Welcome, Park Managers!

This hotfix resolves additional issues reported by the community as well as expands the Help menu with a new section for Park Issues.

Please send your feedback and bug reports to our Discord server's[discord.com] appropriate channel. Thank you!

This hotfix makes Animal Info Signs more reliable by streamlining their data for saving and loading. To facilitate this transition however, we had to phase out all the existing info screen save data.

Players will be required to re-assign animals to their info signs and save their game. We apologise for this inconvenience!

• UI/UX
  • Added Help articles for Park Issues
    
  • Added section to the Terraforming Help article that mentions how to remove specific pieces of foliage

• Balance
  • Lowered purchase price for Microraptor and Archaeopteryx
• Animals
  • Removed the backwards look around animation from Argentinosaurus, Brachiosaurus and Camarasaurus until a better solution can be put in place
  • Added the Grassland biome to the following animals:
    • Apatosaurus
      
    • Brachiosaurus
      
    • Brontosaurus
      
    • Camarasaurus
      
    • Dryosaurus
      
    • Paraceratherium
      
    • Torvosaurus (tanneri only)
  • Adjusted minimum exhibit sizes for the following species’ default grouping size. Most of these were significantly reduced:
    • Ankylosaurus: 2,000m2
      
    • Coelodonta: 1,200m2
      
    • Coelophysis: 600m2
      
    • Dilophosaurus: 1,100m2
      
    • Dryosaurus: 732m2
      
    • Elasmotherium: 1,300m2
      
    • Leaellynasaura: 435m2
      
    • Mammuthus: 1,904m2
      
    • Panthera: 700m2
      
    • Plateosaurus gracilis: 994m2
      
    • Plateosaurus trossingensis: 1,704m2
      
    • Protoceratops: 650m2
      
    • Psittacosaurus mongoliensis: 475m2
      
    • Psittacosaurus sibiricus: 401m2
      
    • Psittacosaurus sp.: 250m2
      
    • Scelidosaurus: 734m2
      
    • Smilodon fatalis: 600m2
      
    • Smilodon populator: 800m2
      
    • Sinotherium: 1,300m2
      
    • Velociraptor: 550m2
  Buildings & Scenery
  • Adjusted collider for Cedar Siding Wall Pillar 4m
    
  • Gate modules will no longer cause groups to snap to fences if that group contains any non-decoration or non-enclosure-related modules
• Foliage
  • Increased forest contribution of Acacia 1, 2 and Marula 1, 2
    
  • Decreased forest contribution of Yucca Tree 2
• UI/UX
  • Improved placement states readability by extending the placement actions’ tooltips to include more information about the validity of the current construction
    
  • Animal, Staff, and Guest welfare displays will now show accurate fill levels, even in sandbox mode, but will always display as green to indicate that a low welfare bar won’t actually have any negative impact on the park
    
  • Renamed Park Issue: ‘Module Logistics Unfulfilled’ to ‘Pending Logistics Transfer’
    
  • Renamed Park Issue: ‘Park Logistics Unfulfilled’ to ‘High Resource Demand’ and disabled it temporarily until we add a Logistics overview screen to the Park Services menu
• Post Processing
  • Removed CTAA option from the Antialiasing quality, as it was causing unwanted visual effects
    
  • Sharpened default TAA
    
  • Adjusted the game’s Ambient Occlusion for a higher visual fidelity. This has a major effect on shaded geometry (such as interiors)

• Crashes
  • Potentially fixed some crashes caused by moving and placing large modular prefabs
    
  • Fixed a crash related to guest animal visibility
    
  • Fixed a crash occurring right after loading a large park
    
  • Fixed a critical application hang when demolishing a large amount of pieces from a large modular group
• Critical
  • Strengthened checks for removing Animal Nursery preview assets, corresponding to previously viewed animals. This should properly resolve a bug that would cause 2 or more animals to be previewed in the Animal Nursery at the same time
    
  • Patched a rendering issue that would cause the camera FOV to not be applied correctly, resulting in weird rendering artifacts on water especially
    
  • Fixed inconsistency around updates to the navmesh
    
  • Animals loaded with invalid positions will now be recovered
    
  • Fixed a bug that could cause the guest walkable area to calculate incorrectly and break all visitors
• Animals
  • Fixed animals getting stuck at the edge of water
• Staff
  • Fixed several bugs leading to staff not properly taking up necessary tasks
    
  • Fixed the way staff gates connect to the navmesh, which should prevent them from teleporting onto roofs
• Guests
  • Further fixed guests ability to recover when you change the environment around them, they should no longer reset to the entrance
    
  • Fixed a bug with animal viewing
• Buildings & Scenery
  • Fixed visibility for Rustic Log 2.5m and Rustic Log 4m fences
    
  • Fixed several desync cases for animal info signs - streamlining their data and save/load. This means that in the future, animal info screens should be far more reliable. To facilitate this transition however, we had to phase out all the animal info screen save data, apologies for this inconvenience.
• UI/UX
  • Fixed camera zoom intensity for perspective camera mode
    
  • Fixed enclosure button in the Animal Info panel not being enabled when the animal is enclosed
    
  • Fixed several localization elements throughout the GUI
    
  • Fixed duplicated keybind elements in the Options Menu
    
  • Fixed a GUI issue causing all the animals in the Animals Management Menu to have maximum star rating
    
  • Fixed a Building Menu listing bug that would result in a significant portion of user-downloaded workshop prefabs to not appear in the list

• Significant optimizations to the modular system
  
• Improvements to fence loading

Welcome to the October Development Update!

Update 12 is out now! In case you missed it, this latest release introduces 3 new species, brand new basic tutorials, a new map, building, staff training, official prefabs and more. You can find the full patch notes here along with our exciting announcement trailer below!

During the start of November, we’ll be supporting U12 (Update 12) with additional hotfixes targeting outstanding issues reported by the community, as well as feedback regarding the feel of Park Issues. At the time of writing, we’ve already released two patches and will continue to read reports as they come in. Thank you for your help!

If you’re a keen follower of our Public Roadmap[trello.com], you probably know what we’re cooking. However, for the sake of ensuring players get more content before Christmas, we’ve made the decision to swap the next two updates.

Update 14 will be focused on animal sociality and improving the state of animals. There is a fair bit of work to be done, especially with ontogeny on the way. Here are our technical goals for the animals in U14:

• Socialize and communicate amongst themselves
  
• Form herds or groups that follow a leader
  
• Smooth out locomotion, minimizing jitter or snappy behavior
  
• Polish foot IKs, making limbs less prone to breaking and ensuring footstep sounds are triggered consistently

This is going to take time and a huge amount of resources, but our programmers have actually been working on U14 on-and-off since August. Once we’ve finished supporting U12, they’ll be going back to finishing animal awareness.

We obviously don’t want to leave you hanging in the meantime, though, which is why Update 13 will be released in mid-December. Since this is primarily content-focused, it does not detract development time from U14.

Update 13 will be our final update of the year, focused on adding new animals, foliage, music and rounding out the user experience with UI changes.

To reveal the first of two mammals arriving in Update 13, we can bearly contain our excitement. After a long hibernation, the Cave Bear (Ursus spelaeus) is finally joining the park.

This primarily herbivorous bear is best distinguished by the massive hump between its shoulders, giving it a bulkier appearance than the modern grizzly. Some of you may be thinking it’s “just a bear,” but to that, we offer the following counterpoint:

It’s a bear!

New animal signs are coming in the next update! These illustrations will be available as modular objects for a few dozen key species, adding a lovely charm around the zoo.

We love how these turned out and can’t wait for you to see them all!

In Update 13, we’re going to be making changes to the building experience. We first started sketching this out internally all the way back in Update 9, but now that we have our updated official prefabs, we think it’s the right time to make the leap.

We understand that building is a huge part of why so many players fell in love with Prehistoric Kingdom, so making changes to the creative side of things needs to be handled with care. Our goal with this update is to streamline the experience and make building more approachable. We do not want to remove customization, but rather present it in a way that is more appealing.

These are just design concepts for the time being, so there’ll be lots of would’s and could’s in the discussion below. Let’s begin!

In this example, we’ll select the central building category. As you can see below, this would be home to all of the game’s modules.

By default, every item is shown in the All category, reducing the clicks needed to find common modules like feeders, enrichment, bathrooms or kiosks. Just like the current UI, players would be able to drag the toolbox up or down to adjust how much of the screen it takes up.

If we were to switch from All to the Guest Facilities tab, we would now only see items that belong to guests. The modules are also split into subcategories to better distinguish their use in the park.

From the bottom, players would be able to isolate a subcategory, hiding all other items. This would be especially helpful when trying to navigate something like the modular building toolbox, as there can be hundreds of pieces!

In this new toolbox, prefabs and items would not coexist at the same time. While this is maybe an odd choice at first glance, players can have hundreds, if not thousands of prefabs saved.

We propose that in the bottom right of the toolbox, players would swap between items or prefabs. By putting prefabs behind a switch, it’d mean we can properly organize them by subcategory without risk of cluttering the toolbox. There’s no chance that they’d drown out important modules.

For the hardcore builders, this means you could save custom beams or arches into their correct spot, rather than having them shoved to the bottom of the list like in the current game.

Side note: the new toolbox would support a small thumbnail option to show more content at once, as seen above.

Controls & Styling
Once the player selects or edits an item, the toolbox quickly ducks out of the way, leaving the player with more screen space to see what they’re doing. On the right, panels for the modular controls and styles slide in, completely detached from the toolbox.

Hovering over the bottom of the screen or canceling your current action would make the toolbox reappear.

Here’s how these two panels would work:

1. Modular Controls
   The control panel is contextual, depending on what settings have been enabled. Options like angle snap and align to surface would be hidden if the building grid is enabled, since they only work with free movement.
   
2. Styling
   The styling window can be expanded vertically, like the toolbox, to show more or less materials at a time. You can also filter for specific object types by selecting one of the style categories (all, modules, walls, roofs, lights or miscellaneous). Coloring options would be available per style.

If you’re someone who wants to keep their toolbox on-screen, just like in the current game, we’ve got you covered. Enabling the “pin” toggle would prevent the toolbox from ducking away while building.

The modular controls change during advanced editing, too! Wow, increments.

This style of contextual control would be brought over to the paths and fences, too. Even though it’s displaying the same information as the current game, we think it draws more attention to what options the player actually has.

And that’s it! We’ll be reviewing your early impressions, but we think these changes to building will be for the better. Let us know what you think!

Created by Krex

Created by W3

Created by DagothDagothDagothDagothDagoth.png

Thank you for reading October's’s dev diary!

With the release of Update 12 having just happened, we hope you can forgive a shorter Dev Diary. We will be back next month to share more progress on Update 13!

- The PK Team

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