This is awesome! Would you have any time to explain a little about the technical design aspects of pulling off the re-coloring system. For example, how do the artists design the textures to be recolorable? How do they assign which parts are which? How do the other layers "specular, etc." work with the recoloring? What are the technical limits of the system?
Live Forum Q&A - Design!
- Thread starter Zac Antonaci
- Start date
This is awesome! Would you have any time to explain a little about the technical design aspects of pulling off the re-coloring system. For example, how do the artists design the textures to be recolorable? How do they assign which parts are which? How do the other layers "specular, etc." work with the recoloring? What are the technical limits of the system?
Thank you. Actually i hardly watch the clock in the game and i am really interested how the changes will be in Alpha 2.
@Dave
Nice news. Recolourable cars. Thank you.
I loved how on the "Disk-o Carpet Ride" you could thread a coaster through the middle, under the hump, can we get this level of ride interaction across the board?
The new stream showed a huge ferriswheel that has such an option so I'll assume there are probably more of those comming.
BTW It seems to be going a bit slow compared to other times, regardless of how many people you have for answering. Did we misunderstand the subject of this Q&A as a community?
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I agree...Only 7 questions answered within the last hour and half... and no answer within the last 20 minutes.
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Maybe Fletch is having problems with his avatar picture [rolleyes] [haha] [haha]
Hi CrimsonOrpheo! The current plan for water is to complement the terrain editing tools (although it won’t feature in Alpha 2) and allow you to create beautiful and authentic landscapes in which to base your park and build around. It’s not a full water fluid simulation, but it looks great, with refractions and optional roughness and more visual flair in the pipeline.
There are also water VFX props that you’ll be able to place as of Alpha 2 next week, which should open up some cool creative options too.
Hey guys, sorry for the delay. The guys are typing away currently and answers will be flowing shortly.
Feels as my fault. I got some kind of curse on me, never getting any of my questions answered on this Q&A events. Always to late into the tread. This time though, I'm early on page 2. That ruins it all.... [sad]
Thanks Zac
Gaz
Gaz
Really guys? They're staying after hours to answer some of our questions (whether you think they're doing it slowly or not) and you're finding a reason to complain? [rolleyes]
Yes, we should respect that. [yesnod]
Should congrats go to Sarah, too, listed in the credits, or, no relation?
Hey SjakieApie! Yes, you will be able to edit the colour of individual track sections, or a stretch of track that you have selected. And of course you’ll be able to change the colour of the whole track overall.
Also, we’ve just added the ability to change the colour of your train on the track too, so you’ll see that in Alpha 2 as well.
Customisable operation sequences which allow you to choose the movements a flat ride performs is something we are investigating.
SO many questions! It’s always interesting to see what you come up with Angelis - you’re a bit famous in the office.
I always think of you as your first avatar! I’m going to stick to the most frequently asked of your questions to try and speed things along. (Edit: nevermind, I answered them all)1) Scale. Although you might think this one is easy to implement, this one scares us the most! I’m not a programmer, but I’ll try to communicate some of the reasons why this is difficult.
As I understand things, all of our assets are designed to be viewed and used at a specific scale; this also applies to things like LODs and other technical aspects that are beyond my expertise. What this more or less means is that any object that can look good at any scale is going to be a resource hog – it will slow down the rest of your game far more than it currently does. The more complex the object, the worse this effect gets! There are knock-on effects to game physics, performance and general code maintainability.
We are always looking for ways to improve our tools – the new Advanced Rotation and Movement options are likely going to increase player’s creativity in ways we haven’t imagined yet – and I hope that stresses to you how seriously we take this aspect of the game, but we don’t currently believe that Scale is a problem we can solve to our own high standards.
On a similar point, where there is a recognized need for objects at different scales, those are objects we can tailor make to those specific sizes – the new rocks in Alpha 2 are a good example of this, we saw how many players were making huge mountains out of rocks, so we added a huge and tiny rock to make this faster to build and more efficient to run.
2) & 3) Real natural paths and Cameras are something we are investigating further, but nothing to confirm right now.
4), 5) & 7) We always read suggestions and feedback, but the current plan is to focus on the core coaster park experience. As I’m sure you’re aware, there’s still a lot of content to add to the base game before release, and right now we’re focusing on this. However, with benches and modular building there’s a huge potential for guest areas which is we’ll have more info on later.
Thanks for your questions, I hope these answers helped!