[2023] Prehistoric Kingdom - General Update (EA 1.1.116)

Welcome, park managers!

In this patch, we've made a number of focused changes relating to performance, guests and balance. A number of bugs pertaining to guests have also been fixed, so your managerial experience should be a bit smoother.

This update also adds Gameplay settings to the options menu when playing in a sandbox park, allowing players to adjust various aspects of their gameplay whenever needed!

Some new music cues have been added, too! These short pieces will play when starting a new game or loading into an existing park, changing based on where your park is in the world. There are even cues for loading into a 5 Star park or one with poor statistics. A few more 5 star variants will be arriving in the future!

There is another patch coming later in February that'll introduce the Research system and quality of life features such as range graphics for power generators and dung beetles. We look forward to sharing more news with you and as always, please stay tuned for our next dev diary. You can check out our Trello roadmap[trello.com] to see what's next in the pipeline.

[trello.com]



Additions

• Animals
  • Added a handful of behavioral idle and resting animations to the species below. Animals marked with * also have a unique idle or rest animation.
    • Acrocanthosaurus
      
    • Smilodon
      
    • Torvosaurus*
      
    • Tyrannosaurus
  • Added a social response animation to Smilodon
• Audio
  • Added sounds when changing maps in the New Game menu
    
  • Added new loading screen ambience and transition
    
  • Added additional broadcast and social call variations to Parasaurolophus
    
  • Added a broadcast to Smilodon
• Music
  • Added over 5 minutes of short musical cues when starting a new game or loading into an existing park
    
    Different cues will play depending on where your park is in the world, if the park is 5 Stars or if it’s experiencing poor statistics!
• GUI/UX
  • Added a Gameplay Settings section in the Options Menu, available in Sandbox mode. This will allow users to change custom gameplay settings on a whim
    
  • Enabled the ‘Mute Ingame Music’ options in the Audio Settings menu
    
  • Added a visibility value to each fence type, accessible through the building information box
    
  • Added special exhibit animals to the Animal Overview Menu

Changes

• Animals
  • Updated Dilophosaurus walk to have less head bob
    
  • Adjusted Tarbosaurus biome preferences
    
  • Updated randomized animal color variation rules: new animals bred in the park might now have more vivid color variation
• Guests
  • Improved Guest AI decision making and seeking of points of interest. Guests should now be more able to maintain their needs
    
  • Guests now cannot use any modules that aren’t currently functioning
    
  • Increased chance of guests naturally looking at animals inside exhibits
    
  • Improved animal visibility calculations, with different fence types now having varying degrees of visibility
    
  • Terrain obstruction now stops animal visibility
    
  • Guests will now recover from navigational changes properly
    
  • Guests can now properly view statues and info signs without needing to stand in an exact position
• Audio
  • Loading screen ambience will no longer drop away
    
  • Minor changes to various Parasaurolophus social calls
• Gameplay
  • Further tuned park rating, making it overall less forgiving after recent user feedback. Exhibit rating and overall animal rating now factors into rating much more heavily
    
  • Changed exhibit rating calculations - now only exhibits with animals in them will contribute towards total exhibit rating
    
  • Changed animal rating calculations - animals which are not confined by any exhibit will not count towards total park rating
    
  • Adjusted timing on the Rating Increase notifications
    
  • ‘No Animals in the Park’ notification now resolves itself if the player places animals
    
  • Decreased upkeep costs across all nurseries
    
  • Decreased upkeep costs on the Wind Turbine and Vending Machine
    
  • Increased upkeep costs on Bathroom 4x8
    
  • Buffed lower tier loan incomes
    
  • Increased Deinocheirus breeding cost
• Graphics
  • Distant Lights now have a level of detail step to dramatically improve performance at night when many thousands of lights can be on at once
    
  • Adjusted weather transition speed

Bug Fixes

• Critical
  • Fixed game’s detection of wrong or corrupt navigation data in saves, the game may now regenerate all navigation graphs. (This may take between 10 and 120 seconds depending on the complexity of the map and speed of your computer.)
    
  • Fixed loading crash when saved navigation data was corrupted
    
  • Tentative fix for crashes while removing vegetation near borders of map
    
  • Tentative fix for guests walking through exhibits
    
  • Tentative fix for white prefab icons and a serious bug related to adding prefabs while the game is silently loading prefabs in the background
    
  • Fixed a Tutorial bug tied to recognizing placed animals in the park, this should hopefully resolve a common issue with the Mammoth placement objective
    
  • Fixed multiple critical memory leaks
    
  • Fixed a common guest AI memory leak.
    
  • Fixed a game settings initialization issue tied to custom sandbox settings
    
  • Fixed two Guest AI bugs that wasted CPU resources with heaps of logging
    
  • Fixed Guests being unable to see animals in some loaded games
    
  • Fixed an animal dung related bug that created unnecessary logging
    
  • Fixed a critical issue with Animal Information Signs losing their power settings after changing the animal species displayed
    
  • Resolved a long-standing issue that caused multiple upkeep costs to be logged within the economy system
    
  • Fixed a potentially critical GUI initialization glitch on first-time game load
    
  • Fixed guests wandering through enclosures
• Animals
  • Fixed randomized animal scaling not loading up properly in saves
• Achievements
  • Fixed an issue preventing the “Ecosystem” and “Managerie Manager” achievements from properly triggering
• Guests
  • Fixed guests not receiving satisfaction from observing animals
    
  • Fixed information signs not being registered as a point of interest for guests
• Structures
  • Fixed backface rendering for modular wall pieces
    
  • Fixed Barrel Cactus biome
    
  • Fixed Path Replacement not working on all path segments
    
  • Fixed Fences not rendering underwater
• Audio
  • Fixed rain audio initialization issue on game load
• GUI/UX
  • Fixed several text element cut offs
    
  • Fixed several Spanish translation elements
    
  • Fixed an obscure Nursery Menu bug that could caused the wrong animal instances to be placed in the park
    
  • Fixed ‘Escape’ key not triggering exit events in Main Menu
    
  • Fixed enclosure selection being stuck after opening a management menu
    
  • Fixed an error related to the weather forecast in the Overview Menu
    
  • Fixed Management Menu header text displaying the name of the last opened menu instead of the current one
    
  • Fixed an issue that would cause the financial pin tooltip to get stuck on screen after the management menu closed
    
  • Fixed a minor issue with the session play time count for new games - this also prevents the “Imaginarium” achievement from unlocking when first starting the tutorial
    
  • Fixed an issue that caused the Load menu to load twice
    
  • Fixed an issue causing the unlock progress on Nursery Menu gallery animal elements to always default at 100%, even without all of the skins being unlocked
    
  • Fixed Mural Djadochta 1 and Mural Djadochta 3 icons being reversed
    
  • Modular Prefab cost preview is now perfectly synchronized to the group’s actual placement cost

Performance

• Light Imposters added. The slowdown from large parks with thousands of lights at night is drastically optimized
  
• Reduced stutters when updating navigation after various terraforming actions
  
• Massively optimized fence placement
  
• Optimized shadows + underwater shadows
  
• Reduced unnecessary logging

Notes

• Memory usage can be very high! We are actively working to address this in future patches.
  
• Some structures might be off path in older saves, simply resetting the structure position should fix this issue until further notice
  
• We are investigating an issue that may result in music suddenly stopping during gameplay.