through the most important features of the game and give some explanations, so we started with getting a system in place for this.
Parkitect
Devlog Update 206
through the most important features of the game and give some explanations, so we started with getting a system in place for this.
Devlog Update 205 + Beta 9
Devlog
Doing an Art Stream wasn’t possible this month, but we got a new ride for you anyways! Here’s the TopScan:
We also added three new basic default terrains to pick from when starting a new park so you got at least something more interesting to choose from than just the flat terrain until the campaign is released without having to generate a terrain using the scenario editor.
The new maps are Lake:
River:
And Hills:
The park entrance for all default maps has been moved towards the center as well.
Beta 8 Build Challenge Results
All submissions can be found on the Workshop - thanks for everyone participating!
These are the 5 winning entries:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1431562314&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1430340520&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1430468466&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1433833013&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1430714639&searchtext=
Beta 9 Build Challenge
For Beta 9 the new Build Challenge is to build a Powered Coaster!
The top submissions get included in the next game update as default blueprints.
Changelog
Devlog Update 204
Guests will also have a negative thought now and lose some immersion when seeing an employee resting at a bench. Don’t forget to build staff rooms!
Devlog Update 202 + 203
Devlog Update 202
And we’re back to doing polish + campaign work once again. Campaign testing is at 75% complete now.
Shops and ride entrances received tunnel frames if needed, so building them into vertical terrain works as you’d expect now:
Devlog Update 203
The main menu screen (the one you get immediately after starting the game) was always meant to be temporary, and we’ve been working on its replacement this week. Initial work to figure out what it will be like started a year ago actually, but over the past few weeks a lot more time went into it and it’s really coming together now.
I also started working on the credits, so you can probably tell that we keep inching towards leaving Early Access. Still so much left to do though that there is no date in sight yet, but one step closer!
Devlog Update 201 + Beta 8
Devlog
We got two new rides this month:
The Hyper Coaster is a high-capacity coaster capable of 60m+ drops. It can’t invert, so it’s all about speed and airtime!
The Plane Carousel is a nice calm ride that slowly spins around a central axis like a carousel, but guests have control over the up/down movement of the planes.
Beta 7 Build Challenge Results
All submissions can be found on the Workshop - thanks for everyone participating!
These are the 5 winning entries:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1403069070&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1406058340&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1404676642&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1403053352&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1408970912&searchtext=
Beta 8 Build Challenge
For Beta 8 the new Build Challenge is to build a Water Coaster!
The top submissions get included in the next game update as default blueprints.
Changelog
Devlog Update 200
Art Stream
Come join us on Garrets Twitch channelon Wednesday (June 27th) at 1pm PDT to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.
Devlog
We are currently doing our first full playthrough of all campaign levels to see if they are beatable and fun and making the necessary changes to improve them. It’s going really well and we made good progress, so the first third of the campaign scenarios are pretty much finalized :)
We’re also improving all the tiny things we’re noticing that feel off during this playtest, so in the past week alone we made ~70 small balance changes and fixes. These will release with Beta 8 next week.
And since this is Devlog 200, here’s a sneak peek at another one of the campaign scenarios - this is Broadmoor Beach by Joshua:
Fitting coasters into this long and narrow strip of land along a beach can be very challenging. Most of the pre-built blueprints are probably not going to fit in there, so you’ll definitely have to come up with some custom coaster designs to beat this one!
Devlog Update 198 + 199
Devlog Update 198
We released a patch for some smaller problems late last week, but overall the update went fairly well and there don’t seem to be any major problems caused by the big underlying changes. The changelog for the patch is at the end of this post.
There are however some rare cases on Mac and Linux where the game is running much slower than it should be for no apparent reason. We’ve contacted Unity about it since it seems to be an engine issue, so hopefully we’ll know what’s going on there soon.
GOG released a new tool that allows us to upload and release new updates by ourselves, which will speed up how fast new game versions appear on their store a lot. We’ve integrated their tool into our release pipeline so releasing updates on GOG is a single click for us now, just like on other big stores.
We’re also getting closer to getting some professional translations done, so I’ve improved our translation tools last week. We had a limitation previously where certain words would be impossible to translate into some languages - for example we have small umbrellas guests can buy from shops and the big ones available as deco that provide shade. Even though these are two very different things in English they are both called “Umbrella” but other languages use different words for each of these, so we needed to add the ability to have multiple different translations for a single English word depending on context.
Changelog (Beta 7a):
- added highlighting trash as source of bad scenery ratings in scenery rating visualization view
- added clicking on a thought marker opens the info window of the person belonging to this thought
- improved behaviour when placing a queue tile next to a ride entrance that is already connected to a path that isn't a queue
- should fix some severe performance issues on macOS
- fixed prices in deco UI not updating when scaling deco objects using hotkeys
- fixed ride light color button being shown even if ride has no custom light colors
- fixed a case where people would sometimes not know how to get somewhere even though there's a path
- fixed a problem with color palettes where colors would be invisible
- fixed rare case where staff couldn't leave staff room
- fixed weirdness with wooden supports when placing rotated blueprints
- fixed edge scrolling being active while game isn't focused
- fixed weather not getting saved/loaded properly
Devlog Update 199
We’re back to working on the campaign once again, so you know what that means by now - not much that we can show currently and most of the stuff going into the next game update are smaller tweaks.
Many of these were small UI improvements. There are per-category buttons for marking objects as available/researched in the scenario settings now:
The handle for extending boat ride stations should look better and more like something that can be interacted with:
Scenario descriptions are visible from within the park now:
Some event notifications got a progress bar so you got a better idea how much longer the event will go:
And fire deco objects emit some flickering light now:
Devlog Update 197 + Beta 7
Devlog
Garret added lights to the Transformer:
And we added the Gyro Drop Tower from last weeks Art Stream:
Beta 6 Build Challenge Results
All submissions can be found on the Workshop - thanks for everyone participating!
These are the 5 winning entries:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1375060271&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1375586700&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1383458480&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1376734869&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1375495229&searchtext=
Beta 7 Build Challenge
For Beta 7 the new Build Challenge is to build a Junior Coaster!
The top submissions get included in the next game update as default blueprints.
Changelog
Devlog Update 196
Art Stream
Come join us on Garrets Twitch channelon Wednesday (May 30th) at 1pm PDT to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.
Devlog
The multithreading stuff seems to be fairly stable right now! We will still be running a bunch of tests this week, but it looks like it will be possible to release it with Beta 7 already.Having more guests messes with the financial balance of the game quite a bit, so we started adjusting that. As usual it will take many tiny tweaks over a longer period of time to get that feeling right again, so don’t expect that to be perfect just yet with the next update.
A more reasonable amount of guests for this test park
The audio team delivered a few hundred new sound effects, so all the props and rides that were added in the past half year or so got their sounds now!Gordon also finished a new calm ride music track which will be very nice for the most low-intensity rides.
Devlog Update 195
I continued working on moving the AI code to a separate thread this week. It still needs a ton of testing, but overall work is going a bit faster than expected. The guest AI is ~95% done, pathfinding is running on its own thread as well now, and I’ve started working on moving the staff AI (which should not be too problematic overall since I can reuse most of the work done for guests).
There have been some requests for properly documented and more detailed benchmarks last time, so here’s one. These are the systems I tested on:
Low-end system:
Mac Mini 2014, Intel i5 @ 2.6GHz, integrated Intel Iris graphics
A system that’s pretty close to our minimum requirements. The main bottleneck is the lack of a proper graphics card - this system can’t even render an empty screen at 20 FPS at full resolution. Since we’re interested in the games CPU performance instead of the integrated graphics performance (and I got no other system to test with) I’ve lowered the resolution to the point where it can render an empty screen at ~55 FPS.
High-end system:
Windows 10 PC, Intel i7-6700K @ 4GHz, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060
A fairly recent and decent system.
I don’t have a mid-range system available for testing but it should be save to assume that performance would accordingly fall between the results from these.
All tests were run with the exact same scene and camera position in the Eastern Highlands demo park with 3.000 guests. This is a rather detailed park and that guest count is higher than it will be in the end for this park (we haven’t done a proper balancing pass yet to account for the improved performance, but something around 2.000 - 2.500 guests is probably more reasonable).
There have been some requests for “removing the guest cap” last week so I want to point out again that the game has no guest cap. If you build a park with better/more rides then there will be more guests.
The “Old” results are with the currently released Beta 6 version and the “New” results are with the upcoming multithreading version.
A fairly modest improvement of 10-15% for this specific scene. Not amazing, but nice. Worth pointing out though is that in the old version there can be some spikes occasionally where single frames take a bit longer to calculate, whereas in the new version it’s all very stable.
Improving guest performance is not only interesting for being able to have more guests in general, but also because the game allows speeding up time. Running the game at x3 speed means running the guest AI 3 times as often, so running a park with 3.000 guests at x3 speed is roughly comparable to running a park with 9.000 guests at x1 speed. This is where the performance improvements become more apparent.
Here’s the same test as above, but running at x3 speed.
The old version takes a pretty significant hit, whereas in the new version it barely has any performance impact at all.