Well I spent the last couple of days re-creating some parts of the game to make it runs smoother, and now I think the game runs about twice as fast, which is great! The pictures on this devlog should give a pretty clear indication of what I’ve been up to, but I’ll give them a description anyway.
First of all, you might notice that I’ve redesigned the interface. It's a lot lighter now and the buttons have symbols. It's generally a lot more pleasant to use. You can drop down a mini "Controls" panel (which is visible in all the screenshots). This lets you customise some of the features on your rollercoaster including:
-Lift hill speed
-Transport wheel speed (e.g. in the station)
-Launches
These can all be modified while the coaster is running, so it really feels like you're in control. Of course, if you don't want to faff around with little details like this, they're set to sensible values by default so you can ignore them and still make a sensible roller coaster.
The first screenshot shows how you can build really subtle drops and curves into the track. This was a major feature Rollercoaster Tycoon was missing. In Project: Roller Coaster you can edit the length of each segment of track, as well as adjust the angle in increments of 5° at a time. The second picture shows the opposite, and features a couple of tight bumps. That won't be too comfy for the riders! It also shows off the new cars I’ve made which are far more convincing than the old ones.
The final picture shows how the game has been optimised. The game can show this much track on the screen at once without too much effort. And that is more track than you'll need in a single player scenario, but in sandbox mode you can build this much track if you really wish. These screenshots show the game in its High graphically mode. If your computer isn't quite up to running this then you can lower the game to Medium or Low. In the lower graphic settings, the track appears to be a little jaggier and a bit fuzzier. Even though it provides a performance boost, it still looks like a roller coaster, and that's all that matters!
The game is currently set to run at 30 frames per second. I am, however, considering making an option to set the maximum frames per second to 15. This option would adjust the physics etc so that the coaster still moves at the same speed, it just doesn't update as often. This will mean the game is playable on pretty much any computer (well, you know what I mean). I can't confirm this feature yet though, I'm afraid.
Thanks for reading!
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