Update 10

Time for another weekly update! By the way, I tagged the previous entries and added a “Weekly Updates” link to the menu at the top, in case you want to filter out the other posts here.

I started this week with implementing the Enterprise ride Garret made during last weeks livestream. Here’s a glimpse of it in action:

I then went back to working on coasters and implemented brakes. You set a target speed for them, and by the end of the segment the train will be slowed down to that speed.

The force of deceleration depends on how much faster the train is than the speed limit and how long the brake segment is - so, while a short segment will properly slow a fast train down…

…that’s obviously not very comfortable for your guests. You might want to build a longer brake run instead, which automatically results in a smoother deceleration:

Lastly, we got quite a few requests for wing coasters, so we’ve done some work on them! They aren’t quite done yet - for example, due to their width they’ll need a special station. Here’s what we have so far though:

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Update 9

A somewhat more technical entry this week - I’ve been working on intersection checks against coaster tracks to make sure that the tracks don’t collide with anything else:

This is done by creating a “virtual corridor” along the track that marks the clearance required by the coaster trains. If anything overlaps this corridor, it can’t be build. Here’s a debug view showing this corridor for a section of the track of the steel coaster (in light green lines):

The width and height of this corridor is dependent on the type of coaster you’re building, so for example for a wing coaster it would be much wider than for the steel coaster above and you’d have to make sure that there are no obstacles in the way to the sides of the track.

This method is pretty precise for ensuring that nothing clips through the tracks - for example, while you’re able to build a track over the balloon shop like this…

…you can’t go over it inverted at the same track height:

(Yes, the supports currently clip through inverted tracks, but that’s a different story)

It also allows to build quite compact coasters with near misses:

(Editor screenshot, not in-game graphics quality)

On a related note, building through wooden coaster supports is working now:

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Ride Art Livestream 2

Hey all! We just put the footage from the livestream up on YouTube as a timelapse. Check it out!

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Parkitect

Update 8

Last week was mostly spent on Kickstarter. We’ve been covered in a bunch of places and received a lot of support, so that our campaign is now at a fantastic 66% after a little over a week. Thanks everyone!

There’s a flood of mails, questions on this blog and great suggestions for us to work through - we haven’t quite replied to everyone yet, but we’ll do so one after another. By the way - there’s also a Parkitect subreddit! That should be a great place for discussing ideas and other things.

I got only back to doing some dev work over the last couple of days - got some less steep slopes for coasters working:

People now can actively look at things (other guests and coaster cars, currently):

They do this while resting or on certain rides (like the ferris wheel). Things can be differently interesting to look at for people - for example, a guest carrying a couple of balloons and wearing a crazy hat will surely turn some heads. The interactive trailer has been updated with this and a couple of bugfixes.

The public beta for Unity 4.6 has been released last week, which we’ve really been looking forward to as it adds a completely new UI system. I can’t wait to start working with it as the current placeholder UI we’ve been using is very limited. I’ve only read some documentation and briefly tinkered around with it, but so far it’s looking like it’ll be awesome for this game. I managed to quickly whip up a basic window system as a test:


Nice.

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