Only 6 days left until the Steam release!
We’ll do a Stream on May 5th at 8am PST, right before the Steam launch. If you simply want to hang out and chat a bit we’d be happy if you join us on Garrets Twitch channel :)


There’s a new visualization for last weeks station synchronization feature that shows connections between all synchronized stations of a ride:
It includes all indirectly synchronized rides, too - for example, the above screenshot shows the synchronization setup for the coaster, which has synchronization configured between its stations and the Drop Tower. The Drop Tower is synchronized with the Carousel though, which means that the coaster can’t start before the Carousel is ready even though it is not directly synchronized with it.
This will probably not be a common situation but it can happen.

There are also a few new decorative objects:

Aside from that there’s not too much to say this week as we’ve obviously been focused on fixing lots of small bugs and annoyances and adding some polish to make a good first impression on Steam :)

Only 6 days left until the Steam release!
We’ll do a Stream on May 5th at 8am PST, right before the Steam launch. If you simply want to hang out and chat a bit we’d be happy if you join us on Garrets Twitch channel :)


There’s a new visualization for last weeks station synchronization feature that shows connections between all synchronized stations of a ride:
It includes all indirectly synchronized rides, too - for example, the above screenshot shows the synchronization setup for the coaster, which has synchronization configured between its stations and the Drop Tower. The Drop Tower is synchronized with the Carousel though, which means that the coaster can’t start before the Carousel is ready even though it is not directly synchronized with it.
This will probably not be a common situation but it can happen.

There are also a few new decorative objects:

Aside from that there’s not too much to say this week as we’ve obviously been focused on fixing lots of small bugs and annoyances and adding some polish to make a good first impression on Steam :)

We haven’t added a new transport ride in a looong time, but there’s a very iconic one used in many theme parks around the world that we didn’t have yet: the Monorail! Garret modeled it during this weeks Art Stream and here it is in the game:

It’s quite fast and especially great for providing transportation to the more remote areas of your park.

We added a ride synchronization feature. You can synchronize any station (i.e. flat rides or tracked ride stations) with any amount of other stations in the park, no matter where they are located.

(We also changed the previous “Waiting Time” setting to the more intuitive separate inputs for minimum/maximum waiting time)

These settings are also carried over into blueprints, so if you for example build a dueling coaster with two separate tracks and put them both into the same blueprint, the synchronization settings will already be properly set up when someone builds that blueprint. 

You can even synchronize tracked ride stations with other stations on the same track. I imagine this might be most useful for dark rides to better control in which parts of the track the trains are, but I’m sure you’ll find some other interesting uses for it :)

Starting with the next release we’ll change the savegame format to a new compressed one (.park) that reduces savegame size by up to ~85%. The biggest savegame I’ve seen was around 10MB and there’s plenty of disk space nowadays so savegame size was never really an issue, but with content sharing over the internet and cloud storage (and bigger parks in the future) it’s still nice to reduce this.
Don’t worry though: all your old .txt savegames will still be supported, and for those of you who like to manually edit their savegame files this only means that you have to decompress the .park file into a .txt once if you start a new park, which can be done easily with a tool like 7-Zip (or modders could easily create an own tool for it within a few minutes).

We haven’t added a new transport ride in a looong time, but there’s a very iconic one used in many theme parks around the world that we didn’t have yet: the Monorail! Garret modeled it during this weeks Art Stream and here it is in the game:

It’s quite fast and especially great for providing transportation to the more remote areas of your park.

We added a ride synchronization feature. You can synchronize any station (i.e. flat rides or tracked ride stations) with any amount of other stations in the park, no matter where they are located.

(We also changed the previous “Waiting Time” setting to the more intuitive separate inputs for minimum/maximum waiting time)

These settings are also carried over into blueprints, so if you for example build a dueling coaster with two separate tracks and put them both into the same blueprint, the synchronization settings will already be properly set up when someone builds that blueprint. 

You can even synchronize tracked ride stations with other stations on the same track. I imagine this might be most useful for dark rides to better control in which parts of the track the trains are, but I’m sure you’ll find some other interesting uses for it :)

Starting with the next release we’ll change the savegame format to a new compressed one (.park) that reduces savegame size by up to ~85%. The biggest savegame I’ve seen was around 10MB and there’s plenty of disk space nowadays so savegame size was never really an issue, but with content sharing over the internet and cloud storage (and bigger parks in the future) it’s still nice to reduce this.
Don’t worry though: all your old .txt savegames will still be supported, and for those of you who like to manually edit their savegame files this only means that you have to decompress the .park file into a .txt once if you start a new park, which can be done easily with a tool like 7-Zip (or modders could easily create an own tool for it within a few minutes).

Art Steam

Due to the imminent Steam launch this months Art Stream will be a week earlier than usual - come join us on Wednesday at 2pm PST on Garrets Twitch channel to watch him live while he’s creating some new art for the game.

Devlog

If you’ve played the game you probably noticed that some of the audio volume seemed a bit off - especially coasters were way too silent. The problem is that our game is a bit of a special case with its near-orthographic camera and its huge range of heights at which objects can be placed: you can have certain objects like drop towers or coasters that are 50 units or so above the ground that you want to hear, and at the same time you want to hear everything that’s going on at the ground too...but not stuff that’s going on at the ground and 50 units away from the center of the screen, because if you’re zoomed all the way in, the stuff that’s on ground level and 50 units away is way off-screen.
Instead of Unitys default volume attenuation that determines volume depending on world space distances we needed one that considers whether an object is on screen or not, and we got a first version of that working now.
In short: coasters and other things should start to sound better over the next versions!

Most of this week was spent on Steam stuff though. I’ve integrated Steams content delivery systems into our build tools and can automatically create a new game build and put it onto Steam with a single click now, which is really nice :)
And we added support for sharing savegames and blueprints on Steam Workshop!

We’re designing the content upload tools in a way that should allow it for other services like ParkitectNexus to plug into it too.

And the track builder got an update so it can adapt better to the requirements of whatever ride you’re currently editing because we were running out of room for slope buttons with the new steeper slopes on the Giga Coaster. And for example for rides that can’t be banked the banking wheel is entirely gone now:

Less uselessly confusing visual clutter!

Art Steam

Due to the imminent Steam launch this months Art Stream will be a week earlier than usual - come join us on Wednesday at 2pm PST on Garrets Twitch channel to watch him live while he’s creating some new art for the game.

Devlog

If you’ve played the game you probably noticed that some of the audio volume seemed a bit off - especially coasters were way too silent. The problem is that our game is a bit of a special case with its near-orthographic camera and its huge range of heights at which objects can be placed: you can have certain objects like drop towers or coasters that are 50 units or so above the ground that you want to hear, and at the same time you want to hear everything that’s going on at the ground too...but not stuff that’s going on at the ground and 50 units away from the center of the screen, because if you’re zoomed all the way in, the stuff that’s on ground level and 50 units away is way off-screen.
Instead of Unitys default volume attenuation that determines volume depending on world space distances we needed one that considers whether an object is on screen or not, and we got a first version of that working now.
In short: coasters and other things should start to sound better over the next versions!

Most of this week was spent on Steam stuff though. I’ve integrated Steams content delivery systems into our build tools and can automatically create a new game build and put it onto Steam with a single click now, which is really nice :)
And we added support for sharing savegames and blueprints on Steam Workshop!

We’re designing the content upload tools in a way that should allow it for other services like ParkitectNexus to plug into it too.

And the track builder got an update so it can adapt better to the requirements of whatever ride you’re currently editing because we were running out of room for slope buttons with the new steeper slopes on the Giga Coaster. And for example for rides that can’t be banked the banking wheel is entirely gone now:

Less uselessly confusing visual clutter!

Oh hey, hello there! If you're reading this over here on Steam chances are you've only recently heard about the game, so welcome!
We've been releasing blog entries of what we've been working on every week (usually around the weekend) for almost 2 years now, and will mirror them over here on Steam for your convenience. This is entry number 92 - if you want to check out any of the previous 91 entries, head over to our "official" devlog.

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It’s been a pretty crazy week :)
We released a new trailer and announced the Steam Early Access launch date. Reactions to that have been really positive, and woah did we get a lot of reactions! We’ve been really busy answering questions about the game all over the internet. Add to that the release of Pre-Alpha 9 and all the feedback for that and you can imagine there’s been a lot going on.

The remaining time this week was spent on getting the Giga Coaster into the game that you might have seen Garret model during one of our previous monthly Art Livestreams:

It can go higher and steeper than any other coaster in the game currently (although we’ll probably enable the steeper slopes for some of the other coasters too).

The coaster support code had to be a bit updated for it to allow these square supports and the angled ones that are slightly offset from the top, and after a certain height it turns off the angled side supports entirely. Some of the older coasters should benefit from these changes too.

While I was already working on supports anyways, ground-level tracks finally spawn supports if you terraform below them as you’d expect:

Oh hey, hello there! If you're reading this over here on Steam chances are you've only recently heard about the game, so welcome!
We've been releasing blog entries of what we've been working on every week (usually around the weekend) for almost 2 years now, and will mirror them over here on Steam for your convenience. This is entry number 92 - if you want to check out any of the previous 91 entries, head over to our "official" devlog.

-----------

It’s been a pretty crazy week :)
We released a new trailer and announced the Steam Early Access launch date. Reactions to that have been really positive, and woah did we get a lot of reactions! We’ve been really busy answering questions about the game all over the internet. Add to that the release of Pre-Alpha 9 and all the feedback for that and you can imagine there’s been a lot going on.

The remaining time this week was spent on getting the Giga Coaster into the game that you might have seen Garret model during one of our previous monthly Art Livestreams:

It can go higher and steeper than any other coaster in the game currently (although we’ll probably enable the steeper slopes for some of the other coasters too).

The coaster support code had to be a bit updated for it to allow these square supports and the angled ones that are slightly offset from the top, and after a certain height it turns off the angled side supports entirely. Some of the older coasters should benefit from these changes too.

While I was already working on supports anyways, ground-level tracks finally spawn supports if you terraform below them as you’d expect: