Gordon finished a new song! It’s really catchy. Give it a listen here.

Improving terrain textures has been an open task for a **very **long time. The reason is that we have a list of requirements/wishes for them, and figuring out a technique that fulfills them all took a while :)

• we wanted to not be severly limited in the amount of different terrain textures we can use (~8 at least)
• hard straight edges between textures don’t look nice, there should be some sort of transition. This can clash with the first requirement; for example Texture Splatting is usually only done with up to 4 different textures, or requires lots of big splat textures, which leads us to the next requirement...
• it shouldn’t increase savegame sizes too much
• it should play nicely with our terrain. The old textures looked particularly bad around hills

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since the Christmas Holidays break last year and did a bunch of research and prototyping, and we’ve finally arrived at a method that we like :D

First of all, here’s what it looks like:



You can change the texture for quarter tiles now instead of for the whole tile, so it’s more fine-grained than before. Actually, it’s even more fine-grained than that, because each quater tile is further divided up into 4 triangles so you can paint around hills nicely:



As you can see, transitions between tiles aren’t exactly smooth but it’s better than straight edges, and I think our art style allows us to get away with the hard cuts.
We can theoretically use up to 256 different terrain textures, and savegame size shouldn’t be increased by more than a couple hundred kilobytes in most cases.

So, we’re pretty happy with that!

On the downside, we’ll have to drop DirectX 9 support for it. DirectX 10 is available since ~10 years by now, but we still wanted to know how many people would be affected by this change.
So we ran some analytics over the last couple months and found that less than 2% of our players use DirectX 9. Doesn’t sound too bad, but that’s still uncomfortably many!
Digging into this further though it turns out that ~90% of these people use DirectX 10-capable graphics cards, so we assume they just don’t have the proper drivers or DirectX version installed. In addition, a good amount of the remaining people is still running Windows XP, which we never officially supported.
So I think we can justify changing our minimum requirements to a DirectX 10-capable graphics card. If you’re still affected by this and can do absolutely nothing about it, please let us know.

Just for fun, here’s a dump of screenshots of the (sometimes weird) things we tried for terrain textures :)

Gordon finished a new song! It’s really catchy. Give it a listen here.

Improving terrain textures has been an open task for a **very **long time. The reason is that we have a list of requirements/wishes for them, and figuring out a technique that fulfills them all took a while :)

• we wanted to not be severly limited in the amount of different terrain textures we can use (~8 at least)
• hard straight edges between textures don’t look nice, there should be some sort of transition. This can clash with the first requirement; for example Texture Splatting is usually only done with up to 4 different textures, or requires lots of big splat textures, which leads us to the next requirement...
• it shouldn’t increase savegame sizes too much
• it should play nicely with our terrain. The old textures looked particularly bad around hills

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since the Christmas Holidays break last year and did a bunch of research and prototyping, and we’ve finally arrived at a method that we like :D

First of all, here’s what it looks like:



You can change the texture for quarter tiles now instead of for the whole tile, so it’s more fine-grained than before. Actually, it’s even more fine-grained than that, because each quater tile is further divided up into 4 triangles so you can paint around hills nicely:



As you can see, transitions between tiles aren’t exactly smooth but it’s better than straight edges, and I think our art style allows us to get away with the hard cuts.
We can theoretically use up to 256 different terrain textures, and savegame size shouldn’t be increased by more than a couple hundred kilobytes in most cases.

So, we’re pretty happy with that!

On the downside, we’ll have to drop DirectX 9 support for it. DirectX 10 is available since ~10 years by now, but we still wanted to know how many people would be affected by this change.
So we ran some analytics over the last couple months and found that less than 2% of our players use DirectX 9. Doesn’t sound too bad, but that’s still uncomfortably many!
Digging into this further though it turns out that ~90% of these people use DirectX 10-capable graphics cards, so we assume they just don’t have the proper drivers or DirectX version installed. In addition, a good amount of the remaining people is still running Windows XP, which we never officially supported.
So I think we can justify changing our minimum requirements to a DirectX 10-capable graphics card. If you’re still affected by this and can do absolutely nothing about it, please let us know.

Just for fun, here’s a dump of screenshots of the (sometimes weird) things we tried for terrain textures :)

Luuk added a bunch of statistics across all of your play sessions and some global ones (this uses Steam statistics, so they are only available when playing through Steam):



And we decided to make a somewhat breaking change: we’re changing the terrain to use less steep half-unit high slopes. Naturally this includes placing rides and walls at half unit high increments and less steep stairs.
To keep old savegames compatible they will continue to use the steep terrain and only new parks will use the flat slopes.
The old steep stairs will still be available in old and new parks.

Luuk added a bunch of statistics across all of your play sessions and some global ones (this uses Steam statistics, so they are only available when playing through Steam):



And we decided to make a somewhat breaking change: we’re changing the terrain to use less steep half-unit high slopes. Naturally this includes placing rides and walls at half unit high increments and less steep stairs.
To keep old savegames compatible they will continue to use the steep terrain and only new parks will use the flat slopes.
The old steep stairs will still be available in old and new parks.

Alpha 11 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

We added Skyfall, a drop tower ride where guests are turned into a horizontal position during the drop:



And there’s the Junior Coaster from this weeks Art Stream:



And Gabby made progress with the visual overhaul of the UI. Updating it all is a ton of work that’ll be ongoing for a while. Releasing it all at once when it’s finished would be difficult, so we’ll ship what we currently have and continue improving it over the next few Alphas until it’s done (like we’ve always done it with all parts of the game :)).Here’s the current state:

• started UI overhaul (not complete yet)
• added Junior Coaster
• added Skyfall
• added terrain generator to scenario editor
• added fountains
• added modern building sets
• added wooden paths and queues
• added smaller park entrance that is easier to theme
• added shadow fadeout distance setting
• added tilt shift intensity setting
• added running costs for shops and utility buildings
• added female staff outfits
• added auto-minimizing deco builder window
• added world markers for person thoughts
• minor balance adjustments
• small performance improvements
• preventing terrain from clipping through rides/shops/utility buildings when terraforming
• tweaked shadows
• improved camera behaviour near terrain bounds
• improved text crispness
• improved sign text readability
• improved height indicator when building deco objects
• improved some windows remember some of their state when closing/reopening
• improved quality of path textures when zooming out
• removed SSAO (for now)
• fixed newly added rides being unlocked in old scenarios
• fixed guests vandalizing objects that don't belong to the park
• fixed Go Karts could get stuck
• fixed Ferris Wheel was in wrong position after loading savegame
• fixed a case where ride entrance/exit could be placed at the wrong height
• fixed color filters not being applied anymore after rain
• fixed scenario autosave files being saved to the wrong folder
• fixed a case where some tracked rides could have unrealistically high intensity/nausea ratings

Alpha 11 is now available for download! The full change log is at the end of this post.

We added Skyfall, a drop tower ride where guests are turned into a horizontal position during the drop:



And there’s the Junior Coaster from this weeks Art Stream:



And Gabby made progress with the visual overhaul of the UI. Updating it all is a ton of work that’ll be ongoing for a while. Releasing it all at once when it’s finished would be difficult, so we’ll ship what we currently have and continue improving it over the next few Alphas until it’s done (like we’ve always done it with all parts of the game :)).Here’s the current state:

• started UI overhaul (not complete yet)
• added Junior Coaster
• added Skyfall
• added terrain generator to scenario editor
• added fountains
• added modern building sets
• added wooden paths and queues
• added smaller park entrance that is easier to theme
• added shadow fadeout distance setting
• added tilt shift intensity setting
• added running costs for shops and utility buildings
• added female staff outfits
• added auto-minimizing deco builder window
• added world markers for person thoughts
• minor balance adjustments
• small performance improvements
• preventing terrain from clipping through rides/shops/utility buildings when terraforming
• tweaked shadows
• improved camera behaviour near terrain bounds
• improved text crispness
• improved sign text readability
• improved height indicator when building deco objects
• improved some windows remember some of their state when closing/reopening
• improved quality of path textures when zooming out
• removed SSAO (for now)
• fixed newly added rides being unlocked in old scenarios
• fixed guests vandalizing objects that don't belong to the park
• fixed Go Karts could get stuck
• fixed Ferris Wheel was in wrong position after loading savegame
• fixed a case where ride entrance/exit could be placed at the wrong height
• fixed color filters not being applied anymore after rain
• fixed scenario autosave files being saved to the wrong folder
• fixed a case where some tracked rides could have unrealistically high intensity/nausea ratings

Hey! As usual near the end of the month, come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (March 1st) at 1pm PST to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

I’ve returned to working on the terrain to hopefully resolve all of the remaining tasks. The first one: preventing terrain from clipping through flat rides/shops/utility buildings.



The biggest challenge with this was not actually making the terraforming stop in occupied places but figuring out whether the place is occupied or not with acceptable performance. We're obviously using space-partitioning data structures (Octrees in this case) to speed up our collision checks, but if you need to do many lookups that gets slow too at some point...

Just like we’ve already done it with guests activities we’re also putting markers for thoughts in the park now when their thoughts tab is opened, so it’s a bit easier to see what the thoughts are referring to:

Hey! As usual near the end of the month, come join us on Garrets Twitch channel on Wednesday (March 1st) at 1pm PST to chat while watching some new Parkitect art being created.

I’ve returned to working on the terrain to hopefully resolve all of the remaining tasks. The first one: preventing terrain from clipping through flat rides/shops/utility buildings.



The biggest challenge with this was not actually making the terraforming stop in occupied places but figuring out whether the place is occupied or not with acceptable performance. We're obviously using space-partitioning data structures (Octrees in this case) to speed up our collision checks, but if you need to do many lookups that gets slow too at some point...

Just like we’ve already done it with guests activities we’re also putting markers for thoughts in the park now when their thoughts tab is opened, so it’s a bit easier to see what the thoughts are referring to:

Unitys text rendering isn’t the greatest currently - text looks blurry, styling and layouting is fairly limited, and when it had some trouble with handling a custom font as part of our current UI overhaul it was clear that it was time to switch to a 3rd party text rendering solution.
Here’s a direct comparison:



The deco window is quite big and can get in the way, so we’re experimenting with automatically minimizing it as soon as the cursor leaves the window. Not sure yet if this might be confusing new players, we’ll have to see :)



Tim has spent the last couple weeks on adding a random terrain generator to the scenario editor, and it’s producing pretty nice results now :) There’s lots of options so you'll never have to play on empty flat terrains anymore (although that’s still possible if you want to):



Garret added a smaller park entrance that can be themed more easily:



And some wooden paths, queues and more deco objects, including additional nice building pieces based on designs by StolleJay:

Unitys text rendering isn’t the greatest currently - text looks blurry, styling and layouting is fairly limited, and when it had some trouble with handling a custom font as part of our current UI overhaul it was clear that it was time to switch to a 3rd party text rendering solution.
Here’s a direct comparison:



The deco window is quite big and can get in the way, so we’re experimenting with automatically minimizing it as soon as the cursor leaves the window. Not sure yet if this might be confusing new players, we’ll have to see :)



Tim has spent the last couple weeks on adding a random terrain generator to the scenario editor, and it’s producing pretty nice results now :) There’s lots of options so you'll never have to play on empty flat terrains anymore (although that’s still possible if you want to):



Garret added a smaller park entrance that can be themed more easily:



And some wooden paths, queues and more deco objects, including additional nice building pieces based on designs by StolleJay: