[2022] Prehistoric Kingdom - Minor Update 1 (EA 1.0.3)

A lil somethin somethin: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page here.

Welcome, park managers!

Update 1 is now available! In this patch, we’ve added a number of new features and quality of life changes to help improve the state of the game. This is only the beginning of our journey through Early Access as there will be many more changes to come.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get this update out earlier due to engine related technical issues. Previously hidden problems with Unity have only just revealed themselves due to a significantly larger playerbase with highly varied machine specifications.

Though we are continuing to fight Unity’s rediculously poor loading and memory related management, we’ve made good headway in optimizing the game and implementing custom workarounds. This will be an ongoing process that’s an unfortunate reality of making a game this large in a brittle and archaic engine.

Features Feeding System
Feeders can now empty after usage, leading to an ever-growing animal feeding demand as your park grows. Use the Animal Overview Menu (found in the Management Dashboard) to place new orders, passively increasing your available supply of feeding types.



Feeders can be manually refilled individually through their respective piece panel or in bulk through the enclosure info menu.

Notifications
Notifications will now appear inside the new Park Status window, alerting players to various problems in their zoo. You can click alerts to go directly to the closest issue!



Alerts can be muted or customized to highlight exactly what you’d like to know.

Habitat Markers
Create invisible paddock boundaries with the Habitat Marker! Unlike regular fences, animals are not held back by Habitat Markers and will require the usage of terrain, rocks or other methods to keep creatures inside the pen.



Habitat Markers are invisible during regular gameplay and will only appear when building or selecting a habitat.

Animal Nursery Sizes
In Update 1, we’ve added a small and medium Nursery Module. Each Nursery size has its own holding capacity and breeding size limit. Use larger Nurseries to breed and release bigger animals.



Bug Report Tool
In the pause/escape menu, players will now find a dedicated Bug Report Tool. This tool replaces manual GitHub reports by directly sending us a full report containing a game screenshot, a title, description, and full error log.



Content A big highlight for Update 1 is all the new scenery pieces! Over 50 new items and props have been added to the game, with some highlights including topiary, hedges and recolorable animal silhouettes.



We also switched over to a new weather/sky solution to improve performance. This does however mean that weather and map specific ambient lighting will be unavailable until we can reimplement those features.



Due to pathfinding related issues, the water troughs shown in our last blog post have been moved to a future update.

If you’d like to find exactly what’s been added, changed or fixed, please continue on to the full patch notes below!

Full Patch Notes: Features

• NEW: Feeding System
  • Feeders can now empty after usage, leading to an ever-growing animal feeding demand as your park grows. Use the Animal Overview Menu (found in the Management Dashboard) to place new orders, passively increasing your available supply of feeding types
    
  • Feeders can be manually refilled individually through their respective piece panel or in bulk through the enclosure info menu
• NEW: Notifications
  • Notifications will now appear inside the new Park Status window, alerting players to various problems in their zoo. You can click alerts to go directly to the closest issue
    
  • Alerts can be muted or customized
• NEW: Habitat Marker
  • Create invisible paddock boundaries with the Habitat Marker!
    
    Unlike regular fences, animals are not held back by Habitat Markers and will require the usage of terrain, rocks or other methods to keep creatures inside the pen
    
  • Habitat Markers are invisible during regular gameplay and will only appear when building, selecting a habitat or in the Management view
• NEW: Animal Nursery Sizes
  • Added 2 new Nursery Modules: Nursery Small & Nursery Medium
    
  • Each Nursery size has its own holding capacity and breeding size limit. Use larger Nurseries to breed and release bigger animals
• NEW: Bug Report Tool
  • Added a dedicated Bug Report Tool which can be accessed through the Pause window. This tool replaces manual GitHub reports by directly sending us a full report containing a game screenshot, a title, description, and full error log

Additions

• Animals & AI
  • Added grazing to Dryosaurus and Coelodonta
• Buildings & Scenery
  • Added 24 silhouette pieces, picked from a wide array of animal and plant species in the game
    
  • Added 3 new Tropical Lamps, perfect for housing fire FX
    
  • Added 12 Topiary pieces, ranging from hedges to animal shapes
    
  • Added Chainlink Arch piece
    
  • Added 2 new styles to the Flat Feeder - Wood and Stone
    
  • Added the remaining feed types to the Flat Feeder - Fish and Insects
    
  • Added 5 Tropical Banners & 3 Tropical Tarp props
    
  • Added 3 Tropical Pot clutter props
    
  • Added 2 Tropical Mask wall decorations
    
  • Added a wooden Tropical Wall Sculpture wall prop
    
  • Added 2 Tropical Basket clutter props
    
  • Added 2 new Tropical Benches
    
  • Added 3 Tropical Bins
    
  • Added 3 Tropical Doors
    
  • Added 3 Tropical Windows
    
  • Added 5 Tropical Paint-Stripped Wooden Beam & Arch pieces
• UI/UX
  • Added: exhibit & modular camera tracking
• Audio
  • Added new foley when animals eat from fruit, fish and insect feeders
    
  • Added sounds to Deinocheirus additive animations
    
  • Added growls to Coelodonta, Dryosaurus and Psittacosaurus when increasing nourishment
    
  • Added new terrain-based surface interaction sounds for when some animals lay down
    
  • Added dawn chorus and additional birds to UK temperate ambience
    
  • Added opening and closing audio events to the dialogue box
    
  • Added completion sounds to animal breeding completion

Changes

• Buildings & Scenery
  • Updated junction distance for concrete and glass fences
    
  • Updated Chainlink piece texture fidelity - better visuals as well as improved tiling on angles.
    
  • Fixed a variety of reflection artifacts on several misc modular items & modules
• Save/Load
  • Crashes during saving should no longer corrupt that save
    
  • Added saving failure notifications to let players know if something has gone wrong
    
  • Expanded economy saving: loan progress is now saved and loaded, and the finances history now carry over saves
    
  • Added nursery animal state saving/loading - bred animals contained in a nursery but not yet released will now be saved and loaded
    
  • Added special exhibit saving/loading - mini aviary settings and animals now carry over saves
    
  • Weather menu preferences are now registered over different save games, provided they are in Sandbox mode
• UX/Balance
  • Foliage items are now categorized by their biomes within the Building Menu
    
  • Changed animal-derived park rating behaviour: global species rating will now only change when an animal is successfully placed, and will go down if no more animals of that species are present in the park
    
  • Camera tracking can now be triggered even when the cursor is over a GUI element
• GUI
  • Changed behaviour of the Nursery shortcut button inside the Nursery Holder to open up the closest nursery to the camera, instead of the first nursery ever placed
    
  • Added keybind support to the Excavations Menu worldmap panning and scrolling
    
  • Applied background blur to the save/load menu
• Rendering
  • Fixed rendering for the UK level ocean
    
  • Improved particle effect rendering
    
  • For performance reasons, we’ve switched to a completely new weather/sky rendering solution, which should be easier to render, while providing a higher graphical fidelity:
    • Cloud and fog graphics have been completely overhauled
      
    • Introduced sun shafts and improved atmospheric volumetrics
      
    • Introduced cloud shadows
      
    • Brightened general nighttime ambience
      
    • Slightly neutralized lamp lights
  • Improved distanct rendering for several path materials
• Audio
  • Added support for unique animal audio per skin and integument
    
  • Adjusted timing for day, night and dawn chorus transitions to match new weather systems
    
  • Changed wind sound when at higher elevations
    
  • Wind rips will now be more frequent at high elevations
    
  • Updated footsteps and terrain sweeteners for Coelodonta

Bug Fixes

• Critical
  • Fixed memory disposal related crashes
    
  • Fixed a Modular deletion bug that could cause both ‘ghost pieces’ and failed deletions.
    
  • Fixed Saving issue that could cause science points to reset at 1,000 on save load
    
  • Potentially fixed an issue that could contribute to excavations sites not unlocking at the right rating level
    
  • Fixed an event failure that caused enclosures to not refresh their data when new feeders were placed within their perimeters
    
  • Fixed a bug that caused random modular objects to occasionally disappear when an exhibit’s dung was cleaned
    
  • Fixed various GUI events that caused modular group power information to not update at the right times
• 
  Buildings & Scenery
  
  • Fixed an issue with the Mini-Aviary lights - the lights should now be fully recolorable
    
  • Fixed the amenity module lights being turned on throughout the day
    
  • Fixed metal fence post LODs
• Rendering
  • Fixed selection outlines rendering artifacts
• UX/GUI
  • Fixed an issue causing the terraforming actions to have a staggered/slow effect
    
  • Improved dynamic scaling ratio of GUI canvases
    
  • Fixed an inaccurate labeling of the time spent on individual saves. Overwriting any of the old saves should now update the labeled metadata with a more accurate time
    
  • The object tooltip now displays the correct genus name when hovering an animal (i.e. the tooltip will now display “Tarbosaurus” instead of “Tyrannosaurus”)
    
  • Fixed an issue causing the excavation site selection highlight to not turn on during selection
    
  • Fixed issue that caused the management menu to stay open when double clicking on the main board management buttons
    
  • Fixed bug causing the exhibit donations to be timescale-independent
    
  • Fixed GUI bug that prevented the correct month and year from displaying in the Finances Overview
    
  • Fixed layout issue that prevented the last save slot in the save/load menu from being deleted
    
  • Fixed Special Exhibit animal welfare bars
    
  • Fixed a minor issue that caused the new game map pins to not promptly display their tooltips
    
  • Fixed a minor layout issue with the breeding progress bar not filling up fully
• Audio
  • Fixed Management Dashboard ambience loop “pop”
    
  • Fixed an audio issue where the audio wouldn't pause within the Screenshot Menu if the timescale was 0
• Dialogue
  • Corrected missing words from Brachiosaurus intro subtitle
    
  • Fixed Nigel repeating a Pachyrhinosaurus line
    
  • Fixed Nigel repeating a Protoceratops line

Performance

• Animals are now loaded in as needed, resulting in a small amount of time where no animal preview is visible in the Nursery
  
• Minor CPU optimizations for modular processing
  
• Significant GPU optimizations for lighting and weather
  
• Optimized loading times significantly
  
• Massively optimized selection rendering for large modular groups

Notes

• Due to edge cases introduced by the new features, we decided to temporarily disable the Tutorial. This scenario will be back at a later date
  
• As the current weather system integration is still a Work In Progress, the lighting orientation slider within the Screenshot Menu has been temporarily disabled
  
• Cloud shadows may display a sharp "cut" edge. This is something we are investigating
  
• Water troughs have NOT been included in this patch due to pathfinding related issues