Welcome, Park Testers!
This PTB release adds ontogeny for Acrocanthosaurus, Carcharodontosaurus and Scelidosaurus while making adjustments to animal weight calculation, research and includes potential crash and animal teleportation fixes.
We have also been making improvements to the modular building system, improving the feel of our advanced tools with smoother precision and enhanced visuals. This includes adding a yellow outline to maintain visibility, hiding any unavailable axis and adjusting some behaviors such as Stack Objects to not reset your height. You can also now hold control to greatly slow the sensitivity of advanced tools. We want to know if these changes feel better or worse for you!
For this PTB we are looking for feedback in these specific areas:
  • Growth speeds have been adjusted in the Animal Nursery. 'Normal' growth has been slowed by 20% and 'Fast' growth has been increased by 30%
  • The modular system has received quite a few tweaks. Please read the full patch notes below, play the game and let us know if construction feels better or worse
Over the next few weeks, we will continue to add new baby animals, implement all of the ontogeny audio and improve reliability for herding. Thank you for all your feedback so far!
How to Access the Public Testing Branch (Experimental!)
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.
Known Issues & Additional Notes
  • Note: social group formation works best for animals that are contained within a habitat
  • Critical: modular lighting is not recolorable
  • Issue: herding cohesion is currently broken, so animals can end up standing too close together
  • Issue: animal avoidance is currently broken, so animals can end up walking through each other
  • Issue: animals in a herd can get stuck constantly getting up/down if they don't need to rest but their herd leader wants to. This should resolve itself eventually, however
  • Issue: additive animations can trigger during one shots or right before animals go to eat/drink/rest. We would like to stop this from happening to prevent jank
  • Issue: many species may have bad color variation or ugly mutations. We are currently going through them one by one using a new method which looks better
  • Issue: animal animations in the Animal Nursery are currently broken due to the addition of babies, we will be fixing this
  • Issue: the game may freeze every so often, we are currently investigating the cause of this issue

Full Patch Notes
Additions
  • Animals
    • Added Acrocanthosaurus ontogeny
    • Added Carcharodontosaurus ontogeny
    • Added Scelidosaurus ontogeny
    • Added baby animations to Ankylosaurus
    • Added baby and trot locomotion animations to Plateosaurus
    • Added baby and trot locomotion animations to Ouranosaurus
  • UI/UX
    • Added confirmation dialog before loading a game while in a save, notifying the player that any unsaved progress will be lost
  • Construction
    • Holding left control while dragging a modular gizmo now slows down movement for finer control
  • Audio
    • Added baby calls to Leaellynasaura, Psittacosaurus and Ouranosaurus (still using adult growls for now)
Changes
  • Balance
    • Changed starting Nursery capacity from 5 to 10
    • Buffed Capacity Protocol #1 and Capacity Protocol #2 research items to reward a higher Nursery Capacity cap
  • Animals
    • Adjusted Nursery growth speeds so that ‘Normal’ growth is 20% slower, while ‘Fast’ growth 30% faster
    • Updated colorations for both Apatosaurus skins
    • Increased maximum scaling for Tyrannosaurus
    • Increased maximum scaling for Edmontosaurus annectens
    • Rebalanced animal mass estimation algorithm, generating more accurate animal weights
  • Buildings & Scenery
    • Reduced the opacity of Habitat Markers, though we’d like to make them even less visible at night in the future
    • Slightly adjusted Beech Tree 5 collision
  • Construction
    • While placing or manipulating an object, it will now have an orange outline to help maintain visibility and better communicate that an action is taking place
    • Improved modular gizmo movement - massively reduced jitter, and reworked distance increment math to be based on the current translation axis
    • Adjusted the size and colors of the modular gizmo to make it stand out more from the environment. There is also now a small dot in the middle of advanced rotation to indicate an object’s pivot point
    • Improved modular gizmo visuals by removing unselected axes from view while dragging
    • The modular height gizmo only appears if the player has manually adjusted an object’s height
    • The ‘Stack Objects’ toggle no longer resets manual height adjustments if ‘Align to Slope’ is off
    • The ‘Align to Slope’ toggle is now on by default, requiring fewer clicks for stacking/aligning behavior, which seems to be prevalent
  • UI/UX
    • The modular grid visuals are now completely white and feature depth blending at their borders
    • Habitat Markers are now visible when selecting a habitat
Bug Fixes
  • Crashes
    • Potentially fixed crashes related to viewing animals with no available ontogeny in the Animal Nursery
  • Critical
    • Fixed loading of the navmesh when the file is corrupt, now it handles this safely and regenerates the navmesh (may resolve crazy teleporting animal bugs and others)
    • Fixed a rare bug in path following logic that could mess up animal positions
    • Fixed a number of potential stability issues when creating certain animals in the nursery
  • Gameplay
    • Fixed an initialization bug related to research loading, which could cause certain research items to not completely unlock in older saves
  • Animals
    • Fixed animal locomotion transitions happening suddenly
    • Fixed swims for certain dinosaur species transitioning awkwardly
    • Fixed Psittacosaurus and Coelophysis swimming in very shallow water
    Construction
    • Fixed ‘Random Scale’ not taking newly placed objects into account
  • UI/UX
    • Fixed animal list not updating when animals are put in different enclosures
    • Fixed baby animals not showing up in the animal social group menu
    • Fixed keybind texts in building action tooltips and the Camera Menu
    • Fixed several cases of selection outlines conflicting, especially during management overlay views
    • Fixed overlapping text in Science Team Assignment items, if there are insufficient funds