RCTW - Early Access - Dev Blog #7 - Update #4 Now Live!
RollerCoaster Tycoon World · published
Dear Tycoons,
It’s time for our next update! This update contains a number of “under-the-hood” fixes, improvements, and a few new in-progress features. As we continue with our production timeline, some updates or patches, like this one, may have less immediately obvious visual impact in-game. However, it’s important to know that the changes now being made to the core infrastructure of RCTW will pay enormous dividends as we continue through and beyond Early Access.
In the last few weeks, our focus has been on AI. This is NOT the final AI update, but rather our first patch on the system since Early Access launched. You will notice peep bathroom and staff behavior are improved. Park staff will now better spread themselves around your park and janitors will clean up messes in a more orderly fashion. As a head’s up, you might have to adjust the number of staff in your park for better results. Additionally, peep emotes and thoughts are improved and more helpful! Let us know what you think by visiting our “Early Access Forums”.
As before, our plan is to make incremental improvements on a variety of systems, see what you think, make sure we are going in the right direction, and then expand on those improvements. So to reiterate - while AI has had a major overhaul, it is just the start of all the improvements we want to do to the system. We need your feedback to make sure we are on the right track!
In other news, we have also improved certain game visuals. We’ve increased the texture quality of all our peeps and improved the level of details on various scenery items. Also, in this update, you will have your first peek at our new Screen Space Reflections system; it is not fully implemented yet and still in development, but look out for new reflections that have been added to a number of objects. We, however, will reserve the before-and-after screenshots for when the feature is fully implemented.
Lastly, but certainly not least, some of you may have noticed that the Adventure Ruins centerpiece scenery object snuck into our last update. We have improved the visuals a bit and are now officially releasing it! It’s exciting to see how much everyone is loving these bigger centerpiece scenery objects, so expect us to add more as we go!
Check it out:
This is the new Adventure Ruins Centerpiece!
It’s been a busy few weeks here at Team RCTW. We are amazed by all the awesome User-Generated Content being placed into the Steam Workshop and the incredibly inspired Screens/Videos we are seeing in the Creativity Forum. We are so happy to see that that forum has really taken off! It seems like UGC is really making its mark on the community and unlocking a ton of awesome creations!
From our Community Team, here’s a sneak peek at this week’s Featured User ChrisG’s park:
This is a shot from this week's feature user's ChrisG’s park!
Thank you for all the support, the incredible feedback, and most importantly – the inspiring parks we are seeing being made!
Until the next post, see you on the forums, and in the meantime, see below for the full list of what’s contained in this update and to get a preview at what we are working on next!
Team RCTW
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Here is the full list of what’s in today’s update, and a preview of what we are working on:
NEW FEATURES AND CONTENT
- Content: Added the new Adventure Ruins scenery to Centerpieces. This new scenery item is a huge adventure ruin that will surely add to the ambiance of your adventure parks. It’s full of holes and paths for your coasters to run through.
- Peeps: Peep emotes have additional information! When a peep triggers an emote it will now also display a + or +++ to clearly show this emote indicates a change in the peep’s status.
- UI/UX: Peep thoughts are now grouped! This will allow you to see common trends and thoughts among your peeps more easily.
- UI/UX: Pin panels in place! We added a new pin icon to all the windows so you don’t have to worry about them moving around anymore.
IMPROVEMENTS
- Coasters: Deleting a highlighted segment while in freeform mode now highlights the previous segment automatically.
- Coasters: Further revisions to a number of premade coasters following our physics update and feedback from you.
- Coasters: It’s now possible to delete the first segment of coasters (with the exception of the accelerator coaster).
- Graphics: Improved the texture quality of all peeps. Their textures will now be of much higher quality.
- Graphics: Number of improvements on the LODs for flowers and plants.
- Peeps: Improved the animations and interactions when picking up a peep. Just click on a peep, hold the right mouse button and drag the peep into the air.
- Peeps: Improved the peep thoughts to be more descriptive.
- Peeps: Peep emotes are now more closely linked with peep thoughts, making it easier to see what’s going on with an unhappy peep.
- Performance: A number of graphics meshes have been optimized increasing performance.
- Performance: A number of meshes are now pooled increasing performance.
- UI/UX: Added slight contrast to white track during the track builder to better differentiate it from the track highlight color.
- UI/UX: Clicking the track while in the test tab will now put you back into track edit mode.
- UI/UX: Improved the look of the button prompts in the tutorial.
- UI/UX: Increased the size and readability of the strength slider for the track builder’s mechanical elements.
- UI/UX: Tool tip placement is now more consistent throughout the entire UI.
- UI/UX: Updated the finance screen to now fit 5 columns of data.
- UI/UX: Updated the sci-fi arch screenshots.
- UI/UX: When in the track tab, putting the cursor on the HUD and back out again will no longer cause you to lose your current segment selection.
ALPHA FEATURES – IN PROGRESS - FEEDBACK NEEDED
This list contains features that are in progress, have had a first pass at improvements, or at an Alpha stage. Occasionally, we will develop features or improve on things that we need more feedback on from you. These are items that we want to release but are still considered “work in progress”.
- Graphics: IN PROGRESS: Screen Space Reflections. We are in the process of rolling out screen space reflections. It’s been added to a few objects in the game. Let us know what you think!
- Peeps: ALPHA FEATURE: Peeps now have a vomit effect! See what happens when they get off a vomit-inducing ride.
- UI/UX: ALPHA FEATURE: Dynamic increments for measurements when using your scroll wheel! Scroll slowly and your objects will move in smaller increments than if you scroll quickly. This will allow for more precise placement of objects. Let us know what you think!
- Peeps: FIRST PASS - Numerous AI Improvements:
- Peeps will now "hold" their nausea and bladder, even if it's extreme, if they're heading for a bathroom and they're within a certain distance of it.
- Peeps will now incorporate distance to bathrooms when scoring them, prioritizing closer bathrooms over more distant ones. We will continue imploring peeps to use the bathroom when they have to pee, and only resort to the path in the most extreme or unfortunate circumstances.
- Peeps will now address nausea, hunger, thirst, and bathroom when their stats are lower than before, giving them more opportunity to deal with these issues before they're a serious problem.
- Peeps should take much longer before becoming injured as a consequence of extremely high nausea, bathroom, hunger, and thirst.
- Peeps should no longer buy drinks when hoping to soothe their hunger. We have informed them that food will be much more effective for this purpose.
BUG FIXES
The Bugs below have all been addressed in this latest update. Note this is not a complete list but does give you an idea of most of the fixes that were made.
- Buildings: Once placing the “Mayan Temple” you cannot delete it
- Coasters: G-forces seem to generate differently on inversions than flat track
- Coasters: Inversions cause last segment of coaster to be intensely twisted
- Coasters: Magnetic Brake description for the Accelerator Coaster is incorrect
- Coasters: Pre-made coasters can be edited
- Coasters: The coaster train stops at the track and fails to complete its cycle, if user clicks on the coaster station when the train is about to leave the station
- Coasters: Twisting a coaster track using the second edit mode will focus the rotation in the middle of the segment
- Coasters: Twisting a coaster track using the second edit mode will focus the rotation in the middle of the segment
- Coasters: When mousing over the outside of the park boundaries the Yaw angle of the node gets locked
- Flatrides: Flatrides not aware they have ticket booths anymore
- Flatrides: Light posts of the “Observation Ride” do not illuminate at night
- Graphics: First LOD level cut’s all the lilac plants in half
- Graphics: Numerous visual issues with topiaries
- Graphics: Park environment is visible through the small hole on the top of the scenery asset “Saguaro Cactus”
- Graphics: The hypercoaster adventure station has an LOD problem
- Localization: Korean language not displaying as an option in the main menu
- Localization: Lots of text is missing in French
- Paths: No assets can be placed on paths
- Peeps: Park staff and rotated incorrectly while walking
- Peeps: Peep body clips with the fences of the “Typhoon Ride”
- Peeps: Peeps are not getting injured from coaster crash
- Peeps: Peeps are not using the correct animation based on their age and gender
- Peeps: Peeps not properly holding items when walking around your park
- Scenarios: Coasters in Scenarios 1 ,2, and 3 broken after previous update
- Scenarios: Loading a finished scenario makes the number of remaining months disappear
- UGC: Blueprints system is not working
- UGC: UGC voting feature has a variety of bugs
- UI/UX: Fire animation is missing in the preview image of the scenery asset “Crashed UFO”
- UI/UX: Park thoughts appear to be truncated
- UI/UX: Peep count always has a green arrow, even if peeps are leaving the park
- UI/UX: Scenery asset “Random Hibiscus” is displayed twice under “Flowers and Plants” category
- UI/UX: Sci-fi theme of the Inverted Coaster fails to match with it’s preview image
- UI/UX: Scrollbars do not move in the direction of travel of the screen
- UI/UX: Small entertainer building texture gets broken when using heat maps
- UI/UX: The current month in the finance window is offset when we first start the game
- UI/UX: The notification bar at the right of the top HUD is not fixed and goes out of the screen when scrolling down the notifications using the mouse wheel
- UI/UX: Warning notifications at the top get truncated if the user invokes “Bulldozer” or “Move” tools when the notification pops up
KNOWN ISSUES
We are still working on a number of bugs, tweaks, and other fixes. With each update we address a number of bugs and make a ton of improvements, but sometimes this may cause new things to break in the process. Our focus on Early Access is getting updates out faster to you so that we can get feedback earlier in the process. If you see a bug please report it HERE. Feedback on what you seeing implemented should go HERE.
For a general guide on fixes and troubleshooting steps (including the one for the 57% bug) suggested by the community to a number of common issues please visit THIS GUIDE.
WHAT’S NEXT
Now that our simulation team has made their first pass on AI, they will be turning their attention to reading more of your feedback, further tweaking/balancing what is implemented, and expanding the capabilities of the system further. One of their next targets is to improve the nausea system so expect more improvements in the next couple of weeks.
For our next update you will see further improvements on AI as more medium and longer term tasks get checked in. For example, we are still working on our “Nausea” system. Expect in our next update that peeps will now have a minimum Nausea Tolerance of 1 (up from 0), and peeps with higher minimum Intensity Preferences will also receive a boost to their Nausea Tolerance.
Additionally, we currently have a specialized team working on paths! This team is working on the main frustration points of our path system and fixing bugs. This is an important task and a top priority in the upcoming weeks. You should expect a number of fixes, frustration point removals, and general improvements to the path system over time. Already, in our next major update, some improvements will be noticeable. Of course, we have planned a few surprises along the way as well!
We also have noted a number of users asking about performance improvements. While performance will improve incrementally with each update, we do have a number of larger initiatives underway that we expect will solve the problem more holistically. Those, however, are taking some time to implement. We will share more updates once we get a bit further along.
Another sneak peak of user's ChrisG’s park!