Welcome, Park Testers!

An early, in-development version of Update 11 is now available to opt-into on the Public Testing Branch! This release includes the adorable Leaellynasaura and many work in progress changes to the game. Staff, logistics and in-depth Excavations ARE NOT included and will be added to the PTB once their systems have developed further.

We're aiming to make continued use of the PTB throughout 2024 so that players have a way to check out what we're working on, even in a basic state.


Here are some specific things that we'd like to get feedback and bug reports on:

• PTB Save Directory: The Public Test Branch will save games to a separate directory ('__PTB__') in order to reduce potential save conflicts. We've made some other changes to the save system, so please report ANY issues that you encounter!
  
• Fence Rework & Staff Gates: Fence placement and mesh generation has been overhauled to allow for the addition of staff gates. Enclosures are very work in progress as a result, potentially to leading to cases where they may fail to register or don't appear in the animal overview menu.
  
• Excavations System: The basic version of our new Excavations system allows players to unlock animals. Please let us know if any issues are experienced, though given its primitive state we don't expect much here.
  
• GUI Updates: New UI elements have been added with more coming throughout the PTB. We've disabled notifications which means inexperienced players may have difficulty navigating the game and some elements such as the Weather menu are in a different location. The Animal Nursery can be accessed from the Park Services menu, but there's temporarily less visual feedback when creating animals (we are working on new notifications!). There's a lot of work to be done in restoring game feel and guiding the player experience!
  
• Guest Art: Some of the updated guest art is in! These are still very much a work in progress, currently lacking clothing color variation and male visitors (we're working on their animation set!).

The Public Testing Branch (PTB) is a version of Prehistoric Kingdom that can be opted-into on Steam, containing experimental and potentially breaking changes. With the help of the community, we're able to hunt down various issues and gather feedback before pushing a an update to the public version of Prehistoric Kingdom.

1. Right click Prehistoric Kingdom in your Steam Library
   
2. Go to Properties
   
3. Betas
   
4. Select 'ptb_public_testing'

Please note that it is not recommended to play Public Testing Branch parks on earlier versions of the game. Please send feedback and bug reports to our Discord server's[discord.com] appropriate channel.

• We're anticipating some potential crashes from loading old parks. If this is discovered, please send your crash logs to our Discord server's[discord.com] appropriate channel.
  
• All staff and logistics buildings are NON-FUNCTIONAL! This is intended until we add staff and logistics.
  
• Enclosures from existing save files are not yet registering as valid exhibits. We are working on this!
  
• The staff gates feature temporary art and will be updated in the future.
  
• The UI is a massive work in progress, featuring old and new panels.
  
• Many UI features such as notifications have been temporarily disabled while we rework them.
  
• When incubating an animal, there's no visual feedback. We intend to show a small notification entering the Animal Holder, but this is not implemented.

As always, we kindly thank you for your patience!

• NEW ANIMAL: Leaellynasaura

• Gameplay
  • Added the Eumeralla Formation
• Buildings & Scenery
  • Added new basic fence: Basic Chainlink Fence
    
  • New Staff Management & Logistic modules (non-functional!):
    • Staff Gate 2.5m
      
    • Staff Gate 4m
      
    • Staff Center
      
    • Loading Bay
      
    • Goods Storage Small
      
    • Goods Storage Large
      
    • Produce Storage Small
      
    • Produce Storage Large
      
    • Compost Heap
      
    • Produce Station (Mix Feed, Plants, Fruit, Meat, Fish, Insects)
  • New Park Management modules:
    • Fossil Depot
      
    • Research Station
  • Added over 19 new basic/backstage props!
    • Liquid Barrel
      
    • Plastic Bowl
      
    • Cooling Box
      
    • Plastic Box
      
    • Plastic Box Tub
      
    • Wooden Box
      
    • Construction Cone
      
    • Construction Floor Sign
      
    • Dry Erase Board 1
      
    • Dry Erase Board 2
      
    • Keeper Spade
      
    • Ladder 1
      
    • Ladder 2
      
    • Shipping Container
      
    • Shipping Crate
      
    • Shipping Pallet
      
    • Staff Shelf 1
      
    • Staff Shelf 2
      
    • Staff Sink
• Audio
  • Added Nigel dialogue to the following animals:
    • Charonosaurus
      
    • Elasmotherium
      
    • Juxia
      
    • Leaellynasaura
      
    • Muttaburrasaurus
      
    • Panthera atrox
      
    • Panthera spelaea
      
    • Tarbosaurus
      
    • Sinotherium

• Animals
  • Updated default expression for Panthera atrox and spelaea
• Guests
  • Fully reworked art (work-in-progress)
    
  • Human animation system reworked from the ground up (work-in-progress)
• Buildings & Scenery
  • Updated the ‘Prehistoric Kingdom Visitor Entrance Stone Age’ prefab to not contain tropical themed pieces
    
  • Updated several Fence visuals
• UI/UX
  • Updated layout, flow and functionality for several pieces of the GUI (wip)
    • Main Action Board
      
    • Management Menu and all its sub-menus (e.g. excavations, animal menu, etc.)
      
    • Modular Editing Overlay
      
    • Weather Menu
      
    • Animal Nursery Holder
  • Moved the Animal Nursery Menu into the Management Menu
    
  • Terraforming menu now displays updated biome icons to match animal info panels
    
  • Huge improvements across the board when it comes to GUI layout updating and refreshing
• Audio
  • Adjusted Nigel’s VO processing
    
  • Selecting Panthera in the Nursery will play the lion roar instead of Smilodon

• Critical
  • Fixed a bug that caused loading to break when Documents/Prehistoric Kingdom/Modular Prefabs folder was not creatable or accessible
    
  • Added a fix for size limit on modular save files
    
  • Fixed a rare crash when animals would check for a place to stand
    
  • Fixed a rare crash in pathfinding
    
  • Fixed a blackscreen issue that would persist through reloading a save, now those saves should be recoverable!
    
  • Fixed a rare animal unlock load bug that would break loading
    
  • Fixed a crash that occurred during Mac emulation
• Buildings & Scenery
  • Fixed a selection issue with the Rock Basalt 1 piece
• Terraforming
  • Fixed numerous issues with modular undo/redo, particularly terrain flattening logic
    
  • Fixed a bug with the water remove brush where it would generate horrific janky edges near the shoreline
    
  • Fixed a bug where undo/redo would just delete a huge chunk of water
• UI/UX
  • Fixed a typo in the Elasmotherium info sign
    
  • Fixed an issue that would cause Screenshot Mode to remain open when opening a building menu

• Loading performance has been improved with additional multi-threading
  • This especially affects the Canada map or any save with a lot of pieces
• Improved modular system performance in a few areas
  • Primarily addressed slowdowns when working with pieces that had many tens or hundreds of thousands of instances on the map (trees on canada for instance)
    
  • Memory efficiency improvements
• Save system upgraded with better read/write performance and a fix for having too many files in a save (caused workshop upload issues)
  
• Save/load menu performance improved
  
• New human animations are more memory efficient
  
• New fences are more efficiently rendered and consume considerably less memory

Welcome to the April Development Update!

In this bite-sized blog post, we’ll be providing more information about the Update 11 PTB (Public Test Branch) and showcasing some important changes to the fence system. If you’d like to learn more about Update 11 as a whole, be sure to check out last month’s development diary![www.prehistorickingdom.com]

To keep it brief, development on Update 11 is going well! The logistics system is essentially complete but pending integration with staff and more UI elements. Staff themselves are coming along with a lot of work being done on their models and animations. Although staff and logistics won’t make the initial PTB release for Update 11, we’re pleased with how they’re developing and look forward to sharing more with you soon.

The first version of Update 11 will be hitting the Steam PTB on May 10th. This build will contain the following features:

• New species: Leaellynasaura
  
• New modules
  
• New basic/backstage props
  
• Improved fences & staff gates
  
• Improved Excavations system
  
• Improved GUI flow

We’ll be rolling out logistics and staff related gameplay to the PTB as their development continues. In the meantime, players will have access to the new staff related modules such as the Loading Bay, Staff Center and Fossil Depot to prepare parks and create custom prefabs.

One of the other changes we’ve made is to the Animal Nursery. Like the Fossil Depot, there will only be one Animal Nursery module per park, with the menu now accessible from the Park Services menu. The current module designs will eventually be converted into props, with a new building and Nursery UI revamp coming down the line.

The current Nursery menu will be found in the same place as Excavations, Research and Finances!

As always, the PTB will include experimental changes and won’t reflect the final Update 11 release. The team will be working to add more content, polish and progressively finalize the update. This year, we’re aiming to utilize the PTB more frequently so that players can check in to see what we’re up to, even if it’s in-development.

Over the years, fences and enclosures have accumulated a lot of tech debt due to having some of the oldest code in the game. They were so old, in fact, that they actually predate the modular building system! With staff needing to access enclosures pretty soon, we had two options:

1. Bandaid gates onto the old code and rework fences down the line.
   
2. Rework fences now but delay Update 11’s PTB to May 10th.

We chose the second option, and in a little over a week, our awesome programmers not only rebuilt the fence system from the ground up, but improved performance AND added support for modular staff gates. On the technical side, these new fences are way less rigid to work with and have allowed the team to add some excellent quality of life improvements for our users.

For example, when placing fences, they’ll now collide and snap to existing sections rather than clipping through them.

The maximum segment length has been increased, making it easier to create circular habitats. There’s also a new line indicator that appears once the max length is reached.

If touching an existing segment, angle snap now uses its local direction, rather than defaulting to the world grid. This means that if you’ve been building fences at a strange angle and decide to use angle snap (e.g. 45°, 90°), the game will automatically account for it.

When replacing fence designs, the preview is now real time! You can see an example below (ignore our debug dev material).

Modular staff gate modules can be attached to fences, updating in real time (temporary gate art). These will eventually allow staff to pass into enclosures once they are included in Update 11.

All of this is on top of fences not only rendering faster, but taking up waaay less memory too! Thanks to this new infrastructure, it’s going to be so much easier for us to tackle things like fence maintenance and animal breakouts in the future. These improvements have been needed for a long time and we couldn’t be happier to finally get it out of the way.

In Update 11, we’re adding a bunch of new backstage props as part of the basic theme. With staff coming soon, we wanted to provide a few more items to help make the zoo feel more real!

Looking to the immediate future, everything discussed below will not be available in the initial Update 11 build coming to the PTB, but will instead be added progressively.

During the Update 11 PTB, a new sauropodomorph will be marching its way into your parks! Please welcome the broad lizard, Plateosaurus.

Unlike its younger relatives currently featured in the game, this Triassic dinosaur was bipedal, featuring short forelimbs with sharp claws. Our scientists have observed extreme size variation in adult specimens of Plateosaurus, making this species a particularly diverse bunch to look at!

Plateosaurus will be released later in an Update 11 PTB patch.

During the Update 11 PTB, we’ll be overhauling the Animal Nursery with a fresh design and new behavior.

Our goal is to move away from showing a general or ‘default’ specimen and aim to instead display the actual individual that’ll be bred. This means that you’d be able to see potential mutations, size and skin variation prior to creation. Each time you create an individual, the next one will appear different.

As you can see in the UI concept art above, all of the habitat stats are missing! That’s because everything you need to satisfy your animals has been moved to the Paleopedia, an upcoming database that can be accessed from anywhere in the park.

Since a lot of the species descriptions are currently being written, we’ll be adding them into the Paleopedia at a later date. Here’s an early look at how that looks, though!

Created by Incog

Created by luci257

Created by gemini98

Thank you for reading April’s dev diary!

Don’t forget that the initial PTB for Update 11 goes live May 10th! We’re excited to have you with us on this journey and look forward to continuing development on Update 11.

- The PK Team

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