We planned to switch to Unity 5 from the very beginning and think the time has finally come to do so next month! It should go fairly smooth but we’ll see.įebruary was tech-focused, so for March we mostly want to take care of polishing and tying up some loose ends.
It’s a huge update of the engine we’re using with many exciting new features that should make some things easier for us. He still needs animations before we can properly implement him though. You guys convinced Garret to create a raptor entertainer during this weeks stream, and here he is: Speaking of translations, I guess we’ll have to get similar lists for other countries. It’s a bit silly and probably nothing you’d have noticed, but I like the thought that these people are all unique somehow. We’re using the peoples names as seed for their appearance and characteristics, so “John Smith” will always look and behave the same. We’re using these lists from the US Census Bureau that handily also contain data on how frequently the names occur. It’s pointless to actually translate things before they’re final but since there’s slowly more text being added to the game it’s good to have this working. In the end, the most simple solution worked the best:Īs you already know from the previous blog entry and can see here we also worked on adding support for different languages And even if it did work all these boxes would really block your view. It seemed like a good idea to automatically space them out to not overlap anymore, so we tried a couple different methods… Quote We quickly noticed a problem with the text boxes from last weeks activity logs - if you had many activities close to each other or zoomed out the boxes would overlap and you couldn’t read a thing. The weighting of these factors is something we’ll have to balance.
It takes into account the average waiting time at a station, the time the ride needs from the entrance to the exit station (on average) and the ride entrance fee in relation to the travelled distance. Here’s a couple of debug screenshots, with the yellow line showing which path the guests would take if they wanted to get from one endpoint of the line to the other (for rides it marks where they enter the queue and the station they leave at): So if for example they want to leave the park they might either walk or hop onto a transport ride and drop off at a suitable station.
Guests became cleverer this week - they learned how to properly use transport rides when heading for a specific location. And if not there are ways to optimize it. I was a bit concerned what this would do to the filesize of our savegames, but judging by some quick tests it should be alright. We added guest activity logging! We’re recording certain events for individual guests and there’s a neat visualization overlay showing you what they’ve been up to: Just because we got it nicely driving on it’s track doesn’t mean there isn’t lots of work left to do on it though! More on that in the coming weeks I guess.
It should also be fairly easy to add other kinds of tracked rides now that the code doesn’t expect everything with a track to be a coaster. Now that it works adding other suspended or powered rides should go much faster though.
Speaking of suspended, it does swing a bit in curves, although it’s hard to notice since it’s rather subtle and the framerate of this GIF is a bit low: Implementing it took some time since it works fairly different from the coasters we had so far - it’s powered, suspended, and then there’s also the shape of these supports. Having multiple stations doesn’t make that much sense on coasters though, sooo…the inevitable next step was to start working on a transport ride! …but the real work was spent on coasters - or tracked rides as I should say.Īs mentioned earlier building tracked rides with multiple stations didn’t work yet. A very busy week with lots of big code changes!