Primal Carnage: Extinction News

This is a quick summary of changes in development for the Primal Carnage Extinction SDK...

We remain continually impressed at the creations people have made with the development toolkit and are looking forward to adding more robust support for custom map making in a future update. You have our apologies for how long this feature has taken, but it is definitely on track for this summer.

The next SDK patch will include some of the content optimizations we've been making. A big one is removing over a hundred unique shader materials and replacing them with more efficient instanced versions. This will have both positive and potentially negative effects to SDK users.

Firstly, this should bring performance improvements and cut loading times down a bit, since there is less for the editor to compile on startup and fewer shaders for the graphics card to worry about.

Secondly, if you have applied different materials to static meshes placed in your levels, they may no longer exist in their old format. If this is the case, you will see an error message upon opening your map that lists the missing materials. It is recommended to take a printscreen or note down the missing assets, since if you save the map after opening it with blanked materials the error list will not show again. You can then search for the new instanced MI_ versions of the old materials to replace anything that is missing.

We will likely be continuing this process over time (reducing the number of custom shaders in use to free up graphics memory) so you may run into the same issue further down the line.

On a similar topic, we still intend to modify our SDK release process to pre-compile shaders before sending out a new version. This step will remove extreme loading times for some users, but we cannot guarantee when this change will occur. It may be some time before we can set aside coding resources to implement.

Additionally, with the next SDK update there will be a couple of new features available to skin makers. The diffuse overlay system used for dinosaur skins has been extended to weapon skins for ease of use, as an alternative to the camouflage system. You will also be able to submit custom overlays for human arms, with "blank bases" of all the human arm textures included in their character packages.

That's all for now. Keep an eye out for further updates on modding support and watch for the new update which should be released later this month!

In the last few community updates we've shared some of the upcoming improvements being made to Primal Carnage: Extinction, but ultimately all the new features in the world need to be supported by excellent core gameplay, and that’s an area we’re continually looking to refine.

To that end, we're going to be introducing some major changes that we hope will improve the balance, fun factor and longevity of the game.

First and foremost, some of these will be large scale core gameplay changes that we want extensive testing and feedback on, so they will not be making their way into our next major update (due in a few weeks). The improvements we're currently planning will focus on a few key aspects of gameplay...


Tyrants have always played a major part in Primal Carnage's core gameplay, but we feel like they could be more menacing and powerful than they are now. In Team Deathmatch, we plan on making Tyrants unavailable for general selection and instead making them a timed "reward" for the Dino team. Every few minutes a random player will be re-spawned as a Tyrant to help sway the game in their team's favor.

Once a player is selected to be Tyrant, they will be able to pick which of the three species they wish to play as. Alternatively, the chosen player can reject their selection as tyrant, which will prompt a different player to be offered the role. Our first implementation of this feature will likely be weighted so that there's a higher chance of players with high scores being chosen, but everyone else is still in with a shot at being selected.

Naturally, all Tyrants will receive a buff to ensure they provide both a big impact for their team, and make them a bigger focus for the Human team. Something that's perhaps worth a few extra points to take down as well.


The dinosaur classes have great diversity and we want to further differentiate the Human classes to match. Promoting teamwork and increasing the overall mechanical depth are our main goals here. We’re going to refine the Human gameplay to better support the theming of each particular character. This will involve tweaks to a number of stats such as health, movement speed, stamina, and more that will be extensively tested.

We'll also look at making changes to loadouts to help improve character utilities - for instance, the Scientist as a long-range character maybe shouldn't have the health pack.


To help support the refinements to many of the classes, we’ll be adjusting some of the pacing of the game. The goal of this is to enable all classes and roles to impact the game in a more positive way, helping to increase the overall suspense, strategy and tactics of the game.


These changes will apply across the board in all game-modes. In TDM and CTE, Tyrant Selection will be semi-random every few minutes. Player feedback and information from our Open Testing sessions will help inform our decisions here. In GTTC, after Humans make a certain amount of progress, Tyrants will start getting chosen and assigned to players.

For those of you that enjoy Team Deathmatch the way it is right now, rest assured that we will also be including a "Classic TDM" mode with the normal Tyrant selection options we have currently. However, the majority of the other balance changes will apply across both game-modes.


Ultimately we feel like these changes are the right direction to take Primal Carnage: Extinction to help improve longevity. The updated gamemodes and gameplay balance will serve as a basis for ongoing enhancements, improvements and new additions into the future. We will continue to improve Primal Carnage: Extinction to make it a game you can enjoy for years to come.

As always, if you'd like to get involved in the discussions about our upcoming changes, or meet new players, feel free to join our Discord Channel

This week we're here to talk about some general improvements and enhancements we're bringing into the next update of Primal Carnage: Extinction!


Stat-Track items are a bit of an unloved area of PCE. Initially we wanted to make Stat-Track items feel a bit more special and unique by having them only drop from limited crates.
Since we added them, we've found that players haven't engaged with them as much as we expected. So we're going to be adjusting how players get Stat-Track items. From our next major update, Stat-Track items will be craftable using Stat-Track DNA Strands, which will have a small chance of being the 2nd item dropped from crates. Use them like a normal DNA strand and the resultant item will have Stat-Track applied to it!
We're also looking at a way to bring Stat-Track onto human weapon skins.


With the addition of the progression system and challenges, one of our goals has been to provide a better summary for players at the end of a round for how they did. We've been working on mocking up an example of what a new end-game screen might look like in the next major update, which includes challenge progress, unlocks and a match XP report! The below image is conceptual only and may not represent the final look and feel.




We've added a secondary slot for Dino Cosmetics, meaning you can wear earmuffs and a collar at the same time!
We're continuing to add more assist types to reward teamwork and working on improving some of our in-game notifications for ammo and health support
Finally, the level cap will be further increased in the next major update!

Our next open testing session is still a few weeks away, but please join our Discord Chat to get notifications of when our new builds come out for testing!

Las Vegas, NV – April 23rd, 2017 – An update to Primal Carnage: Extinction has been released. The update will be applied automatically when you restart Primal Carnage: Extinction. The major changes include:

• Fixed some minor issues with flyer head turning
  
• Collision adjustments on various GTTC Maps
  
• Adjustments to timers on GTTC capture point settings
  

• Reduced acid pool damage tick timer to be more reliable
  
• Decreased mid-flight recovery time for flying dinosaurs when hitting objects
  
• Decreased momentum multiplier on Tupa charge
  
• Increased overlay effect timer for Cryo spit effect
  
• Fixed flaregun not doing correct damage
  
• Fixed flamethrower not doing correct damage
  
  

Welcome to the second Primal Carnage community update. This week, we're focusing on a brand new feature that is coming to Primal Carnage: Extinction!



Challenges is something we've been wanting to bring into the game for a long time. We've finally got the opportunity to introduce them as part of some broader changes coming in the next major update to the game.

Each week, players will get 3 weekly challenges to complete, such as "Kill 500 Enemies", "Win 10 TDM Games" or "Kill 100 Dinosaurs with throwable weapons". In the first iteration of challenges, we'll have pretty general, less specialized goals, however going forward we hope to introduce more specific ones to encourage players to try new classes and gameplay mechanics.

Completing a weekly challenge will award you with an item drop of Common, Uncommon, or Rare quality. During seasonal events (ie Christmas or Halloween), Challenges will also be a way of getting themed cosmetic skins.



We're aiming to release minor update 1.8.4 this week, which includes some further GTTC map fixes, improvements to damage tick for spitter pools and fixes to some other inconsistent weapon behaviors.



We'd like to remind the community to continue engaging with our workshop and content creators! We continue getting outstanding submissions to the PCE workshop. We expect to include several dozen new Community skins in our next major update, scheduled for later this year.

To vote on your favorite items, head over to the Workshop section and check them out!

As for full custom map support, we're also working hard on finalizing that feature and it should be available in our next major update.