Prehistoric Kingdom News

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.

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.




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!

[h3]Full Patch Notes:[/h3]

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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
    

• 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
  

• 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
  

Welcome to the May Update!

In this month's post we’ll be taking a brief look at what we’ve been up to over the last couple of weeks as well as sharing some statistics from the first month of Early Access launch.



May was a great month for the team. Having just released into Early Access, we were able to reach brand new audiences (hello!) and read a lot of constructive community feedback. Every bit helps us understand what we could improve and what people would like to see in the future!

Currently, we are working on the game’s first Minor Update - a small patch that introduces quality of life improvements and a smattering of content while we work on our much larger quarterly updates. Memory management and loading issues inherent to Unity prevented us from releasing the patch earlier, however we expect it to drop in the next week or so.


Sort of like a sibling to the state icons currently in the game, Notifications will alert players to things they should take a look at. Customizable in nature, players can pick exactly what they want to get notified for.

UI Concept Art


Management is an area of the game that we are determined to flesh out as the project develops further. As a small start, Mau worked on our new food production mechanics. Unlike at launch, feeders will now empty requiring them to be refilled.

As you place new feeders and refill old ones, the park’s dietary supply will decrease. Keep an eye on your inventory from the Animal Management menu and order new shipments to meet the demand.



With this new system in place, we’ve added Fish and Insects to the flat feeders to provide additional options for you and your animals. Players can also find two new styles available for the flat feeder: wood and stone.



Nathan, our hard surface artist, created a large and small water trough for animals to drink from. These new items will allow animals like desert dwelling Protoceratops to drink without the need of a lake in their habitat.

Work in progress water visuals.


In May, our concept artist Ida developed new designs for a medium and small Animal Nursery - significantly shorter (and more affordable!) than the large variant currently in the game. These smaller modules will allow for less intrusive facility building.




Given the creative tools available in Prehistoric Kingdom, it was only a given that the community would want a way to create fully custom enclosures. So, we’d like to introduce… Habitat Markers!

These are a new type of fence that define an invisible paddock boundary. 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.

As they’re so visually different to many other items in the game, creating and noodling around with a custom shader was a real treat. Despite their rambunctious aesthetic, Habitat Markers are invisible during regular gameplay and will only appear when building, selecting a habitat or in the Management view.



We've got plenty of new scenery items in the new patch, too, including tropical lantern posts, customizable animal silhouettes and beautiful topiaries to decorate your parks. There are so many beautiful concept designs yet to be added, we really think you’ll love what we’re cooking up behind the scenes.

A blog post will be released once the update is live to show off all the new items. Here's our sneak peek from social media earlier this month:



...


[h2]Early Access Launch[/h2]
The Early Access launch was certainly an exciting event for the team! We had a peak of over 2,500 concurrent players with over 40,000 total unique players in the first month.

Three hotfixes were released that included general bug fixes, improved memory performance, and small rendering improvements that were especially notable on low end machines - but the optimization doesn’t end there!

[h2]Ongoing Optimization[/h2]
We've still got some further room for memory optimization, and after extensive testing on all of our rendering systems, we were finally able to pin-point the heaviest GPU hitters. This has allowed us to create internal optimization plans so that we can work towards more performance improvements alongside the planned content updates.

Part of this effort includes the removal of our previous weather package in favour of one that not only looks better, but has shown significantly improved rendering performance on some of our test systems (+15-50%). Please make sure to try out different graphical presets to find what works best for your system.



[h2]Improving Animals[/h2]
With Early Access out in the wild, we have begun putting more resources into improving animal movement which is the backbone of developing better AI. You will see more from this in the future as the locomotion overhaul is currently slated for our first major update (July).

[h2]Catch Us Live![/h2]
This month we also started streaming regularly on Twitch. Every Monday members from the team go live to share behind the scenes exclusives, announce new updates or just play some Prehistoric Kingdom and chat with you all! We’re planning future key giveaways and competitive build-offs with the devs, so tune in to watch the chaos unfold!

...


[h2]New Species[/h2]
The first species announced for the quarterly update in July is… Dilophosaurus! With its signature double crests acting as a flamboyant mohawk, this carnivore is ready to make an entrance in every prehistoric park!

One down, two more to reveal… what could they possibly be?

Upclose look at some of the detailing on our Dilophosaurus.

You can view our Public Roadmap on Trello that highlights some of the new upcoming features & improvements that we have planned for Early Access.




Created by Cesar Creates.

Created by Black Heron.

Created by Aresuft.

Created by PoisonBlade.

Created by Moral_.

Created by AtakGames.

...

Thank you for reading May’s dev diary!

We’re ecstatic to have so many players enjoying our game and waiting for new updates. Everyone here at Blue Meridian is extremely excited to continue the journey through Early Access and build a great experience.

We’ll be releasing an FAQ in June to try and answer the community’s most burning questions.

Until next time,

- The PK Team

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Hello Park Managers!

The May update needs about a weeks more prep time before the patch goes live - We're workin' hard to get the update out ASAP, and we'll keep you posted throughout the week.

- The PK Team

Welcome, Park Managers!

We’ve been working around the clock to fix some of the main issues regarding performance, and while that’s going to be an ongoing task for us, we’ve located some of the main hotspots regarding high memory usage. This performance improvement update targets some of them by integrating more efficient engine memory utilization, substantially reducing RAM and VRAM across the board. This is going to be especially notable on low end machines, as we hope the game’s going to be less prone to crashing and generally easier to load up.

These are not going to be the last of our efforts on that front, as we’ve still got some further room for memory optimization going forward, as well as some more memory leaks to completely iron out (at the moment most notable by loading in and out of main menu repeatedly).

The good news doesn’t end here! We’ve been religiously testing all of our rendering systems, and were finally able to consistently pin-point the heaviest GPU hitters, allowing us to set in motion realistic optimization plans! We’re going to be addressing these changes in performance patches to be released throughout the month, in parallel with the gameplay updates currently laid out on our Trello roadmap.

Thank you for your patience!

• Audio
  • Added incoming phone call to contextualize Nigel ending the tutorial
    
• Options
  • New ‘Cinematic’ quality level
    

• Foliage
  • Terrain Foliage is now repositioned properly after undo/redo
    
• Rendering
  • Improved Shadow Rendering
    
  • Improved general AA stability and reduced jitter
    
• Audio
  • Adjusted music mix for mammoth cinematic in the tutorial
    
• Input
  • Reduced vertical camera movement speed
    

• Critical
  • Fixed critical mammoth placement check that could cause the tutorial to get stuck
    
  • Fixed several exceptions that could seldom cause crashes or impact performance
    
• Construction/Landscaping
  • Water brush undo/redo no longer create artifacts around updated area
    
  • Water brush remove no longer creates “jello” artifacts
    
  • Foliage brush no longer removes poop
    
• Rendering
  • Fixed an issue that could sometimes cause shadows quality to degrade
    
  • Fixed a color masking issue on the Animal Nursery
    
  • Mitigated texture bleeding on the AC unit pieces
    
  • Changed color masking for windowed doors
    
• UX/GUI
  • Fixed Landscaping Menu vegetation tooltips not displaying the right plant height and continent information
    
  • Fixed an issue that caused tutorial/scenario progression to not register
    

Performance

• Optimized Memory Use of Prefab Previews
  
• Optimized UI Background Blur Rendering
  
• Revised Quality Settings for Increased Scalability
  
• Improved Memory Management - shaved off around 1GB RAM on average
  

Notes
Due to introducing a Cinematic setting to the Options Menu, some of your current settings might be defaulted to that. Upon opening the update, please ensure that your settings aren’t higher than they should be.

We are aware of several issues with scenario objective completion, exhibit data registering and savegame stability. Those are high on our priority list and are going to be addressed as soon as possible. Thank you again for your patience.

Hi everyone, thank you for your invaluable feedback and patience with the many current glitches. We've done a new round of general fixes, and added a much requested input feature: re-bindable camera controls. Over the next few days, we're gonna address the biggest performance and stability issues, as we're targeting to lower the game's general RAM and VRAM usage.

• Options
  • Added bindable camera panning and rotation options
    

• Input
  • Improved option menu keybind input while setting custom keybinds
    

• Critical
  • Fixed a critical initalization issue that caused the options menu to get stuck in the main menu, preventing the game from being loadable
    
  • Fixed a couple of critical UI-related bugs that contributed to creating gameplay issues downstream
    
  • Fixed one of the critical issues that was severely affecting framerate
    
  • Fixed some tutorial unlock events, generally making the tutorial scenario more stable. Still more work to be done on this front.
    
• Buildings & Scenery
  • Fixed texture tiling on tropical wooden roofs
    
  • Fixed color masking on modern railing and metal beams
    
• Rendering
  
  Fixed a loading issue that prevented the right shader for loading up for the ocean water, as a result, the reflection graphics have improved for the ocean material
  
• UX/GUI
  • Removed borders from the excavation menu world map
    
  • Fixed rare edge cases where the box selection would still render while panning/rotating the camera