his art stream this week:

Watching it swing around the corners is quite fun!
On Vine
The above screenshot also demonstrates that tracks and some other things received a slightly more metallic look.
If you missed this months live streams we now got the time lapse videos for you! Here’s the Teacups:
You Tube
And the Suspended Coaster:
YouTube

[Photon]

This continues to look cool. That is all. Proceed with the coolness.

[deanr201]

Garret is currently busy with moving to a new place, so I’ve used this week to do some more experimental technical work.
Probably the biggest and most important system that’s still entirely missing is the scenery visibility checking. I had done some initial tests a couple months ago though, and this week was a good opportunity to push it a bit further to figure out what we can do with it.
Here’s a debug screenshot:

Every white line here connects a path tile with the scenery items that are visible from that spot, taking occlusions into account. Of course it’s just a rough approximation, and it has only been done for the rock objects here for testing purposes, but as you can see that’s still a slightly crazy amount of calculations that need to be done.
You can imagine that it’s not a great idea to test every path tile against every single scenery item in the game world - a method for quickly getting only nearby objects relative to a given point is needed. This can be achieved using space partitioning: for example, imagine that the game world is divided into two halves, A and B, and you have done some calculations beforehand to figure out which objects are inside half A and which are inside half B. If you now want to know which objects are within a certain range of some point you first check how far away that point is from your two halves - if one of the halves is further away than the range you’re interested in, you know that all objects inside that half are outside the range as well and you don’t need to do any distance checks against them individually. Nice!
Now, instead of using just two halves a better and slightly more sophisticated approach is to use a hierarchy of ever-smaller cubes that partition space more fine-grained in areas with lots of objects. This structure is called an Octree, and it’s one of the usual solutions for doing space partitioning (see the linked Wikipedia article if you’re interested in learning more about it!).
To my own surprise we so far got away without using one, but we rarely had to do checks against nearby objects so far (e.g., for checking collisions when building something new - this is only done for one single frame, and checking against every single object in the game world was fast enough so far to not cause any overly noticeable lag).
There are so many scenery visibility checks to do though that it was necessary now, and we would have needed it for bigger parks anyways.
Here’s what an octree looks like in action:

And with that the performance of doing the visibility checks is in a feasible range now (and some older code received a performance boost too!). The main problem left is that recalculating everything when loading a park still takes too long, but before working on that we should figure out for which kinds of objects we’ll use these visibility checks anyways (probably not for every single little stone?), and how much they add to the gameplay.

[deanr201]

It’s been a rather unremarkable week for the devlog. Garret has been busy trying to keep the craftsmen refurbishing his new place under control. I’ve had to spend a couple days on bookkeeping and taxes. Gordon has been trying to convince a local theme park of letting him do some sound recordings (with uncertain results so far). He also delivered the sound effects for the remaining flat rides that we have in the game right now, and we got them implemented.
We’re approaching another build now, which means the remaining time went into testing and fixing, so there’s not much to say apart from that really. I guess most notable would be that I finally added some checks to prevent you from building rides and shops halfway into the terrain:

It’s been one of the long-standing tasks that I somewhat procrastinated on - in the end it was trivial to implement! You can still build rides/shops underground, but they have to be completely covered now.
I still need to disallow dragging terrain through existing stuff, though….hmm!
Garret did a spontaneous art stream to test his new internet connection! He worked on the beginnings of a mini train. Here’s the current state:

The entire recording is still available for a while over on his Twitch channel if you missed it.

[deanr201]

Update 54
We finished and implemented the Miniature Railway transport ride:

Compared to the Suspended Monorail it’s significantly slower, but it can transport more people at once.

Rides received a test run mode. Tracked rides received support height limits. And of course there’s the obligatory number of small improvements and fixes.
We should have a build for our $40 tier backers next week. This’ll be the first time a bigger group of people will have access to the game, so it’ll be interesting to see how it goes!

[deanr201]

Update 55
Art Stream
It’s time for an art stream again! Garret will be streaming the creation of some new art on his Twitch channel on Wednesday from 12pm to 2pm. He plans to start working on a Carousel!


It’s been a busy week! We’ve added some new food stalls:

This is Bubble Tea, Chinese Food, Mini Donuts, Popcorn and Ice Cream.
And we added a Mini Coaster:

It’s supposed to be used for fairly relaxed rides through some scenery, so its building options are rather limited.
We put the guest names from the $50 Kickstarter tier into the game, so these uniquely named guests come to check out your park every now and then.
I spent the majority of this week on a rather big feature though - tracked ride blueprints! That means you’ll be able to save your tracked ride for placing it in another park or for sharing it with someone. It’ll also allow us to ship the game with some pre-designed rides eventually (which we’ll also need for the $500 Kickstarter tier).
I initially didn’t write the code with the idea in mind that coasters will ever be moved or rotated around so some bigger changes were required, but it’s almost working now:

I tried to finish it for this weeks $40 tier build, but there’s still a couple things left to do and due to the bigger code changes that had to be done we decided to leave it out for now and properly test and finish it later.
The build still got delayed longer than initially planned due to this, but it’s done now and we sent it off to Humble! It’ll probably take another couple days until they uploaded it though. You’ll receive an email once it’s available
Gordon bought a Concertina last month:

He’s still learning but already used it for a song!
It’s another one that’s supposed to play in the background while building stuff.
Sound Cloud

[Alex Strook]

That accordion track is really cute ! That seems to go perfectly with the game !

I really love the look and feel of the game, I was wondering if the grass will stay exactly the same ? It seems a bit repepetive, considering that one thing we"ll see most of the time, maybe it deserve some variation (like big subtles patches of a slightly different color)...That one thing that most of the game with a lot grass miss ^^

[deanr201]

Downloaded my $40 tier reward so if any has any questions let me know and I'll do my best to answer them.. I will also post some screen shots once I have had chance have a bit play around.