Dante80

Not so fast. Just one week after release ATARI decided to do a 45% off exclusive "fall sale" for RCTW, thus @#$%^@$% over their existing customers...again. The caveat? This sale is only happening through their own website, not Steam. http://www.rollercoastertycoon.com/buy/ If you go to Steam now...you pay 45% more. http://store.steampowered.com/app/282560 The reason ATARI decided to do this is two-fold.. 1. So that many existing customers on Steam won't find out they have been shafted. Btw...if you buy right now from the Steam Store, you pay 45% more. 2. So that the Steam 2hr refund process does not apply to the guys that get it from there. Good luck getting a refund from ATARI themselves. Steam won't cover you. Niiiiiiceee..

Posting some pictures from around the web. The things people do in this game give a lot of inspiration, and also make me feel like a corncob. Example of how you can use verticality for both theming and ride building. The art shapes are somewhat limited (this part really needs both a re-texturing option, as well as a scaling tool), but you can still do a lot of things with them. The 4m block size as well as the rotation/translation tools can help in making sincere re-productions of known venues. Here is someone making the Efteling entrance. With the grid tools for pathing you can make pretty compact and efficient food courts.

If you have the thrillseeker edition (or pre-ordered the game before alpha 3 came out to Steam), you can access the sketchbook and soundtrack right now. Go to your install drive, Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Planet Coaster, and the two respective folders are there. That works for Win7. The sketchbook is 93 pages long, with an excruciating amount of detail and pretty sweet illustrations. It covers how the game was made. The soundtrack (16 tracks) is offered in lossless FLAC and 160kbs MP3. Also has a printable album cover picture. Both are pretty sweet additions imo. I'll definitely get some mileage out of that soundtrack while driving to work.

And the game is live. Grab it if you have it. It’s here! Planet Coaster has officially launched! Today, on November 17, 2016, Planet Coaster is officially released! Adding to the beta update earlier this week, the released game comes with all 12 Scenarios and more general balancing and fixes, as well as Steam Achievements and Trading Cards. We’ve hit so many milestones over the past months, and it’s been a long way from concept to finish, so let’s quickly recap some of the highlights: At the heart of the game are the park guests. Everything you do, whether it’s management or creativity-based, now has an impact on each individual crowd member. Each of them have their own simulated preferences and needs to ultimately affect gameplay, and new, advanced crowd simulation and path-finding algorithms help with the logistics of guest flow around your park. Authenticity is key – a huge amount of research and development went into all aspects of the game, something especially noticeable in coasters. For example, the system which automatically designs the correct support structures for wooden and hybrid coaster had to be built with a new rendering pipeline, with so many pieces being on screen at once. In fact the attention to detail and development effort that goes into each ride, coaster, guest and scenery piece from a technical, visual and audio point of view is an order of magnitude more than any previous coaster park game we’ve worked on. Piece-by-piece construction gives you the opportunity to build anything and everything you’ve ever dreamed of. Change your parks by theming your areas, create buildings in every style, or add (animated) scenery and customised audio to entertain your guests and up your park and scenery ratings. The unprecedented control and customisation means that you can truly get super creative or be more focused on sophisticated finance and management; whatever suits you as an individual player. The technology underpinning the game is both advanced and highly useable. The 3D voxel landscape gives terrain that’s completely in your control, the lighting engine ensures that everything you create in your park instantly becomes a seamless part of the whole dynamic lighting environment, and you can now create your own dark rides with full creative control of triggering ride events, lights and audio. Every single aspect and element of Planet Coaster has been carefully selected and designed to work in conjunction with every other one as an integrated whole. The tight integration with Steam Workshop has a front end that puts your friends to the fore. It enables creators to share and receive credit for their original designs, and also allows those of us who want to use these fantastic creations to download that content and enhance their parks with those existing blueprints. It has been a fantastic experience for us at Frontier to have the opportunity to create a new game which we hope sets a new quality bar for a genre loved by so many people – no team could have been better suited to the task or more passionate. It’s taken a blend of the team’s expertise and experience, talent, and deep connection with the community; and for that we must thank you all. First and foremost, we want to thank the developers for their incredible hard work, passion, and dedication to the project. Everyone at Frontier has contributed to Planet Coaster in one way or another; a true team effort and shared love for the game from the start. Programmers, animators, producers, sound team, designers, artists, QA, publishing team, engine wizards, support team, video editors, and all you other experts: you’re awesome, well done. #FrontierFam We also want to give a massive shoutout to our forum mods, content creators, and master builders. Thank you for keeping the community an overwhelmingly positive place, where everyone has a voice but no one feels unwelcome. Thank you for making videos or streaming the game, showing it off to your viewers, and spreading the word across your community. Thank you for challenging yourselves and creating the most intricate buildings, for using shapes and items in ways even the devs couldn’t have thought of, and for pushing your creativity to the limit. Last but not least: thank you. Thanks to every single member of this amazing community for your ongoing support, invaluable feedback, and enthusiasm about Planet Coaster. In the end, this game is for you, the players. You have helped shape the game in so many ways, inspired the devs with your ideas and suggestions, and humbled us with your shared passion for the game. We are honoured to have a community like this one. So thank you for joining us on this crazy and ever-evolving rollercoaster ride!

Launch trailer is out. Frontier decided again to use mostly community creations for people like Silvarret and De-Lady-signer. Which is a pretty good choice for showcasing what the game can do imo (far better than a pre-rendered trailer).

A new update is out. Birds, ballons, rapids, giga-coasters, and 2.5x larger parks among other things. https://forums.planetcoaster.com/showthread.php/15053-Planet-Coaster-Beta-Update!?p=127880#post127880

They have also announced what NVISSIO was really working on all this time. And it was not RCTW really...

Btw...I still cannot get over how good the sound design in this game is. I mean, ok..Frontier has shown that they can produce something very good in this category via Elite Dangerous, but this thing is next level. The soundtrack is pretty good, the way music meshes with gameplay is superlative, the actual ride effects are extremely sophisticated, UI sounds are masochistically extensive (almost everything you tweak, plop down, move etc has a different sound), and the camera sound LoD and mixing when going around your park is out of this world. Sound is something that many times is just tacked on and doesn't get much attention from developers, and we are talking about a CMS game here, where (barring the coaster sounds) sound should be even lower in the list. It really really isn't though, and I am glad of it. I mean, do this, as an example. Make a hybrid or wooden coaster (or get one from the workshop), put your headphones on and go on a ride in the front seat. And then in the back. The game even uses my buttkicker that I have bought for E:D, with pretty good results. VR support cannot come soon enough for this one...

Here is a pretty cool hybrid coaster creation. Also, a short preview video by Gamespot.

So, it seems we are getting 27 coaster types/variants for the beta.

Last pre-release dev diary is out. Management matters.

Yeah, it really seems they delivered on this one. Here is the full stream for anyone interested.

Some new shop types shown. You gotta give it to Frontier..most of the franchises there are pretty inspired and catchy. And a pretty nice kotaku article on this, after they went over to the Frontier offices for a day. http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2016/11/05/elite-dangerous-developer-is-building-the-ultimate-theme-park-sim

More. This time about management. https://forums.planetcoaster.com/showthread.php/12510-Management-Matters

Frontier posted this picture on Facebook today. Among other things, we can see a full color picker, what seems to be the option for custom ride music, the ability to make custom signs, a day/night cycle picker, a tracked rides tab in the UI and the ability to change the name of the ride.